The American Dream Detour, or: how suburbs stole the spotlight from apartment living. Exploring the roots of the stigma surrounding apartments and what it will take to reclaim their place.

Having been raised in an apartment outside Barcelona in the 1980s and 1990s, I am always amazed at how apartment living has such charged connotations in the US West’s collective unconscious. The stigma of apartment living is real.

But multi-housing isn’t a phenomenon exclusive of rapid industrialization, which led to the vertical shanty towns depicted by Jacob Riis in his late-nineteenth-century photojournalism work about New York’s miserable turn-of-the-century tenements, and ancient Romans lived in what today we’d call “mixed-income” apartment buildings, or insulae.

Riis pioneered the use of flash photography to document the darkest, most sordid corners of the buzzing New York places where immigrants recently arrived from Europe survived under unsanitary conditions.

In 1895, Riis began taking night walks around the city to observe the concerning living standards with a highly involved rising public figure in the city: a somewhat cocky young police commissioner who had expressed the influence on him of Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives. The commissioner’s name was Theodore Roosevelt.

Upon reading the book and seeing the photographs in 1894, Teddy Roosevelt looked for the author at the offices of the newspaper where he worked, but Riis wasn’t there, so Roosevelt left a card: “I have read your book and I have come to help.”

“Jacob Riis, at forty-six, was the most influential reporter in the city. A big, rumpled, noisy, sweet-natured Dane, he had been obsessed with social reform ever since his youth as a penniless immigrant on the Lower East Side. (Deep within him, he carried the memory of a policeman beating the brains of his pet dog against the steps of Church Street Station.) In 1890, Riis’s documentary book How the Other Half Lives, illustrated with his own photographs, had shocked all thinking Americans into awareness of the horrors of the ghetto.”

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), Edmund Morris, chapter 19, p. 502

The long shadow of tenement life

Later, Riis would explain how Roosevelt got involved in improving apartment living in the biggest American city. The Danish immigrant and reformist certainly didn’t see a young go-getter trying to push his way up to power but a conscientious servant trying to improve people’s lives. He claimed that the years he spent with Roosevelt were the happiest of his life.

“When Roosevelt read [my] book, he came… No one ever helped as he did. For two years we were brothers in (New York City’s crime-ridden) Mulberry Street. When he left I had seen its golden age… There is very little ease where Theodore Roosevelt leads, as we all found out. The lawbreaker found it out who predicted scornfully that he would ‘knuckle down to politics the way they all did,’ and lived to respect him, though he swore at him, as the one of them all who was stronger than pull… that was what made the age golden, that for the first time a moral purpose came into the street. In the light of it everything was transformed.”

But Roosevelt’s idea to fight misery in the least privileged vertical slums of the city didn’t have anything to do with demonizing multi-family housing, apartment building life, or urban density. To improve people’s lives, streets had to be safe, and lampoons blackmailing people had to be removed.

Those were the last years in which Roosevelt tried to become a rancher in the Badlands, became his city’s police commissioner, then New York Governor in 1901 —but only after helping the American Army expel Spain from its last colonies in the Western Hemisphere in 1898, which to this day we call in Spain “el desastre de Cuba,” a trauma and coming to terms of Spain’s irrelevance.

Those were also the years in which New York City and Chicago were going vertical, thanks to a booming economy, the elevator, and high-rise building techniques. Chicago was growing fast thanks to the rise of the meat packing industry, which had attracted Roosevelt’s own entrepreneurship (the story, explained by Edmund Morris in Roosevelt’s biography, is as fascinating as it sounds).

Modern cities turning denser

And so, New York’s mansions of yonder, erected by many of the city’s personalities (some of them resembling the mansion of Benjamin Rask, the financier depicted by Hernan Diaz in Trust, which survives the city’s transformation), were torn down along with lower tenements to raise taller, more spacious buildings and high-rises.

Apartment life lost its class stigma in the city, and many new multi-family buildings went up to host all classes, from the most affluent to professionals and blue-collar workers. Immigrants just arriving at Ellis Island settled in the unhealthy tenements of the Lower East Side denounced by Riis, moving out as soon as they had the chance to do so. Other cities across the industrial Northeast and Middle West followed suit, but apartment living remained an oddity in the rest of the country.

A great vantage point from where to peek into the reality of poor tenements is Will Eisner’s classic graphic novel A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, a great collage of communal living that I read while at college like a bizarre but inspiring hybrid between George Perec’s novel La vie mode d’emploi and the classic Spanish comic series 13, Rue del Percebe by Paco Ibáñez.

One thing that may strike people raised in urban environments across Europe or Asia when they visit the US is how different Americans’ concept of space is, especially in areas developed after World War II, where social organization has evolved exclusively suburban and car-dependent.

From the Dakotas’ Badlands to fighting poverty and crime in NYC

Between the land-meets-the-sky expansive landscape of old Western movies and the residuals of a long-gone, though still mythical boom mentality, there’s plenty of room to keep expanding, even if doing so means taking over unhospitable land where only shrubs, sagebrush, chaparral, and other hardened vegetation flourish.

Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in his memoir Tristes Tropiques that, unlike the Old World societies, transplanted societies in the Americas were founded upon the promise of extending the carpet of civilization to the West, equaling the sunset with a civilizational culmination and a call to fulfill individualism.

The urban and human consequences of colonial cities and exploitation systems like the “encomienda” (“sesmaria” in Portuguese America, “indentured servitude” in English America, or the “seigneurial” system of France and other exploitative systems transplanted into the Americas by metropolitan powers) benefited from an apparent tabula rasa to start town plans from scratch. In this newly exploited Arcadia, ranching was perceived as the natural way of social organization. This explains why even pedigreed Yankees like Teddy Roosevelt proved their worth by buying cheap land to raise cattle and trying to ride the boom of the Chicago meatpacking industry.

Reading Edmund Morris’s first book of Teddy Roosevelt’s trilogy, The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt, we meet one fascinating character that encompasses the archetype of an individualist trying to fulfill his dream in America: we discover one of his neighbors in the Badlands, Marquis de Morès, a French nobleman who banked his fortune moving to the Dakotas to try to build a cattle empire during the 1880s. The ambitious and flamboyant figure tried to revolutionize meatpacking by slaughtering cattle locally and shipping refrigerated meat by rail. Though his enterprise ultimately failed, he became Roosevelt’s vision of the promise of the American frontier.

Unlike the customary social organization from Europe and its exploitative transplantation to the New World (once forced labor and disease had wiped out most of the population in dense pre-Columbian societies), Lévi-Strauss explains that ancient civilizations from the East see space, social organization, and urbanism from a very different perspective given an evolution that constantly dealt with denser environments.

Instead of focusing on the individual, old Asian societies evolved to manage the stress of high-density living while maintaining a cohesive social fabric. Ancient ways of, for example, sharing the same limited space in parallel worlds are the caste system from the Indian subcontinent, a reminder from the past that contemporary India still struggles to deal with.

When did apartment living become un-American?

Apartment living has transformed since city hygienists pushed for effective reform to bring dignity, sanitation, and healthy public spaces to all. Cities like Paris, London, and New York understood that apartment living in world cities transcended origin and class, and well-being at the top was interlinked with dignity at the bottom.

Ever since the times of the booming industrial towns and cities from the Northeast and Midwest, American urbanism has evolved following its own boom-and-bust rationale and can be connected to the historical concept of “boomtowns” rising quickly around resource-based industries (logging, gold, steel, oil, tech), and then collapsing or stagnating once those industries dwindle or demand shifts towards other industries and commodities.

Car culture and the marketed dream of owning one’s own house with a manicured lawn by a calm, tree-lined street transformed the American urban experience after the war. With convenience and affluence, car culture and suburban landscape transformed the lives of the middle class, a physical landscape built on top of individualism and awash in material wealth, but also an emptiness and uprootedness beneath the surface-level comforts that fostered a new sense of alienation not much different from that found in apartment living (according to social critics of the idea of living in denser, apartment-focused communities).

Most of us imagined the golden era of suburban life through the lens of writers like Joan Didion. Her magazine articles, later collected in books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, depict a sanitized, plasticized version of the American Dream: one marked by consumerism, conformity, and detachment from the more complex and interconnected life of pre-war cities, where different communities and social classes had learned to coexist despite phenomena like redlining (regarding her upbringing, Toni Morrison has explained that she grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a multi-ethnic and interclass town located by Lake Erie, with her mum sharing recipes with mums of Polish or Italian origin).

The undeniable success and pervasiveness of single-family housing and suburban life in post-World War II America reads like a description of Joan Didion about the changes in the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles, where stucco houses and low buildings become more spare and reliant on the roads that connect the area to the city as the air gets hotter and the landscape drier towards the Mojave desert; or her descriptions about the birth and transformation of Sacramento, the dusty city overseeing the fertile and scorching hot Central Valley from the shore of the Sacramento River to the North.

The sociology of early suburbs

It’s a tale of the rapid expansion and self-segregation interconnected by freeways, shopping malls, and parking lots everywhere to make public transport obsolete to the middle class and life shifting towards isolation and atomization. The need for a manicured home, a clean and safe neighborhood where order and control prevail, often masks the disillusionment and messiness of real life. To Didion, the promise of suburban life—clean, orderly, convenient—was a facade masking the loss of the often more decadent yet more nuanced urban life of yesteryear.

Joan Didion, writing about the suburban San Bernardino valley going up after the war:

“The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then hey abandoned it, but by the time they left the first orange tree hand been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in the dry air, people who brought with them the Midwestern ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land. The graft took in curious ways. This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look; the movies and the newspapers.”

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, Joan Didion; initially published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1966. Also, the opening chapter of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

As an adult, Didion lived in all the landscapes that secured a room in the American collective unconscious a long time ago. None of them is a detached, boring, conventional suburb, though she rented big, unkempt homes in Malibu and Brentwood, Los Angeles. After graduating from Berkeley, Didion moved to New York City to work at Vogue magazine; then, after marrying, she settled in Los Angeles with her husband John Gregory Dunne, and the experience nurtured the descriptions of car-centric culture and alienation in the stories collected in The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Early social housing in the East Village

After returning to California, Didion’s writing filled with descriptions and stories depicting the West’s sprawling nature, car culture, the fragmentation of California life, the counterculture, the bubble that is Hollywood, the naïve island of Malibu exiles and Big Sur misfits.

In the 1980s, Didion and Dunne moved back to New York City, living in a pre-war apartment on the Upper East Side. Their privileged existence wasn’t as far away from the experience of tenement inhabitants just landed in the Lower East Side in pre-war years as one would imagine. All city inhabitants share an implicit social contract, for they agreed to “make things work” and share the same space with no distinction; they all share the same treats and annoyances —from Central Park and The Highline (a rare success in urban regeneration), but also rats and the microcosm of the unkempt metro lines, used by the Mike Bloombergs and the last immigrant cleaning ladies to arrive alike.

However, vertical living has endured long-lasting bad press over the decades. The stigma is related, though not only associated with the most urban version of social housing or what American parlance calls “projects.” The expression “apartment projects” wasn’t born with the class and racial charge it has carried over the last decades; during the 1930s, the American public showed solid consensus around the social programs designed under another Roosevelt, Franklin D., and the New Deal.

The Public Works Administration (PWA) and later the US Housing Authority (USHA) were set to provide housing during the Great Depression. Aimed at struggling blue-collar workers, the early buildings tried to dignify living conditions at a moment when shanty towns were a reality even within Manhattan’s core in Central Park.

And, though today a privileged area, one of the early projects, New York’s First Houses, was a series of well-designed low-rises that went up in the East Village to target people who couldn’t afford to live in the city due to the dire economic crisis.

Projects and apartments (and mixed-income insulae from Ancient Rome)

The denigration of social apartment buildings started with the program’s Post-War expansion from the 1940s to 1960s. Albeit many projects got up to house war veterans and low-income families, most of the plans became so big that local representatives and neighbors considered them out of proportion and detached from their surroundings, a legitimate critique that proved right in most cases. Most of the projects were built in poor, racially segregated areas, reinforcing patterns of segregation.

Yet, when thinking of apartment living as a sub-optimal lifestyle, we forget how rewarding and special it is for the many fortunate to experience urban living in New York, Paris, and many other cities, especially during their formative years:

“In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

(…)

“It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities, then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion; initially published in the New York Times, 1967, and also the closing chapter of of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), pp. 227-229

I don’t know if Joan Didion would have written that the emphasis on quantity over quality marked the divorce of American public opinion with the idea of vertical living, and it took many decades until younger cohorts looked again at apartments built in vibrant city areas as an appealing lifestyle and investment option. At least—one cynic but incisive observer, like H. L. Mencken, could say—it didn’t take America the same time to warm up to apartments again as it took in Europe.

Since the five-to-seven-story apartment buildings of Ancient Rome and its harbor at Ostia Antica, the mixed-income insulae (with professionals—”equites”—living at the bottom and first floors, whereas plebeians and slaves got the more dangerous and hot upper floors) to the early apartment buildings of Renaissance Italy, it took Europeans over a millennium to get back to the level of urban density achieved by Rome when it hit one million people during the Empire.

Even public housing projects are finding a second life in contemporary America. Many public housing projects have been demolished, but others have been redeveloped with the idea of creating mixed-income communities.

However, the shortage of affordable housing persists as one of the biggest contemporary issues in North America and abroad, and an important root cause of the problem is our almost sacred belief that real estate is the most important vehicle for families to steadily build equity over the years.

If housing should be a right, it certainly is an investment vehicle first for everyone—whether real or aspirational.