but this book will attempt to track the history of homeownership in both urban and rural areas to colonial times.
Middle class and working class: For many, owning a home is a sign of belonging to the middle class. A 1975 survey found that three-fourths of the members of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations—most of whom were, by definition, working class—owned their own homes, and most of them defined themselves as “middle class.”2 Americans who pretend to be insensitive to class distinctions tend to define classes by income: upper, middle, and lower classes. In fact, however, distinct cultural differences existed and still exist between working-class and middle-class families even if they earn about the same incomes.
Working-class employees, also known as blue-collar workers, have little college education, earn wages, and have occupations that rely more on physical labor or repetitive activities. Middle-class or white-collar employees are more likely to be college graduates, earn salaries, and have jobs focused more on knowledge and analysis than physical labor. Mainly because of differences in education, the middle class and working class have significant differences in tastes.
Most sociologists break these two groups down still further. The upper-middle class might include corporate executives and top doctors and lawyers; the central-middle class would include middle managers and other professionals; the lower-middle class might include clerks and other low-level managers. Working-class employees are often broken into skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled. Outside these groups are the wealthy—sometimes called the leisure class—who don’t have to work and the hardcore poor, sometimes called the underclass, who for some reason are unable to work regularly.
Social class is more than about money; it is about status and opportunity as well. Some divide the upper class into two groups: old money and new money; old money has, at least to some, a higher status. In the latter part of the 20th century, many working-class jobs paid as much or more than some middle-class jobs. Yet as sociologist Bennett Berger observes, “It is a great mistake to equate an income which permits most of the basic amenities of what the middle class calls ‘decency’ with becoming middle class.”3
One way to show off status is to buy better-quality (or at least more-expensive) goods that are highly visible, such as houses and cars. The purchase of a Cadillac or Mercedes is as much, if not more, about status as it is about transportation. But this type of status display is difficult if your income is no greater than the income of those whom you are trying to impress. In that case, people instead try to deny lower-status people access to those status symbols. As Berger says, “Status groups respond to the clamor by money for prestige by tightening their entrance requirements.”4 For example, old-money owners of cooperative apartment buildings in New York and Boston often reject new-money applicants, such as Calvin Klein or Barbra Streisand, who want to move into one of those apartments.5 Middle-class efforts to deny homeownership status to working-class families forms the deep background behind much of the debate over land use.
An important question for Americans is social mobility, that is, how easily people or their children can move into a higher class. America is supposed to be the nation where anyone can grow up to be president. Yet the most recent president who came from what we would today define as a working-class background was James Garfield. Elected in 1880, Garfield was one of only two presidents who were actually born in a log cabin. The Roosevelts, Kennedys, and Bushes were old-money, upper-class families. The fathers of other recent presidents had upper-middle-class or middle-class occupations, including a manufacturer (McKinley); a lawyer (Taft); a medical doctor (Harding); an engineer (Eisenhower); politicians (B. Harrison and L. Johnson); ministers (Arthur, Cleveland, and Wilson); small-business owners (Carter, Coolidge, Hayes, Hoover, Nixon, and Truman); and salesmen who, depending on how successful they were, were at least lower-middle-class (Ford and Reagan). Obama’s father was an economist and his mother an anthropologist.
This history suggests that social mobility in the United States is more myth than reality. Many sociologists believe that, although Americans are highly mobile geographically, social mobility is more limited. Historian Stephan Thernstrom found, for example, that only about one out of five working-class employees in the industrial city of Newburyport, Massachusetts, managed to move into the middle class in the 19th century.6 Looking at Boston in the 20th century, he found that this pace stepped up slightly to one out of four.7 This book will argue that homeownership can help children of working-class families move into the middle class, and that efforts to restrict homeownership hamper such social mobility.
Cities and suburbs: The distinction between cities and suburbs is confusing because people often mean different things when they use these terms. Demographically, the central city is the largest, and usually the oldest, city (or sometimes two cities, such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota) in a metropolitan area, while the suburbs are the cities and other developed lands contiguous to the central city. Stereotypically, cities have higher population densities, lower incomes, and lower rates of homeownership than their suburbs.
These stereotypes are not always realistic. The population densities of suburban Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco are greater than the densities of most other central cities. The densities of many suburbs, particularly in the Sun Belt, are as great or greater than their central cities. Median family incomes and homeownership rates in many central cities, particularly those in the Sun Belt, are greater than in their suburbs. In fact, of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, about half have higher homeownership rates in their central cities than in their suburbs.8
Urban planners often deride low-density suburbs as “sprawl.” The Sierra Club once labeled Los Angeles “the Granddaddy of Sprawl.”9 Yet the Los Angeles urban area (which includes Pasadena, Anaheim, and nearby suburbs) is the nation’s densest urban area, about 25 percent denser than the New York City urban area (which includes much of northern New Jersey).
One source of confusion is that American cities were built in three eras: the pedestrian era, before 1890, when most people walked; the streetcar era, between 1890 and about 1920, when many people traveled by urban transit; and the automobile era, after 1920 (but mostly after World War II), when most people traveled by car.
Manhattan, Brooklyn, and much of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Providence, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., were built in the pedestrian era and feature high-density, mid-rise housing (high-rise in the case of Manhattan) mixed with other uses, including retail and offices. Manhattan has about 60,000 people per square mile, while the densities of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are 11,000 to 13,000; San Francisco has more than 16,000, while the densities of Providence and Washington are above 9,000 and Baltimore’s is 8,000.10 Most other inner cities built in the pedestrian era have been redeveloped and no longer have these characteristics.
Much of Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Portland Oregon, and Seattle were built in the streetcar era, and their residential areas consist largely of moderately high-density single-family housing on small lots. Los Angeles has an average density of nearly 8,000 people per square mile, and its suburbs are close to 7,000 people per square mile. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Seattle have 6,000 to 7,000 people per square mile, while Denver and Portland have 3,000 to 4,000. Developments along streetcar lines outside the pedestrian-oriented inner cities are sometimes called streetcar suburbs, even though most of those suburbs have since been annexed into their central cities.
Most Sun Belt cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, were built almost entirely in the automobile era, so they typically have much lower population densities than the pedestrian or streetcar cities. Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston have 3,000 to 3,500 people per square mile, while Phoenix has only 2,800. The suburbs of streetcar- and automobile-era cities were built mostly in the automobile era and have around 2,000 people per square mile.
In short, densities of 1,500 to 2,500 are typical of auto-era suburbs; densities of 2,500 to 3,500 are typical of auto-era
