This chapter argues that urban history is important for understanding the puzzle about the GermanâAmerican homeownership gap. It answers the puzzle not only by looking for causes prior to the first interventions by central government, but also by exploring the subnational level (the more important governing unit prior to the twentieth century and perhaps even for housing in general) to explain national differences. As the results will show, the move from the municipal back to the national level is justified by the fact that countriesâ cities cluster relatively homogeneously.
Drawing upon the rich literature of the largely national urban history of the two countries, I explain why the major German and American cities came to represent two different urban types by World War I. German cities were turned into multi-unit-building cities, while American cities became suburbanized in single-family form. The core of the explanation is about different modes of city extensions: privately organized city extensions, either in the form of anarchic individual settlement or organized by corporations, are more likely to lead to lower rise single-family house settlements. This mode of city extension was predominant in the USA because cities were largely free from the administrative shackles of the past. German cities mainly expanded through extension plans where municipalities controlled the growth of the urban fabric through regulations, which tended to increase building density. This mode of city extension was much more conservative. This chapter suggests that these different urban governance types, rather than the generally similar growth of urbanization levels, are behind the varying patterns of urban form and building types. Once established, these patterns tended to determine further urban extensions and the course of homeownership: the higher the share of single-family houses in cities around 1900, the higher their homeownership levels today.
How Germany became a country of multi-unit buildings
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Board of Trade undertook extensive studies of the cost of living of the working class in Great Britain, as well as Belgium, France, Germany and the USA. These industrializing nations were eating up Britainâs industrial and commercial lead and different housing conditions were seen as one possible factor in explaining the British competitive disadvantage. The inquiry was based on a sample of at least 30 cities in each country, and collected levels of rent, wages, prices and general housing stock characteristics of the working classes. Unfortunately, ownership structures â only known to the American Census and some German cities at that time â were merely reported in anecdotal manner. If, however, one considers the strong association of multi-family units with rental tenure in Central and Northern Europe, then the reportsâ housing stock descriptions already foreshadow later homeownership developments, and this at a time when the first housing acts had barely been passed in the countries under study.
With hindsight, the study offers the most complete comparative picture of urban forms prior to World War I when the strongest urbanization had been largely accommodated by cities. It distinguishes between two broad types of cities according to their physical structure and layout. At one extreme one finds the British case that the Belgian case reflects on the continent: âthat is to say, the small house occupied by one or two families is the predominant type, whilst tenement houses play only a very small part, and even where they exist, are rarely of large sizeâ (Board of Trade 1908a: viii). At the other extreme, the report finds that â[t]he German working classes are housed almost exclusively in large tenement buildings, frequently constructed round a central courtyard, each building containing a number of separate dwellingsâ (Board of Trade 1908b: xl). A similar picture is described for Scotland:
In an ordinary English industrial town, street after street of two-story cottages built on an almost uniform plan are met with. In Scotland the cottage disappears and its place is taken by blocks of flats of two, three, and four stories; in Edinburgh, for example, the most usual type of tenement house is that of four stories, each with four flats or 16 in the block.
(Board of Trade 1908c: xx)
The report on France summarizes:
Thus, whilst in England and Wales the dominant type of working-class housing is a self-contained two-storied dwelling, containing four or five rooms and a scullery, and in Germany the prevalent type is a flat of two or three rooms in a large tenement house,1 in France both types exist, and though the German type is on the whole predominant, the tenement houses are not as a rule so large as in the neighboring continental state.
(Board of Trade 1909: iv)
While France is found to be right in the middle of the two extremes, the American case is found to be close to the British one with the exception of some tenement cities in the northeast, especially New York, and the strong tendency of workers purchasing their own homes (Board of Trade 1911: xxvii). In Germany, the only city found to correspond to the British family house and American ownership pattern is Bremen, where a homeownership rate of 40.3 percent is reported (ibid.: 107), a particularity persistent through the next 100 years.
The study by the Board of Trade already points to initial differences in urban form among countries that laid the ground for later discrepancies in homeownership rates. This section intends to show how the distinct German compact tenement-city type, in contrast to the single-family house suburbanized city type in the USA, came about in the first place.
The influence of the pre-industrial past
Western European cities are still built on the skeleton of Roman settlement, supplemented by the eleventh-/twelfth-century settlement movements, feudal city constructions after 1648 and industrial cities in the nineteenth century, to name some of the greatest changes (Hohenberg and Lees 1985). Even in the nineteenth-century expansion phase, one may observe relatively stable city hierarchies, with larger cities usually growing the fastest (Pfeil 1972[1947]: 122). To pick out the late nineteenth-century developments of city extension as a critical juncture is not to say that prior city developments were irrelevant; the major population growth and the accompanying city extensions in Imperial Germany, however, acted as a catalyst without which these prior developments may have remained dormant.
Some of these feudal inheritances that the typical German home town of post-1648 (Walker 1971) was bringing about are indeed crucial to distinguish it from its American counterpart, one major feature being its closeness both in social and in physical structure, realized through its surrounding city walls, summed up in Max Weberâs definition of âcityâ:
One can attempt to define âcityâ in a variety of ways. But all definitions have one thing in common: it is at least a (relatively) closed settlement, a town (Ortschaft), not one or several isolated dwellings. On the contrary, today houses tend to be located particularly densely, often one right next door to the other, in cities (but naturally not only there).
(Weber 1980[1921/1922]: 727)
The refortification of German towns began with the first reconstructions of old Roman city walls in the eleventh century as an expression of a new urban consciousness against feudal lords (Porsche 2000). Early chartered cities, located on borders, with larger populations and merchant cities, were all likely to develop urban fortifications (Tracy 2000: 87). In the seventeenth century, the ever improving artillery and especially the territorial states and their armies began to make them militarily and politically obsolete. Up until World War I at the latest, territorial states adopted the strategy of using heavily fortified frontier cities as a bulwark against their enemies while dismantling all inner fortifications to abolish separate powers. Germanyâs late formation as a nation state, however, greatly retarded this general continental tendency which in France had begun in the early seventeenth century (Wolfe 2009). A fortification historian writes:
The impact of the political arrangements of Westphalia on the physical form of German cities was unmistakable. Unlike the situation in other European countries such as France, England, or parts of Eastern Europe, the idea of a wall-less, defenseless city remained for a long time a contradiction in terms in the German lands. In France, the king demolished many an urban wall in the seventeenth century, and in England, in the words of an Italian traveler, âthe sea served as the wall and moatâ of a united, even if not completely pacified country. But since every member of the Holy Roman Empire had the constitutional right to defend itself and since external threats did not disappear but had to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, it was almost unthinkable for a city to demolish its defense systems.
(Mintzker 2011: 37)
Whereas the Napoleonic wars meant a huge wave of defortification in German towns, many walls were still to remain throughout the nineteenth century for reasons of national security and against suburbanites, of city pride or of tax collection (Mintzker 2012: 212). This meant that much of the urban population growth accelerating from 1700 onward (Bairoch 1988: 215) had to be absorbed into the existing area by building and compressing the urban structure into sometimes a 90 to 100 percent built-up area (Spiethoff 1934). Cities used their walls and remaining restrictions against liberal settlement practices to deny many a suburbanite city political rights of social and police protection and inner settlement. Prior to 1760, German cities seem to have managed the slow population growth and kept overall urban density below 240 inhabitants per hectare, with some poorer higher density areas (Weber 1995). In the nineteenth century, however, German inner cities counted among the most densely settled areas due to physical barriers that expressed the previous drive for military autonomy and a continuing desire for tax and security politics autonomy.2 Even where physical barriers were torn down in the nineteenth century, municipal leaders often still maintained âpsychological walls,â thereby hampering uncontrolled urban sprawl (Jerram 2007: 394). Whereas this certainly accounts for the inner-city multi-story housing stock, it does not explain why city extensions did not adopt the American form of detached single-family suburban homes.
A first account of this difference goes back to the different situation of suburban landownership in the two countries. As an 1890 US census comparative study reveals, American cities were endowed with many more acres per inhabitant, much of which remained undeveloped (US Census 1895); the already built-up area shows the higher population densities per built area and per dwelling. The much earlier European settlement left all ex-urban land in the hands of agrarian owners, pre-existing adjacent municipalities or feudally tied to corporations. It was not until the 1850s that an unfettered marketing of land emerged. The feudal agrarian use of land had often left it in the shape of small long strips that speculative builders could best use by constructing deep tenement buildings (Lichtenberger 2002: 165). Indeed, the subdivision of city blocks into longer parcels is a continental European characteristic, in contrast to the smaller parcels in rows featuring Northwestern European and American town houses, with New York Cityâs large 8 Ă 30 m (Montgomery 2003) and Bremenâs smaller parcels being the exception (HäuĂermann and Voigt 1988: 263). Smaller parcels in rows served by minor roads also make low-rise buildings more accessible (Rappaport 1933: 227). Among the (ex-)urban landowners, the municipality itself prevailed, owning up to 50 percent of inner-city land and even several times the city area of outer land (Neefe 1900: 16, own calculations). This vast tract of municipal land was either used by cities for speculative purposes to cover municipal expenses or, with restricted expropriation rights in German cities, it became a tool to re-allocate land to socially desired uses such as low-cost housing cooperatives. Either way, higher prices or prescribed land use did not significantly further the construction of single-family homes on these terrains. The fragmented outer-city land property structure, overcome in only some towns by means of agrarian land consolidation laws, often restrained early city extension.
Another inheritance was the tradition of autocratic city planning concerning both its town-planning and architectural aspects. Attached multi-story stone construction, already in existence as a building type in the form of insulae in ancient Rome (Liedtke 1999), had re-emerged in the twelfth century with the urban renaissance, though it became crucial as an architectural ideal in the Italian Republics and in the town planning of French absolutism after 1648. In this tradition, feudal authorities developed certain building types that private builders, when asking for the feudal building favor, had to adopt, the overall goal being to create uniform and symmetrical patterns along the axes linking the monument-bearing squares, a tradition applied in the few feudal city renovations or extensions such as Berlinâs Friedrichstadt or newly planned towns of feudal residence (Fehl 2012: 61â63). Frederick the Great also replaced 300 low-rise constructions with four-story buildings between 1769 and 1786, granting the value-added to the otherwise ignored property owner, and was even surpassed in this enforced urban redevelopment by his successor (Hegemann 1930: 176â178). Whereas these building types represented at most four-story houses, the typical ârental barracksâ comprised up to six stories (Hartog 1962: 36), but both types were built for wealthy families with at least four rooms that could eventually be subdivided to accommodate various low-income families and lodgers (Fehl 1988). But the more expensive front apartments were inhabited in particular by wealthy bourgeois who showed renting to be a status-compatible form of living. âCertainly, once the middle classes become confirmed flat-dwellers in any town, there is very little chance of escaping from the âflat-trapâ thus created, even if external restrictions on growth [fortifications] are removedâ (Sutcliffe 1974: 9). North of the Alps, the early inner courtyards encircling rental buildings were of...
