Suburban Legend

An unconventional key to some of the features of a Los Angeles housing tract

Oct 9, 2025
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This text is excerpted from the chapter “Earth” in Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire (Angel City Press, 2025) by D. J. Waldie.


STUDS

They’re called 2-by-4s, only they aren’t. The true 2-by-4 became—a fraction of an inch by a fraction of an inch—today’s notional 2-by-4. It’s actually 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches, 34 percent less in volume. Those in the wood trade call the difference between lumber then and lumber now “selling air.”

Two-by-four studs are the vertical members of a wood frame wall. A wall’s studs, mud sills, fire stops, and plates can be nailed up by just two or three framers. It doesn’t take very long. Finished, the wall is hollow, a skin of stucco and drywall over a skeleton of wood. It’s a grid of absences. Electrical conduits weave through the empty spaces between the studs like lianas in a dark jungle. This sort of “light stick framing” built the tract houses in Los Angeles.

This way of building a wall evolved from “balloon” frame construction, quick to …

D.J. Waldie has lived his whole life in Lakewood, California, in a 957-square-foot, three-bedroom house built in 1942 for defense workers at the Douglas Aircraft plant in nearby Long Beach. The Federal Housing Administration called the tens of thousands of postwar tract houses in Lakewood and in dozens of other Los Angeles suburbs “minimal, traditional” housing.

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