Though the FHA and related agencies at first did a great deal to improve housing standards, by the second World War these efforts were less involved with promoting good design and more interested in avoiding mortgage risk with formulaic standards for houses and neighborhoods. The success of the project was not measured in terms of good design but rather in terms of economic efficiency. The new affordable home would be stamped from a template reflecting mortgage risk formulas and the bottom line.
As a clearing house for development standards, the FHA published circulars and technical bulletins setting out construction and property standards. Divisions within the organization specialized in legal regulations, construction and land planning. Finally all of the work was intended to correspond to the quantifiable calculations of mortgage insurance risk and market trends which were prepared by the FHA statistical division. Circulars provided the actual specifications underlying the minimum property standards like curb cuts and plumbing details. Technical Bulletins distilled this information into a more accessible format for a broad circulation of developers and builders. The bulletins covered a number of issues from "Mechanical Equipment" to "Modern Design," and are important in shaping the post war boilerplate suburbia.
Two of these Technical Bulletins, number's 5 and 7, reflect the shifting intentions of the guidelines. Technical Bulletin Number 5 [1936], entitled "Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses," assumed the tone of a kind of practical manual, selectively exhibiting some of the expertise of the progressive planning movement together with suggestions for what might be shared standards. Technical Bulletin number 7, in 1938, entitled "Planning Profitable Neighborhoods" prioritizes the developer's financial security and the government's mortgage risk. The bulletins outline methods likely to receive FHA insurance approval, providing "good" and "bad" graphic comparisons about efficient platting, residential streets, and neighborhood character. During the early years of the FHA, the land planning division provided a service to revise subdivision plans, and the Technical Bulletins published the before and after drawings. The illustrations were reproduced widely in trade journals and other industry publications and demonstrate shifts in the critical dimensions of residential fabric based on the financial templates of developer security and mortgage risk. Though intended to raise standards, the bulletins effectively encouraged minimum standards.
One of the most significant differences in procedures for residential development encouraged in Technical Bulletin number 7, is the "pre-improved" subdivision. Pre-improved subdivisions were tracts of land entirely built with houses before the potential homeowners arrived, thus streamlining both the building and the banking process and substantially changing the morphology of the residential street. Uniform dimensions and generic relationships between the otherwise more intricately connected volumes of homes and landscape effectively neutralized the fabric. Directives to develop small parcels of land as a means of reducing debt, to protect against "non-conforming" uses at the edges of these parcels, and to subdivide them with lots big enough for front-entry garages contribute further to changes in suburban morphology.
Since the bulletins actually list guidelines they lend themselves to point by point comparative study. Both discuss 1)the relation of the development to the city 2)size of the development 3)the mixture of commercial and institutional uses within residential fabric 4)the design of streets and lots 5)specialized residential arrangements 6)methods of growth and 7) neighborhood character .