Housing

Housing. Housing in America, from the earliest Native American homes to the present, has been shaped by a wide range of factors, including building traditions, techniques of construction, cost considerations, material availability, the homebuilder's skill, and class and ethnic differences. Not until the twentieth century did the two features of contemporary housing—government intervention in the form of building regulations, zoning requirements, and financing support; and the effective use of technology in terms of indoor plumbing, electricity, and central heating and cooling—become widespread.

Native American Housing Traditions.

The approximately three hundred different Native American groups who were the earliest builders on the North American continent utilized a variety of materials and construction processes. Eastern woodlands and Great Lakes tribes created domed houses using lightweight stick frames covered by bark or woven mats. The Iroquois's version, called a longhouse, could contain as many as thirty families. Plains Indians, in contrast, erected tentlike tepees, constructed out of poles wrapped with buffalo skins. In the Southeast, Cherokees built log houses out of small logs chinked with dirt and sand. In the Southwest, the Anasazi created dramatic cliff dwellings, honeycombed with room clusters and kivas (social‐ceremonial chambers).

Colonial Housing.

Colonists, immigrants, slaves, and other newcomers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used traditional housing forms and adapted construction techniques to the American environment. Slaves followed African or Caribbean practices of constructing one‐ or two‐room cabins, often using mud‐covered woven branches for the walls and grass thatched roofs. Both the English and Dutch used heavy timbers to construct mortise and tenon frames, which gave their early houses low, massive profiles. In New England, houses often had large center fireplaces, whereas in the South, kitchens with fireplaces were often constructed as separate buildings.

In the Southwest, Spanish and Mexican settlers built flat‐roofed adobe houses with one to three rooms and hard‐packed dirt floors. Larger Mexican‐styled haciendas often had small, open courts at the center. In contrast, northern European settlers from Belgium and the Scandinavian countries built log houses and log barns in the Middle West. In all cases, local materials and traditional building techniques were combined to provide the best quality shelter possible.

Middle‐class Housing.

Most American single‐family housing was designed not by architects but by local carpenters. In the nineteenth century, however, the publication of pattern books and popular magazines enabled architects such as Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) and Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) to promote the new Gothic and Italianate revival homes. With these new styles, and the proliferation of homes built in the classical revival tradition, middle‐ and upper‐class citizens in America built spacious, three ‐or four‐bedroom houses with broad front porches and large entrance hallways. The expansion of rail and streetcar systems in the late nineteenth century and freeways in the twentieth enabled the prosperous classes to develop new residential suburbs adjacent to major cities.

Although the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois and the Hershey Chocolate Company in Pennsylvania created planned company towns (in 1881 and 1903 respectively), most small‐town and suburban housing has been financed and built on a piecemeal basis. In 1975 a typical builder produced fewer than twenty units a year, and those who built one thousand or more accounted for less than 5 percent of total production.

Urban Housing.

In cities, crowded conditions and higher land prices forced a continuous search for more efficient housing types. Small wooden houses, often crowded with two or three families, came first. In New York City in 1855, for example, an average of three families, totaling fifteen people, lived in each house. Connected row houses were also built. Later in the nineteenth century, tenements and narrow four‐ or five‐story, twenty‐five‐by‐one‐hundred–foot apartments, called railroad flats because each room could be entered only by going through another room, were erected.

Hotels represented another urban housing option. Whether palatial structures like the Waldorf Astoria in New York (1893), designed for wealthy visitors, or residential hotels and cheap boarding houses that rented single rooms to the middle and lower‐middle classes, hotels often pioneered new plumbing, air‐conditioning, and electrical technologies.

Federal Intervention.

Despite the growth of middle‐class suburban housing and the vast array of boarding houses, hotels, and apartments (sometimes called flats) in America's cities, finding affordable housing remained a problem. From 1900 to 1929, rising wages and prices for lumber and technology dramatically increased the costs of single family homes. Although the decision to make home mortgage interest payments deductible when the federal income tax was introduced in 1913, and the creation of a Housing Corporation during World War I, were signs of a more activist state, it was the Great Depression of the 1930s that forced Congress to intervene in the housing market in a major way.

The Depression threw millions out of work and forced banks to foreclose on thousands of home mortgages. Although the New York City Housing Corporation had earlier built low‐income housing and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union had sponsored cooperative apartments in the Bronx and Manhattan, it was the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration (PWA), created as a part of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, that marked the entrance of the federal government into slum clearance and the low‐cost housing market. In its four years of existence, the PWA financed or helped build 58 housing developments containing nearly 25,000 dwelling units around the country. In 1937, the Wagner Public Housing Act formally linked public housing to slum clearance. Underfunded and poorly administered, the PWA's housing division built cramped, barrackslike complexes such as the one in the Red Hook section of New York City that remained poor people's housing. Although the National Housing Act of 1949 also proposed to expand public housing, by the 1980s only 3 percent of all housing units in the country were owned by nonprofit or government agencies. The long tradition of private home ownership effectively undercut reformers’ attempts to create more publicly owned, low‐income housing.

Most federal aid during the Depression, not surprisingly, went to individual homeowners. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (1933) refinanced mortgages and helped save many owner‐occupied nonfarm residences. The National Housing Act (1934) created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which provided federal insurance for home rehabilitation loans and mortgages for new homes. By 1950, FHA mortgage guarantees made it possible for most white, middle‐class families to buy comfortable homes in suburban neighborhoods. African Americans were generally excluded by a variety of discriminatory devices. For example, William Levitt, the developer of Levittown, used racially exclusive covenants to bar blacks from his new postwar subdivisions.

Planned Towns and Communities.

The search for new forms of housing increased after World War II. Self‐contained mobile homes accounted for 25 percent of new housing in nonmetropolitan America in the 1970s. Manufactured homes, sometimes called trailer homes, were also popular. As the cost of house construction rose, new building materials, including vinyl and metal siding, were developed to recreate the look of wood at a lower price. Younger buyers often purchased condominiums, connected apartment units managed by a homeowners’ association. More extensive developments, called planned communities, pioneered by Forest Hills Gardens, New York, in 1909, have included Reston, Virginia (1966), Kentlands (Gaithersburg, Maryland, 1988), and the Disney Corporation's town of Celebration, Florida (1996). These developments gained space for parks and public areas by reducing lot sizes and clustering homes more closely together. As the twentieth century came to a close, increasing emphasis was placed not only on the housing, but on the environment in which it was placed.
See also Architecture: Domestic Architecture; New Deal Era, The; Slums; Suburbanization; Urbanization; Urban Renewal.

Bibliography

Gwendolyn Wright , Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, 1981.
Kenneth T. Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, 1985.
Dell Upton, ed., America's Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America, 1986.
Bernard L. Herman , Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 1700–1900, 1987.
Lisa Taylor, ed., Housing: Symbol, Structure, Site, 1987.
Jessica Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, 1992.
Fred W. Peterson , Homes in the Heartland: Balloon Frame Farmhouses of the Upper Midwest, 1850–1920, 1992.
Peter Katz, ed., The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, 1994.
Gail Radford , Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era, 1996.

Clifford E. Clark Jr.