To understand how work is valued in American culture, take a look at workers’ houses. The house, after all, is where recent generations have experienced work’s rewards most vividly—a sense of security, upward mobility, and hard-earned comfort. But amidst today’s affordability crisis, housing is increasingly difficult to find and a source of anxiety for many. I wrote Building a Social Contract to get a longer view of the relationship between work and housing in America.
In Detroit, the quintessential city of modern industry and the focus of the book, I explore workers’ struggle for better houses in the early decades of mass production—the 1910s and 1920s. The book centers human stories about what houses meant to this first generation of modern workers. It explores the importance of housing to workers’ identities and their hopes and dreams for their families. In that turbulent era, Detroit's workers fought to establish a lasting ideal: that hard work should be respected and offer a pathway to a better life.
The prosperous 1920s is known as a difficult period for organized labor. Detroit employers were proud of the relatively low level of union activity in the city in those years. At the same time, an important social realignment was occurring outside of the factory gates. It had to. With the auto industry growing rapidly, and migrants streaming into Detroit seeking work, the city faced a severe housing shortage that threatened the ambitions of employers, the government, and the workers themselves. All turned their attention to building. Between 1915 and 1930, the city’s housebuilders produced 150,000 new units in single-family and duplex configurations, part of a nationwide building boom that transformed American cities.
As the book illustrates, construction workers played a crucial yet often overlooked role in this effort, adopting innovative methods to meet the extraordinary demand. Detroit’s population tripled in just two decades, and workers achieved significant quality of life gains in the process. These wins demonstrate what is possible when workers’ housing is prioritized in policy and culture. But workers found that the era’s wage increases, and growing housing supply, were not enough to secure their gains in the absence of bargaining power.
Detroit’s bungalows, duplex flats, and upgraded cottages of the 1910s and 1920s introduced many residents to modern comforts such as electric lighting and indoor bathrooms for the first time. Covered porches provided leisure space and access to the lively social scene of the neighborhood street. However, the cost of renting or buying such a house stretched working-class budgets, especially amidst inflation. Gender inequality also contributed to this challenge. While women entered the wage workforce in significant numbers in the early twentieth century, their typical earnings in the auto industry were just two-thirds of what men earned, impeding households’ efforts to improve their financial position.
Black workers, despite their significant contributions to the city’s economy, were largely excluded from the benefits of its newly-constructed subdivisions due to racial deed restrictions and violence. Across the country today, exclusionary real estate regulations persist in the form of zoning, a major impediment to affordable housing construction. The book tells the story of one Black working-class family’s extraordinary efforts to resist the racial exclusion of the Jazz Age and to remain in a modern duplex flat.
Ultimately, all of the city’s workers faced a crisis when the seemingly boundless growth of the 20’s gave way to an unemployment crisis in the global depression.
“Houses in the Polish District,” by John Vachon, FSA/OWI, Library of Congress, 1942.
In the implicit social contract of the 1910s and 1920s, Detroit workers traded their labor for a piece of the city’s rising quality of life. This agreement threatened to collapse amidst the mass layoffs of the early 1930s brought about by the Great Depression. Workers, with little savings and no federal social safety net to fall back on, saw their hard-earned gains dramatically reversed. Eviction and foreclosure threatened, as did cold and hunger. Furniture and other household possessions, bought on credit in better times, were repossessed. Building a Social Contract analyzes the Detroit city government’s effort to blunt the impact of the crisis and to stave off social unrest through welfare payments and employment schemes. The city transformed open spaces into what it called “Thrift Gardens,” providing seeds and advice to help residents plant produce for their families.
Yet as the fear and deprivation of the unemployed grew, workers began to rise up. They joined communist-led Hunger Marches and resisted eviction and utility shutoffs with acts of civil disobedience. Rather than suffering their losses as individual households, workers demanded that employers, government, and the larger society share in the search for a solution.
Through their activism, and at the ballot box, these workers helped to transform American capitalism in the 1930s. With the New Deal, they saw the establishment of a social safety net they had suffered without. And as the newly-formed United Auto Workers (UAW) began organizing at manufacturing plants across the Motor City, workers began to fight for formal, rather than implicit, assurances that their hard work would provide a path to prosperity.
Building a Social Contract is a reminder of the importance of working-class power to secure American Dreams of better housing. This is as true now as it was a century ago. Workers’ needs and desires have changed over time, but the fight to secure affordable housing remains a labor issue: related to wages and their security, to land use regulations, and ultimately, to construction.
Michael McCulloch is Associate Professor of Architecture at Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University
Building a Social Contract is available at the Temple University Press website.
