Of Dreams and Real Estate

Margaret Garb. City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index, $40.00.

Amanda Seligman. Block By Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. 320 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).

An important and interesting trend in urban historiography is the number of scholars at work on some facet of housing. The influential University of Chicago Press monograph series, "Historical Studies of Urban America," re-issued Arnold Hirsch's path-breaking study of public housing in Chicago, Making of the Second Ghetto, and published both of the books reviewed here—an original account of homeownership in the late nineteenth century and a social history of urban renewal in a postwar neighborhood. Both authors, Margaret Garb and Amanda Seligman, at least allude to Hirsch's argument that group conflict and racism determined residential patterns, while complicating any sort of monolithic and potentially racialist image of the white neighborhood. To differing degrees, they join a sophisticated and complex debate on urban political economy staked out by leading scholars Sven Beckert and Lizabeth Cohen, as well as Thomas Sugrue and Robert Self. Some of this writing examines real estate, neighborhood, and mobility to understand the so-called urban crisis, defined by Sugrue for the postwar era as the flow of capital to suburbs, the failure of renewal, and the immobilization of black neighborhoods by white violence. By now something like a preliminary synthesis of local and federal housing and renewal policy has emerged, which includes innovative books on ethnicity (settlement, prejudice, and assimilation) by Thomas Gugliemo and David Roediger arguing that the housing boom turned immigrants of color into white men. Thus the monographs discussed below profitably return us to a narrower conception or subject of housing, but from new vantages of time and place.¹

In City of American Dreams, Garb draws on newspapers, reform tracts, and municipal archives to chart the rise of a popular desire to own one's own home, which was shaped by the changing context of struggles over municipal regulation and middle-class reform. In the 1870s and 1880s, the thrust of municipal policy advantaged the wealthy over workers and the poor such that owning proved a challenge even for upwardly mobile craftsmen. Surprisingly, the status-conscious middle class preferred renting a single-family house to buying, but also demonstrated a concern with the respectability of an area.

Meanwhile, Chicago's workers gathered in protest of new building regulations established in the wake of the Great Fire of 1877, which among other provisions prohibited wood frames, because many could not afford the cost of brick. Although workers and professionals alike celebrated the triumph of the contract and the end of slavery, several classes of citizens simultaneously contested and embraced the prerogatives of private property. Like Lizabeth Cohen's description of the essentially liberal orientation of white ethnics by the time of the New Deal, Garb's analysis seems to find that this earlier generation of workers embraced industrialization "by combining wage labor with access to residential property rights" (p. 27).²

At a time when many Irish, Polish, Slavic, and Italian immigrants had purchased cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and moved into tenements, and as some immigrants became concentrated in particular neighborhoods that sometimes exhibited socialism, each group of newcomers formed different views of and responses to private property. In addition, working-class apartment-dwellers protested conditions in the tenements, and their labor leaders pressed for new building codes to be drawn up and enforced by city hall. Popular discourse cast renters as a dependent class—like female workers—that merited special protection. If many of the upwardly mobile responded to the recession-prone economy with the desire for investment, working-class African Americans failed to do the same (p. 39). Garb found that in 1890 only 250...