Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 11
Through his growing experience with building many houses simultaneously and his inherent skill at using local media to his own ends, Fred was introduced to well-connected politicians and learned through them how to call in favors at the right time, and, most important, chase government money. The lure in Virginia Beach, where Fred learned the advantage of building his real estate empire with government handouts, was the generous funding made available by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Founded in 1934 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the FHA seems to have strayed far from its original mandate by the time Fred began taking advantage of its largesse. Its chief purpose had been to ensure that enough affordable housing was being built for the country’s constantly growing population. After World War II, the FHA seemed equally concerned with enriching developers such as Fred Trump.
The project in Virginia was also a chance to hone the expertise he’d begun to acquire in Brooklyn: building larger-scale projects as quickly, efficiently, and cheaply as possible while still managing to make them attractive to renters. When the commute back and forth to Queens became too inconvenient, Fred moved the entire family to Virginia Beach when Elizabeth was still an infant.
From Mary’s perspective, other than finding herself in an unfamiliar environment, things were much the same in Virginia as they had been in Jamaica Estates. Fred worked long hours, leaving her alone with three children under the age of six. Their social life revolved around people he worked with or people whose services he needed. In 1944, when the FHA funding that had been financing Fred’s projects dried up, the family returned to New York.
Once back in Jamaica Estates, Mary suffered a miscarriage, a serious medical event from which it took her months to recover fully. Doctors warned her against further pregnancies, but Mary found herself expecting again a year later. The miscarriage created large age gaps between the older and younger children, with Elizabeth floating in the middle, almost four years younger or older than her two closest siblings. Maryanne and Freddy were so much older than the youngest children that it was almost as if they belonged to two different generations.
Donald, the couple’s fourth child and second son, was born in 1946, just as Fred began plans for the new family house. He purchased a half-acre lot directly behind the Wareham Road house situated on a hill overlooking Midland Parkway, a wide tree-lined thoroughfare that runs through the entire neighborhood. When the kids found out about the impending move, they joked that they didn’t need to hire a moving truck; they could just roll their belongings down the hill.
At more than four thousand square feet, the House was the most impressive residence on the block but still smaller and less grand than many of the mansions that dominated the hills in the northern part of the neighborhood. Set at the top of a rise, the House cast shadows in the afternoon over the wide flagstone steps that led from the sidewalk to the front door, an entrance we used only on special occasions. The lawn jockeys, racist reminders of the Jim Crow era, were first painted pink and then replaced with flowers. The faux coat of arms on the pediment over the front door remained.
Although Queens would eventually be one of the most diverse places on the planet, in the 1940s, when my grandfather bought the land and built the imposing redbrick Georgian colonial with the twenty-foot columns, the borough was 95 percent white. The upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jamaica Estates was even whiter. When the first Italian American family moved to the neighborhood in the 1950s, Fred was scandalized.
In 1947, Fred embarked on the most important large-scale project of his career up until that point: Shore Haven, a proposed complex in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, comprising thirty-two six-story buildings and a shopping center spread over more than thirty acres. The draw this time was the $9 million in FHA funds that would be paid to Fred directly, just as Donald would later capitalize on tax breaks lavished on him by both the city and the state. Fred had previously described the type of people renting the 2,201 apartments as “unwholesome,” the implication being that upstanding people lived only in the single-family dwellings that had been his early specialty. But $9 million can be very persuasive. Around that time, when it became clear that Fred’s fortune would only continue to grow, he and his mother set up trust funds for his children that would shield the money from taxation.
Though an iron-fisted autocrat at home and in his office, Fred had become expert at gaining access to and kowtowing to more powerful and better-connected men. I don’t know how he acquired the skill, but he would later pass it on to Donald. Over time, he developed ties to leaders of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, the New York State political machine, and the federal government, many of whom were major players in the real estate industry. If getting funding meant sucking up to the local politicos who held the FHA purse strings, so be it. He joined an exclusive beach club on the south shore of Long Island and later North Hills Country Club, both of which he considered excellent places to entertain, impress, and rub elbows with the men best positioned to funnel government funds his way, much as Donald would do at Le Club in New York in the 1970s and at golf clubs everywhere.
As Donald was later alleged to