plan and construction is very similar to the traditional shotgun house, except there are stairs in the back room leading up to the second floor. The second floor, or "hump", contains one to four rooms. Because it was only a partial second story, most cities only taxed it as a single-story house – this was a key reason for their construction. A combination, the Double Camelback shotgun, also exists. A minor variation is a side door allowing access to the kitchen, or a porch along the side extending almost the length of the house. "North shore" houses are shotgun houses with wide verandas on three sides. They were so named because most were built on the north shore of New Orleans' Lake Pontchartrain as summer homes for wealthy whites. Decline and legacy The construction of shotgun houses slowed and eventually stopped during the early 20th century. The increased affordability of two technological innovations, the car, and consumer air conditioning units, made the key advantages of the shotgun house obsolete to home buyers. After World War II, shotgun houses had very little appeal to those building or buying new houses, as car-oriented modern suburbs were built en masse. Few shotgun houses have been built in the US since the war, although the concept of a simple, single-level floor plan lived on in ranch-style houses. The surviving urban shotgun houses suffered problems related to those typically facing the inner city neighborhoods in which they were located. The flight of affluent residents to the suburbs, absentee owners, and a shortage of mortgage lenders for inner-city residents led to the deterioration of shotgun houses in the mid-to-late 20th century. Confusing ownership passed down within a family over several generations also contributed to many houses sitting vacant for years. Though shotguns are sometimes perceived as being prevalent in poor African American neighborhoods, many originally constituted much of the housing stock of segregated white neighborhoods. Many of these neighborhoods became predominantly black during the 1950s and 1960s, but many others did not and remain predominantly white. Regardless of who was living in them, from World War II until the 1980s shotguns came to be widely viewed as substandard housing and a symbol of poverty, and they were demolished by many urban renewal projects. This thinking is no longer so prevalent, with such cities as Charlotte establishing "Shotgun Historic Districts". Shotgun houses have even been praised as