Self-Help Housing

Historical Geography in the Developed World

Self-help housing was once widespread throughout what is now the developed world. It was especially common in rural areas, small towns, and in working-class and/or immigrant suburbs. Here, the absence or lax enforcement of building regulations and of requirements to employ qualified tradesmen or union labor made it possible for families to erect modest dwellings and build in stages. Families often occupied a single room or basement, framing extensions as finances permitted or as growing families required. Cheap land enabled owners to save a large proportion of their housing costs by taking on a wide variety of construction tasks, including site management. Especially in thinly populated rural areas, there was little scope for people to develop and exercise specialized skills or to establish themselves as full-time builders. Many men acquired a range of manual skills.

In North America, as in Australia and New Zealand, most early settlers and later immigrants had a strong desire to acquire property. Self-help brought homeownership within their reach, as it did for a wide range of blue-collar workers. Until at least World War II, the same was true in the suburbs of many European cities, including Paris, Madrid, and Athens. In some countries, notably Great Britain, regulations sharply limited its incidence from the mid-19th century. In most cases, in all of these countries, owner-builders acquired legal title to the land on which they built, and many urban fringe subdivisions were marketed to them. In a few cases, notoriously in parts of what became Central Park in New York City, squatting occurred.

Owner-building has occurred in irregular cycles, corresponding with housing shortages. These could be due to waves of immigrant settlement, as in Toronto from 1900 to 1925, or of domestic migrations, as from the dust bowl states to California during the 1930s. Following a long period of reduced construction and because of surging demand from returning veterans, owner-building reached a 20th-century peak in North America after 1945. In 1949, about 27% of all new housing starts and 34% of all single-detached units were initiated by owners for their own use; the latter rate had fallen to 15% by 1955. Since then, the enforcement of building regulations, rising incomes, and rising land costs have almost eliminated owner-building from major metropolitan areas, except at the exurban fringe. It remains significant in rural areas. Within the United States, it is now concentrated in the border regions of California and Texas, where tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants have established colonias settlements.

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