Hoover, as commerce secretary under President Warren Harding, outlined his vision in a 1922 speech for a housing exhibition, titled “The Home as an Investment.” In pursuit of that scheme, Hoover sought uniform building codes and zoning rules across the country. In 1924, when relatively few localities had zoning, his agency published a model zoning law that, by 1930, thirty-five states had adopted.
What happened in those years was critical to defining the American system of housing. Advised by powerful private industry groups, such as the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the Hoover Commerce Department firmly rejected, as socialist, the model of building public housing that had gained steam in France and the United Kingdom. Instead, it backed a system in which housing was built by private interests — soon, with aid from the government.
At the same time, the agency promoted standardization to ease operations for large businesses. The idea that diverse local codes could allow for differing wall thicknesses or floor loads, for instance, presented an obstacle to construction firms working at a massive scale throughout the country.
In other words, the Hoover Commerce Department began the tradition of the federal government promoting a model in which housing was a standardized consumer and industrial product, one that could be manufactured at scale just as easily in the arid heat of Arizona as in the rolling Green Mountains of Vermont, and financed by an investor in New York City just as well as by a small local bank.
It is true that the United States had a pre-existing pro-suburbs movement in the 1800s, led by thinkers such as Catharine Beecher and Frederick Law Olmsted, that promoted an ideal of the detached home with a yard as combining the best of urban living and rural tranquility. What the Hoover Commerce Department launched, though, was instead a project to transform housing into an investment product that could be quantified, regularized, and generally made legible in a way conducive to the workings of big business, creating the conditions for the sprawl that would later take over America.
Presidents of recent decades would go further. Bill Clinton in 1995 laid out a National Homeownership Strategy, describing a house as an “asset that can grow in value and … generate financial security.” His Department of Housing and Urban Development backed the idea of homeownership as a “forced savings plan.” Both Clinton and George W. Bush, with his vision of the “ownership society,” would seek to boost homeownership rates by letting low-income families take on greater mortgage debt, to disastrous effect in the financial crisis of 2008.