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of Urban History

Housing Ideals and Realities: New Historical Explorations

Gail Radford
Journal of Urban History 1999 25: 716
DOI: 10.1177/009614429902500504

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 1999
Radford / HOUSING IDEALS AND REALITIES

REVIEW ESSAY

HOUSING IDEALS AND REALITIES

New Historical Explorations
PAUL GROTH, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the
United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, xxii, 401 pp.,
illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index, $35.00 cloth.
PETER G. ROWE, Modernity and Housing. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,
1995, ix, 408 pp., illustrations, maps, appendices, index, $30.00 paper.

What are optimal environments for personal life, and how might they
become widely available? Peter Rowe and Paul Groth both address these
questions in their recent books. They do so by the time-honored strategy of
writing histories of housing in industrial economies and of efforts to improve
it. Rowe focuses on architecturally noteworthy examples within the reform
tradition, while Groth investigates a particular kind of housing produced by
the market. Each aspires to more cosmopolitan and affordable urban neigh-
borhoods, where choice and personal control are maximized. And both
champion attractive images of what housing in a developed society could be
like. In the end, however, neither presents a satisfying account of why the
United States remains so far from these visions.
Peter Rowe begins his handsomely produced and generously illustrated
Modernity and Housing not only by posing the question of how appropriate
and desirable kinds of housing could be provided under contemporary condi-
tions but also by interrogating the concept of modernity. He concludes that
the core of modernity consists of new attitudes about technology, time, space,
and symbolic representation. These new ways of thinking, he maintains, pro-
duced the “modern process” of “normalization and standard setting” (p. 47).
With regard to cities, Rowe believes the “intellectual condition of moder-
nity” was unfortunate, since it led to building regulations, zoning, and univer-
sal dwelling standards (p. 67). Spatial segregation of function and abstracted
universality of form strike at the very heart of urbanity, he argues. Indeed,
Rowe sees these trends as largely to blame for the grim uniformity of the
directly subsidized housing of the postwar period, both in the United States

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© 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.
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 Radford / HOUSING IDEALS AND REALITIES 717

and Europe. One of the first images in the book is of Chicago’s Stateway Gar-
dens, a series of giant concrete hulks, ten to seventeen stories high, erected in
the 1950s (p. 2). The photograph shows the buildings rising out of a barren
plain and extending to the horizon in what looks to be an infinite regress. The
implication seems clear: this inhuman environment is the logical outcome of
the modern worldview.
Yet Rowe’s attitude toward modernism is clearly ambivalent, as the core
of the book consists of six well-researched, engagingly written, and frankly
appreciative studies of what he identifies as “modern” housing. The first were
built in the high tide of early modernism in the 1920s: Römerstadt in
Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York;
and Kiefhoek in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His second trilogy of positive
examples dates from the late 1960s through the 1980s: the Byker Redevelop-
ment Project in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the United Kingdom; Villa Victoria,
in Boston’s South End; and the Malagueira Quarter, in Evora, Portugal.
Escorting his reader though these neighborhoods, Rowe is a marvelous
guide and teacher. He conveys a palpable sense of the three-dimensional
world, evoking the distinctive atmosphere of the places he describes. Mean-
while, he explains the design decisions that created these pleasing districts.
For the reviewer, his tours of Römerstadt and Sunnyside brought back vivid
memories of afternoons spent walking through these neighborhoods, at the
same time clarifying what it was that made them so appealing.
These discussions are so insightful that one hesitates to complain about
Rowe’s disinclination ever to offer a specific definition of what he calls
“modern housing.” Yet his reticence is disequilibrating, because his obvious
enthusiasm for the projects he labels “modern housing” is hard to reconcile
with his severe critique of the modernist perspective. Take, for example, his
discussion of the Römerstadt district in Frankfurt, arguably a textbook exam-
ple of the so-called International Style. Rowe praises some of Römerstadt’s
buildings for their “strong sculptural and somewhat expressionistic ele-
ments,” while describing others as “well integrated into the surrounding gar-
dens and other site works” (p. 140). The retaining wall that protects the settle-
ment from the flood plain of the Nidda River is portrayed as “conforming
to topography” and evoking the old Roman town originally built on the site
(p. 398). This is hardly the visually and symbolically sterile environment the
reader expects from the modern movement as Rowe depicts it.
“Modern housing,” as Rowe uses the term, is clearly something positive.
One assumes that he means something on the order of neighborhoods of
well-designed, affordable urban dwellings. But how exactly does one judge
these? And what about them is particularly “modern”? Like the man who
maintained that he did not know what art was, but knew what he liked, Rowe

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718 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 1999

seems to base his definition on his own taste—if it’s good, it’s modern hous-
ing. In his defense, however, this reviewer would be the first to say that his
taste is first-rate. Also, he certainly is not the first person to find the term
“modern housing” problematic and then proceed to use it anyway. Catherine
Bauer was ambivalent about employing the term for the title of her 1934 book,
in which she, like Rowe, showcased innovative residential communities.
Unable to think of anything better, she reconciled herself with the thought
that at least the book would be shelved in the proper section in libraries.1
For Rowe, the main problem that arises from this lack of explicitness is
insufficient attention to the influence of both the state and the market. With-
out analyzing the role of politics and the impact of profit-driven development
on housing, he is unable to present a satisfactory account of why the type of
housing he advocates has fared so poorly in the United States. Some of the
drawbacks with his historical analysis become apparent when we consider
Sunnyside Gardens, Rowe’s example from the 1920s of American modern
housing.
Rowe maintains that his various examples of modern housing developed
out of major tendencies within the country where they were built, but Sun-
nyside really had little to do with what was going on at the time in American
residential construction. This reality is obscured by Rowe’s almost complete
focus on cultural factors. Indeed, Sunnyside was influenced by the ideas
about site design, architecture, and building techniques that were circulating
throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century. But these
concepts made little headway in the United States beyond influencing a few
intellectuals. Here, even at the height of the building boom of the twenties,
private contractors produced houses pretty much as they had for decades.
Small, poorly capitalized U.S. home builders lacked the capacity to utilize
new materials and large-scale production techniques, even if they had so
desired. Nor were these little operators in any position to alienate possible
customers by putting up structures that challenged mainstream notions of
how a house should look. Furthermore, government was not involved in
housing during this period, even to the extent of attempting to coordinate the
financial structure of residential property investment (which would later
become its chief objective). When Clarence Stein and Henry Wright
designed their Queens project for the City Housing Corporation, they worked
with no encouragement, let alone financial support, from the public sector.
Local officials even turned down requests to modify street patterns that
existed only on paper. In sum, Sunnyside influenced Radburn (a later com-
munity development experiment by the same team) and little else. Without
government involvement, an initiative like Sunnyside was destined to remain
disconnected from the main trends of American housing development.

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 Radford / HOUSING IDEALS AND REALITIES 719

Compare this situation with what happened in Germany. When Ernst May
created Römerstadt in Frankfurt-am-Main, he enjoyed prerogatives almost
unimaginable from an American perspective. Holding both the offices of
municipal architect and chief planner for the city, he also had the backing of a
popular mayor. May utilized municipally owned enterprises for materials
and transportation, which cut costs and gave him greater control of the build-
ing process as well. He even established a city-owned factory to manufacture
prefabricated concrete components, allowing him to experiment with indus-
trialized construction techniques. Altogether, May had, in Rowe’s words,
“almost absolute power over building and urban design” in the city during the
second half of the twenties (p. 128). The differences between May’s situation
and that of Stein and Wright go far to explain why Römerstadt was only one
of many innovative and attractive residential districts constructed in a single
European country during the 1920s, while Sunnyside stood practically alone
as a demonstration of new approaches to domestic architecture and neighbor-
hood planning in the United States.
By never confronting the fact that Sunnyside was an isolated case in the
United States, Rowe does not have to give reasons. He does, however, try to
account for the fate of American public housing. The problem with his analy-
sis is that, without politics, the trajectory from the design innovations of the
interwar period that he lovingly details to the failures that he sees in Ameri-
can public housing are only understood in terms of design errors. In his
words, by the 1970s, “the modern system of housing envisaged some fifty
years earlier had collapsed” (p. 264). We are led to assume that various unfor-
tunate tendencies of modernism—its totalizing schemes, its enthusiasm for
abstraction to the point of inexpressiveness, its naive optimism regarding the
revitalizing potential of the built environment—resulted in the loss of public
support for public housing generally, but especially in the United States.
But was it really the “intellectual condition of modernism” that led inexo-
rably to Stateway Gardens? And does hatred of high-rise housing adequately
explain the history of directly subsidized housing in the United States? The
accessible and dramatic narrative that ascribes public housing’s failure in
America to revulsion against the excesses of architectural modernism retains
a powerful grip on the public imagination.2 Yet this popular story line
obscures key issues that need to be confronted if Americans are to apply
Rowe’s valuable insights about how to construct affordable, attractive, and
ecologically sensitive living environments.
The design error thesis leaves out the economic and political constraints
within which public housing administrators and architects operated. For
example, a good case can be made for the proposition that cost-cutting pres-
sures rather than some basic logic of modernism led to the physical bleakness

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720 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 1999

of America’s “second ghetto.” In the late nineteenth century, speculative

builders in New York City put up apartment houses that adhered to the most
minimal standards the law allowed. Lawrence Veiller used a model of an
entire block built of dumbbell tenements to shock the public as part of his
campaign for stricter building codes. One look at Veiller’s exhibit conveys
how the drive for economy was capable of producing architectural exteriors
every bit as visually barren and emotionally alienating as any ascribed to the
baleful influence of modernist ideals.3 Also, with regard to the arid environ-
ments of public housing developments, economics again seem more culpable
than any of modernism’s supposed propensities. Throughout the book, Rowe
mentions occasions when community facilities envisioned by architects were
deleted for lack of funds.
Looking specifically at the context that produced Stateway Gardens, the
overriding importance of politics and profits becomes evident. The fact is that
the administrators of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), to say nothing
of the architects they hired, were negligible players in the postwar recon-
struction of the city. Arnold Hirsch characterizes the CHA as essentially an
“appendage” to private redevelopment schemes.4 As Hirsch and others have
shown, powerful local institutions concerned with property values manipu-
lated urban renewal programs to push African Americans out of desirable
sections of the city. Meanwhile, white homeowners used violence to block
integration of their neighborhoods. As a result, blacks were confined to very
restricted areas unsuited to residential development. Practically all the sites
the City Council approved for public housing were situated in what Martin
Meyerson and Edward Banfield describe as “slum areas adjacent to rail
roads, factories, and traffic arteries.”5 Surely these pressures alone, dictating
as they did putting the most people in the least space, would have implied a
high-rise architectural solution—even if Le Corbusier had never lived.
Rowe’s narrative leaves out these kinds of issues. As he tells it, modern-
ism’s “sweeping programs” simply “ran out of promise and were abandoned”
by the 1970s (p. 172). He ends on an optimistic note, however, because he
believes that in recent years architects have paid more attention to “differ-
ences, specificity and localism” (p. 227). On the book’s last page, he asserts
that modernism no longer prevents us from achieving “good modern hous-
ing” (p. 348). Yet, on the evidence that he himself presents, it can be plausibly
argued that it never did.
Paul Groth’s Living Downtown is a fascinating overview of residential
hotel life in the United States since it first became possible early in the nine-
teenth century. Like Rowe, Groth has a special talent for recognizing and
writing about the attributes of good places to live. This is a well-written,
deeply researched book, with a wealth of illustrations and diagrams that

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 Radford / HOUSING IDEALS AND REALITIES 721

greatly contribute to the story. Anyone imagining the topic to be interesting,

but possibly marginal to core housing issues, is set straight on the book’s first
page, where we find that in 1990 more people in the United States lived in
hotels than in public housing. Clearly, residential hotels were and continue to
be an invaluable resource for poor people. But Groth has more in mind than
merely making the point that single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) are a
necessary option of last resort; he wants us to appreciate what he sees as posi-
tively inviting features of living in furnished rooms in the center of the city.
Given the pervasive negative stereotypes about SROs, this is a tall order.
Yet Groth succeeds, at least for this reader. He continues and elaborates the
revisionist view of SRO living put forward by Joanne Meyerowitz, and also
promoted in the joint work of Robert Slayton and Charles Hoch.6 From
Groth’s perspective, living outside of “traditional household culture” means
being “unfettered by place and possessions” (p. 7). This way of living offers
greater personal independence and more diverse experiences. He makes a
compelling case for thinking of hotel room life not as a radically reduced
form of an idealized existence within a freestanding family house in the sub-
urbs, but instead, as something completely different, and in some respects
better.
To accomplish his purpose, he examines an earlier era when hotel living
was commonplace and respectable, even prestigious, for people of substan-
tial means. The book begins with an entertaining and informative look at the
opulent life of the grand hotel. At the turn of the century, many of the social
elite (and others who aspired to be) lived as permanent “guests” in high-status
hotels like the Fairmont in San Francisco or the Plaza in New York City.
Indeed, when the Plaza opened in 1907, The New York Times published dia-
grams of the building showing how huge chunks of the building were already
leased on a long-term basis to Goulds, Vanderbilts, and Harrimans. Dubbed
“palace hotels” for a reason, these establishments offered extremes of both
luxury and choice. Within architecturally imposing buildings, managers laid
on elegant furnishings, meals prepared by famous chefs, and staffing ratios as
high as four employees to a single hotel tenant. Residents could “intersperse
days or hours of seclusion with the conviviality of the dining room, lobby,
bar, or downtown theater, gymnasium, or club” (p. 31).
For those outside the ranks of the super rich, mid-priced hotels offered
pared-down variants of this lifestyle. Less-expensive hotels were particularly
important for middle-class people who moved often for their jobs. In the days
before IBM, wives were expected to relocate whole suburban establishments
every few years, mobile professional families simply resettled themselves in
a new city by taking a furnished suite in a hotel. Many geographically stable
middle-class people, particularly professional women, appreciated the

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722 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 1999

freedom from domestic responsibilities afforded by what Groth calls the

“cooperative housekeeping” provided by hotels (p. 62). (“Commercialized
housekeeping” would probably be a more accurate term.) Thus, even if the
environment was less posh, mid-priced hotels still offered the core attractions
of hotel life: domestic convenience, easy accessibility to employment and
entertainment opportunities, plus the stimulation of crowds combined with
easy opportunities for anonymity.
Groth maintains that less affluent people were historically attracted to
these same features of hotel life, even if they settled for a more Spartan
“homebase” from which to enjoy them. For example, single rooms appealed
to many low-income young adults who migrated to cities around the turn of
the century, especially compared to boarding with a family, their other easy
option. For one thing, renting a furnished room allowed them to take their
meals at cheap restaurants. These often offered more palatable and cheaper
food than that provided by landladies. In any case, they provided more
choices over menus and eating times. Then, there was the easy access to the
nearby dance halls, movie theaters, bars, and bohemian gathering places. In
Groth’s words: “rooming house life plugged the individual directly into the
high-voltage currents of the industrial city” (p. 127).
Groth presents this rich social history of hotel life as experienced and
enjoyed by people from all ranks of society largely as a way to counter pre-
vailing wisdom about SROs. He contends that negative attitudes have and
continue to pose the chief threat to this invaluable resource for people of slen-
der means. From the Progressives to the Chicago School sociologists and
beyond, intellectuals identified hotel life with trends toward individuation
that they believed were threatening the fabric of civil society. In 1915, long
before anyone fretted about how Americans were “bowling alone,” sociolo-
gist Robert Park worried that people in big cities lived “much as the people do
in some great hotel, meeting but not knowing one another” (p. 226). Groth
looks specifically at California to show how this cultural critique was trans-
lated into law. For example, the California Commission on Immigration and
Housing, a prototypical Progressive Era reform organization, supported
building codes that disadvantaged hotel owners by driving up minimum stan-
dards, and zoning regulations that outlawed single-room housing in certain
areas. This kind of legislation discouraged mixed use of space—a trend that
Groth (like Rowe) finds pernicious.
Groth’s attentiveness to how political conflict and legal rules affected out-
comes in the housing sector is a welcome change from a conception of social
change precipitated almost exclusively by cultural frameworks. Yet Groth,
too, probably overstates the influence of ideas on social change. He believes
that the primary reason for the decrease in availability of furnished rooms is

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 Radford / HOUSING IDEALS AND REALITIES 723

the “doctrinaire idealism” that overvalued family life in suburban houses at

the expense of other positive choices for individuals (p. 263).
By contrast, this reviewer would argue that the changing organization of
urban space over the course of the twentieth century that both Groth and
Rowe deplore has more to do with the logic of profit-driven development
than with the ideas (however misguided or enlightened) of those who have set
out self-consciously to improve the world. Groth’s exhaustive historical
research allows this reality to emerge, even as he employs the familiar narra-
tive structure that puts reform-minded actors at the center of the story. By his
own account, the most powerful constituency behind the drive to create a
“new city of more single purpose areas” was composed of large investors
anxious to stabilize property values (p. 196). This group, not university pro-
fessors or leaders of reform organizations, had the political muscle to get zon-
ing laws passed. Furthermore, Groth makes it clear that large-scale economic
change was the key factor on the supply side of the SRO equation. For exam-
ple, the great demand for casual labor early in the century meant a large clien-
tele for furnished rooms. Property investors responded by putting up many
buildings designed specifically for single-room occupancy. These
“purpose-built” structures generally provided real improvements in living
conditions over previously available makeshift arrangements, with more
light, better ventilation, and private sinks in each room. As employment
opportunities for migrant and unskilled workers dried up by the end of the
1920s, the customer base for cheap hotels became so impoverished that new
investment evaporated. After 1930, no one built new lodging houses, and
those already in the business were usually on the lookout for ways to sell.
Thus, an alternate reading of his own evidence allows us to perceive that—as
with the postwar physical transformation of Chicago discussed
above—reformers were actually bit players in the drama.
Groth’s analysis underemphasizes the role of the market, but his focus on
politics is an important contribution to housing history. He explains that since
the 1960s community activists have joined with hotel residents to oppose the
destruction of residential hotels. The long battle to save San Francisco’s
International Hotel in the 1970s, for example, helped to change attitudes and
laws throughout the country, even though it failed to preserve this particular
building. Like Rowe, Groth ends his book with positive examples of recently
designed housing of the type he favors. Attractive and convenient buildings
like San Diego’s 207-room Baltic Hotel (constructed in 1987) convince the
reader that the necessary design expertise is readily available. Yet, even
though the legal environment is no longer actively hostile and many public
officials now positively support residential hotels, only a few new SROs have
made it off the drawing board. As cost-effective as these residences are, most

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724 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 1999

poor single people simply cannot afford rents that would allow such build-
ings to break even, let alone attract private investors. Even simple types of
single-room housing are not viable without subsidies, which is also the case
with the neighborhoods that Rowe advocates.
Both Rowe and Groth provide images of what they (and this reviewer)
consider better housing patterns than we have arrived at in the United States.
They document instances when the kind of housing they support was actually
built. However, their narratives of why overall housing patterns in the United
States are so different from these admirable models are weak. Both empha-
size culture, without considering barriers presented by the structure of the
U.S. economy. While Groth gives some attention to political factors, Rowe
all but ignores them. Why does this matter? For one thing, because any
account of obstacles and possibilities encountered in the past has implica-
tions for how outcomes closer to the authors’ ideals might be achieved in the
future.

—Gail Radford
State University of New York,
Buffalo

NOTES

1. Mary Susan Cole, “Catherine Bauer and the Public Housing Movement, 1926-1937”
(Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1975), 136.
2. For a persuasive argument that racial anxieties in the United States were more important
than any architectural critique in fueling negative attitudes toward public housing, see A. Scott
Henderson, “‘Tarred with the Exceptional Image’: Public Housing and Popular Discourse,
1950-1990,” American Studies 36 (1995): 31-52.
3. For the model, see Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, The Tenement House Prob-
lem, vol. 1 (New York, 1903), 24a.
4. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960
(London, 1983), 122. Devereux Bowly, Jr. explains how the Chicago Housing Authority assem-
bled land in the 1940s to make it possible for Michael Reese Hospital to expand. The authority
acquired slum properties, razed the dilapidated buildings that stood on them, and transferred the
land parcels to the hospital. No new housing was constructed, so the whole effort “reduced the
housing supply, albeit slum housing, available to poor people.” Bowly, The Poorhouse: Subsi-
dized Housing in Chicago, 1895-1976 (Carbondale, IL, 1978), 59.
5. Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Politics, Planning and the Public Interest: The
Case of Public Housing in Chicago (Glencoe, IL, 1955), 130.
6. Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930
(Chicago, 1988); Charles Hoch and Robert A. Slayton, New Homeless and Old: Community and
the Skid Row Hotel (Philadelphia, 1989).

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