Between the 1860s and 1920s Chicago’s working-class immigrants designed the American dream of homeownership. They imagined homes that were simultaneously a consumer-oriented respite from work and also productive spaces for increasing property values and housing small businesses such as market gardens, laundries, or boardinghouses. Leapfrogging out of town along with assembly-line factories, Chicago’s diverse early suburbs were marketed with the elusive promise that homeownership might offer a bulwark against the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism, that homes might be “better than a bank for ... More

Between the 1860s and 1920s Chicago’s working-class immigrants designed the American dream of homeownership. They imagined homes that were simultaneously a consumer-oriented respite from work and also productive spaces for increasing property values and housing small businesses such as market gardens, laundries, or boardinghouses. Leapfrogging out of town along with assembly-line factories, Chicago’s diverse early suburbs were marketed with the elusive promise that homeownership might offer a bulwark against the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism, that homes might be “better than a bank for a poor man,” in the words of one evocative advertisement, and “the working man’s reward.” Coinciding with Victorian ideals of gendered domesticity as well as early city planning, Chicago’s working-class suburbs were spurred from both above and below. With the twentieth-century institutionalization of racialized property assessments, the working man’s reward evolved into the mortgages of whiteness: the hope that property values would increase if that property could be kept white. Because Chicago presented itself as a paradigmatic American city and because numerous Chicago-based experts eventually instituted national real estate programs, Chicago’s early growth affected the growth of twentieth-century America. This work examines the roots of America’s suburbanization, synthesizing the new suburban history and reperiodizing it. Despite two working-class riots against suburbanization in 1872 and 1919, Chicagoans helped develop America’s urban sprawl.