Housing

The major housing need between 1870 and 1900 was simply to provide dwellings for the nation’s exploding population, which doubled from 38.6 to 76 million. This task was particularly challenging in cities, since the urban population more than tripled, from 9.9 to 30.2 million, during these years. In these three decades 6.4 million new urban housing units were built for 20.3 million new urban residents, a ratio of 3.2 new residents per new unit. By way of comparison, nationwide there were five persons per dwelling unit in 1890 and 4.8 in 1900. Between 1880 and 1900 the number of dwellings increased at a faster rate than the number of inhabitants in 18 of the 28 largest cities.

Housing came in a wide variety of types, sizes, configurations, and materials. The diverse housing stock comprised millionaires’ mansions along Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue and on Beacon Hill in Boston, as well as lavish suburban estates far from urban congestion and pollution; sharecroppers’ shacks in the rural South; tenements in New York City; apartments above commercial buildings everywhere; balloon-frame, wooden two - and three-story houses in new subdivisions on city outskirts; wooden upstairs-downstairs duplexes in midwestern industrial cities; and the endless streets of brick rowhouses—three - and four-story narrow, attached single-family residences—in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

The single-family residence was the norm not only in rural and small-town settings but also in the nation’s large cities. In 1890 at least 75 percent of the housing stock in two-thirds of the 28 largest cities was single family; in Denver, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Omaha, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, single-family residences constituted more than 90 percent of total dwellings. Only in New York City did singlefamily houses comprise less than half of the dwellings.

Home ownership was an important goal for many households, both as a form of investment and as a means of gaining greater control over a family’s housing destiny and higher status. Housing tenure was first measured systematically in the census of 1890, so earlier estimates are somewhat episodic. Both the 1890 and 1900 censuses showed national ownership rates of 47 percent. In these years there was a substantial gap between ownership in rural and urban areas: The rural rate was 65 percent ownership, as compared with only 37 percent in urban areas, which also had widely varying ownership rates.

Obtaining financing was a major obstacle to purchasing one’s own house, especially in urban areas. Despite

Homes of the poorer classes, Chattanooga, Tennessee (Library of Congress) the growth of building and loan associations, individuals still accounted for more than half of all home loans in the last decade of the century, and land contracts were more prevalent than mortgages. Repayment schemes were not well developed, so buying homes required large down payments and short mortgages or contracts. Most borrowers made regular payments only on the interest, so they had to repay the entire loan at the end of the two-to-three-year contract, which meant they had to obtain a new loan and hopefully, but not always, reduce the amount of the loan. Under these conditions, home lending was a risky business and less attractive to lenders than loans for rental properties, a factor that increased the costs and risks for home buyers.

While the increase in quantity of new housing exceeded the increase in population, the quality of that housing was uneven at best. The poignant, stark photographs of immigrant families in New York City by Jacob A. Rlis published in the mid-1880s and his classic book How the Other Half Lives (1890) constitute the most enduring and widespread images of housing in late 19th-century urban America, leaving the impression that all immigrants and working-class city dwellers lived in dark, windowless, airless, unsanitary, overcrowded, tiny tenement apartments. However, outside New York City most working-class city dwellers lived in single-family houses at much lower densities. But in all cities shoddy construction resulted in inferior dwelling units. Primitive technology and the enormous expense of providing infrastructure for explosive urban growth created neighborhoods with few amenities, many liberally strewn with animal and human refuse and with streets that became quagmires and virtual cesspools when it rained.

Reformers, especially Alfred Tredway White, linked the problem of housing to the problem of slums. Working with settlement house children in Brooklyn, New York, White found that defective sewers and crowded tenements were at the root of most health and social problems. Convinced that it was “better to build homes which will prevent” disease than hospitals to cure it, he studied low-income housing in London. Starting in 1877 and continuing through the century, White built in Brooklyn the world’s most advanced housing for working families. Although New York City, Boston, and Milwaukee had established codes with minimum standards for space, light, direct access, and plumbing since the late 1860s, these codes were considered too costly and seldom enforced. Making his slogan “Philanthropy and five percent” a reality, White proved that good housing rented to those of limited means could be profitable. His housing and the publicity he gave it inspired Riis’s classic book and helped enact the New York State tenement legislation of 1895. Showing other late 19th-century housing reformers the way, White became a leading member of the New York State Tenement House Commission, bringing stronger regulations in all cities, patterned on the landmark New York Tenement House Law of 1901.

Further reading: Robert G. Barrows, “Beyond the Tenement: Patterns of American Urban Housing, 18701930,” Journal of Urban History 9, no. 4 (1983): 395-420; Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Michael J. Doucet and John C. Weaver, “Material Culture and the North American House: The Era of the Common Man, 1870-1920,” Journal of American History 72, no. 3 (1985): 560-87; Sam B. Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); Wendy Walker, ed., The Social Vision of Alfred T. White (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Proteus Gowanus; Brooklyn Historical Society, 2009).

—J. Paul Mitchell

Howells, William Dean (1837-1920) writer A leading realistic novelist of the Gilded Age, William Dean Howells was also its most distinguished literary critic. The son of Mary Dean and William Cooper Howells, a printer and journalist, William Dean Howells was born on March 1, 1837, in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, but his family moved to Hamilton, 20 miles from Cincinnati, when he was three. His father was an idealistic, abolitionist editor of a Whig newspaper who sacrificed the family’s prosperity for his egalitarian radicalism. Young Howells had almost no formal education and was working as a typesetter in his father’s shop by the age of nine. The family moved repeatedly as the elder Howells tried to restore his fortunes with a variety of unsuccessful newspapers, and at the age of 19 Howells began reporting on the state legislature for a Cincinnati paper. Two years later, in 1858, he became editor of the Ohio State Journal at Columbus. In 1860 his campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln earned him enough to visit the cultural center of the country, Boston. There he met such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell. Howells’s biography impressed the newly elected Lincoln enough to bring him an appointment as consul at Venice, a post he held from 1861 to 1865. In 1862 he married Elinor Mead, a gifted artist, with whom he had three children. Within a year of his return to Boston, he joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, of which he became editor in 1871. During his ten years in that position, his essays made him one of the most influential critics in the country, and he published six novels of his own, developing a distinctive literary voice of objective psychological and social realism.

With his seventh novel, A Modern Instance (1882), Howells emerged as the leader of the realistic school in America, portraying the average American with sensitivity to the interaction of character and social conditions. His best-known work, The Rise of Silas Lapham, published four years later, wittily contrasts the Boston aristocracy of Beacon Hill with a self-made man who tries to rise in genteel society, loses his fortune, and rises above his defeat by strength of character. In Lapham, Howells created a classic American type, his vulgarity and pushiness offset by his scrupulous moral rectitude. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells examined the effect of industrialism on the common person and demonstrated his growing engagement with social issues. Influenced by Leo Tolstoy, he dealt increasingly with issues of poverty and suffering and the need for more humane values in the capitalist age. He became one of literature’s leading voices for liberal causes, taking a courageous stand for the anarchists condemned as a result of the Haymarket riot of 1886, helping found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and supporting labor in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Howells wrote the Editor’s Study column for Harper’s Monthly from 1886 to 1891 and the Editor’s Easy Chair from 1900 until his death. A forum for his socialist ideas and modernist literary opinions, these influential posts enabled him to promote the reputations of Emily Dickinson and his close friend Henry James, introduce the work of several Russian novelists to America, and encourage such emerging realist writers as Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. Much honored in his later years, he became known as the dean of American letters. He was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from its founding in 1904 until his death on May 11, 1920.

Further reading: Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

—Dennis Wepman

Hunt, Richard Morris See art and architecture.