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tively high density.42  Before widespread use of regulatory

mandates and zoning ordinances, private markets generally

provided housing for the poor.  During the period from 1890

to 1930, for instance, truly vast amounts of new working-

class housing were built in American cities.  In Philadel-

phia during that period, for instance, some 299,000 brick

row homes were built--many of which have stayed in use.

Data from the period show that a significant percentage of

residents of poor neighborhoods lived, not in tenements

owned by rapacious absentee landlords, but in small homes

that they either owned themselves or in which the owners

also lived, renting out one or more units in addition to

that in which they lived.

As early as 1894, more than a third of residents in the

poorest neighborhoods of Chicago lived in their own homes or

rented homes of which the owner was also an occupant.  By

1930, census data for 23 poor Chicago neighborhoods showed

that the percentage of homes owned by their occupants was

fully double that of 1894.  It is noteworthy that, by 1940,

Chicago had more than twice as many housing units in two-,

three-, and four-family houses (382,028) as it had single-

family homes (164,920).  In contrast to the public housing

that would be built largely after World War II, the world of

modest, owner-occupied residential structures can be said to

imply a struggle-based vision of housing improvement.  One

could rent an apartment or even a room (reformers called

that "the lodger evil").  One could save money to buy a

modest "workingman's cottage" (small single-family home) or

small tenement (two to four units), improve it (perhaps

helping to pay for it through rental income), then sell it

and move up to a better home in a slightly more affluent

neighborhood.  Thus were built new and better neighborhoods,

such as those described by Woods and Kennedy, as "zones of

emergence" into the mainstream of American economic life.43

Public Housing Modernization

Public housing is HUD's inheritance from the housing

reform movement--part of the Progressive movement whose

supporters believed that the private housing market was so

fatally flawed that it had to be replaced by public owner-

ship.  Housing reformers like Catherine Bauer believed that

as many as two-thirds of all families would not be adequate-

ly served by private residential builders.44