The wealthy and upper-middle class continued to live on large lots, either at the periphery of streetcar suburbs or farther out from the city, and probably relied on forms of transportation other than streetcars. Warner estimates that Boston’s streetcar suburbs had a homeowner-ship rate of about 25 percent in 1900—a significant increase over the average urban rate of 17.6 percent in 1890, but well below modern rates.12
The first gasoline-powered automobiles were developed at about the same time as the first streetcars. But early automobiles were too expensive for any but the wealthy and upper-middle class to own. That status changed in 1913, when Henry Ford began building Model Ts on a moving assembly line. Ford’s system reduced the cost by so much that Ford cut the price of his cars in half even as he doubled workers’ pay.
Automobiles were at least twice as fast as streetcars, which meant they could serve four times the land area without increasing commute times. With their door-to-door capability, they were far more convenient than streetcars or any other form of mass transportation. In 1919, Oregon became the first state to approve a gasoline tax dedicated to highways; by 1931 all other states had followed, providing a user-fee-driven source of funds for roads for auto owners to drive on.13 By 1927, 56 percent of American families owned at least one auto, and 10 percent owned more than one.14 Those families that owned autos no longer had to live on tiny lots or in multifamily housing to maintain their access to jobs, shops, and other services.
As the streetcar did before, the mass-produced automobile revolutionized the design of cities and suburbs. In the early 1900s, Kansas City developer J. C. Nichols was building homes for what Warner would call the central-middle class. In 1909, Nichols felt that it was essential that the local streetcar company build a line to one of his subdivisions. By 1913, however, Nichols opened a subdivision with no streetcar line and advertised that people could drive to downtown faster than they could get there by streetcar.15 In 1922, Nichols opened Country Club Plaza, the nation’s first suburban shopping mall designed to accommodate auto drivers. Although Kansas City residents initially called it “Nichols’ folly,” the mall remains a success today.16
New Manufacturing Technologies
Henry Ford’s moving assembly line also revolutionized the making of everything from soap to railcars. Products built using traditional methods could be manufactured in multistory buildings, but moving assembly lines demanded many acres of horizontal space. This necessity led manufacturers to locate or relocate their plants in the suburbs, where land was less expensive. The oft-heard tale that everyone moved to the suburbs and then created traffic congestion trying to drive to work downtown is a myth: jobs moved to the suburbs along with the people.
Moving assembly lines both enabled and were enabled by widespread auto ownership. Ford’s Rouge River plant, for example, covered one and a half square miles and employed 100,000 workers at its peak in the 1930s. Packing all those workers and their families (which averaged 3.5 people in the 1930s) within a one-mile walking distance of the plant would require multifamily housing at a population density nearly as great as Manhattan’s is today. Because most employees could drive to work, they could live in much lower densities and many more could afford to own their own homes.
Homebuilders also attempted to adopt assembly-line techniques to make homes at a lower cost. One way was through the sale of kit homes—all the lumber, roofing, flooring, paint, nails, hardware, and other materials needed to build a home, precut and ready to assemble. The manufacturers of these kit homes offered hundreds of different house plans and claimed that homebuyers could save 10 percent or more on the cost of building a home.
In 1906, a Sears, Roebuck manager named Frank Kushel was directed to shut down the catalog company’s building materials division because it was losing money. Instead, he proposed to repackage building materials into enough parts to build entire homes. Sears began selling kit homes in 1908 and over the next 32 years sold about 70,000 to 75,000 such homes.
Early Sears catalogs advertised homes ranging from 320 square feet to 2,000 square feet at prices ranging from 50 cents to about $2 a square foot. By 1918, the largest home in the catalog was nearly 3,000 square feet. Buyers had to supply their own labor, bricks, cement, and plaster. Also excluded were plumbing, electrical systems, furnaces, and furniture, though all these things were separately available, of course, from Sears. All the parts in the kit were numbered so assembly was supposed to take as little as a few days to several weeks. At the height of production in the mid-1920s, Sears delivered more than 300 homes per month.
At least eight other companies offered kit homes, including Montgomery Ward, whose homes were made by and were identical to an Iowa kit-home manufacturer named Gordon-Van Tine. But the real center of kit-home manufacturing was Bay City, Michigan, where three companies—Aladdin, Lewis, and Sterling—together sold close to 200,000 kit homes. Aladdin actually preceded Sears slightly by offering a kit boathouse in 1906. Other companies were located in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and upstate New York.
The various manufacturers offered a variety of styles and plans, including Cape Cod, foursquare, Queen Anne, Tudor, Colonial, bungalow, and many other traditional styles of homes. Sears even offered a couple of Prairie School styles and, in the late 1930s, a flat-roofed International home. Buyers could ask that floor plans be reversed or for other custom changes to the basic plans. Duplexes, fourplexes, barns, and other outbuildings were also available.
In 1911, Sears began selling homes with a 25 percent down payment plus a mortgage at 6 percent interest over 5 years or a higher rate for as long as 15 years. Starting in 1917, buyers could even get a mortgage with no money down, though Sears discontinued that after 1921.
Over several decades, kit-home makers sold well over 450,000 homes, most of them between 1908 and 1930. Still, considering that all homebuilders combined built more than 7 million homes during the 1920s alone, kit homes were a small part of the market.
New Development Practices
The other major homebuilding trend in the early 20th century was the growth of planned communities. These communities were subdivisions where the developer either built some if not all the homes or set rigorous architectural standards for any homebuyers or home-builders to follow. The largest planned communities included parks and other common areas, community centers, and other amenities that residents could share.
An example of a minimally planned subdivision is Ford Homes, located in Dearborn, Michigan, near the Rouge River plant. Henry Ford always wanted to show that he could make or do things—from running a railroad to operating a steel mill—less expensively than anyone else, and Ford Homes was an example of that ambition. Ford hired an architect, Albert Wood, to design a site plan for the subdivision. One of Wood’s suggestions was to cluster garages in a special service area for each block of the subdivision, forcing residents to walk a block or so to get to their cars. Needless to say, Ford rejected this idea. Wood also designed six basic homes, all in a Colonial style that Ford himself favored, which were used in the neighborhood.17
Following his assembly-line methods, Ford had five crews build the houses in stages: one crew dug the basements (using Ford tractors); a second put in foundations; a third framed the building; a fourth did the interiors, including wiring and plumbing; and the last crew did the exteriors, including landscaping. The process was simplified enough that Ford did not need to rely on skilled craftsmen; instead, he simply borrowed workers from his factories, noting that “men ought to spend part of the year working outside factory walls.”18
Ford offered buyers mortgages at 6 percent interest. The only restrictions Ford put on the homes were that buyers could not resell them for seven years, while the company had the option to buy back the home within seven years if the buyer proved “undesirable”