Low-Cost Housing: The New England Tradition

Abstract

N O other purely domestic problem is more insistently hammered into the public consciousness today than the question of low-cost housing. Yet in all present-day discussion of the matter one aspect is invariably forgotten. Nobody seems to remember that whatever else it may be, the building of low-cost housing is an American achievement of long standing. In fact, America was the first country to face the social implications of the Industrial Revolution, the first to build low-cost housing systematically and on a large scale. This early housing was not the result of the exceptional philanthropy of our capitalist ancestors. Rather, it was the direct outcome of the unique social and economic situation in which they found themselves. In America, as in England, textile manufacturing was the first trade-group to develop into a modern mass-production industry. In England the soil had been prepared by four centuries of a special economic evolution. When the invention of the steam engine and of various special machines made factory manufacturing possible, it was able to replace household manufacturing speedily. Indeed, the new method of production soon surpassed the old. Expanding to supply new foreign markets, the textile industry grew like a weed. But over here, manufacturing was from the start a hothouse plant, raised in the artificial atmosphere of war. It was the English Civil War that sowed the seed. It was the series of crises that began with the American Revolution and ended with the War of i8 12 that raised the sprout and brought it to maturity. Then suddenly, the crises being over, this cultivated flower was obliged to adjust itself to an unfos-