High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century by Matthew Gordon Lasner (review)

In High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, Matthew Gordon Lasner traces the history of collective homeownership in the United States. This groundbreaking account ranges from the 1830s to the recent past and covers a wide range of metropolitan locations and building types. Lasner also introduces the reader to developers, homeowners, and planners from New York to California to Florida in an exploration of this little-studied form of homeownership. The book spans what Lasner calls “the suburban century” in seven chapters that are organized roughly chronologically from the decades just before the Civil War through the very recent past. The initial chapters focus rather tightly on Manhattan, with just a few examples drawn from other cities like Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The later chapters take the reader into the mid- and late twentieth century and to California, Florida, and Georgia.

The use of “suburban century” in the title is curious, since Lasner’s argument is that despite historians’ focus on suburban housing, many other factors—such as the growth of dense downtowns and adjacent residential districts—shaped housing in this period, particularly in urban areas. The author defines this long suburban century as having begun in the 1830s and continuing into the early twenty-first century. As Lasner notes, this is the period when the “American built environment [was] perhaps most distinguished for its high concentration of detached, single-family houses”; by the early twenty-first century, “two-thirds of U.S. households owned their own dwellings, and around eighty percent of these were freestanding housing” (3–4). Nevertheless, Lasner chooses to direct his scholarly gaze beyond this statistical monolith to a less common type of home: co-owned multifamily housing.

Researchers have long equated homeownership with single-family suburban homes. Lasner counters this prevailing notion by proposing that middle- and upper-class Americans found in condominiums an alternative to owning a suburban detached home—but this alternative has seldom been acknowledged, because it does not correspond to a single, identifiable kind of built form. There is indeed no one type of condominium that can be conveniently placed into our understanding of vernacular architecture. Instead, the condominium and co-op come in many different forms, from one-hundred-year-old high-rise buildings in Manhattan to California townhouses to Florida golf-course communities.

In a wide-ranging and particularly insightful introduction, Lasner provides an overview of the housing history of the United States. He sets his study within several bodies of literature in urban studies, including scholarship on suburbs, homeownership, high-rise buildings, housing policy, and community studies. He masterfully leads his reader through these multiple historiographies, setting his own work clearly within it. A key theme that recurs throughout is the evolution of ideas about public and private space and their relationship to notions of community.

The book is organized chronologically in three sections that relate to broad real estate cycles. The first two chapters are centered on the first co-ops in the United States, beginning before the Civil War and continuing through the onset of the Great Depression. These initial chapters explore the development of the co-op as an experimental form begun by a small number of well-to-do Manhattan families in multistory buildings. From Manhattan this alternative to tenancy expanded to several other cities, including Washington, D.C., and Chicago, as well as suburban locations across the country. A second overlapping wave of expansion began in the 1910s and continued into the 1960s. In the two subsequent chapters, Lasner traces the role of the New Deal in the history of cooperative homeownership and then focuses on national policy that made the limited equity co-op a priority after World War II.

The three final chapters explore the role of cooperative homeownership in the second half of the twentieth century. This is the era most associated with...