Home, Bittersweet Home: Histories of Housing and Homeownership in America Since 1850

3 units

The idea of owning one's own home has been central to realizations of the American dream or the good life. By 1931, Herbert Hoover called the idea a sentiment deep in the heart of our race and of American life. While the dream continues, the reality of homeownership has been elusive or fraught with struggle and sacrifice for many Americans. If home ownership is such a central part of American identity, why have so many generations of Americans struggled to achieve it? In this course, students explore the histories of different versions of home and homeownership by touching down in different locations at pivotal moments in order to investigate the varied meanings of housing and homeownership in the context of a particular place and time in American history. Using a case-study approach, the course travels across time and space to explore diverse forms of housing, including the big house and slave house in the south under slavery, the immigrant tenement in New York City, the company town in south Chicago, the Midwest homestead, the planned postwar suburban neighborhood, high rise public housing and gated communities. This format exposes students to the important role of federal and local policies as well as themes of housing including homes as private and domestic realms; housing as a commodity and the largest form of American debt; housing as an icon and encoder of social status; housing as exclusionary and inclusionary; housing as racial or socio-economic discrimination; the suburbs and their discontents; and the recent housing crisis.