City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and ...

In this vivid portrait of life in Chicago in the fifty years after the Civil War, Margaret Garb traces the history of the American celebration of home ownership. As the nation moved from an agrarian to an industrialized urban society, the competing visions of capitalists, reformers, and immigrants turned the urban landscape into a testing ground for American values. Neither a natural progression nor an inevitable outcome, the ideal of home ownership emerged from the struggles of industrializing cities. Garb skillfully narrates these struggles, showing how the American infatuation with home ownership left the nation's cities sharply divided along class and racial lines. Based on extensive research of real estate markets, housing and health reform, and ordinary home owners--African American and white, affluent and working class-- City of American Dreams provides a richly detailed picture of life in one of America's great urban centers. Garb maps out the rise of urban reform movements that placed new emphasis on household health and family privacy; tracks the expansion of urban real estate developers who marketed ever larger and more expensive homes to affluent buyers; and chronicles the bloody battle over property rights that occurred on Chicago's South Side. Ultimately, she demonstrates how the pursuit of a single-family house set on a tidy yard, commonly seen as the very essence of the American dream, resulted from clashes of interests and decades of struggle.