so strict that few speculative builders would divert their money into this kind of construction any more, and the housing shortage for the poor grew worse.”52
Wright points out that the housers “brought moralistic middle-class biases to their crusade” and “considered their own taste to be a universal standard of beauty, hygiene, and human sentiment.” When Chicago succeeded in condemning a tenement and was evicting its Italian residents, one reformer noted, “It was strange to find people so attached to homes that were lacking in all the attributes of comfort and decency.” One housing proposal urged that tenements be given more of those attributes by equipping them with such amenities as doorbells and bay windows.53 Such requirements, of course, would do nothing to fix the fundamental problem of urban poverty.
Rather than regulate urban housing, some housing reformers dreamed of moving working-class families to the suburbs, where land was cheap and they could live in uncrowded conditions. In the 1870s, Boston Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale encouraged working-class men to form and join building and loan associations so they could buy suburban homes. Recognizing the transportation problem, Hale urged the railroads to provide “cheap trains for laboring men.”54
In New York City, Edward Bassett, a one-term member of Congress who later helped write New York City’s zoning code, argued that people should move “from crowded centres to the open spaces” where they could have “sunny homes and plenty of air.” Overcoming the transportation problem required “low fares, so that the expense might not deter people from moving where life would be pleasanter.” The main obstacle, he believed, was “the real estate forces of New York [who] believe in congestion” and who “prevent the opening up of new areas by five-cent rapid transit” for fear it will reduce property values in the urban core.55
Unfortunately, even the traditional nickel streetcar fares were beyond the reach of many unskilled workers. As planning historian Peter Hall notes, the development of the mass-produced automobile, not the five-cent streetcar, managed to “dissolve the worst evils of the slum city through the process of mass suburbanization.”56
Fortunately for working-class families outside New York City, most low-income housing in Chicago and other industrial cities would be considered luxury housing relative to the Lower East Side. Typical was the “two flat,” a two-story building with an apartment on each floor.57 Less common were three flats (or as they were known in Boston, three-deckers) for three families. Many flats were owned by absentee landlords, but often the owners of a two- or three flat would live on the top story (which was generally quieter and had slightly more square footage than lower stories) and rent out the other flats.
Like New York City tenements, two flats were built on 25-footwide lots, but most of the houses were only about 20 feet wide so there was room for a walking path between each one. They generally had small backyards, some of which have been filled with garages since they were first built in the late 19th century. Two flats and three flats on narrow lots, with occasional four- to eightplexes, provided enough density for working-class employees to live within walking distance of work in Chicago and other industrial cities. But the multifamily nature of the buildings meant that most workers could not achieve the immigrants’ dream of owning their own home.
Although middle-class families were less attached to the idea of homeownership than those from the working class, they enjoyed relatively high housing standards whether they rented or owned. A late 19th-century working-class home, such as the kind built by Samuel Gross in 1890, might have a parlor, a kitchen that doubled as a dining room, and two seven-by-eight-foot bedrooms, usually with a privy in back instead of indoor plumbing.58 Even more basic was a two-room working-class cottage, with a kitchen that also served as parlor, dining room, and bedroom for the children, and a bedroom that was sometimes shared with boarders.59
“A generation later,” says historian Joseph Bigott, housers such as Edith Abbott “denied that cottages ever provided decent accommodation.” Abbott argued “that the unskilled are a dangerous class; inadequately fed, clothed, and housed, they threaten the health of the community.” She wanted the government to build public housing for low-income families, but such government programs would be politically possible only if Abbott could persuade people that the homes workers provided for themselves were unsafe or otherwise inadequate.60 In attempting to do so, she was imposing her middle-class biases on working-class families.
Middle-class homes had several features not found in a typical working-class house of the 1890s: water, sewer, and (later) electrical hookups; a three-fixture bathroom; a kitchen sink and other new technologies, such as an icebox, washing machine, and, eventually, electrical appliances; a formal dining room; enough bedrooms so that parents and children could have their own rooms; a front porch; and storage closets (since working-class families had “little to store,” their basic homes “made almost no provision for built-in, enclosed storage”).61 Although working-class families aspired to add these features to their homes in the 20th century, the fact that their homes did not have them in the late 19th century did not mean they were ignorant or (except in the case of sanitation) dangerous to the community.
As the 19th century came to a close, Riis’s revelations about the abominable housing conditions of many low-income families led middle-class intellectuals to ask two important questions. First, how can the poor be assured of safe and decent housing? And second, how can we make sure they don’t move next door to us? Not surprisingly, the second question was answered first by government policies such as zoning and public housing, while the answer to the first question would wait for the ingenuity of entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford and William Levitt.
After the end of World War I, the National Association of Real Estate Boards started a campaign encouraging people to “own your own home.” On the premise that a home construction boom would revive the nation’s economy, the Department of Labor joined in the campaign, distributing pamphlets and flyers. In 1921, the campaign received an even bigger boost when the young secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, personally lent his support, encouraging the homebuilding industry to reduce costs by standardizing construction practices and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of a booklet titled How to Own Your Own Home.1
Considering that the number of owner-occupied homes grew from 10.9 million in 1920 to 14 million in 1930, many would deem this campaign a success. Some have gone so far as to label the campaign a “conspiracy” aimed at deceiving many Americans into buying homes when they would be better off renting.2
In fact, the own-your-own-home campaign was one of the least important factors in the rise of homeownership in the early 20th century. The government, in cooperation with various special-interest groups, conducts all sorts of campaigns aimed at changing our behavior, from urging people out of their cars and onto transit to reducing obesity. There is little evidence that these campaigns have a major effect on behavior.
On the other hand, the years between 1890 and 1930 saw several profound changes that transformed American lifestyles and the role of homeownership for both middle- and working-class families. Those changes included an expansion of credit; new transportation technologies, such as streetcars and automobiles; new industrial technologies, such as the moving assembly line; a new class of homebuilders who combined subdivision planning with home construction; and the use of protective covenants and zoning to protect home values—often by protecting middle-class neighborhoods from working-class intrusions.
When combined, those changes dramatically increased urban homeownership rates. Rural homeownership rates were already high in 1890: more than 64 percent of rural families but only 17.6 percent of urban families lived in their own homes (see Figure
