Who Owns the Lunger Building? Disease, Property, and the Limits of Accountability in Tenement Reform in St. Louis, 1832-1917

Abstract

This article traces the rise and fall of an urban land tenure system in an industrializing American city, St. Louis, alongside efforts to regulate it in the name of health. Historians of tenement reform have placed the question of accountability at the center of reformist critiques of housing conditions in 19th- and early-twentieth-century America. Few, however, have incorporated informal and temporary housing into their analyses. This article argues that these spaces were both common and vital to the rise of St. Louis’ cyclical and often transient market in unskilled labor. Reformers, operating from an antebellum-era conception of property, sought to create a system of accountability that placed the burden of healthfulness on landlords. Yet, St. Louis’ emerging labor market undermined the accountability they sought. Confronted with a crisis of housing affordability, reformers failed to question the market or look beyond property regulation alone as a means to protect health.