Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977. 603 pp., 1910s
. . . "We have received great assistance from the employers," real estate speculator Edwin Janss testified before a governmental commission in 1914 . . .
"Los Angeles boosters actively promoted Los Angeles as the city with more wage earning home owners than any other city in the country. But many of the new suburban homes, Janss admitted, were little more than shacks of two-room frame construction, and although payments frequently lasted up to seven years, families were often unable to maintain them. Keying the policy to the open shop notion, employers were able to utilize the real estate situation to their benefit . . ." p. 145
" . . .
"By World War I real estate, according to one observer, had become "our chief stock in trade in Los Angeles." The city had almost five thousand real estate agents, that number increasing rapidly in the next decade . . .
. . . "They have no organized connection with one another," novelist Upton Sinclair bitterly wrote of an expanding Los Angeles. "Each is an individual desiring to live his own life, and to be protected in his own little privileges. The community is thus a parasite upon the great industrial centers of other parts of America. It is smug and self-satisfied making the sacredness of property the first and last article of its creed . . . Its social life is display, its intellectual life is 'boosting,' and its politics are run by Chambers of Commerce and Real Estate Exchanges."" p. 146