The Culture of Property: Race, Class, and Housing Landscapes in Atlanta, 1880–1950 (review)

The history of racial and class segregation of American cities was, until two decades ago, shrouded in myths about individual choice and free markets. “White flight,” the term used to describe the mass movement of working- and middle-class white families to lily-white single-family home-owning suburbs, was seen as a logical, if somewhat racist, response to the deteriorating living conditions and growing violence in largely African-American urban centers. Yet, as scholars questioned the inevitability of racial segregation, their primary targets were the federal housing programs that subsidized white suburban home buyers and denied investment capital to urban neighborhoods. These New Deal housing programs, no doubt, inflicted racial segregation on the postwar landscape. But in blaming government bureaucrats for putting racial requirements on housing loans, scholars have perpetuated the notion that single-family home ownership—the proverbial house on a tidy yard— was a natural human desire and an inevitable result of American political ideology. This assumption about Americans’ housing aspirations is ahistorical, and, crucially, for the past century, has narrowed housing options for most Americans and limited the imaginations of planners, builders, and policymakers struggling to create stable, diverse communities.

Lands aims to shatter that assumption. In a well-researched study of Atlanta’s housing markets from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Lands demonstrates that a set of social forces—driven primarily by builders and land speculators—guided the aesthetic choices of Atlanta’s white elite; thereafter, builders, planners, and government officials, using a variety of discursive strategies, effectively naturalized the white elite’s newly acquired vision of the proper family home. Late nineteenth-century Atlanta housed neighborhoods of rich and laboring—and, to some extent, white and African-American—people where renters outnumbered home owners. This social diversity and variety of housing types was wrecked with the creation of “park-neighborhood sensibilities” (42), the construction of new elite communities that stressed home ownership and park-like landscapes. Promoted by early twentieth-century land speculators, these communities generated what Lands calls a “landscape way of seeing, the practice of looking [at] and absorbing (consciously or unconsciously)” a broad expanse “and attaching meaning to what one sees” (5). In other words, elite home owners considered the properties beyond their own and the residents of neighboring houses as shaping the aesthetic value of their homes. By the 1930s, whiteness was associated with single-family home ownership and park-like landscapes. Racial exclusion and class stratification, couched in seemingly benign aesthetic choices, were codified in federal housing policies during the New Deal.

Lands is concerned with the ways in which urban space and housing forms helped to constitute social identities and ultimately cement racial and class differences in twentieth-century cities. She uses gis, federal census data, and federal housing maps, along with such literary sources as builders’ advertisements and planners’ manuals. Her work relies heavily on whiteness studies, the scholarship that links the construction of whiteness to social privilege. Lands brings urban geography to whiteness studies, emphasizing how early twentieth-century racial ideologies and visions of the family home were intertwined. The emerging “culture of property” was, usually and implicitly, racist and elitist.

Segregation by race and class derived from deliberate attempts to reshape the urban landscape and boost property values. This second aim receives little attention in Lands’ study. She effectively traces the emergence and circulation of home-ownership ideology but leaves largely underanalyzed the economic incentives that intersected with, and buttressed, that ideology. A “culture of property,” as Lands acknowledges, traces the discursive construction of the urban landscape, or shows how particular housing forms were invested with meaning. The connection between meanings and material advantages, between aesthetic and economic value, remains implicit in her discussion.

Lands’ final chapter is her most innovative and most impassioned, detailing the legacies of the property culture constructed in the early twentieth century. With tragic precision, she demonstrates that...