Housing

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HOUSING

Native American and Colonial Housing

HOUSING Native Americans built a wide variety of houses on the North American continent thousands of years before European colonization. Some were simple triangular tipis, engineered to resist the wind and keep out the cold but easily moveable; others were earthen, wood and covering, stone, or adobe houses. Often the shapes of these dwellings reflected the features of the land around them as their builders sought a safe accommodation with nature. Native Americans lived in single-family structures, extended-family structures, and multiunit structures. In the mid-sixteenth century Spaniards explored the Southwest, where they found Native Americans living in remarkable cliff dwellings and pueblos. The Europeans added their own

concepts of housing to indigenous materials and methods of construction to create a distinctive style still common in the Southwest. European colonists arriving on the eastern seaboard in the seventeenth century built houses of masonry or wood that imitated Old World houses. The few remaining from the colonial period are readily identifiable as Dutch, French, or English. In forested New England, colonial houses were built of wood. In Virginia and Maryland the colonists built masonry houses, using the clay soil to make bricks and oyster shells to make mortar. The earliest colonial houses were simple one-or two-room, one-story buildings.

During the colonial period there emerged several types of American houses that incorporated distinctive environmental adaptations. New England houses were designed for difficult winters with sharply sloped roofs, low ceilings, small rooms, and small windows. The houses of the Southwest faced inward onto courtyards, had thick adobe walls, high ceilings, and small windows in outer facades. The houses of the Middle Atlantic states and the South were built with high ceilings, large windows, central halls, and long porches. Houses were placed on hills to capture breezes or sheltered to avoid harsh winds. Not until central heating and air conditioning did such adaptations to climate become less crucial.

Settlement of the West and the Urbanization of America

Nineteenth-century settlers beyond the Appalachians at first built modest houses that utilized the resources available to them. Those in woodland areas built log cabins. Faced with treeless prairies, the immigrants who settled the Great Plains in the second half of the nineteenth century built dugouts or sod houses and sometimes houses of stone. However, when the railroads brought cut lumber and other building supplies, wood-framed houses in styles popular on the east coast became typical in the interior portions of the country.

In 1860 four times as many people lived in rural as in urban areas, but by 1920 rural and urban populations were approaching parity. Industry transformed America between the Civil War and the early twentieth century from a rural agricultural nation to one in which cities were growing rapidly as people came to them from both foreign countries and rural areas. The Census of 1890 counted some 12.7 million families in the United States. That number was 11 percent more than the number of dwelling units, with an even worse housing ratio in the eastern industrialized cities. For example, in 1900 three-quarters of New York City's population lived in squalid, overcrowded tenements. In 1890 Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, a shocking description of slum life among New York City immigrants.

On the other hand, the houses of the more prosperous were being equipped with electric lights, central heating, and indoor bathrooms by the 1880s. New forms of public transportation, primarily electric streetcars, made possible the development of housing away from city centers. A nationwide speculation boomin land acquisition and subdivision of building lots developed in the 1880s, and by the end of 1892, the housing market in the United States was oversupplied.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the new American industrialists began displaying their wealth by building showplace houses in cities and more rural settings. Newport, Rhode Island, was a favorite location for the fabulous summer homes of the wealthy. The elegance and luxury of this housing stood in sharp contrast to city tenements and the shacks of the poor in the South.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Suburbanization

Before World War I, a comprehensive movement of social and political reform known as progressivism took a stand against the ostentatious lifestyles of the wealthy and condemned the wretchedness of slum housing. Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned the ideal suburban house for the independent American family, a free-standing house on its own plot of ground. Wright proposed that American housing development be spread over the entire country with each family occupying one house on one acre of land. A vast network of roads could link it all together in a culture without cities. It is this pattern of sprawl, so sharply in contrast to the centralized settlements brought to the United States from Europe, that has come to prevail in the United States.

Wright's Prairie Houses incorporated a new form of interior design that featured large fireplaces in the center of the house and an open flowing floor plan. The symbolism of the houses was sanctuary for the American family, natural surroundings, escape from the crowded conditions of the city, and rejection of the artificiality of overwrought design. Wright's designs were part of a movement away from the formal Queen Anne houses so dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century and toward the simpler Craftsman or bungalow styles.

Prosperity, Depression, and World War II

Between 1923 and 1927 a period of economic prosperity brought with it one of the greatest housing booms in the history of the country. The new availability of automobiles stimulated construction of houses in the suburbs, where land was relatively cheap. More than seven million new dwelling units were started in the 1920s; annual housing peaked at 937,000 units in 1925, a figure that would be unsurpassed for the next twenty years. By 1932, housing production had fallen to 134,000 units and the industry, along with the rest of the economic and financial structure of the country, was spiraling downward. Property values fell by more than 25 percent from 1929 to 1932, eliminating homeowner equity and increasing mortgage debt from 36 percent of value in 1928 to 61 percent in 1932. As foreclosures increased, approximately one million people were forced into homelessness. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt drew housing into the purview of the federal government during the 1930s by creating, along with several other programs,

the Federal Housing Administration to provide federal insurance for home loans.

The crisis of World War II produced the first mass production of prefabricated houses. Builders devised factory-built, standardized building components such as wall and ceiling panels, and utilized light metal framing with girders and trusses that allowed for greater spans. Poured concrete foundations became standard. Many technological advances were made with the help of leading universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This cooperative effort established the basis for the hugely expanded postwar construction industry. The small, craft-oriented, homebuilding industry became more like the rest of American industry in general.

Postwar Prosperity, the Flight from the Cities, and Racial Discrimination

Americans came out of World War II with higher incomes to buy better houses. Housing starts in 1946, at 1,023,000, were higher than they had been in 1925, the previous record year, and they reached nearly 1.5 million in 1949. During this boom period the average cost of building a house rose from $4,625 in 1945 to $7,525 in 1949. Veterans Administration guaranteed loans were a major factor in helping to house the millions of servicemen returning from the war. The proportion of nonfarm home ownership rose from 41.1 percent in 1940 to 50.8 percent in 1945, the fastest increase of such magnitude to take place in the twentieth century. By 1956 the owner occupied portion of nonfarm occupancy would be 59 percent, a huge increase from that of 1940.

The 1950 Census showed an improvement in the physical condition of the country's housing. Based on a standard of more than one person per room, overcrowding was reduced from 20 percent in 1940 to 15 percent in 1949. As the country continued its emergence from the depression and war years, those who could afford it largely fled the cities, leaving behind a poor minority population, a diminished commercial core, and growing slums. An American Public Health Association Report in 1948 recognized racial segregation and substandard housing in central cities as major problems. The Housing Act of 1949 favored "a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family," but it was years before racial segregation in housing was addressed comprehensively. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order barring discrimination in the sale, lease, or occupancy of residential property owned or operated by the federal government. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred racial discrimination in any housing requiring federal funding assistance and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 established equal housing opportunity as official U.S. policy.

Expanding Suburbs, More Apartment Buildings

The new American middle class wanted the suburban houses that prosperity could make available to them in the postwar period. The ideal was a single-family house for the nuclear family on a large lot away from the deteriorating inner city. Builders acquired large tracts of land relatively inexpensively at the perimeters of towns and cities, secured government-insured advance financing, installed streets and other infrastructure, and mass produced standardized ranch-style housing. Production of mobile homes, which had been around since the 1930s when they were called trailers, began to expand rapidly in the 1960s as assembly-line techniques were improved.

The development of the elevator and steel frame construction had promoted intense multistory apartment building construction in the late nineteenth century in large cities where land was too expensive to justify single-family houses. Yet in 1960 only about 5 percent of housing units were in apartment buildings of ten or more units, except for New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Apartment construction increased in the 1960s as a result of smaller households and higher per-household income. There was a surge of luxury apartment buildings with balconies, swimming pools, large lobbies, and tenant services such as guest screening, message and package reception, and security features. In addition to rental units, condominium and cooperative apartments, which had some of the features of home ownership, became popular.

Seeking the American Dream

Despite the energy crisis of the mid-1970s and decreasing family size, houses became larger as they were recognized as the best hedge against inflation and the most important source of wealth creation for families. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms became standard. Total housing starts, including shipments of mobile homes, reached an astonishing 21,482,000 in the 1970s. This production level was at the rate of approximately one new dwelling unit for every ten people in the country. The median price of new conventional single-family dwellings rose from $23,400 to $62,900 during the decade. Economist Alan Greenspan estimated in 1977 that the market value of the nation's entire stock of single-family, owner-occupied houses was increasing at an annual rate of $62.2 billion, almost all of which was being converted to cash through mortgages. This money was recirculating in the economy, bringing the United States out of the mid-1970s recession and spurring more housing production. Capital gains from housing outstripped by three to one the gains taken by private investors in the stock market at this time.

In the late 1970s builders began to create new types of housing clusters including duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. Large landscaped developments often included a mix of detached houses, apartment buildings, and townhouses around a central feature such as a golf course or other recreational facility. Eventually the more expensive of these developments would become socially segregated "gated" communities with access limited to residents and their guests.

By the 1980s the national homeownership rate was nearly 65 percent, with the highest rate among people from ages fifty-five to sixty-five. The incidence of new two-story houses increased, and all new houses had more bedrooms, bathrooms, and fireplaces. At the other end of the scale were the homeless whose numbers reached an estimated 500,000 to 750,000 during the 1980s.

By 1999 the average new house had two or more stories, three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, central heating and air conditioning, a working fireplace, and a two-car garage. Its average size was 2,250 square feet, 50 percent larger than the average new house in 1970.

The number of housing units in the United States at the end of the twentieth century was nearly 116 million, with 91 percent of these occupied on a full-time basis. Approximately one-third of the remaining 9 percent were seasonal, recreational, or occasionally used dwellings, an indication of the housing prosperity of Americans. More than 66 percent of the units occupied on a full-time basis were occupied by their owners; in 1900 only 36.5 percent of dwelling units were owner occupied. The average household size at the end of the century was 2.6, a number that had been 4.8 in 1900 and 3.7 in 1940.

Housing is an essential component of the nation's economy and a prime indicator of national economic direction. Home ownership is usually the major form of investment for individuals and households, and a key to financial stability and upward social mobility. Home ownership has long been the American Dream, the goal toward which many strive.