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

Abstract

146 Michigan Historical Review Margaret Garb. City of American Dreams: A History ofHome Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 256. Bibliography. IUustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $40.00. From the rude log cabin of frontier lore to the brick bungalow in ethnic neighborhoods of industrial cities to the ranch house of post World-War-II suburbia, the image of the American way of life has been etched into a series of single-family houses: front yards, porches, later a car parked in the driveway, and the wife and kids greeting dad, head of the household and property owner. This national obsession with the single-family home has had many unintended effects, and in City ofAmerican Dreams Margaret Garb focuses on one American city in an attempt to separate reality from the fictions we believe about home ownership. One major conclusion she reaches is that home ownership passed increasingly beyond the financial means of low-waged and unskilled workers. In addition, valorizing home ownership as the quintessential American way of life hindered our ability to solve housing problems for those who were shut out of private housing markets. Garb traces the history of housing in Chicago from 1871 to 1919in the context of "two distinct and rich strands of urban history: studies that have demonstrated significant rates of home-ownership among the post-Civ? War immigrant working classes and those that have tracked the gradual expansion of middle-class suburbs in the late nineteenth century" (pp. 4-5). She has good grounds for considering Chicago a "generaUy representative city"(p. 9), since patterns of industrialization, immigration, class conflict, and struggles over property rights, as weU as labor and reform movements in this midwestern city not only reflected what was going on elsewhere in the United States but also were influenced by national developments. Garb begins by reviewing a weU-researched aspect of Chicago history: the public conflict over the banning of wood-frame construction within the city limits after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She describes how Chicago's German, Irish, and Scandinavian workers "looked to home ownership to secure their economic and political status in the new urban world" (p. 17). In the book's strongest chapter, "Staking a Claim in the Industrializing City," Garb describes the variety of ways inwhich "Chicago's laborers used residential property to stake a claim in their new homeland and to strengthen their economic position Book Reviews 147 in relation to employers and a generaUy inadequate labor market" (p. 37). Garb's use of land-tide records gives us a deta?ed understanding of the strategies employed in "local capital markets" (p. 56). She describes how workers provided themselves with a cash flow beyond the limited low wages of factory work before the emergence of a citywide real-estate market. Working-class families used various strategies to make up for the lack of an adequate household income. Wives took in washing, did piecework, and took in boarders. Ch?dren left school to bring in additional pennies aweek. Such sacrifices led middle-class reformers to question working-class parents' ambition to own their own homes and to discourage the very strategies of ch?d labor, piecework, and boarding workers used in their quest to own property. IronicaUy, Garb argues that the pursuit of home ownership at almost any cost came into conflict with the new standards of living that reformers advocated during the Progressive Era. She provides a valuable account of how municipal public health expanded and intersected with the market for multifamily and single-family homes. She reveals the complicated and unexpected outcomes of reformers' efforts to promote good sanitation as weU as the way in which homebuilders and land speculators linked respectability and health. These two trends produced a "remarkable shift in the ways residential property was valued" (p. 126). One of the outcomes was the distinction between respectable and unworthy homes; businessmen builders like S. E. Gross established a "class-segregated housing market and a pattern of mobility that would characterize Chicago and its suburban real estate markets through much of the twentieth century" (p. 147). UnskiUed wage workers found home ownership...