Occasionally I get great comments posted elsewhere regarding something I said on radio or in a blog. This posting, from a history scholar, was a reaction to my interview on NPR’s Marketplace last week. I’m looking forward to a dialogue and reading her book:
After hearing your interview with John Wasik, author of The Culdesac Syndrome yesterday, I would like to offer an historian’s perspective on American’s seemingly insatiable appetite for home ownership. Contrary to what Wasik said, Americans’ desire for home ownership is not rooted in the eighteenth century. Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries linked home ownership to productive property. A house sat at the center of a farm and its value came from a farmer’s ability to produce what he needed to sustain his household. Home and work sites overlapped. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of small farmers celebrated property ownership precisely because property, he believed, made men independent.
Industrialization and urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century altered this view. A single-family house on an urban street did did not have an obvious productive value. (Though of course, wives, daughters and servants worked to clean, prepare food, raise children so that the male head of household could earn an income outside the home.) Most men and some women in cities worked for wages in factories, workshops and offices. Work was separated from domestic spaces and the family home was increasingly viewed as a site of leisure and mark of status. Middle class families tended to place great emphasis on the location of their homes and on décor, but ownership was not a priority.
It was, in fact, immigrant working class families who pursued homeownership with the greatest zeal. Many used their homes to generate additional income, taking in boarders, growing small kitchen gardens, and taking out multiple loans on their property. And, many were willing to sacrafice the upward social mobility of education to achieve home ownership; they pulled their children out of school at young ages, putting them to work for wages to contribute to the family’s goal. Ironically, it was European immigrants, many of whom had been denied the right to own property in their homelands, who established home ownership as the American dream.
New Deal housing programs completed the process. The New Deal introduced federally insured mortgages for home buyers and loans for builders, as well as federally-financed construction of high ways and tax breaks for mortgage interest. All of these made home ownership affordable for expanding numbers of American families.
It is important to note that shifts in the economy—the dramatic shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy—transformed the ways Americans conceived of the family home. Equally important was the role of the federal government in subsidizing home construction and purchases. The American dream then is little more than a century old and rooted in the massive social and economic changes of the late nineteenth century.
Margaret Garb, associate professor
Department of History
Washington University in St. Louis
Author: City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform, Chicago 1871-1919.
Tags: Garb, history, Washington University