health, safety, morals, and general welfare, but upon a desire to employ this new device of zoning to make exclusive districts more exclusive.”65
At the other extreme from Bassett (at least in 1931), an architect named Charles Cheney argued that zoning boards should have absolute authority over the aesthetic character and architectural design of all new buildings. He estimated that 90 percent of new buildings, whose dollar value was about three-fourths of all new construction, were “so ugly, so badly planned, so inappropriately located, or on such narrow or inconvenient streets as to be a liability instead of an asset.” He arrived at this amount from estimates of the number of buildings constructed without the aid of an architect, presuming that any non-architect-designed building would have a net negative effect on the city or neighborhood in which it was built.66 The fact that his self-serving proposal would significantly increase the cost of that 90 percent of buildings did not seem to bother him a bit, and many cities have since reduced housing affordability by implementing his demand for architecture review boards.
The Early Suburban Backlash
The fact that zoning was a quiet way to shield middle-class families from the vulgarities of working-class culture doesn’t mean that no working-class suburbs of single-family homes were built in the 1920s. They were, and while they were not up to the standards of middle-class suburbs, they tended to provide far better housing than working-class families could find in the cities. As in the 19th century, residents often grew vegetables and raised chickens or other livestock in their backyards. But such suburbs were built mainly in areas that did not yet have strict zoning or protective covenants.67
It is likely that the working-class suburbs are what first led American intellectuals to begin their campaigns against the suburbs. As historian John Stilgoe notes, until the 1920s, most elites favored moving people out of crowded cities and into the suburbs. But when they saw what those suburbs were like, they were “substantially unnerved.” “In the outer suburbs thrived a mindset,” says Stilgoe, “that challenged urban intellectuals profoundly smitten with European thinking.” Fascinated with International-style, flat-roofed architecture, architects were upset that Americans chose to live in Cape Cod, Tudor, and other vernacular pitched-roofed homes. Urban planners entranced with the “City Beautiful” movement and its grand boulevards and public parks were upset that Americans focused on prettifying their own private backyards.68
Stilgoe argues that the earliest and best-known attack on the suburbs was Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt. Lewis’s formula—that the suburbs were boring places inhabited by vapid, mindless people—would be repeated over and over, most recently in James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere and Sam Mendes’s films American Beauty (1999) and Revolutionary Road (2008). These attacks would pave the figurative road for revolutionary new forms of zoning in the 1990s that would attempt to force the reconstruction of the suburbs into high-density cities that the intellectuals appreciated even if they themselves did not always live there.
Urban homeownership increased between 1890 and 1930 because protective covenants and zoning made homeownership attractive to middle-class families who, in the 19th century, would have rented or leased their homes. But covenants applied only to individual neighborhoods, while zoning spread across entire cities. This widespread zoning made homeownership in those cities unaffordable to working-class families who, in the 19th century, put a high priority on homeownership. As architecture critic Anthony Jackson put it in 1976, “The grade of dwelling that private enterprise had supplied for the use of nineteenth-century immigrants had been rejected by the rising standards of housing reform, which served the community rather than the poor by preventing private enterprise from reaching down to this level.”69
“To own one’s own home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of the freedom of spirit,” President Herbert Hoover told an audience of 3,700 leaders of the construction, real estate, and lending industries in December 1931. People sing songs about their homes, “but they never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.”1 The occasion was a White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership in which participants divided into more than 30 committees to discuss specific housing problems and policies.
Hoover’s keynote speech boiled those problems down to two: first, “in what manner can we facilitate the ownership of homes and how can we protect the owners of homes,” and second, “the standards of tenements and apartment dwellings” and “the question of blighted areas and slums in many of our great cities.” Hoover conceded that the tenement problem was important but suggested “that millions of people who dwell in tenements, apartments, and rented rows of solid brick have the aspiration for wider opportunity in ownership of their own homes. To possess one’s own home is the hope and ambition of almost every individual in our country.”2
Conference participants were acutely aware that the real problem was the Depression that had brought the growth of homeownership, along with much of the rest of the economy, to a screeching halt. Annual housing starts fell more than 90 percent from a peak of 937,000 in 1925 to a trough of 93,000 in 1933. Moreover, many of the people who had purchased homes in the 1920s couldn’t afford to keep them: foreclosures rates had increased from 75,000 a year before the Depression to more than 230,000 a year by 1932.3
Rescuing Homeowners
Other than handing out Hoover’s How to Own Your Own Home booklets in the 1920s, the federal government had never before taken any major actions regarding housing. But the Depression led Congress to approve two types of programs. First, a series of laws passed between 1932 and 1938 aimed at helping struggling homebuyers repay their mortgages and, it was hoped, spurring an economic recovery by stimulating home construction. Second, the federal government itself engaged in home construction, including housing projects for low-income families, “new towns” and housing for farmers, and after 1940, housing for defense workers.
Though addressing the two great problems raised by Herbert Hoover, these two types of programs were somewhat opposed to each other. Housing reformers, or housers, wanted to see more public housing for low- and even moderate-income families. But the real estate and homebuilding industries feared that public housing would take away their potential customers: why buy a home if the government will subsidize your rent? Whether or not they helped relieve the Depression, financial programs such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) would play a huge role in the postwar housing boom. But, due largely to opposition from realtors and homebuilders, prewar public housing programs played a trivial role in the nation’s housing.
The first problem was the growing default rate on home mortgages. In response to the Depression, building and loan associations (which were slowly refashioning themselves as savings and loan associations [S&Ls]) tried to minimize foreclosures on people’s homes. Many allowed debtors to pay just the interest on their loans, which for most home mortgages might be as little as a dollar or two per month. Others would refuse to foreclose as long as patrons showed they were doing their best to work with the lenders. Such lenience naturally stressed the balance sheets of the S&Ls, a number of which closed or were liquidated in 1931.4
To help struggling S&Ls, President Hoover persuaded Congress to pass the Federal Home Loan Bank Act in July 1932. This law created 12 federal home loan banks that could lend to S&Ls to carry them through the Depression and, it was hoped, spur an economic recovery. This legislation was the first federal law specifically aimed at helping homebuyers in general, and it set a precedent for the flurry of laws passed when Franklin Roosevelt became president.
Just 70 days after Roosevelt’s inauguration, Congress passed the Home Owners’ Loan Act, which aimed to rescue nonfarm homebuyers who were in default on their mortgages. The law created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which allowed homebuyers to reduce their payments by replacing short-term mortgages with fully amortizing mortgages lasting 15 years (later extended to 25). HOLC would loan up to 80 percent of the appraised value of a home—but since home values had dramatically declined, this loan was sometimes less