Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T19:43:39.729Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

New Building and Investment Patterns in 1920s Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Gail Radford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

After the economy stabilized following World War I, the U.S. experienced a record level of residential construction. When considering housing in this period, scholars have usually focused on the sheer number of units built and perhaps on the fact that the rate of construction turned down several years before the whole economy soured. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which U.S. building patterns differed in the 1920s from earlier periods and what these changes can tell us about broader social trends. This article examines residential building in this period in more detail, by looking at the city of Chicago, and suggests that new patterns of housing construction may have been linked to changes in the economy as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1992 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Edith (1936) The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Allan, Albert P. (1927) “Chicago's housing problem.” Report to Chicago Housing Commission, 14 July, Graham Taylor Papers. Newberry Library, Chicago.Google Scholar
Barrows, Robert G. (1983) “Beyond the tenement: Patterns of American urban housing, 1870-1930.” Journal of Urban History 9: 395–420.Google Scholar
Behrens, Carl F. (1952) Commercial Bank Activities in Urban Mortgage Financing. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.Google Scholar
Bemis, Albert Farwell (1934) The Economics of Shelter. Cambridge: Technology Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Binder, Carroll (1931) “Living standard of America bar to lower rents.” Chicago Daily News, 17 August, p. 10.Google Scholar
Boysen, Louis K. (1931) “A history of real estate bonds.” Chicago Real Estate Magazine 6 (23 May): 12-13.Google Scholar
Burgess, Ernest W., and Newcomb, Charles (1933) Census Data on the City of Chicago, 1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chicago Plan Commission (1942) The Report of the Chicago Land Use Survey. Vol. 1, Residential Chicago. Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission.Google Scholar
Chicago Plan Commission (1943) Master Plan of Residential Land Use in Chicago. Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission.Google Scholar
Colean, Miles L. (1944) American Housing: Problems and Prospects. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.Google Scholar
Condit, Carl W. (1973) Chicago, 1910-29: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
de Wit, Wim (1983-84) “Apartment houses and bungalows: Building the flat city.” Chicago History 12 (Winter): 19–29.Google Scholar
Doucet, Michael J., and Weaver, John C. (1985) “Material culture and the North American house: The era of the common man, 1870-1920.” Journal of American History 72: 560–87.Google Scholar
Edwards, George W. (1932) Principles of Banking and Finance. New York: Ronald.Google Scholar
Fearon, Peter (1987) War, Prosperity, and Depression: The U.S. Economy, 1917-45. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Fisher, Ernest M. (1951) Urban Real Estate Markets: Characteristics and Financing. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.Google Scholar
Gottdiener, M[ark] (1985) The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Grebler, Leo, Blank, David M., and Winnick, Louis (1956) Capital Formation in Residential Real Estate: Trends and Prospects. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Halliburton, Alexander (1939) “The real estate bond house: A study of some of its financial practices.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University.Google Scholar
Harloe, Michael (1985) Private Rented Housing in the United States and Europe. New York: St. Martin's.Google Scholar
Hilliard, Celia (1979) “ ‘Rent reasonable to right parties': Gold Coast apartment buildings, 1906-1929.” Chicago History 8 (Summer): 66–77.Google Scholar
Hoyt, Homer (1970 [1933]) One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago. New York: Arno.Google Scholar
Illinois Housing Commission (1933) Final Report. Springfield.Google Scholar
Jackson, Anthony (1976) A Place Called Home: The History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Carrie Maude (1933) “Apartment house bonds: Some plans for reorganizing defaulted issues.” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 9: 358–67.Google Scholar
League of Nations (1939) Urban and Rural Housing. Geneva: League of Nations.Google Scholar
Leven, Maurice, Moulton, Harold G., and Warburton, Clark (1934) America's Capacity to Consume. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Maxwell, W. Floyd (1931) “The building industry since the war.” Review of Economic Statistics 13: 68–75.Google Scholar
Mayer, Harold M., and Wade, Richard C. (1969) Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Broadus, and Mitchell, Louise Pearson (1947) American Economic History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Monchow, Helen Corbin (1939) Seventy Years of Real Estate Subdividing in the Region of Chicago. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Monthly Labor Review (1930) “Cost of living.” 30: 451-78.Google Scholar
Moulton, Harold G. (1938) Financial Organization and the Economic System. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Naigles, M. H. (1942) “Housing and the increase in population.” Monthly Labor Review 54: 869-80.Google Scholar
Pederson, Victoria J. (1933) “Urban mortgage debts,” in Clark, Evans (ed.) The Internal Debts of the United States. New York: Macmillan: 63–91.Google Scholar
Peters, Andrew J. (1918) “The city's obligation in housing,” in Housing Problems in America, vol. 7. New York: National Housing Association: 329-35.Google Scholar
Posner, Louis S. (1948) “The lesson of guaranteed mortgage certificates.“ Harvard Business Review 26: 560-71.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, Alan (1980) The Real Estate Gamble: Lessons from 50 Years of Boom and Bust. New York: AMACOM.Google Scholar
Rodwin, Lloyd (1961) Housing and Economic Progress: A Study of the Housing Experiences of Boston's Middle-Income Families. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Technology Press.Google Scholar
Simpson, Herbert D. (1933) “Real estate speculation and the depression.“ American Economic Review 23 (Suppl., March): 152-71.Google Scholar
Smith, J. W. Brabner (1938) “The financing of large-scale rental housing.” Law and Contemporary Problems 5: 608-16.Google Scholar
Soule, George (1947) Prosperity Decade. London: Pilot.Google Scholar
Stone, Michael E. (1980) “The housing problem in the United States: Origins and prospects.” Socialist Review 10 (July-August): 65-119.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1984) “History. Notes on urban images of historians,” in Rodwin, Lloyd and Hollister, Robert M. (eds.) Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum: 119-32.Google Scholar
Tygiel, Jules (1979) “Housing in late nineteenth-century American cities: Suggestions for research.” Historical Methods 12: 84–101.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1923) Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No. 347, Building Permits in the Principal Cities of the United States in 1922. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1925) Bulletin of the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No. 397, Building Permits in the Principal Cities of the United States in 1924. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1927) Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No. 449, Building Permits in the Principal Cities of the United States in 1926. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1929) Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No. 500, Building Permits in the Principal Cities of the United States in 1928. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1930) Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No. 524, Building Permits in the Principal Cities of the United States in 1929. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress (1935) Preliminary Report: Investment of Real-Estate Bondholder Reorganizations. 74th Cong., 1st sess. H. Rept. 35.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1933) Fifteenth Census, vol. 6. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Weiss, Marc A. (1987) The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Westfall, Carroll William (1984) “Home at the top: Domesticating Chicago's tall apartment buildings.” Chicago History 14 (Spring): 20–39.Google Scholar
White, Eugene Nelson (1986) “Before the Glass-Steagall Act: An analysis of the investment banking activities of national banks.” Explorations in Economic History 23: 33–55.Google Scholar
Wickens, David L. (1941) Residential Real Estate. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.Google Scholar
Woodbury, Coleman (1931) Apartment House Increases and Attitudes toward Home Ownership. Chicago: Institute for Economic Research.Google Scholar
Young, Hugh E. (1937) “Need for and some practical method [sic] of rezoning urban areas.” Paper presented at the Meeting of the City Planning Division, American Society of Civil Engineers, New York, 21 January. Municipal Reference Library of Chicago.Google Scholar