Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930 (review)

Bouregois Nightmares is a useful supplement to Robert Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985). It examines the rise and continued use of restrictive covenants for suburban land development in the 60 years between 1870 and 1930. Restrictive covenants were not new in 1870, but they did not become common until the turn of the century

The intellectual father, if not the originator of restrictive covenants, was Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated architect of Central Park in New York City and some of the most well-known suburbs in the country. Olmsted regarded a suburb as an ideal blending of the rural and the urban, a place in a park-like setting close to urban amenities. Such idyllic communities required both planning and careful husbandry. Undesirable people and property uses had to be kept out in order to maintain the pristine character of the suburban tract. The restrictive covenant arose as a means to accomplish those ends.

Covenants themselves have a history. Developers (subdividers in Fogelson's lexicon to distinguish them from later builders) learned through trial and error and from court findings what elements worked in restrictive covenants and what did not. When first introduced, covenants met stout resistance because they seemed an affront to the central American values of individualism and personal freedom. Opponents of covenants claimed that property ownership bestowed on the owners the absolute right to do as they pleased with their own land. At first courts were inclined to agree, but as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth courts found the covenants to have social value and saw that the covenants, even if they interfered with individual liberty, nonetheless served to maintain and expand the value of property owned by people of wealth and standing.

What the subdividers and the buyers sought was both permanence—that the tract would always remain a desirable place to live—and rising property values. One goal of the planners was the hope of attracting only desirable people. Some restrictive covenants contained racial exclusion clauses. The subdividers and the builders excluded Negroes in the early 20th century across the country and peoples of Asian descent in the West. Other groups who might have been excluded—Jews, Catholics, the Irish or other ethnicities—generally were not, which suggests the especially strong prejudices against African- and Asian-Americans. Perhaps the use of a minimum purchase price excluded other undesirables without spelling out who they were.

The subdividers also sought to enjoin the use of property within a given tract for unpleasant or property-value-threatening uses. Thus, factories and grocery stores (and in some cases any business at all) were barred, along with rearing domestic animals. Household pets generally were not banned, though sometimes the number and size of pets was regulated.

Another factor in the rise of restrictive covenants was their use as marketing devices. Developers used them because they helped to sell property. Buyers liked them because they promised to maintain property values and the quality of subdivision. The restrictive covenant then was an ingenious way to secure a quick sale and a low-risk investment at the same time.

Fogelson's most important contribution is his detailed description, buttressed by many examples, of how restrictive covenants worked in a variety of new subdivisions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His analysis of how the covenants developed and how they worked is a major addition to our understanding of urban development in the period under study. Somewhat less valuable are his more cryptic discussions of the implications of the rise of restrictive covenants. Why, for example, did the courts switch their view of restrictions on the use of property from an individual to a community focus? What are the larger social implications of this shift and the concomitant rise of...