Affordable Housing Institute : US

What defines modern housing?  Tour enough castles, abbeys, and stately homes and it isn’t hard to identify the five critical features:

 

State of the art, thirteenth century

 

1. Central heating rather than fireplaces

2. Running water instead of basins and pitchers

3. Flush toilet and sewer instead of chamber pots and outhouses

4. Bright lighting instead of candles

5. Electricity for appliances

 

One of the five great technological advances

 

So ingrained are these things in our consciousness that by now they’re mandated by every formal building code – and they constitute a sufficiency for the embryo house.

 

[Editorial note: I toyed with adding sealable clear windows to this list, but decided against it, since we find such windows dating back eight hundred years (Saint Chapelle in Paris).]

 

Beautiful and delicate, but unlivable: the Sainte Chapelle

 

Vermeer, Girl Reading A Letter, circa 1658

 

When did such homes become commonplace?  Over what period of time?

 

Where else but the world’s fastest growing Industrial Revolution city?

 

To my surprise, there’s an answer, and it’s unexpected:

 

By the end of the Civil War, the newest dwellings more closely resembled those built a hundred years later than those erected only twenty years earlier, for technologically housing had advanced half a millennium in a single generation.  To the middle and upper classes of that generation, it was nothing short of a miracle.  Page 45.

 

The place for this miracle?  The cradle of American apartment living, the birthplace of municipal finance for infrastructure: New York City.

 

Immigrants landing in New York, 1858

 

The time?  You’d think it would have been a slow process, but in fact all five innovations came in a headlong rush, a mere quarter-century leading up to the Civil War — and, in the manner of such technological revolutions, they all reinforced each other.

 

You’d think it would have been a slow process.  For something essential, the technology of housing has advanced throughout human history with extraordinary slowness.  Fireplaces and chimneys, which brought heat to every room in the house and completely changed castle and palace design, were invented around the thirteenth century.  For the next six hundred years, little happened to improve houses beyond the addition of gradually larger windows as glassmaking advanced. 

 

As readers will recall, I’ve become intrigued by the history of affordable housing globally and of financial institutions and how the US housing finance ecosystem came to be, and it was in that vein that I read

John Steele Gordon’s history of the US banking system, about which I posted in Jefferson’s Curse.  That in turn led me to his history, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street:

 

Don’t you want to know my story?

 

The subtitle is much less racy: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the Erie Railway Wars.

 

Vanderbilt bestrides the railroads.  The sign reads,

All freight must pass here and pay any tolls we demand.

 

In this lively book, Gordon covers executive-suite shenanigans, complete with barricaded corporate headquarters protected by cannon, a zaftig mistress and her handlebar-mustache impresario lover, financial hijinks such as trying to corner the supply of money, and stock-price manipulation of a kind to make Frank Raines green with envy. 

 

Jubilee Jim Fisk of the Erie Railway

 

His point is the emergence of Wall Street securities regulation – it was first professionalized through self-governance after the financial catastrophe known as the Erie Railway; government regulation came only later.  [More on this in a future post. – Ed.]  Along the way, however, he includes a chapter, the Great Boom Town, that has little or nothing to do with his eventual story, but is chock-full of terrific details about the transformation of antebellum Manhattan.

 

Development, speculation, technological improvement, and urbanization all went hand in hand, all driving from the booming economy led by transportation, first the Erie Canal (1817 to 1823):

 

From Albany to Buffalo

 

and then the railroads, beginning in 1843 with the celebrated New York and Erie Railroad:

 

Connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, via New York City

 

Let’s start with Manhattan’s most recognizable topographic feature, its great grid of streets.  Were they created for urban-planning?  No:

 

In order to regulate the city’s growth in some coherent way, the government in 1811 produced the grid plan for the areas of the city not yet developed.  This plan ignored both the better aspects of city planning as it was understood at the time and the nature of Manhattan’s hilly, granite geography. 

 

Unoccupied but fully gridded

 

The agent of change?  Those profit-oriented entrepreneurial entities, the dreaded real estate developers.

 

Rather, as the plan forthrightly stated, it was adopted because “straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.”  It was a plan, in other words, that only real-estate speculators could love, and they took it to their collective bosom with a passion.  Page 32.

 

[At roughly the same time, Boston's Back Bay was being gridded and filled in, and for roughly the same reason: to create easy-to-sell development plots. – Ed.]

 

Fifth Avenue, looking south from 38th Street

 

What drove the speculators?  Profits in standardization:

 

Except for the greatest palaces on Fifth Avenue and its immediate environs, New York’s houses were erected almost entirely by real-estate speculators, who built them in blocks of six, eight, or more identical units and sold them off to individual families.  This produced a formidable uniformity in the appearance of New York’s streetscapes.

 

Today we find them charming

 

The speculators were very conservative in taste, each unwilling to be even a little out in front of the pack in style for fear that their equally conservative and socially insecure nouveau riche customers would be scared away.  By the 1850’s the Italianate style, with its brownstone front, elaborate bracketed cornice, carved lintels, high stoop, and double front door beneath a small but ornate portico was virtually the only style of row house being built.  Page 42.

 

The new houses were marvels of technology:

 

Primitive forced-air furnaces were first installed in the 1840s, but those worked fitfully and as often as not provided more soot and fumes than heat.  By the 1860’s steam heat, with all its efficiency and technological, if not esthetic, advantages, was being installed in the latest row houses.

 

Technology reached the kitchen as well:

 

Two inventions transformed the kitchen at this time as well.  The cast-iron cook stove replaced the open hearth and the icebox came into use.  Soon the stoves were fitted with water tanks, and hot running water –- undreamed-of a generation earlier – became a commonplace, while the icebox made a cold glass of milk in July a marvelous reality.  Page 43.

 

Better cooking, easier cleaning, greater efficiency: what’s not to like?

 

If the kitchen was better, so too was the plumbing, giving rise to a new room in the house:

 

Soon new houses could not be sold unless they had water closets and bathrooms, and the city was forced into a crash program of sewer and water-main construction. 

 

Mark II: the second generation of toilet, from 1878

 

Changing household consumption had dramatic unintended consequences:

 

The drop in demand for well water caused the water table to rise alarmingly and forced the city to construct storm and drainage sewers to overcome an epidemic of flooded basements. 

 

As always happens, urbanization outstripped municipal infrastructure.  Markets were moving faster than government, which raced to catch up, with an explosion of building:

 

All this sewer construction – as much as fifty miles a year – added greatly to the city’s appearance of being one huge, never-completed construction site.

 

That huge demand for capital led New York City, as I’ve posted extensively before, to invent municipal infrastructure finance:

 

But when water from Westchester’s Croton River first came into the city via aqueduct in 1842 the situation began to change very rapidly.  Croton water gave New York City its undying and richly deserved reputation for having the finest municipal water in the world. 

 

Like many a global-south city today, New York seemed nothing more than one large construction site:

 

This incessant change, this constant building up and tearing down, had its consequences.  While New Yorkers were proud of their city, extolled its grandeur, and heralded its future, few of them loved it.  “Why should it be loved as a city?” Harpers Monthly asked in 1856.  “It is never the same city for a dozen years though.  A man born in New York fifty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.  If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate.  But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone.”  Page 33.

 

The shock of the new: Five Points, 1859

Note the presence of both old (clapboard) and new (rowhouse) construction

 

Twenty years later, 1879, the mid-rises are dominant

 

It also led to traffic jams:

 

As early as the 1840’s, newspapers were bemoaning how crowded and noisy the streets were and how slow and tangled the traffic.

 

“Noisy, roaring, tumbling, bustling, stormy, and turbulent – and I don’t mean myself!”

Walt Whitman

 

In 1842 Walt Whitman wrote in an editorial, “What can New York – noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York – have to do with silence?”  By the 1850’s fifteen thousand vehicles a day were counted passing St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at the foot of City Hall Park.  Page 35.

 

Congestion relieving invention: a Broadway walkover bridge, 1860s

 

It is ever thus.

 

An intrinsic condition of cities?

 

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