![]() ![]() ![]() The Great Depression gave the idea of rurban living an added impetus. During the 1920s, manufacturing boomed as hundreds of local and national firms established plants in the county, including Ford, Goodrich, Firestone, U.S. The combination of its film, agricultural, and manufacturing industries made Los Angeles County a prime location for the small farms movement. In addition, subsistence homesteads served as symbols of the limitations of New Deal and progressive thought, and the racialized land and housing policies that would undermine the homeownership dreams of minority laborers in California and the nation for decades afterward. Yet, while the two projects would offer struggling Depression-era families a chance at the combination of rural and urban lifestyles-what Gast called "rurban" living-they would remain exclusively white and in many ways demonstrate the racial impulses that had long fueled the small farms movement. With $25 million dedicated to the experimental, federally supervised "small farms program" known as "Subsistence Homesteads," Gast would oversee both the 40-unit San Fernando Valley and 100-unit El Monte homesteads: planning them, building them, and selecting 140 families from a pool of thousands of hopefuls to live on them. Wilson and organized within the Department of the Interior, DSH leaders looked to Southern California for model sites. Therefore, when New Dealers created the Department of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH) led by M.L. Advertisements "extolling the virtues" of small farm living appeared regularly in local newspapers, notes historian Robert M. At least six hundred El Monte families already cultivated their own fruits and vegetables on small farm plots. A 1934 Los Angeles Times article estimated that 3,000 newcomers had settled on small acreage plots in the growing town prior to 1933. As an El Monte resident, Gast had witnessed the fruits of his promotional work close at hand. San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys had also experienced a boom in the numbers of white settlers looking to live out the "small farms" existence. This bulletin deals chiefly with the economic problems that will be met by those people who are planning to combine part-time farming and wage earning, 1934 | Photo courtesy of US Library of Congress As a federal official would tell the public in 1934, the hope was for the small farm movement to "develop a better standard of living and increase the security of families by eliminating their complete dependence on a paycheck." In suburbs like South Gate, working and middle class homeowners built their own bungalows and planted their own gardens as much out of economic necessity as any pretense to lifestyle or any hope of improving financial portfolios. Wage laborers, clerks, and even underpaid professionals by day, residents augmented their income with small acreage food cultivation. For many working class homeowners in and around Los Angeles, the home held value productively rather than speculatively. Through Gast and others, the Los Angeles Times had spent much of the 1920s promoting the "small farm movement." By 1933, the newspaper claimed that 5,000 households in the county engaged in the practice, with more than 2,000 joining the ranks in that year alone. "The way I see it, the small farm home is not just a piece of property but a mode of living, one that is being adopted generally in Southern California," he noted. "It is a good home in good and bad times and a place to save earnings with an incidental production of food supply." The writer-an editor at the Los Angeles Times' Farm and Garden Magazine and El Monte resident-had long advocated for the "small farm lifestyle," a return-to-the-land movement that stretched back to the turn of the century. Gast told an audience of San Diegans in 1933. and the small farms home gives them that opportunity," Ross H. It was realistic and sufficient that we’d live on either side of Instagram at most."People want to get outdoors. Honestly, the door shutting on the opportunity to meet the team hadn’t crossed my mind. I wouldn’t know if it really was the best restaurant in the world or get to take part in that conversation. I wouldn’t taste the ingredients that have broadened my horizons through a mere social media platform. I’d be fine, but I wouldn’t see the fermentation lab that I’ve watched impact culinary education and chefs everywhere. Then Redzepi announced the dining room’s imminent closing, citing the unsustainability of fine dining restaurants, and I had to accept that I’d never make it. I priced out upgrading my Amex, weighed the benefits, believed making it to Copenhagen any time soon was unlikely, but ultimately determined the cost put far too much pressure on the experience and convinced myself to let it go. I had considered attending the Noma dinner series in New York when the possibility popped up in my Resy app in 2022. ![]()
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