A Paradise of Small Houses

"A Paradise of Small Houses

By Max Podemski

Beacon, 272 pages, $29.95

With fine disregard for the first law of urban physics -- density begets productivity -- William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia, promised that the city would be both a "great town" and a "green country town." An egalitarian Quaker who was dismayed by the fires and diseases that seemed endemic to his native London, he envisioned a well-aerated grid of leafy estates that would "never be burnt, and always be wholesome." He even specified that Philadelphia's houses be sited in the middle of their lots, to leave a buffer of green space, and thus helped invent sprawl.

It was Penn's goal of a "great" busy hub of commerce, however, that largely came to pass -- as the joke goes, Quakers came to America to do good and ended up doing well. The spacious plots were quickly chopped into narrow slices. The brick row houses that filled them weren't the sort of architecture that Penn had planned, but they did bear out some of the democratic promise of his vision. As an 1852 visitor to the city marveled, "tradesmen of the most humble class can have a house to themselves." That easy abundance seems like a lost utopia now, when the U.S. is several million housing units short of demand. In "A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing," Max Podemski suggests we can look to history for help.

To that end, he offers chapters on nine representative types of American (and Canadian) urban housing, including Philadelphia row houses; New York tenements; Portland, Ore., bungalows; New Orleans shotguns; and the Vancouver high-rises known as point towers. Though Mr. Podemski is a practicing urban planner (he works on transit for the city of Los Angeles), the focus isn't on specific policy prescriptions. The recommendations he does present are basically the supply-boosting Yimby ("yes in my backyard") gospel that unites the moderate left and market right -- reduce parking requirements and loosen zoning regulations to allow smaller, denser and more varied structures -- plus some sensible pleas for investing in the kind of public spaces that bind housing into neighborhoods.

The real treat is Mr. Podemski's histories of each building type, which trace the interplay of engineering, economics, culture and even morality. The shotgun houses of New Orleans, he writes, were modeled on houses in Haiti that were designed to maximize airflow in a swampy climate. Today they are an emblem of the city. Few tears are shed, by contrast, when Chicago's wooden workers' cottages are torn down, but their lightweight "balloon frame" construction, which took advantage of new mass-produced nails, set the template for American housebuilding.

Philadelphia row houses were another import, from Continental Europe by way of Britain. English aristocrats, driven by the regicidal turmoil of the 1600s to flee to the Low Countries, brought the style back to Britain, where it was ennobled into runs of "terraced" houses with unified designs to project grandeur. In the American colonies, houses like these proved so adaptable, suitable for swells and workers both, that they now constitute roughly 70% of Philadelphia's housing, Mr. Podemski notes.

The outer walls that row houses share with their neighbors bear the structural load; that means interior walls can be easily rearranged. Row houses were built in different sizes, too, with larger houses on main streets and smaller ones on the alleys, which helped keep neighborhoods agreeably mixed and affordable. The city's many savings-and-loan associations enabled workers to pool their incomes to invest. Even the poor could buy one of the tiny "trinities," three-story houses with one room per floor. In 1900, when other cities were riddled with "intractable urban slums," Mr. Podemski writes, the row house strongholds of Baltimore and Philadelphia had "the lowest rates of overcrowding in the country."

By that point, the well-off had been fleeing cities' crowded centers for several decades. The serial arrivals of the streetcar, railroad, trolley and automobile allowed cities to seep outward like inkblots. Gloomy tenements, built in part to house an influx of immigrants, gave dense housing a bad reputation. They, and by association their inhabitants, were considered unhealthy and immoral; "decency is impossible" there, declared an 1872 guidebook quoted by Mr. Podemski. Even the three-floor wood apartment buildings ubiquitous in greater Boston, which seem pretty innocuous today with their clapboard siding and light-gathering bay fronts, were damned in 1917 as the "three decker menace."

One of the most popular remedies pushed by housing reformers was, ironically, another foreign import: the bungalow, a modest single-family house adapted from Indian models by the Arts and Crafts movement, whose members saw it as a wholesome organic counter to Victorian frippery. Unlike row houses, Mr. Podemski notes, "the bungalow gave each room its own distinctive purpose." The bathroom and kitchen, for example, were "based off the latest advances in germ theory," finished in porcelain and tile for easy cleaning. Bungalows were the "birth of modern middle-class housing," a leap forward in mass comfort, and they spread quickly across the Western U.S. But the zoning strictures that made monoculture bungalow neighborhoods initially charming "locked in" their character, Mr. Podemski suggests, making it difficult to add density later. Now those fields of well-preserved bungalows in Portland, Ore., and San Francisco are forbiddingly expensive.

Mr. Podemski is a lively writer but his research -- perhaps unavoidably in this brief but wide survey -- is sometimes shallow. It's hard to fault the enterprise of somebody who quotes Plumber and Sanitary Engineer magazine, but he could have cross-checked his finds better. He seems to think that Knickerbocker was the surname of Theodore Roosevelt's ancestors, when it was a nickname for their class. He describes an oligarch's architectural folly in New York as if it were finished, when the project is still under construction. And he misquotes Penn's lines about the "green country town," despite including a citation for his source. But this is a valuable book despite such small flaws. At a moment when housing-policy battles can seem deadlocked, "A Paradise of Small Houses" conveys a tonic sense of what is, or has been, possible.

---

Mr. Farrington is a former editor at Harper's and the Journal." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Where Americans Call Home. Farrington, Timothy.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Apr 2024: C.10.