Marketing the suburban lifestyle

Suzanne and I were talking this morning about Layton, Utah, a city along the I-15 and Highway 89, north of Salt Lake City, towards Ogden, and how between the state highway (6-8 lanes wide) and the freeway, any local sense of place has been mostly eradicated, aided by the development of a very specific retail estate and retail development paradigm that operates identically across the country.

For whatever reason she was looking up Mission Viejo, where she grew up, in Orange County in Southern California.  

The community developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and they had great marketing communications promoting adoption of suburban living through the acquisition of a house in the far suburbs--Mission Viejo is about 50 miles from Los Angeles.

Orange County had been rural and agricultural.

One of the great things about newspapers and magazines from this time is that they had these kinds of advertisements, which help to track changes in a community (e.g., the advertising by then local businesses like banks and appliance stores, ads on new shopping centers and residential developments, etc.).  

Similarly, at the time when there were so few but dominant national mass marketing media -- the three television networks, major metropolitan newspapers, and national magazines like Life, Saturday Evening Post, TIME, Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes & Gardens, American Home, and Fortune (plus trade magazines such as for home builders, gas station owners), etc. -- looking at newspapers and magazines especially is a great way to get documents of these changes.  (It is unfortunate that going forward, as newspapers and magazines go out of business, but also as these kinds of businesses either no longer exist or don't advertise in this way, we lose this kind of documentation.)

The University of California has a great digital archive called Calisphere, which has digitized many of these promotional materials as it relates to land use history in the state.

There are some great ads.  (Interesting too that the City website has a page on "Advertising Mission Viejo" linking to these ads.)

This one promotes the idea of locally provided amenities, that you don't need a car to get to, that you can cycle to, on a tandem bike no less.  Although no real quality bike infrastructure was provided.  

This postcard is brilliant.  It was provided as part of a welcome packet to new homeowners, who could send postcards promoting the "new town" when notifying friends and family of changes of address.

While billboards promoting new subdivisions are nothing new, it's great that they have been documented for Mission Viejo.

Interestingly, they were promoting the inclusion of community amenities as the "re-creation" of home, implying that this kind of home no longer existed in urban places.  And not really admitting that the necessary connector between home and amenities is the car, whereas before, community implied walkability.