Building a Market

The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914-1960

Richard Harris

Building a Market
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Richard Harris

448 pages | 62 halftones, 5 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2012
Historical Studies of Urban America
Cloth $45.00 ISBN: 9780226317663 Published August 2012
E-book $7.00 to $36.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226317687 Published August 2012

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores.
Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself. 
Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.

John F. Bauman | University of Southern Maine

“While much has been written about homeownership, until now no history has explored the flip side of home owning, home repair, home maintenance, and home remodeling. In this unique, highly readable, and richly illustrated study, Richard Harris unscrambles the fascinating saga behind the building of the home improvement market. Part consumer history, part business history, and part planning and development history, Harris’s work carries us from the small lumberyards of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to Johns-Manville showrooms and the modern Home Depot. It is an illuminating and enjoyable ride.”

Choice

“Making judicious use of a notable array of sources—advice manuals, industry publications, government reports, popular magazines, oral interviews—Harris constructs a remarkable detailed yet very readable narrative. He documents the shifting attitudes and practices of the many players (middle-class homeowners, lumberyards, manufacturers of tools and building materials, retailers, the media, and the government) necessary to an economy and ideology of home improvement. . . . An important perspective on the American dream of home ownership. Highly recommended.”

Contents
List of Abbreviations
Preface

ONE / Introduction

PART I:  ORIGINS

TWO / The Foundation of Home Ownership
THREE / An Industry Unready to Improve
FOUR / The Realm of the Retailer
FIVE / The Birth of the Home Improvement Store

PART II:  CRISIS, 1927–1945

SIX / A Perfect Storm for the Building Industry
SEVEN / Manufacturers Save the Retailer
EIGHT / The State Makes Credit

PART III:  RESOLUTION, 1945–1960

NINE / Mr. and Mrs. Builder
TEN / Help for the Amateur
ELEVEN / The Improvement Business Coalesces
TWELVE / A Zelig of the American Cultural Economy

Notes
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Geography: Urban Geography

History: American History | Urban History

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