Governing The Single Family House: A (Brief) Legal History

This paper investigates connections between the extensive New Deal law and regulation that lead to the proliferation of single family detached houses and the continuing racial disparities in housing security and ownership in the United States. Too often, the pervasiveness of this house as the ideal form of ownership and racial inequalities in accessing it have been treated as merely results of free market forces or social preferences. This paper complicates that narrative by bring to the forefront the extensive federal and local governance that profoundly shaped the U.S. housing market and social preferences. Drawing on the work of urban historians, architects, and geographers as its foundation, this analysis then excavates the often overlooked histories of the law, zoning, and federal regulation that built America’s housing. This historical account of government intervention and ideology enables to understand the current crises in housing – from municipal bankruptcies to the disparate racial impacts of the Foreclosure Crisis – in the much larger context of the creation of suburbia at the expense of cities and racial minorities in them. Against this historical backdrop, these current crises appear not as separate phenomena (as they are portrayed in various scholarly and media accounts), but rather as closely intertwined events. Their disparate racial impacts also appear less accidental or unexpected. My argument is that these phenomena – depleted cities, the Foreclosure Crisis, and racial disparities in housing – are not the ‘natural’ results of a free market. They are the inevitable results of over seven decades of law and regulation enacted to entrench the white nuclear family living in a single family house as the organizing unit of American society