| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 33.1

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| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 33.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Margaret Garb. City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 256. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $40.00.
From the rude log cabin of frontier lore to the brick bungalow in ethnic neighborhoods of industrial cities to the ranch house of post-World-War-II suburbia, the image of the American way of life has been etched into a series of single-family houses: front yards, porches, later a car parked in the driveway, and the wife and kids greeting dad, head of the household and property owner. This national obsession with the single-family home has had many unintended effects, and in City of American Dreams Margaret Garb focuses on one American city in an attempt to separate reality from the fictions we believe about home ownership. One major conclusion she reaches is that home ownership passed increasingly beyond the financial means of low-waged and unskilled workers. In addition, valorizing home ownership as the quintessential American way of life hindered our ability to solve housing problems for those who were shut out of private housing markets.	1
Garb traces the history of housing in Chicago from 1871 to 1919 in the context of "two distinct and rich strands of urban history: studies that have demonstrated significant rates of home-ownership among the post-Civil War immigrant working classes and those that have tracked the gradual expansion of middle-class suburbs in the late nineteenth century" (pp. 4–5). She has good grounds for considering Chicago a "generally representative city"(p. 9), since patterns of industrialization, immigration, class conflict, and struggles over property rights, as well as labor and reform movements in this midwestern city not only reflected what was going on elsewhere in the United States but also were influenced by national developments.	. . .

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