The Electrical Standard for Housing

Expensive homes with the new technology of the 1920s automatically downgraded the older housing stock. Technological obsolescence and building depreciation occurred, as with any asset, because of product innovation that shifted market values away from older products as well as wear and tear on the dwelling. The nation's housing boom of the 1920s thereby fragmented the housing stock into different technological classes. Technological differentiation crowded a higher percentage of Riversiders, white and nonwhite, into inadequate dwellings and intensified racial residential segregation. Well-to-do white families, representing a small percentage of all households, moved to new and technologically modern dwellings, or upgraded the technology of their present home, leaving older dwellings to the less-well-off. When the building boom be-

gan in 1922, local realtors estimated that go percent of the new dwellings were being custom built by local families who expected to move to them. Custom and speculation houses tended to be expensive; in 1924, the average single-family detached dwelling cost $3,000 to build, as estimated on permits. In 1926, the average cost of over four hundred new residences had risen to $4,500. While the average building cost reached a peak in 1926, new dwellings averaged above $3,000 through the decade.^[17]

Builders and the real estate industry paid little attention to technologically antiquated dwellings until the boom collapsed; then they looked around for work other than new housing construction. Perception is a matter of interest. Until the collapse of the building boom, the construction and real estate industries had far less money to make in fixing up older housing than in building new housing; when their interest shifted, they perceived the inadequate housing as a new market to keep themselves in business. Their situation was analogous to that of American's private electrical utilities. During the 1920s, utilities made their big money in industrial electrical modernization. Not until the depression destroyed the industrial market did the private utilities turn in earnest to the home market. With the building and real estate industries, perception of the home market preceded the stock market crash and the onset of the depression in mid-1930. This is because the building boom of the decade locally peaked in 1928, then rapidly faded. Its collapse by itself shoved the nation closer to the depression.

In August 1929, the Riverside Enterprise carried its first building trade article on modernization, claiming that "25 Per Cent of Riverside's Homes Need Modernization." Electrical modernization featured prominently in the local home industry's promotion, with two ads on a modernization theme page promoting electrical modernizing and an editorial advertisement urging homeowners to modernize. A local real estate investment company urged home owners to take loans to modernize, promising that "the security is good because modernization adds much to property values."^[18]

When the depression arrived in full force, the construction and building industries suffered deeply with a dramatic decline in business and massive worker layoffs. The industries desperately tried to stimulate modernization business for themselves. Advertising of modernization services emphasized that when a home owner modernized her dwelling, the community would gain by employing workers and buying building materials locally. One ad explained: "Buy your building materials and other supplies from local dealers; Do your building, remodeling, repair work, painting, etc., now—give employment to your neighbor now. The Riverside Chamber of Commerce and the Riverside Building Trades Council advocate the employment of hour labor and local help."^[19]

To stimulate home owners' interest in modernizing their homes, the Riverside Chamber of Commerce organized a modern home exhibition in the Municipal Auditorium for October 193 1. Local builders, retailers, and suppliers in the home modernization and remodeling industry rented space to exhibit their products and services. The chamber individually invited prominent citizens from

the region to attend and the public entered free. The First Annual Building Materials and Home Furnishings Style Show was a huge hit. All seventy-three available booths rented out and Riversiders toured the weeklong show in large numbers. A few months later, in another effort to stimulate building business, the chamber sponsored a "small house contest." To enter the contest, individuals would submit rough plans for a small house, and a committee would select six plans as winners. The prize included professional redrawing of the plans by architects and all materials needed for building the dwellings supplied at cost by local suppliers. On March 5, 1933, a day after President Roosevelt's inauguration, a final and pathetically desperate local civic advertisement appeared in the newspapers to urge home owners to modernize their way out of the depression. The advertisement for the "Spend An Extra Dollar Campaign" spanned two full pages, naively bordered by a band of swastikas. A photograph of a suited middle-aged gentleman, with right hand raised as if to take an oath, dominated the advertisement. The huge caption read: "1933 Depends on Me." The text of the advertisement solemnly declared that 6,080 of Riverside's 8,388 homes were obsolete and needed repairs and modernization. The last decade's advances in "electrical, plumbing, heating, and cooking equipment, refrigeration, insulation, ventilation, air conditioning, bathrooms, and decoration" made obsolete go percent of the 2,937 homes built before the decade began. If owners modernized all these obsolete homes, the ad promised, prosperity would be around the corner.^[20]

Of course, neither breast beating nor boosterism nor commanding authority would avail. The economy by then was mired too deeply in the depression for wishful thinking to succeed. Except for a very few homes built by wealthy families, home building and modernization were dead in the nation, dead in Riverside. The depression marketplace framed the housing industry's perception of the need for home modernization and shaped the housing industry's solution for filling that need. Precisely because the marketplace was in depression, the problem of technologically out-of-date housing was beyond local redemption. If home building and home modernization were to prime the pump of consumption and raise prosperity, households would have to spend more than "an extra dollar." The federal government would have to spend extra billions of dollars in construction and modernization. Home buying would also have to come within the reach of the average family. Renters do not fix up the dwellings they live in. President Hoover tried to address this need. His housing conference in fall 1931 studied the problem of broadening home ownership and stimulating the home industries. A variety of measures, similar to measures that Franklin Roosevelt's administration sponsored in 1933 and 1934, were recommended. The conference culminated a half century of home ownership ideology and represented the last expression of the notion that private capital was largely capable of re-solving the crisis and rescuing the American dream.^[21]

Home modernization emerged in 1934 as a major priority of the New Deal. The Home Owners Loan Corporation began accepting applications for modernization in September 1934. Title I loans of the National Housing Act financed

modernization. Riverside welcomed the news that the HOLC would give modernization loans. "Riverside Home Owners File Applications for Loans Tuesday," the Daily Press announced, personalizing the news. Riversiders had waited long enough for this assistance to appreciate that "every effort will be made by the corporation to eliminate red tape and simplify procedure up to the limit imposed by law and good sense."^[22]

The National Housing Act of June 1934 fulfilled the long-anticipated promise of home modernization. Indeed, in initial local coverage of the Federal Housing Administration, the newspaper characterized the National Housing Act in terms exclusively of home modernization, neglecting to mention its title to broaden home ownership. Speaking of the FHA's appointed director, one article said, "Moffett's job is to sell the landlord the idea that his house is not in shape, that it should be made more pleasing to the eye or more commodious, and that he should go to his bank or building and loan association and borrow enough money, with Government guarantee, to do it." Editorial support for Title I clattered out of the Linotype machines. In August 1934, the Riverside Enterprise described the program as having "considerable promise." By September, anticipation had raised the stakes. Verging on belief, the paper reported that "some hail the new housing act as providing a method of ending the depression."^[23]

To assist implementation of Title I of the National Housing Act, in fall 1934 Riverside surveyed its housing conditions. Around the nation, federal agencies similarly surveyed social and housing conditions of other cities, to assist formation of policy and administration of relief projects. In 1933, the federal and state emergency relief administrations conducted numerous house-to-house surveys of social conditions. The Department of Commerce conducted a similar survey of housing conditions in over seventy major cities to determine the need for electrical and gas modernization. The department intended to assist private industry in developing new markets and thereby, it was hoped, stimulate business recovery. In the late spring, as the National Housing Act made its way through Congress, the Riverside Chamber of Commerce's Building Trades Committee discussed the usefulness of a housing survey, and in July approached the new Federal Housing Administration to request a survey. A few months later, the chamber sponsored the "Better Housing Campaign," to link a survey of housing conditions to local builders, with a similar hope of stimulating the modernization business. California's State Emergency Relief Administration agreed to pay forty canvassers, to be trained and managed by the local office of the Federal Housing Administration. The canvassers would go house to house, survey the dwelling, noting needed repairs and modernization. They would distribute information about Title I home modernization loans, up to a maximum of $2,000 per dwelling. Pledge cards requested owners to commit to modernize their home. Households mailed the pledge cards to a "clearinghouse." Lumber companies and local building businesses paid the budget of the clearinghouse, which distributed to the businesses information about which owners wished to modernize. Coordinated with the housing survey in November 1934, the chamber spon-

sored "before and after" exhibits of bathrooms, roofs, and other possible modernization projects in the basement of the City Hall. A more extensive exhibit replaced the basement exhibit in March 1935. In January 1935, builders rehabilitated a "run-down residence" into "one of the classiest small homes in the city" as a modernization demonstration for public viewing.

The Better Housing Campaign attracted enormous publicity within the city. It is difficult to conceive that any permanent resident did not know that the federal government surveyed dwellings to prepare for a national program to repair, rehabilitate, and modernize homes. The morning newspaper alone carried over twenty-five news stories and editorials covering the survey and the Better Housing Campaign. Although I could not locate visitor statistics for the City Hall building exhibition in place from November to March, a later exhibition attracted 2,845 registered visitors between March and September 1935—surely testimony to the popular consciousness of the campaign. The house-to-house survey conducted by forty State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA) paid canvassers in November and December 1934 visited nearly ten thousand dwellings, interviewed residents, filled out questionnaires, and personally acquainted Riverside's citizens with the federal program. Since the campaign resurveyed some homes for verification, program representatives visited some households as many as three times (including a business follow-up). So much personal visitation occurred that the police warned households of con men fraudulently representing themselves as part of the government's program. An advertising campaign by banks, loan finance companies, the building trades, and the building supply industry offered to facilitate federal loans for the home owner or landlord. Official proclamations by the mayor and city council and informational meetings at numerous civic clubs and trade associations accompanied the campaign. Radio news reinforced local campaign news and movie news clips of national aspects of the modernization campaign gave Riversiders a sense of their participation in a nationwide movement. Obviously, a plethora of advertising did not guarantee that the federal program impinged on the consciousness of each Riversider; the wish may be mother of the deed, but it is not the deed. Nonetheless, coupled with the door-to-door survey, we should have little doubt that nearly everyone, including East Side residents, knew of it.^[24]

Electrical modernization played a major role in home modernization. The need for electrical modernization of dwellings made obsolete by electrical technology of the 1920s had been a prominent theme of the modernization campaign when it was started by industry in 1929. After the FHA campaign of 1934 got under way, a more systematic education of the home owning public began. Householders had to understand that electrical modernization involved more than simply buying an appliance, a higher wattage lightbulb, or an additional lamp. It required more than the increased consumption promoted by the National Recovery Act. Electrical modernization usually required rewiring dwellings, reconfiguring rooms, and by reconfiguring them, changing the architectural arrangement of living and working in the house. Electrical modernization was

not piecemeal; it led to the whole renovation of the home to bring the quality of living in it up to the electrical standard. Obviously, such extensive renovation required an FHA Title I loan. (See figs. 5.6–5.8 following this chapter.) Advice given in 1936 in a full page of advertisements typified electricity's Great Instauration:

Electric wiring in the home has undergone many changes in recent years. The wider use of electrical appliances of all kinds had made provision for adequate outlets important; planning placement of the large pieces of furniture before wiring facilitates a good arrangement of these conveniences. New types of nonmetallic sheathed cable make for greater safety in interior wiring, and the use of a circuit breaker instead of a fuse box makes this safety device more convenient. Wiring supplies should bear tags or imprints signifying the approval of the Underwriting laboratories, to assure the best operation and greater safety.^[25]

Riverside's municipally owned electrical utility assisted the education, emphasizing the extent of inadequate or faulty wiring strung around the city. Installing a new underground distribution system in the central business district, the city light department discovered that many businesses had defective entrance switches, inadequate fuse protection, and other defects in their wiring systems. The light and water department displayed a traveling exhibit on faulty wiring, put together by national underwriting laboratories, in its main office. Familiar electrical devices could be dangerous. "First to meet the eye of many Riversiders who have visited the display during the past two days is an inexpensive radio which caused its own destruction and other damage when it caught on fire because of inadequate insulation." "'Even the hook-up of electric clocks can prove dangerous, though they draw a very small current,' declared C. G. Dahlfren, business agent of the city light department."^[26]

For several years, Congress added temporary provisions to the National Housing Act providing for purchase of large electrical appliances through Title I loans. The government promoted refrigerators as especially important. The national advertising campaigns for refrigerators in the 1930s defended the appliance as a way to save money and promote health. Refrigerators permitted longer-term storage of food and thereby promoted more efficient food management. At the same time, colder food storage decreased the risk of food poisoning. Private industry attributed the dramatic drop in food poisonings in the 1930s to the mass adoption of mechanical home refrigerators. The Title I appliance loans also benefited renters. Since new refrigerator models did not require remodeling of the dwelling itself (which only owners could have done), the legislation permitted renters to take out loans for the purchase of the appliances. With refrigerators selling as low as $100 and three-year Title I loans available at 5 percent interest and no down payment, households could buy a refrigerator for as little as $3 to $5 a month—little more than the cost of ice. This plan placed mechanical refrigeration—the key to modernization of the kitchen and food management—within the reach of nearly all Americans.^[27]

Although Riverside's construction and real estate industry enthusiastically promoted the FHA Title I modernization loans and Title II mortgage loans, Riversiders initially took out FHA loans slowly. From 1934 through March 1939, homeowners in Riverside took out 171 FHA-insured loans. Of that total, they took 159 loans in 1938, seventy-three for new dwellings, eighty-six for modernization. The mortgage loans constituted only 35 percent of the 207 permits issued in 1938 for new dwellings, and the eighty-six modernization loans accounted for only 9 percent of the permits for alterations to existing dwellings. Other southern California cities did better in 1938. In Alhambra, Bakersfield, San Gabriel, and Whittier in the second quarter of 1938, the FHA insured all new buildings; in San Bernardino in the same quarter, the FHA insured 54 percent. Ever mindful of Riverside's position in southern California's municipal growth competition, the Riverside Daily Press editorially scolded the city for failing to take advantage of the FHA programs and urged greater participation. By 1941, the last prewar year of unrestricted building, Riverside had finally caught on to the FHA. Of the 260 permits issued in 1941 for new dwellings, 246 were FHA-insured loans.^[28]