City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919

Abstract

Margaret Garb's City of American Dreams examines the origins of the ideal of owning a single-family house as the touchstone of success and security. Garb found answers in late-nineteenth-century Chicago. Like their counterparts in other cities, working-class Chicagoans labored hard to acquire “property rights in housing” (p. 2). In the wake of the great fire of 1871, they argued vociferously against building regulations that would have prevented rebuilding with wood, the only material they could afford, and thereby deprived them of their rights as Americans. Enterprising builders, most notably Samuel Eberly Gross, met the demand for housing with thousands of inexpensive, small cottages. The economic shocks of the late nineteenth century prompted builders to shift to middle-class customers, who, lured by persuasive ideological advertising, eagerly adopted their working-class predecessors' penchant for single-family homes. But members of the middle class preferred homes served by sewers, exacerbating the incipient class divide between neighborhoods. In the course of that transition, the meaning of homeownership shifted from a tool for financial survival to a status symbol dependent on the proximity of similarly situated neighbors. Therefore, when African Americans moved to Chicago in large numbers in the early twentieth century, white homeowners thought it increasingly important to exclude them.