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4. The Suburban Dream

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 4.1). By 1930, the rural rate had declined slightly to 54 percent, but the urban rate increased by 2.5 times to 43.4 percent.³ Since urban populations more than tripled in that same time period, while average family size declined from 4.76 to 4.01, the number of owned homes in urban areas grew more than 10 times, from about 710,000 in 1890 to 7.4 million in 1930. Most of that increase was before the realtors’ own-your-ownhome campaign began: in 1920, urban homeownership had already climbed to 37.4 percent, representing 4.7 million homes.⁴

Expansion of Credit

This increase in homeownership was financed by an expansion of credit tools, and especially by the growth of building and loan associations. As previously noted, as of 1893, B&Ls had helped finance about 300,000 homes. By the 1920s, they became the primary source of finance for homebuyers, offering amortizing loans for up to 12 years with as little as 25 percent down. In a decade that saw the construction of 7.03 million new homes, the B&Ls financed 4.35 million homes, lending $15 billion, or nearly $3,500 per home.⁵

Growth of the Suburbs

Between 1890 and 1930, the number of urban homes, rented and owned, more than quadrupled. This rise contributed to the rapid growth of the suburbs: During the 1920s, the first full decade in which urbanites outnumbered ruralites, the suburbs grew twice as fast as the cities.⁶ The political reason for suburban growth was the increasingly scarce vacant land inside the cities, and people living outside the cities were increasingly resistant to being annexed at a time when many cities were run by political machines known for their corruption.

The social reason for suburban growth was that it allowed middle-class families to get away from working-class neighbors and settle into communities of people more like themselves. Historians Oliver Zunz and Margaret Garb have shown that, in the 1880s, urban neighborhoods in cities such as Detroit and Chicago were divided along ethnic lines, while by the 1920s, they were divided by income classes.⁷ This change hints at a dark side of growing homeownership, which was that it took place mostly or entirely among the middle class, while working-class homeownership rates appear to have stagnated or declined.

Too many, the term “suburbs” evokes images of Levittowns and other post-World War II developments, but people began escaping cities for the suburbs long before that. In the pre-sanitary and public health era—which includes almost all of the 19th century—cities were rightly regarded as unhealthy and unsafe, prime locations for epidemics, not to mention crime and other problems. The ability of those with urban occupations to escape the city for the suburbs depended on their wealth, leisure time, and access to transportation.

New Transportation Technologies

Before the 1830s, the only transportation available to most urbanites was foot or horsepower. Since only wealthy or high-income people could afford to keep horses in cities, most people located within one or two miles of urban job centers. The development of steam-powered trains offered a few people the option of living farther away. Early steam trains had top speeds of about 30 miles per hour but typically ran much slower. In 1839, Ulysses Grant rode a train on part of his journey to West Point and observed top speeds of about 18 mph and average speeds of 12 mph.⁸ These rates still represented a significant advance over walking speeds, and speeds rapidly increased so that, by 1850, trains could achieve 60 mph and typically cruised at 30 to 40 mph. However, commuter train services were available only in the largest cities, and fares were so expensive that only the wealthiest people could use them for commuting.

An alternative to steam-powered trains was the horsecar—a horse-powered vehicle running on rails—which was first offered in New York City in 1832 and was common in many American cities by 1850. San Francisco saw the first cable car system in 1873, and by 1890 cable cars operated in around 30 American cities. However, horsecars and cable cars were both slow and expensive, so although they attracted some middle-class riders, they did not stimulate much suburban growth.

The electric streetcar, which was perfected in the late 1880s, led to the first major suburban boom. Average streetcar speeds of 10 to 15 mph were slow by today’s standards, but much faster than any previous form of transport other than the far more expensive steam train. Electric streetcars were so inexpensive to operate that almost all horse- and cable-car lines quickly converted to electrical power, and by 1910 well over 800 American cities had at least one streetcar line. In many cities, developers would build a streetcar line between downtown and their subdivision as a way of attracting homebuyers. Although nickel fares were sufficient to operate the streetcars, the cost of building the lines was actually subsidized by lot and home sales. Later, these streetcar lines often merged and often ended up under the control of the local electric power company.

The streetcar transformed both cities and suburbs. Before the streetcar, wealthy urbanites often built the finest homes on major thoroughfares, where they had easy access to transportation and other services. Wealthy suburbanites tended to live 3 to 10 miles from city centers— close enough to reach by horsepower but too far to walk. But the noise and crowds brought by the streetcar caused the wealthy to retreat from arterial streets, which were soon lined with shops and multifamily housing, and to move as far away as 15 miles from the city center.⁹

Historian Sam Warner estimates that about 5 percent of people in the Boston area of 1900 were wealthy or in the upper-middle class, meaning the owners of large businesses or prosperous lawyers and other professionals. Another 15 percent would be in the central-middle class, including small business owners, teachers, and other professionals. Some 20 to 30 percent were in the lower-middle class, including office workers, shopkeepers, and skilled artisans. The remaining 50 to 60 percent were working class.¹⁰

The traditional streetcar fare of 5 cents per ride kept working-class commuters out of the suburbs. Warner estimates that about 40 percent of the housing in Boston’s streetcar suburbs was multifamily, often two- and three-deckers, and was the home for many lowermiddle-class families. These structures tended to be closest to the streetcar stops. Central-middle-class families tended to live in single-family homes on lots that would be considered small by today’s suburban standards, typically around 5,000 square feet.¹¹ The result was that streetcar suburbs tended to be fairly compact, so that commuters would not have to walk long distances between their homes and streetcar stops.

The wealthy and upper-middle class continued to live on large lots, either at the periphery of streetcar suburbs or farther out from the city, and probably relied on forms of transportation other than streetcars. Warner estimates that Boston’s streetcar suburbs had a homeowner-ship rate of about 25 percent in 1900—a significant increase over the average urban rate of 17.6 percent in 1890, but well below modern rates.¹²

The first gasoline-powered automobiles were developed at about the same time as the first streetcars. But early automobiles were too expensive for any but the wealthy and upper-middle class to own. That status changed in 1913, when Henry Ford began building Model Ts on a moving assembly line. Ford’s system reduced the cost by so much that Ford cut the price of his cars in half even as he doubled workers’ pay.

Automobiles were at least twice as fast as streetcars, which meant they could serve four times the land area without increasing commute times. With their door-to-door capability, they were far more convenient than streetcars or any other form of mass transportation. In 1919, Oregon became the first state to approve a gasoline tax dedicated to highways; by 1931 all other states had followed, providing a user-fee-driven source of funds for roads for auto owners to drive on.¹³ By 1927, 56 percent of American families owned at least one auto, and 10 percent owned more than one.¹⁴ Those families that owned autos no longer had to live on tiny lots or in multifamily housing to maintain their access to jobs, shops, and other services.

As the streetcar did before, the mass-produced automobile revolutionized the design of cities and suburbs. In the early 1900s, Kansas City developer J. C. Nichols was building homes for what Warner would call the central-middle class. In 1909, Nichols felt that it was essential that the local streetcar company build a line to one of his subdivisions. By 1913, however, Nichols opened a subdivision with no streetcar line and advertised that people could drive to downtown faster than they could get there by streetcar.¹⁵ In 1922, Nichols opened Country Club Plaza, the nation’s first suburban shopping mall designed to accommodate auto drivers. Although Kansas City residents initially called it “Nichols’ folly,” the mall remains a success today.¹⁶

New Manufacturing Technologies

Henry Ford’s moving assembly line also revolutionized the making of everything from soap to railcars. Products built using traditional methods could be manufactured in multistory buildings, but moving assembly lines demanded many acres of horizontal space. This necessity led manufacturers to locate or relocate their plants in the suburbs, where land was less expensive. The oft-heard tale that everyone moved to the suburbs and then created traffic congestion trying to drive to work downtown is a myth: jobs moved to the suburbs along with the people.

Moving assembly lines both enabled and were enabled by widespread auto ownership. Ford’s Rouge River plant, for example, covered one and a half square miles and employed 100,000 workers at its peak in the 1930s. Packing all those workers and their families (which averaged 3.5 people in the 1930s) within a one-mile walking distance of the plant would require multifamily housing at a population density nearly as great as Manhattan’s is today. Because most employees could drive to work, they could live in much lower densities and many more could afford to own their own homes.

Homebuilders also attempted to adopt assembly-line techniques to make homes at a lower cost. One way was through the sale of kit homes—all the lumber, roofing, flooring, paint, nails, hardware, and other materials needed to build a home, precut and ready to assemble. The manufacturers of these kit homes offered hundreds of different house plans and claimed that homebuyers could save 10 percent or more on the cost of building a home.

In 1906, a Sears, Roebuck manager named Frank Kushel was directed to shut down the catalog company’s building materials division because it was losing money. Instead, he proposed to repackage building materials into enough parts to build entire homes. Sears began selling kit homes in 1908 and over the next 32 years sold about 70,000 to 75,000 such homes.

Early Sears catalogs advertised homes ranging from 320 square feet to 2,000 square feet at prices ranging from 50 cents to about $2 a square foot. By 1918, the largest home in the catalog was nearly 3,000 square feet. Buyers had to supply their own labor, bricks, cement, and plaster. Also excluded were plumbing, electrical systems, furnaces, and furniture, though all these things were separately available, of course, from Sears. All the parts in the kit were numbered so assembly was supposed to take as little as a few days to several weeks. At the height of production in the mid-1920s, Sears delivered more than 300 homes per month.

At least eight other companies offered kit homes, including Montgomery Ward, whose homes were made by and were identical to an Iowa kit-home manufacturer named Gordon-Van Tine. But the real center of kit-home manufacturing was Bay City, Michigan, where three companies—Aladdin, Lewis, and Sterling—together sold close to 200,000 kit homes. Aladdin actually preceded Sears slightly by offering a kit boathouse in 1906. Other companies were located in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and upstate New York.

The various manufacturers offered a variety of styles and plans, including Cape Cod, foursquare, Queen Anne, Tudor, Colonial, bungalow, and many other traditional styles of homes. Sears even offered a couple of Prairie School styles and, in the late 1930s, a flat-roofed International home. Buyers could ask that floor plans be reversed or for other custom changes to the basic plans. Duplexes, fourplexes, barns, and other outbuildings were also available.

In 1911, Sears began selling homes with a 25 percent down payment plus a mortgage at 6 percent interest over 5 years or a higher rate for as long as 15 years. Starting in 1917, buyers could even get a mortgage with no money down, though Sears discontinued that after 1921.

Over several decades, kit-home makers sold well over 450,000 homes, most of them between 1908 and 1930. Still, considering that all homebuilders combined built more than 7 million homes during the 1920s alone, kit homes were a small part of the market.

New Development Practices

The other major homebuilding trend in the early 20th century was the growth of planned communities. These communities were subdivisions where the developer either built some if not all the homes or set rigorous architectural standards for any homebuyers or home-builders to follow. The largest planned communities included parks and other common areas, community centers, and other amenities that residents could share.

An example of a minimally planned subdivision is Ford Homes, located in Dearborn, Michigan, near the Rouge River plant. Henry Ford always wanted to show that he could make or do things—from running a railroad to operating a steel mill—less expensively than anyone else, and Ford Homes was an example of that ambition. Ford hired an architect, Albert Wood, to design a site plan for the subdivision. One of Wood’s suggestions was to cluster garages in a special service area for each block of the subdivision, forcing residents to walk a block or so to get to their cars. Needless to say, Ford rejected this idea. Wood also designed six basic homes, all in a Colonial style that Ford himself favored, which were used in the neighborhood.¹⁷

Following his assembly-line methods, Ford had five crews build the houses in stages: one crew dug the basements (using Ford tractors); a second put in foundations; a third framed the building; a fourth did the interiors, including wiring and plumbing; and the last crew did the exteriors, including landscaping. The process was simplified enough that Ford did not need to rely on skilled craftsmen; instead, he simply borrowed workers from his factories, noting that “men ought to spend part of the year working outside factory walls.”¹⁸

Ford offered buyers mortgages at 6 percent interest. The only restrictions Ford put on the homes were that buyers could not resell them for seven years, while the company had the option to buy back the home within seven years if the buyer proved “undesirable” (it isn’t clear whether this meant failing to keep up the payments or turning into a labor organizer at a Ford factory).¹⁹

Ford Homes were not designed to be particularly affordable for working-class families. Ranging from 1,200 to 1,500 square feet, the homes initially sold for $6,750 to $7,750 in 1919 ($85,000 to $98,000 today using the consumer price index; $277,000 to $318,000 today using the unskilled wage index). By comparison, General Motors built several hundred homes near Flint, Michigan, that started at $3,500 and averaged around $5,000. But neither Ford nor GM was trying to build worker housing; instead, they just wanted to show other developers how they could build more efficiently. In fact, many other developers had already adopted and gone well beyond Ford’s techniques.²⁰

One such developer was J. C. Nichols of Kansas City, who became noted for building one of the largest planned communities in the early 20th century. Although Nichols’s Country Club District is sometimes called a master-planned community, a type of community that became popular in the 1960s, the Country Club District was in fact incrementally planned. Nichols started in 1906 with just 10 acres, which he subdivided into about 70 lots. With the profits he earned from that subdivision, he bought more land and subdivided it. Each new subdivision gained from what he learned from previous subdivisions. As mentioned earlier, he also built shopping areas, including the nation’s first suburban shopping mall, hotels, apartments, and commercial office space. By 1930, the Country Club District covered 4,000 acres and housed at least 30,000 people in 9,000 homes.²¹

Deed Restrictions

One of the most important features in Nichols’s subdivisions was the use of restrictive covenants. These covenants limited what people could do with their land, who they could sell it to, and how common areas would be managed. Nichols also created homeowners associations to manage and enforce the covenants. By prohibiting nonresidential uses in residential areas, Nichols’s covenants assured middle-class homebuyers that their neighborhoods would not be invaded by industrial or retail shops. Moreover, by specifying the minimum cost of building a new home or the use of high-cost materials, the covenants assured homebuyers that their neighborhoods would not be invaded by working-class families whose tastes were significantly different from their own.

Nichols was far from the first to use protective covenants. As early as 1749, the Penn family used deed restrictions in some of their land sales requiring buyers to build homes of brick or stone, not wood, within one or two years of purchase.²² In 1837, homebuyers in a development called Rock Park Estate in Cheshire, England, had to agree to have no fences taller than three feet, to have no businesses other than medicine or teaching, to set homes and other buildings back from streets, and to share in the cost of a community water supply.²³

In the mid 1850s, a New York City businessman named Llewellyn Haskell put together 350 hilly, wooded acres near West Orange, New Jersey—which at that time would have been a long commute from New York City—and subdivided it into 130 lots of at least 1 acre each. He set aside 50 acres along a creek as a common area and restricted the lots he sold to residential purposes.²⁴

Haskell turned out to be ahead of his time, or at least he timed his project badly. He lost control of the project during the recession of 1857, and the Civil War also put a damper on land sales. By 1886, only 38 out of 130 lots had sold.²⁵

Nichols was more influenced by Kansas City developer Kersey Coates who, in 1857, put a deed restriction on some of his subdivisions requiring that homes be built of brick, which cost five times as much as wood homes. These subdivisions became known as “Quality Hill.” Coates, an abolitionist, also designed subdivisions for working-class families and donated land in one neighborhood to a black Baptist church and a black elementary school. Ironically, Coates’s well-intentioned efforts effectively segregated blacks from whites in Kansas City.²⁶

In 1868, Frederick Law Olmstead helped design Riverside, a suburb of Chicago whose restrictive covenants required minimum lot sizes of one-half acre and homes costing no less than $3,000 (about $50,000 today using the consumer price index and $350,000 using the unskilled wage index). Also influential was Roland Park, a suburb of Baltimore planned in the early 1890s. Roland Park included a small shopping area that today might be called a strip mall. Deed restrictions forbade nonresidential uses in the rest of the subdivision. Depending on the lot, the minimum cost of houses was set at $2,000 to $5,000 ($50,000 to $125,000 today using the consumer price index and $240,000 to $600,000 using the unskilled wage index). Initially, deed restrictions were perpetual, but the developer later changed them to last for 25 years and be renewable after a vote of the homeowners.²⁷

As it happened, Roland Park was managed by Edward Bouton, a Kansas City native, and was designed with the help of George Kessler, a Kansas City engineer. Kessler would later work with J. C. Nichols, and Nichols would credit Roland Park as one of his main inspirations.

Nichols’s ability to learn from each new subdivision can be seen in the evolution of the deed restrictions he wrote for them. In 1908, the restrictions for one of his first developments were written to last 25 years.²⁸ Such restrictions were common to many planned communities, but they created a problem at the end of those 25 years. Developers were reluctant to make restrictions perpetual, because no one could foresee what people in the distant future would want. Some developers urged cities to pass zoning ordinances to take control when the deed restrictions expired.

Starting in 1909, deed restrictions written by Nichols lasted 25 years with an optional renewal by the homeowners association. Nichols thought this option still created a problem because the homeowner association would have to take a positive action to renew the restrictions or they would lapse. So he hit on the idea of having the restrictions renew automatically unless the homeowners association voted not to renew them.²⁹

By 1922, Nichols had developed what he considered the optimal set of restrictions, and so he went to the homeowners associations of his already-completed subdivisions, as well as some nearby developments done by others, and urged them to adopt his new restrictions. They all agreed to do so, although a minority group at one subdivision protested as far as the Missouri Supreme Court, which agreed with the majority.³⁰ Nichols also created deed restrictions and a merchants association for Country Club Plaza, his pioneering shopping mall.

Nichols considered deed restrictions to be such a powerful selling tool that all his advertising emphasized that property values would be “protected” by the restrictions. His restrictions did not specify any particular architectural styles, but they did require that his company approve all building designs. He also included minimum costs for homes and various other limits on uses. “Every year we are planning and studying as to how we can impose upon that property more conditions, and more restrictions,” he told other developers in 1921, “and it has paid and it is paying.”³¹ Restrictions cost the developer almost nothing, but they could add considerably to the value of property by assuring buyers that their land values would not be reduced by undesirable intrusions.

Among the other common areas included in Nichols’s developments were “interior parks” in the middle of some blocks, with playground equipment and other features accessible only through the back doors of people’s homes. Similar parks had previously been included in Roland Park and were later a part of the much-lauded Radburn, a planned development in New Jersey designed by architect Clarence Stein. Stein treated the streets as service areas only and faced the fronts of the homes in Radburn toward the parks, which included walking paths that connected the homes with the outside world. Nichols also oriented his homes toward the side away from the street.

The problem with interior parks, as Country Club District residents found, is that they expose homes to potential intruders on two fronts: the front and back of the homes. If the interior parks are common areas, as at Radburn and in some Country Club subdivisions, as opposed to private backyards as in more conventional suburbs, then no one can tell if someone walking in the common area is a resident or a potential burglar. Because of residents’ concerns about vandalism and break-ins, all but one interior park in the Country Club District were resubdivided among homeowners. Many of the Roland Park interior parks were also eliminated.³²

The solution to this dilemma turned out to be gated communities. Sometimes decried as enclaves for the rich, a gated community is one way homeowners can protect themselves from turning interior common areas into pathways for crime; without such common areas, there would be no need for gated communities. The first planned community with a common area, Llewellyn Park, is a gated community, and no one from outside the community, except guests of the residents, may visit the common areas without written permission from the community association.³³

One constant in Nichols’s deed restrictions was a provision forbidding homeowners to sell to blacks and, in his early developments, Jews. Some writers have challenged the entire idea of protective covenants based on the fact that some of them included such racial restrictions.³⁴ Although America’s racist past is shameful, covenants and deed restrictions can’t be blamed for it any more than today’s transit agencies can be blamed for the Montgomery, Alabama, bus company that was required by Jim Crow laws to order Rosa Lee Parks to sit in the back of the bus.

Racial restrictions were actually rare to nonexistent in protective covenants before 1908. Instead, developers implicitly assumed that other restrictions, such as minimum-cost requirements for homes, would effectively prevent blacks and other minorities from moving into their subdivisions.

Zoning and Land-Use Restrictions

The City of San Francisco first introduced racism into land-use rules in 1885, when it tried to restrict the mobility of Chinese by banning public laundries from most of the city. Even though the ordinance was overtly race neutral, the Supreme Court ruled that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.³⁵

In 1910, Baltimore wrote a zoning ordinance that excluded blacks from any block on which more than half the residents were white and excluded whites from blocks where half the residents were black. Baltimore’s mayor Barry Mahool, a prominent member of the Progressive Party, commented that “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.” Birmingham, Alabama; Richmond, Virginia; St. Louis, Missouri; and other cities wrote similar ordinances.³⁶ When the ordinance for Louisville, Kentucky, reached the Supreme Court, the Court unanimously ruled in 1917 that such zoning rules were unconstitutional. After that ruling, southern cities practiced “expulsive zoning,” which allowed intrusive uses in black neighborhoods that were forbidden in white neighborhoods.³⁷

The Supreme Court’s ruling against racial zoning spurred developers to add such racial restrictions to the deeds for more planned developments. In 1928, a legal scholar named Helen Monchow reviewed the deed restrictions for 84 different developments and found racial restrictions in 40 of them, none of which dated before 1908.³⁸ Over time, the percentage probably increased until 1948, when the Supreme Court effectively invalidated such restrictions by ruling that the courts could not enforce them.³⁹

Although deed restrictions preceded zoning by hundreds of years, such restrictions only applied to new developments. Zoning was conceived in the early 20th century as a way of providing the same stabilization of property values to existing neighborhoods. Although New York City is credited for passing the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, Los Angeles actually passed the first zoning ordinance in 1909—the difference being that the New York ordinance included height limits and setback requirements, while Los Angeles’s original ordinance only regulated use.

L.A.’s 1909 ordinance designated certain areas residential, light industrial, and heavy industrial, while it left other areas unzoned. By 1915, the city had created as many as 27 different zones. Unlike most modern ordinances, the Los Angeles rule did not include a grandfather clause, so businesses that found themselves in an area zoned residential were forced to move. A 1915 Supreme Court ruling upheld this policy as a way of dealing with nuisances.⁴⁰

While deed restrictions responded to the market, zoning responded to political pressures. Many landowners anticipated that commercial and multifamily zones were more profitable than single-family residential and lobbied to have their properties zoned for the higher-value uses. Such lobbying led to systematic errors in the allocation of land to various uses.⁴¹

“By the time less than half the city [of Los Angeles] was zoned, it became obvious that three or four times as much property had been zoned for commercial use as could ever be used and that such zoning often blighted the property as owners waited for commercial development that would never come,” reports Robert Alexander, an architect who worked with L.A.’s planning agency in the 1940s. This imbalance was never corrected, and in 1989 the 82-year-old Alexander stated that the city still had too much land in commercial and multifamily zones.⁴²

Los Angeles is not the only city to have overzoned for multifamily housing. During the 1920s, as cities were passing their first zoning ordinances, realtors used their political muscle to promote the allocation of more land to multifamily zones. For example, Portland, Oregon’s first zoning ordinance, enacted in 1920, put most of the city’s residential neighborhoods into a single-family-housing zone. Under pressure from realtors, the ordinance was referred to the voters, who narrowly defeated it. Realtors then campaigned for a new ordinance that included far more land in multifamily housing, which was passed in 1924.⁴³ The city ended up with a surplus of multifamily housing, relative to single-family homes, that lasted at least into the 1990s.⁴⁴ Similarly, in 1960, so much of Staten Island was zoned for multifamily housing that it had a capacity for 7.4 million people; its actual 1960 population was about 222,000; by 2010, it still had only about 480,000.⁴⁵

Zoning conferred so much power on public officials that it soon became a major source of corruption. In 1938, Los Angeles recalled Mayor Frank Shaw from office for, among other things, “buying and selling of planning permits, spot zone changes, and variances.”⁴⁶ Nearly 30 years later, a writer for Harper’s magazine was doing research on corruption in zoning. A developer told him that, thanks to a history of bribery, “We know where we stand now—$25,000 for zoning for a trailer park in this country. Why upset things by talking about it?”⁴⁷

The deed restrictions of planned communities protected the middle-class residents of many of those communities from intrusions by working-class families by such means as forbidding chickens and other domestic animals other than cats and dogs; prohibiting boarders; and restricting in-home businesses, all things more commonly found in working-class homes than in middle-class homes.⁴⁸ Developers who were building communities for working-class families obviously would not include such restrictions in their deeds, and working-class homebuyers could find plenty of neighborhoods that had no restrictions at all.⁴⁹

Zoning changed all that. Zoning boards and planning staffs, dominated by middle-class planning advocates, didn’t hesitate to blanket entire cities with residential zones that forbade working-class practices and habits. By 1930, 981 cities and towns, including nearly 2 out of 3 of the 250 largest American cities, had passed zoning ordinances affecting a total of 46 million of the nation’s 123 million people.⁵⁰ In many cases, these ordinances helped to price many working-class families out of the market for single-family homes.

“The basic purpose of suburban zoning was to keep Them where They belonged—Out,” says Rutgers planning professor Frank Popper. “If They had already gotten in, then its purpose was to confine Them to limited areas. The exact identify of Them varied a bit around the country. Blacks, Latinos, and poor people always qualified. Catholics, Jews, and Orientals were targets in many places.”⁵¹

An analysis of land values before and after Chicago passed its comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1923 found that zoning significantly increased property values, and the greatest increases were in residential areas that were zoned exclusively for residential use. Although Chicago’s commercial zone allowed either commercial or residential use, giving landowners more options, the exclusivity of the residential zone apparently made it more valuable.⁵²

The effect of such zoning made housing more attractive to middle-class buyers and less affordable for working-class buyers. An analysis of mortgages in Paterson, New Jersey, by sociologist Helena Flam found that the share of loans to middle-class homebuyers increased from 39 percent in the early 1890s to 45 percent in the mid-1920s.⁵³ Although that’s not a large difference, it only counts mortgages in the city; if suburban mortgages were included, the difference would likely be much bigger.

The economic argument for zoning and protective covenants was that the value of one family’s property depended partly on how nearby landowners used their property. Certain uses of one particular property can conceivably enhance the value of that property but can detract from the values of adjacent properties by more than the enhanced value of the first. Zoning and covenants are designed to protect collective property values, and the popularity of these tools among homebuyers suggests that those homebuyers, at least, believed in the economic argument.

This argument was put to a legal test when the owner of 68 acres of land in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, Ohio, challenged Euclid’s zoning ordinance, saying that it had reduced the value of the land without compensation and therefore was an unconstitutional taking. Prewar zoning ordinances tended to be “cumulative,” meaning that single-family zones allowed only single-family housing; multifamily zones allowed either single- or multifamily housing; commercial zones allowed either residential or commercial use; and industrial zones allowed any use at all. Ambler Realty, which owned the 68 acres, wanted its land to be zoned industrial.

The district court agreed with Ambler Realty and ruled that zoning was unconstitutional. Six members of the Supreme Court, however, were sympathetic to the economic argument for zoning. “The development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses,” wrote Justice George Sutherland for the majority in 1926, “which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.” These apartments bring “disturbing noises” and traffic, while they deprive “children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play . . . until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed.” As a result, “apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances,” and thus are subject to the police power of the state.⁵⁴

The Growth of Multifamily Housing

In 1992, a California land-use attorney named Kenneth Baar argued that the Euclid decision was the culmination of a “national movement to halt the spread of multifamily housing.” The implication was that, thanks to this movement, many urban areas had “inadequate production of multifamily housing.”⁵⁵ In fact, the reverse is likely to be true: as previously noted, many cities actually overzoned for multifamily, while areas outside city limits tended to be unzoned through the 1960s, leaving plenty of land for multifamily housing if the market demanded it.

Moreover, though the 1920s were prosperous and saw far more housing starts than any previous decade in American history, the real growth over the decade in many cities was in multifamily housing. In the nation’s 255 largest cities, the number of single-family homes built in 1928 was just 4.7 percent greater than in 1921, but the number of duplexes was 10.5 percent greater, and the number of multifamily houses (three units or more) was 281 percent greater. At the beginning of the decade, multifamily housing accounted for less than 20 percent of new dwellings; by the end, it was over half.⁵⁶

An economist named Coleman Woodbury, who would later become a distinguished housing scholar at the University of Wisconsin, wondered why multifamily housing had suddenly become so popular. One possibility was that tastes had changed and some people discovered that they preferred to live in multifamily housing. So in 1931, Woodbury surveyed more than 900 homeowners and nearly 800 apartment renters asking, among other things, if they would rather be renters or owners. Only 14 percent of homeowners said they wanted to become renters, while 53 percent of renters said they wanted to become homeowners.⁵⁷

Another possibility was that high-quality urban transit had enticed people to live in higher densities so they could have access to that transit. Comparing transit improvements with the growth of multifamily housing, Woodbury found a weak correlation—but one that largely disappeared when he excluded the nation’s three largest (and most transit-intensive) cities, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.⁵⁸

Woodbury did find that wealthier cities seemed to have more multifamily construction, which he took to mean that apartments were attracting well-to-do families.⁵⁹ But it is also possible that the apartment boom was stimulated by low-income families in those cities who were priced out of the market for single-family homes. This possibility is supported by Woodbury’s finding that cities with higher property taxes tended to have more multifamily construction, with the most construction in the poorest neighborhoods of those cities. He also found a “slight degree of association” between high residential land values and multifamily construction.⁶⁰

Woodbury found the strongest correlation between zoning and multifamily construction. “Zoning in almost all cities has, to some extent, stabilized land values. This steadying of values and the assurance of the character of a district on which it is based, according to this line of reasoning, should enhance the desirability of home ownership and act to increase the building of single-family houses.” This stabilization suggests “that zoned cities probably have experienced the apartment house growth in less degree than unzoned cities,” Woodbury hypothesized. “In fact, the opposite conclusions are clearly indicated,” he found. The 88 cities that had no zoning saw less than an 8 percent increase in apartments, while the 167 cities with zoning saw more than a 33 percent increase in multifamily housing.⁶¹ Cities that had passed new, stricter building codes also saw more multifamily construction.⁶²

Sixty years after Woodbury’s research, housing historian Gail Radford offered one more explanation for the increase in multifamily construction during the 1920s: mortgage bonds. These bonds were similar to the bonds that played a major role in the 2008 financial crisis, but in the 1920s they were limited to commercial developments, including multifamily housing. Before the introduction of such bonds into the real-estate market in the early 20th century, builders of large housing projects had to finance those projects with short-term, high-interest loans. Only after construction was complete could they get longer-term, lower-interest loans, and then only for about half a building’s net worth. Bonds made it possible to get more money up front at lower interest rates, Radford suggests, and thus precipitated a multifamily construction boom.⁶³

Radford’s argument is superficially persuasive, but it doesn’t explain two things. First is timing: Though mortgage bonds were first issued around 1900, only $500 million of such bonds had been issued by 1920. Yet during the 1920s, another $5.5 billion were sold.⁶⁴ Why did they become popular during the 1920s? Second is geography: Radford’s analysis looked exclusively at Chicago, one of the cities where zoning had increased land and construction costs. Mortgage bonds were available to developers in any city, yet they were most heavily used in the 1920s in cities with zoning.

More easily available credit for multifamily construction may have played a role in the 1920s apartment boom. But the main story was that middle-class planners and zoning boards, using the deed restrictions of developers like J. C. Nichols as models, enacted their biases and preferences for what housing should be like into city zoning ordinances. This action boosted the value of land zoned for single-family residential, especially in cities like Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, that had overzoned for multifamily at the expense of single-family, effectively pricing working-class families out of the market for single-family homes. Developers then built multifamily housing for working-class and lower-income families.

In 1931, attorney Edward Bassett, known as the “Father of Zoning” for his role in writing New York City’s original zoning ordinance, accused city planners of going well beyond the original purposes of zoning, which he said were to preserve “public health, safety, morals, and general welfare” and to “not be discriminatory.” He noted that some cities “simply transferred private restrictions relating to cost, peaked roofs, and style of architecture into a zoning ordinance.” Others had zoned schools, hospitals, and churches out of single-family areas and forced them into multifamily zones, effectively making these services inaccessible to many residents of single-family neighborhoods. Such exclusions were “unreasonable,” Bassett said, because they were “not based on the public health, safety, morals, and general welfare, but upon a desire to employ this new device of zoning to make exclusive districts more exclusive.”⁶⁵

At the other extreme from Bassett (at least in 1931), an architect named Charles Cheney argued that zoning boards should have absolute authority over the aesthetic character and architectural design of all new buildings. He estimated that 90 percent of new buildings, whose dollar value was about three-fourths of all new construction, were “so ugly, so badly planned, so inappropriately located, or on such narrow or inconvenient streets as to be a liability instead of an asset.” He arrived at this amount from estimates of the number of buildings constructed without the aid of an architect, presuming that any non-architect-designed building would have a net negative effect on the city or neighborhood in which it was built.⁶⁶ The fact that his self-serving proposal would significantly increase the cost of that 90 percent of buildings did not seem to bother him a bit, and many cities have since reduced housing affordability by implementing his demand for architecture review boards.

The Early Suburban Backlash

The fact that zoning was a quiet way to shield middle-class families from the vulgarities of working-class culture doesn’t mean that no working-class suburbs of single-family homes were built in the 1920s. They were, and while they were not up to the standards of middle-class suburbs, they tended to provide far better housing than working-class families could find in the cities. As in the 19th century, residents often grew vegetables and raised chickens or other livestock in their backyards. But such suburbs were built mainly in areas that did not yet have strict zoning or protective covenants.⁶⁷

It is likely that the working-class suburbs are what first led American intellectuals to begin their campaigns against the suburbs. As historian John Stilgoe notes, until the 1920s, most elites favored moving people out of crowded cities and into the suburbs. But when they saw what those suburbs were like, they were “substantially unnerved.” “In the outer suburbs thrived a mindset,” says Stilgoe, “that challenged urban intellectuals profoundly smitten with European thinking.” Fascinated with International-style, flat-roofed architecture, architects were upset that Americans chose to live in Cape Cod, Tudor, and other vernacular pitched-roofed homes. Urban planners entranced with the “City Beautiful” movement and its grand boulevards and public parks were upset that Americans focused on prettifying their own private backyards.⁶⁸

Stilgoe argues that the earliest and best-known attack on the suburbs was Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt. Lewis’s formula—that the suburbs were boring places inhabited by vapid, mindless people—would be repeated over and over, most recently in James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere and Sam Mendes’s films American Beauty (1999) and Revolutionary Road (2008). These attacks would pave the figurative road for revolutionary new forms of zoning in the 1990s that would attempt to force the reconstruction of the suburbs into high-density cities that the intellectuals appreciated even if they themselves did not always live there.

Urban homeownership increased between 1890 and 1930 because protective covenants and zoning made homeownership attractive to middle-class families who, in the 19th century, would have rented or leased their homes. But covenants applied only to individual neighborhoods, while zoning spread across entire cities. This widespread zoning made homeownership in those cities unaffordable to working-class families who, in the 19th century, put a high priority on homeownership. As architecture critic Anthony Jackson put it in 1976, “The grade of dwelling that private enterprise had supplied for the use of nineteenth-century immigrants had been rejected by the rising standards of housing reform, which served the community rather than the poor by preventing private enterprise from reaching down to this level.”⁶⁹