For Gwendolyn Wright, the houses of America are the diaries of the American people. They create a fascinating chronicle of the way we have lived, and a reflection of every political, economic, or social issue we have been concerned with. Why did plantation owners build uniform cabins for their slaves? Why were all the walls in nineteenth-century tenements painted white? Why did the parlor suddenly disappear from middle-class houses at the turn of the century? How did the federal highway system change the way millions of Americans raised their families? Building the Dream introduces the parade of people, policies, and ideologies that have shaped the course of our daily lives by shaping the rooms we have grown up in. In the row houses of colonial Philadelphia, the luxury apartments of New York City, the prefab houses of Levittown, and the public-housing towers of Chicago, Wright discovers revealing clues to our past and a new way of looking at such contemporary issues as integration, sustainable energy, the needs of the elderly, and how we define "family."

Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "metropolis," New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in innovation and reform. Plunz traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present, exploring the housing of all classes, discussing the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower.

Radical changes in the design of housing in post-war Japan had numerous effects on the Japanese people. Public policy toward housing provision and the effects of escalating land prices in Tokyo and a few other very large cities in the country from the mid- to late 1970s onward are examined, but it is dwellings themselves and the slow but steady shift from a floor-sitting to a chair-sitting housing culture in urban and suburban parts of the country that figure most prominently in the discussion. Central to the book is the author's translation of an account written by Kyoko Sasaki, an observant wife and mother, about the housing she and her growing family experienced during the 1960s, and subsequent chapters explore some of the issues that flow from her account. Chief among these are the small size and generally poor quality of the private-sector housing that Japanese of fairly ordinary means could afford to occupy in the early postwar years, the new design initiatives undertaken at about that time by public-sector housing providers and the diffusion of at least some of their initiatives to the housing sector as a whole, and the adjustments that the occupants of housing had to, or chose to, make as the dwellings available to them as renters or as owners changed in character. Attention is also paid to the structural requirements of dwellings and attitudes toward dwellings of diverse types in a country prone to earthquakes.

Named one of the Top 10 books about council housing - the Guardian online Born of idealism, and once an icon of the Labour movement and pillar of the Welfare State, council housing is now nearing its end. But do its many failings outweigh its positive contributions to public health and wellbeing? Alison Ravetz here provides the first comprehensive and apolitical history from which to arrive at a balanced judgement. Drawing on the widest possible evidence, from tenant and government records to the built environment itself, she tells the story of British council housing, from its seeds in Victorian reactions to 'the Poor', in philanthropy and model villages, Christian and other varieties of socialism. Her depiction of council housing in its mature years shows the often bizarre persistence of 'utopian' attitudes (whether in architectural design or management styles); its rise to a monopoly position in working-class family housing; the many compromises consequent on its state finance and local authority control; and the impact on working-class lives as an intellectuals' 'utopian dream' was converted into a social policy for the masses.

Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

An examination of America's housing crisis by the leading progressive housing activists in the country.

From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance? Living Downtown, the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge. Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness. This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.

This is a growing sector undergoing a huge period of change - with local authorities able to build their own housing for the first time in decades. Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars explores how social/affordable housing has been delivered and designed with success throughout the UK in the last 10 years. Weaving together exemplar case studies, essays and interviews with social housing pioneers and clients, this book demonstrates real-life best practice responses to the challenges associated with housing provision, with a focus on design ideas.