Homebuilding before 1920 was a craft industry with homeownership stuck below half the population
Evidence
At the time, the building of homes was still largely a craft. Most builders built only one or two houses a year. In the period from 1890 to 1920, the total number of housing starts in the nation’s cities, suburbs, and small towns generally ranged between 250,000 and 400,000 a year. Though a handful of people had begun to integrate building and land development, the vast majority of builders did not sell lots or install utilities. The purchase of a home was also quite complicated, since there were two markets for new housing, one for business and professional people and one for workers and shopkeepers. In the first market, a buyer often had to put 50 percent down, with the remainder due the bank in five years – ten at the most. In the second market, which operated mainly in ethnic neighborhoods, the building and financing processes were not so neatly separated: To become homeowners, working-class families had to rely on sweat equity and community self-help networks. For the nonfarm population as a whole, the homeownership rate in 1920 was 41 percent, a figure that had changed little since the government began to keep housing statistics in 1890. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 85
Categorization
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
- XREF: connects to: Postwar America faced a five-million-unit housing deficit after a generation of little building — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 80
Broader Connections
- Postwar America faced a five-million-unit housing deficit after a generation of little building
#responds-to(0.70) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 80