City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919 (review)

Historians of the nineteenth-century urban experience in the United States have long understood that working-class immigrants achieved surprisingly high rates of home ownership. The question—really a raging debate—is how to explain this phenomenon. Were the strivings of unskilled immigrants for home ownership a counterproductive life choice that sacrificed education and health in return for a tenuous hold on property, as Progressive Era critics and later historians argued? Or did home ownership represent a reasonable strategy for weathering the vicissitudes of capitalism and securing social and political status, as more recent scholars have contended? Garb's well-written City of American Dreams includes evidence that could support both sides, though the book sidesteps the value judgments implicit in the debate and instead focuses on the clashes between workers and reformers in Chicago over the "social meanings of property rights."

Desperate to hold onto their investment and home-owning status, unskilled workers wanted the freedom to build inexpensive wooden homes (especially after the great fire of 1871), to reject expensive city services like sewer hookups, and to rent to income-producing boarders. Reformers, on the other hand, wanted to trump property rights with fire codes, public-health requirements, and morally imposed occupancy standards. Garb thus presents nineteenth-century home ownership as a contested field in which property rights have economic, social, and, to a lesser extent, political meanings.

Much of the story of nineteenth-century Progressive reform and working-class resistance has been previously told, but Garb offers new and important knowledge. Her most original contribution involves details about how the unskilled achieved high home-ownership rates. Garb uses Cook County handwritten tract books to trace the property history of one block on Chicago's west side in the 1880s, showing the remarkably sophisticated transactions conducted by impoverished immigrants to achieve and then sustain home ownership. She highlights an unskilled Irish bread peddler named Bernard Brophy, who borrowed from an informal capital market of friends and neighbors to purchase a home. Brophy then mortgaged it three times for various purposes, including the purchase of a rental property. Garb's compelling evidence suggests a great deal more initiative among the unskilled in their relations with property than previous accounts.

More provocatively, Garb argues that the working class was the driving force behind America's love affair with the single-family home: "The home ownership ideal was inspired by the immigrant working classes and gradually transformed into a middle-class aspiration" (7). The evidence for this influence is strained; she attributes this transformation to large developers, such as Samuel E. Gross, who shifted his marketing prowess from a working-class to a middle-class market in the 1880s. But once empowered by ownership, the working class created its own social meanings around property rights and demanded, among other restrictions, racial segregation (201).

Similarly, Garb sees a "calamitous underside" to working-class home ownership (8). She argues that once the "dream" of ownership became less attainable as housing costs rose in the early twentieth century, property rights divided the skilled and unskilled and undermined working-class unity. Historians have found numerous sources for intraclass conflict; whether property ownership is seminal to this divide or merely a small force among many is less clear. Moreover, the argument that ownership opportunities diminished in the early twentieth century relies on the limited analysis of Progressives with their own agendas; a detailed understanding of housing affordability in the early twentieth century still awaits further historical analysis.

In a chapter on the creation of Chicago's African American "black belt," Garb blames low ownership rates on low incomes, a discriminatory housing market, and "the lack of capital." The first two conditions make sense, but the third deserves the kind of scrutiny that the book's earlier research methods employed to uncover the Brophy story. Did unskilled African Americans also engage in sophisticated property...