Housing, Owner-Built

In urban and suburban America, it was primarily working-class and impoverished families who built homes for themselves from purchased or found materials. Self-built housing—the wooden shanties lining alleys in late-19th-century Washington, D.C., the frame hovels on rear lots on Chicago's West Side, or the “shacktown” suburbs of early-20th-century Toronto—was housing built far below the costs of commercial construction. Self-built housing was most common in rapidly growing industrial cities where immigrant laborers with little cash invested labor to produce their homes. Although often small, dark spaces lacking indoor plumbing, self-built housing proved a strategy for acquiring shelter and achieving homeownership for low-wage workers in cities where housing costs outpaced wages. A survey of American cities conducted in the late 1920s suggests that as many as one fifth of all homes were owner-built. That number fell during the 1930s and declined rapidly after World War II. Still, although not widely recognized, owner-builders played a significant role in the American real estate market in the 20th century.

Housing in cities and suburbs generally was constructed by one of three producers: custom builders, speculative builders, or owner-residents. Most expensive were custom built houses, designed by architects and constructed by contractors using skilled labor. More common and less costly were the rows of nearidentical houses constructed by merchant or speculative builders. Merchant builders typically purchased large chunks of land, subdivided the land, and hired skilled and unskilled workers to build from several to several hundred houses. In some cities, speculative builders constructed shells, unfinished houses that were affordable to lower income workers and could be completed by the new owners. Fully self-built housing, typically constructed from cheaper materials and generally just one to three rooms in size, was the most inexpensive but most labor-intensive for the owner.

Self-builders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to be families applying household labor to lower the costs of shelter. (Single men and women lived with their families or in boardinghouses.) Many were recent immigrants or African Americans seeking homeownership in northern cities. Families purchased or rented a lot, often for a small down payment and monthly installments. They purchased some materials and often scrounged for others, scavenging from demolition sites or local dumps. Some husbands and sons were trained carpenters, but many ownerbuilders were low-wage workers who had learned the rudimentary skills of house construction. Although often heralded in news accounts for their individualism and self-sufficiency, men relied on the labor of their wives, children, and often friends and neighbors to help them complete their houses.

Families engaging in self-building often purchased lots on the edges of built-up sections of cities, areas where land was cheap and municipal regulation of construction was minimal. Self-builders, needing to lower construction costs and to avoid health and housing inspectors, purchased lots where municipal services such as sewer and water lines, paved streets, and garbage collection were limited or entirely absent. Homeowners sacrificed amenities—sewer lines and indoor plumbing—that might improve the health of their households in exchange for lower housing costs and an opportunity for homeownership. Selfbuilding—in particular the lack of indoor plumbing—determined the working conditions for wives and daughters who managed their homes. It sometimes required wage-laboring household members to commute long distances to jobs in the city. New communities of self-built homes grew slowly as houses and numbers of dwellings expanded, forming working-class suburbs on the edges of industrial cities.

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