When Thomas Jefferson began work building Monticello in 1768 he not only laid the foundations for his elegant home, but instigated the idea of home ownership as the basis for happiness into the minds of the American public.
How should we define The Dream? It seems to be a given; a shared but unspoken concept. I characterize it as a high degree of self-sufficiency, a certain level of material wealth and convenience and an upper middle class social status.
The birth of the single family home can be traced back to revolutionary New England when immigrant settlers were migrating from the eastern seaboard red brick colonies to the interior and the challenges of adapting to the reality of their new, fairly bleak, environment. This may explain their preference for timber frame construction. It was during this period that in states like Vermont the dominant suburban American housing form of a single-family house on a large plot set well back from the street was born. Some historians have suggested that the preference for large, detached houses redolent of farmhouses was linked to the settlers agrarian roots.
The singlefamily house was enhanced by and survived many technological advances and improvements such as balloon-frame construction and the kit housing trends in the nineteenth century and the “all-electric home” of the twentieth century. The scientific “minimum house” movement of the Depression years was supported by Federal mortgage schemes and, although it boosted the construction industry and helped many ordinary Americans, it also led to increasing suburbanization and, ironically, probably reinforced and confirmed the idea of the single-family house which was well suited to the large suburban plots.
However much we believe in The Dream, American reality persistently impinges upon it and so, in supposedly laissez--faire America.
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