Mortgage restrictions forced wasteful duplication of carport and garage onto suburban homes

Evidence

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Wright reinvented his own plans for houses and garages, moving from the urban bourgeoisie to the middle class. Wright’s Usonian projects, a term he invented to describe a utopian model of suburban, futurist housing, removed the garage and replaced it with a carport, a term Wright coined to describe a roof without walls designed to house a car, rendering it visible rather than concealed behind a door. … Yet legal restrictions on mortgages, restrictions motivated by racial segregation, designed to differentiate suburban from urban, white from Black, carried with them wasteful architectural excess that remained: Wright was forced to build homes with both carports and garages, a feature his followers maintained. A house needed a garage to be respectable, to be suburban, to be white. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 197

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Echoes the class/morality signaling dynamics in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece — a material marker legally enforced as respectability.
• XREF: connects to: Tract housing’s design deficiencies directly generated residential energy demand — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 264