tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post1045403435975320207..comments2024-03-27T04:02:47.206-04:00Comments on Old Urbanist: When the Market Built Housing for the Low IncomeCharlie Gardnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07317335121565650040noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-11265994241256084862018-09-14T02:13:39.620-04:002018-09-14T02:13:39.620-04:00Lower middle class couples were in actual apartmen...<br /><br />Lower middle class couples were in actual apartments without shared bathrooms. They would also run their own rooming houses, maybe informally, to help afford a house.<br /><br />Middle-middle class couples often chose "housekeeping" apartments of 3 to 5 rooms that came with a maid to do the heavy cleaning weekly. That was cheaper and less trouble than hiring a part-time maid yourself and trying to afford a house. Some of them would also have a house and boarders/rooms for rent. They were not often "kitchenless."<br /><br />Upper-middle-middle class couples, though, were well represented in the "kitchenless" world. They would choose to live in residential hotels for financial reasons because it was cheaper to live there than to hire a full time maid-of-all-work, which would be expected for their position. Upper middle and upper class couples and even families found it cheaper to keep a residential suite at a hotel and make use of the hotel's ballroom and various entertainment rooms to host their own parties than have their own homes, and upper middle class couples also got the thrill of having the upper class couples just a floor or two away (though the upper middle class couple would have one room and a bathroom or at most a suite of two rooms, while the upper class couple or even family would have 3 rooms or more, of course).<br /><br />When people stopped expecting to have heavy levels of household help--because wages went up and also because household chores became easier--and as the cost of the labor to prepare food soared when compared to the cost of the food, the kitchenless lifestyle lost its luster. The tradeoffs of the lack of privacy and the lack of control of your food weren't worth the perks. So they left.<br /><br />The only people who were staying in kitchenless residences were now some singles and the lower class, and the downtowns took on more and more the characteristic of slums. The costs of remodeling to add bathrooms and kitchens were high, and the rents expected were low--never mind fire regulations, which took a long time to catch up in some towns to decent standards.<br /><br />At this point, a savvy businessman could have made apartments for singles and couples without kids, but most people in search of a better life had gone to the suburbs, and the grocery stores and "daily" retail followed them. There was also no parking for these old apartments, which is fine if you are easily able to move every time you change jobs--which lower class people did pretty often, unless they were in an ethnic ghetto, when their employment was pretty much tied to the neighborhood and there was never going to be much improvement in their condition--but even lower class people were richer and had more stuff to move and wanted to be able to look farther afield for work.<br /><br />Interestingly, it's the small towns where upper-story apartments were actually still very viable. Usually some provision could be made for parking nearby, and the supermarkets were often just a 5-minute drive from downtown. But the new tract housing was so incredibly cheap there that it seemed like a bad return on investment to pick remodeling downtown for rent versus a cheap tract house with an FHA-backed loan.Sweet Aftonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03508987925732896008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-16200176412912573382018-09-14T02:13:35.045-04:002018-09-14T02:13:35.045-04:00The rooming house phenomenon deserves more explana...The rooming house phenomenon deserves more explanation. In the 1910s, kitchenless living was widely appealing to a huge swath of the population. Single men and women would overwhelmingly choose a kitchenless (or near-kitchenless) life because the very few things that could be cooked by a full time worker in the time that he had as his disposal were monotonous and/or expensive, and he'd have to choose to have expensive delivery of all kinds of things. <br /><br />Food workers got incredibly low wages--much lower than "minimum wage"--for a LONG time. They were excluded from minimum wage laws until the latter half of the 20th century. Raw food was also incredibly more expensive. As a result, cheap cuts of food cooked well (a good stew, for instance--time-consuming and cheap) were generally a lot cheaper than the kind of food you could whip up in an evening. As cheap dining options spread, the old boarding houses went out of favor. You didn't have to show up at a certain time to get fed or limit yourself to one woman's food repertoire. You could eat cheaply 6 nights and splurge another, if you wanted to. So boarding houses were out. Rooming houses were in. This was true for lower and middle class singles all over the country.<br /> <br />Lower class couples were fairly rarely seen in the kitchenless housing. They gravitated to single-wall kitchen and shared bathroom "apartments," even if the wife worked--she just worked even more to make food how she could around her working hours, which would mostly be "doing for" different families different days so she could control her working hours well enough to actually have the time to cook. Sweet Aftonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03508987925732896008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-15454037775774168862018-09-14T02:00:23.904-04:002018-09-14T02:00:23.904-04:00You can't have cheap housing and also have hig...You can't have cheap housing and also have high "quality" requirements for the site.<br /><br />In the 1950s, there was huge amounts of housing built for the middle-middle and lower-middle classes. First, there was a HUGE pent-up demand from the 1930s. Second, all the GIs were coming back and getting married at once. Third, the FHA programs began. Fourth, the anti-rooming house measures were taking hold. Rooming houses WERE often upper-level slums. But fifth, and just as critically, food was so much more convenient to buy and cook setting up house was no longer a hideously expensive endeavor unless you had both a wife and a good wage. <br /><br />These were homes that were smaller than the professionally-built homes of 30 years before. They had no sidewalks. Sometimes no real curbs! No buried powerlines. No "walkable" anything. They were build on cheap land on the outskirts of cities. No special controls for runoff--no flood control other than building them on high land. Storm water was separated from sewer and released directly into the nearest stream. No special fees for building new schools or for infrastructure increases.<br /><br />These are the communities that today, as they filter farther down, are incredibly expensive to provide services to. People want to live in NICE suburbs with good-sized houses. The standard for "nice" changes over time, and it now requires 2 bathrooms and a garage when before 1 bathroom and a garage is fine.<br /><br />You can tell exactly what properties will filter down because if it's built for a family and has less than 2 bathrooms, no garage, no easy place for a dishwasher, and no dedicated laundry facilities, it will filter down unless there are huge pressures pushing it up--or unless people are adding on heavily.<br /><br />Some of these old affordable communities are otherwise fine. Others employed criminal cost-cutting procedures. Levitt's early homes were among the criminal. He cranked up the water heater to near boiling and used the water to heat the homes' slabs. He was too cheap to buy a mixing valve, and so the water came out of the tap at around 200 degrees. He did this deliberately and caused a number of people to get skin grafts and caused a small child (who innocently got into the tub by himself and twisted on the water) to nearly die.<br /><br />There is no such thing as cheap housing built to the "high level" that so-called urbanists dream of. It simply does not exist. It is, at best, a terrible, tiny, crowded tenement that is new for approximately 5 years and stays sorta nice if you get "nice" people to rent from you (broke student baristas whole parents you can hold financially responsible for a drunken party's damage and not the semi-employable for life).Sweet Aftonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03508987925732896008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-84807510850815464962016-03-21T12:17:18.443-04:002016-03-21T12:17:18.443-04:00In New Orleans we have historic preservation areas...In New Orleans we have historic preservation areas of low income housing. Native black families have to get a certificate of appropriateness just to fix the porch, while their new rich white neighborhood can add a Bauhaus-style addition because they can afford the architects and lawyers to realize their vision.<br /><a href="https://www.basmetelriyadh.com/%D8%B4%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B8%D9%8A%D9%81-%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%AC%D8%AF-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B6/" rel="nofollow">Mosques</a>Elgammalhttps://www.basmetelriyadh.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-66976845702267695682016-03-15T08:29:47.521-04:002016-03-15T08:29:47.521-04:00In urban areas also the number of poor people hold...In urban areas also the number of poor people holds one third of the total population. Hence the numbers of slums are increasing every day. Also some low income families prefer to stay in slums rather renting a house. So finally government has put attention towards this problem and decided to build housing for them. Bravo!! <a href="http://www.sltproperties.com/real-estate-property-management-company/" rel="nofollow">Property Management Winston Salem, NC</a>. Austin Curtisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-23291516152742901252016-01-26T02:27:42.362-05:002016-01-26T02:27:42.362-05:00Well, Facebook is doing something like that: http:...Well, Facebook is doing something like that: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27717752/facebook-floats-idea-more-housing-menlo-park<br /><br />The biggest roadblock seems to be the municipalities, which are skeptical of any increase in housing, even if it houses highly-paid workers.alaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05334835705248693244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-23721329816556297912016-01-05T15:12:14.223-05:002016-01-05T15:12:14.223-05:00Right, excellent points as to factory housing and ...Right, excellent points as to factory housing and the tenements. I suspect what changed was the same thing that changed as to all housing at first in the 1920s and then, in a second round, in the 1970s: the rise and intensification of exclusionary zoning. Secondly, it probably has to do with the rise of the automobile, such that workers have access to a much larger housing market and would themselves feel less compelled to take up a company on an offer of housing. The exception might be in the very expensive coastal markets, but then, in those places, zoning is so strict and the development process so slow that it may not be politically feasible to build large quantities of worker housing/dormitories. Charlie Gardnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07317335121565650040noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-31305596783299579772016-01-05T15:04:14.747-05:002016-01-05T15:04:14.747-05:00Thanks Terry.Thanks Terry.Charlie Gardnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07317335121565650040noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-16146595876114323782016-01-05T14:36:01.839-05:002016-01-05T14:36:01.839-05:00The equivalent today would be if Microsoft set up ...The equivalent today would be if Microsoft set up giant apartment buildings next door to their office parks to house all the temps, contract workers, janitors, and so on -- and on the other side of the office park, platted out rows and rows of tiny tract houses with no side setbacks for the permanent employees.<br /><br />But they didn't. And neither did Amazon. Or Google. Or any of the other big companies.Nathanaelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-51469637959840785282016-01-05T14:31:20.953-05:002016-01-05T14:31:20.953-05:00Some idiot wrote: "very little private housi...Some idiot wrote: "very little private housing in the United States was originally built for low-income people."<br />What utter nonsense. Even apart from what you wrote in your essay...<br /><br />This isn't even true of formal developers.<br /><br />Factory housing -- where factory owners built housing for their employees, who were low income -- is a long-standing tradition and a major feature of the 19th century. This was one of the major activities of professional developers: building factory housing. Huge swathes of Chicago's housing was "worker housing" for the workers of specific companies or specific projects; both the "single family" homes on the South Side and the larger apartment buildings.<br /><br />Low-income worker housing is also the primary origin of the giant "tenement" apartment buildings built for the low-income in New York City. These weren't even owned by the factory owners. But their workers had to live somewhere, preferably close by, and so they cooperated with the builders of large apartment buildings for the low-income workers -- generally right next door to the factory buildings.<br /><br />Both of these traditions -- company-owned housing and tenements -- seem to have been largely eliminated. Now employers expect workers to find their own housing. Why? What changed?Nathanaelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-60658071683143877572015-12-29T22:39:52.955-05:002015-12-29T22:39:52.955-05:00Terrific post, thanks. Something to read when I...Terrific post, thanks. Something to read when I'm feeling too optimistic yet it leaves a little space for hope. Terryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14154846109609330503noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-13333910986674380712015-12-28T18:46:42.600-05:002015-12-28T18:46:42.600-05:00I have noticed this in SF as well. It doesn't ...I have noticed this in SF as well. It doesn't help that local rent-control and tenants' rights laws mean that being the landlord of a small multi-unit building is much less attractive than owning a single-family home (even if it's rented out).alaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05334835705248693244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-64630391741747339332015-12-28T10:21:47.108-05:002015-12-28T10:21:47.108-05:00It never ceases to amaze me the myriad ways zoning...It never ceases to amaze me the myriad ways zoning and building laws in the US have been used against black people.Zephhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10977471797021193972noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-71333006994069600402015-12-28T09:28:54.024-05:002015-12-28T09:28:54.024-05:00In New Orleans we have historic preservation areas...In New Orleans we have historic preservation areas of low income housing. Native black families have to get a certificate of appropriateness just to fix the porch, while their new rich white neighborhood can add a Bauhaus-style addition because they can afford the architects and lawyers to realize their vision. The city keeps throwing up barriers to entry for black builders in the name of preservation.Justin Lee Millerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17282292325257978573noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-50202858027465393572015-12-27T09:46:06.806-05:002015-12-27T09:46:06.806-05:00Hi Eli, thanks for the comment. I need to read tha...Hi Eli, thanks for the comment. I need to read that book. In some other post, not sure which one, I mentioned the variety of housing arrangements that the Census enumerators of 1950 were trained to look out for. When you look through the original Census records from 1920, 1930 and now 1940 (just released) what is striking is the sheer number of boarders and subletters in apparent single-family homes. Widows would let out rooms in their homes to keep up with payments. As today, tenants would split up single homes, taking a room apiece. Many of those brownstones no doubt had basement apartments or otherwise had boarders in a room or two to help the person living there make their payments. Wealthier people would very often have a servant or two living in a suite within the home.<br /><br />These sorts of informal arrangements are not totally illegal today, but the occupancy laws and restrictions on subdivision (limiting kitchens, etc) make it much more difficult than it once was.Charlie Gardnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07317335121565650040noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7394091530012769761.post-37178869148892463122015-12-27T09:30:11.371-05:002015-12-27T09:30:11.371-05:00"Small multifamily housing wherein a person o..."Small multifamily housing wherein a person of some means would build a home with one or two attached apartments which could be let out at low cost. Often these apartments would be sub-let to boarders who might occupy a single bedroom."<br /><br />In <i>The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn</i>, the author talks about how middle-class "discoverers" of Brooklyn's row-house neighborhoods considered themselves to be restoring their houses to their original purpose when converting them from multi-unit to single-family use--but that in fact often there was no basis to this idea. Likely many of these buildings were always multi-unit dwellings in some sense.<br /><br />This seems like a particularly pernicious practice in supply-constrained cities, since these conversions replace several affordable units of housing with one much more expensive one, decreasing supply and increasing cost in one fell swoop.Elihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02986322663986188137noreply@blogger.com