Early Zoning and the War on Multifamily Housing

Triple-deckers in Boston. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/MarkinBoston.)

Zoning in America, from its earliest origins, has always had two purposes. One, which is more conventionally understood, was to protect the health and safety of urban dwellers, not so much by restricting noxious uses as by regulating the form of buildings to allow for sanitary and adequate living conditions. A 1901 law in New York City requiring tenements to provide adequate sunlight and fresh air is the canonical example of this, taught in every history of urban planning.

But the other purpose was to crack down on communal and rental living arrangements that many of the early zoning proponents found morally objectionable. These reformers waged a deliberate war on multifamily housing in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. They largely won it. They used zoning and building codes as their tools, and many of the key figures were the same progressive public health reformers who had worked on the tenement laws.

Improvised Housing Strategies in Booming Cities

Industrializing U.S. cities in the late 19th century grew unfathomably quickly, and in a largely decentralized fashion, as individual builders followed simple templates copied over and over, with minimal oversight. The result was a lot of housing, but much of it cramped, unhealthy, and unsafe.

Most people at the time could not afford to buy a new single-family home. There was no 30-year mortgage with a low down payment. Instead, there were a series of commonplace strategies for securing housing in booming cities. These strategies were not a matter of public policy; they were emergent and adaptive responses. They were imperfect and often uncomfortable, but they were copied en masse because they met people’s need for shelter.

These strategies included boarding houses and residential hotels, lodging in private homes, and various innovative forms of small-scale multifamily construction and homeownership. Almost all of them would be widely illegal in U.S. neighborhoods by the 1930s.

Banning the Triple-Decker

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of migrants from both rural America and overseas flooded into the cities of New England, looking for work in the region’s thriving mills and factories. Somerville, which had a population of just under 15,000 in 1870, would by 1920 be home to six times as many residents. In New England, the housing solution that arose to serve such burgeoning urban populations was the triple-decker.

The triple-decker is a distinctively New England housing type. It is a three-story, wood-framed house consisting of three stacked apartments, each typically with a small balcony. The interior units have nearly identical floor plans, thus resulting in kitchens and bathrooms “stacked” on top of each other for ease of plumbing and ventilation. Some are basic boxes, while others have ornamentation characteristic of the Victorian and Queen Anne styles popular at the time.

Triple-deckers sprouted by the tens of thousands in cities, including but not limited to Boston, Providence, Lawrence, Worcester, and Woonsocket. According to the New England Historical Society, 16,000 triple-deckers housing 192,000 people were built in Boston alone between 1880 and 1930.

The triple-decker was a small-d democratic housing solution, in that it was inexpensive and uncomplicated to build. Most were not built by professional real-estate developers, but by a combination of skilled tradespeople, mill and factory owners, and immigrants. These homes quickly became the preferred option of immigrants to New England because they were an affordable first rung on the ladder to homeownership, at a time when obtaining a mortgage for a single dwelling was prohibitive for those without significant savings.

The owner of a triple-decker would typically live in the ground-floor unit, and house relatives in the second unit, allowing a family to share housing resources and reduce expenses. The third floor would be occupied by a paying tenant, and the income stream would make ownership of a triple-decker a viable proposition for a working-class owner.

Triple-deckers soon provoked the ire of the New England establishment, and campaigns began to restrict their spread. A 1917 article in Providence magazine assailed the “three-decker menace.” Complaints ranged from the aesthetic to often-warranted concerns about fire safety, especially when these homes were built with balloon framing. Much of the criticism, however, also contained overt or thinly veiled anti-immigrant sentiment.

In 1912, a Massachusetts state law allowed cities to ban any “wooden tenement” in which “cooking shall be done above the second floor.”  By 1920, dozens of municipalities had banned the construction of new triple-deckers. In 1923, Providence passed its ban. By the 1930s, the construction of triple-decker homes had almost completely ceased in New England.

The “Lodger Evil”

Lawrence Veiller, who had been the main framer of the New York State Tenement House Act in 1901, was a leader of this movement. In 1911, Veiller formed the National Housing Association (NHA), which sought to produce model housing and zoning regulations for cities to adopt. He set his sights on his perennial nemesis of urban population density, declaring in 1912 that “the lodger evil is the root of our room overcrowding problem.”

It was common at the time for American households to take in a lodger or boarder. In the 19th century, as many as half of urban Americans spent part of their lives either as lodgers in others’ homes or as hosts of lodgers in their own. In 1850, according to census records, a lodger was present in 35% of households in the central cities of metropolitan areas of 50,000 inhabitants or more. By 1900, this figure had fallen to 21%, but the practice remained a common strategy for affording housing in America’s bursting cities.

Lodgers were most often unmarried young men, frequently immigrants who had come to America in advance of their families and would stay in the home of a family of the same ethnic group. Lodgers would occupy basements, attics, and spare rooms. The frequency of these arrangements varied by ethnic group but was most common among Eastern and Southern Europeans.

Lodging was an adaptive, usually short-term strategy to reduce rent burdens and increase household savings. Both contemporary and modern evidence show that households with lodgers tended to have greater savings at the end of the year, and that the practice was associated with higher rates of homeownership later in life among ethnic groups, including Poles, Slovenes, and Italians. By the 1930s, foreign-born individuals owned a majority of the homes in New York City.

To Veiller and like-minded reformers, on the other hand, “the lodger evil” was not merely a source of unhealthy overcrowding, but a contributor to crime and sexual immorality, and a danger to children. Proposals to curb this “evil” involved legal occupancy restrictions and random enforcement (which, Veiller lamented, was easily evaded by resourceful tenants who would hide or escape the premises as needed). It soon evolved into a much more sweeping legalistic attack on multifamily housing.

Zoning as a Tool of Economic Exclusion

Early zoning proponents understood how zoning could be used to effectively ban certain housing typologies without having to ban them, simply by making them prohibitively expensive to build. Veiller recommended the use of fire codes for this purpose, because “zoning legislation will no doubt be fought strenuously and perhaps defeated." No one would question the importance of fire safety regulations, even when they were used to achieve other aims:

[D]o everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two- family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind... If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds, because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power... In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever (NHA Proceedings 1913, 212).

The legacy of this strategy remains evident today. The model building codes used by virtually every U.S. city include one code for most residential and commercial buildings, and a separate, simpler code exclusively for one- and two-family structures.

Frank Backus Williams, a collaborator of the famed city planner John Nolen, expressly recommended in a 1916 report that cities use land-use planning as a route to economic exclusion:

She can indirectly create certain residential districts from which all but one family houses and others from which all but one and two family houses are measurably excluded. This she can do by making such height and area requirements as will render it unprofitable, at the price of land prevailing in the district, to build anything but the desired type of residence.

Single-family zoning, pioneered in Berkeley, California, in 1916, received its first national legal test in 1926 when the Supreme Court heard Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. At issue was whether the city of Euclid, Ohio, by designating a zone in which exclusively single-family houses would be allowed, had unfairly reduced the value of Ambler’s land. The Supreme Court sided with Euclid, and indicated that zoning ordinances would generally be upheld as long as some connection to the public welfare could be argued. Infamously, the court’s opinion contained the assertion that, “very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.”

As a result of Euclid v. Ambler, the term “Euclidean zoning” was born, referring to the practice of designating zones of a city for single, exclusive uses. At the time of the ruling, at least 425 American cities had zoning codes. Soon, the number would be in the thousands. 

Zoning was influenced by the biases of planners at the time, which favored homeownership and low-density development. Those biases remain embedded in the codes our cities still employ today. Most of your city’s land probably prohibits apartments, even of a modest form like the triple-decker. If so, you have the arrogance of early zoning reformers to thank. Too often, they failed to see the common multifamily arrangements of the time as practical strategies that millions of working-class Americans used to afford housing, and instead saw them as something morally corrosive and even evil.

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