" To this fear were added specific programs to tax property so as to create public improvements and jobs to benefit working class voters . The observation of Lord Bryce that municipal government was ' The conspicuous failure of the United States ' was often quoted . The import of such projections was not lost on middle-class families , who often took the opportunity that low price and good transportation afforded to move beyond city jurisdictions . " " Throughout the nineteenth century ... American cities annexed adjacent land and grew steadily ... the predominant view in the nineteenth century was the doctrine of forcible annexation . " However that would change toward the end of the century : " the first really significant defeat for the consolidation movement came when Brookline spurned Boston in 1874 . Thereafter virtually every other Eastern and Middle Western city was rebuffed by wealthy and independent suburbs . " By the turn of the 19th century , a middle class expectation of having residential space had emerged , which Jackson attributes to work of Andrew Jackson Downing , Calvert Vaux , and Catharine Beecher . “ Family came to be a personal bastion against society , a place of refuge , free from outside control , ” with “ the emerging values of domesticity , privacy , and isolation reach ing fullest development in the United States . The big , mean city , with its confidence men and squalor , did not promise the same haven as the suburbs . The “ ideal house came to be viewed as resting in the middle of a manicured lawn or picturesque garden . ” In 1833 in newly rebuilt Chicago , a new type of building appeared , ' balloon frame , ' that " would absorb most of the population growth of the United States over the next one hundred and fifty years " . A " new structure could be erected more quickly by two men than the European-style heavy timber frame by twenty ... so that many poorly paid immigrant groups had homeownership rates as high as white Americans . " " For the first time in the history of the world , middle class families in the late nineteenth century could reasonably expect to buy a detached home on an accessible lot ... the real price of shelter in the United States was lower than in the Old World . " Intended to spur housing construction after the Great Depression , President Roosevelt 's Federal Housing Administration established minimum standards for home construction and low down-payment amounts , and home loans amortized for the full-term of 20 to 30 years . Before that , " first mortgages were limited to one-of or two-thirds of the appraised value of the property " , and loans had to be renewed every five years and interest rates were subject to revision every renewal
newly rebuilt Chicago
Great Chicago Fire
Crabgrass Frontier