Central air conditioning was not essential to postwar affordable housing, contra a leading account

Evidence

In Air-conditioning America, Cooper draws similar conclusions about the hotbox design of the typical tract house and the elimination of traditional climate-control features. But she offers a different explanation for the rise of air conditioning after World War II, perhaps because she relies on sources from the heating, cooling, and ventilating industry rather than the building industry. She argues that “air conditioning was most often installed as a means of achieving affordable home ownership.” Since the cheap tract house was uninhabitable without air conditioning, she concludes, “consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they had merely to ratify.” See 142, 156. I think the process was more complicated. Central air conditioning certainly was not essential to achieving affordable housing for the masses – the opposite was true, as the building industry understood from the first – and consumers were not as passive as Cooper suggests. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 340

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts the reader’s own developing narrative of builder-driven energy waste with Cooper’s consumer-passivity account; useful for the LGST polyad’s method thread about whose evidence (which industry’s sources) shapes causal explanation.
• QUESTION: Rome asserts consumers were not passive in choosing air conditioning but this chapter’s excerpt gives no evidence for his alternative mechanism — worth chasing in later paragraphs.