The House Is in the Mail

During the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of Americans bought homes through mail-order catalogs. Prospective homeowners picked out a design, and the manufacturer shipped them everything they needed to build it, along with detailed blueprints. (Sears, Roebuck and Company, the best-known kit home purveyor, sent the blueprints in a leather book embossed with the buyer's name.) Many homeowners built the homes themselves; Sears estimated that a "man of average abilities" could complete one of their houses in 90 days.

"Imagine getting a letter that says, 'Your house will be on the train three days from now. Go down to the depot and unload your box car,'" says architectural historian Rebecca Hunter, who has written several books about kit homes. "It's so weird and wonderful."

On the designated day, the new homeowners would arrive at the train station and begin unloading the materials they would use to build their new home. Over the next several days, they would transport (in an automobile, if they were lucky) lumber, nails, shingles, windows, doors, pipes, and even doorknobs to their home site. The materials for Sears Modern Home #111, a two-story foursquare home called the "Chelsea," included 25 doors, 28 windows, 750 pounds of nails, 325 feet of crown molding, and six dozen coat hooks.

Sears and other companies marketed their homes to buyers of "modest means"; advertisements emphasized the low cost and described the homes as "practical" and "for everybody." In an era where single-family housing was still relatively rare, mail-order homes were a way for middle-class families to attain a previously unaffordable goal of homeownership. In addition, Sears and some other manufacturers offered financing for the kits, and the applications didn't ask about race, gender, or ethnicity. This may have made it easier for immigrants, minorities, and single women to purchase homes, since they faced discrimination from other mortgage lenders of the time (although they might still have been restricted, formally or informally, from purchasing lots in many places). Existing records don't enable historians to determine the composition of kit-home buyers, but anecdotal evidence suggests that some people who couldn't obtain financing from traditional sources were able to obtain it from Sears.

A modern-day analog to kit homes is manufactured housing. These homes are assembled in a factory and then shipped to the site and tend to cost significantly less than traditional site-built homes. With housing affordability an increasing challenge for even middle-class families, observers ranging from industry trade groups to affordable housing advocates are looking to manufactured housing as a potential solution.

Building a Market

In the late 1880s, former railroad station agent Richard Sears started selling watches through the mail with Alvah Roebuck, a watchmaker and repairman. They incorporated as Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1893, and by the following year, their catalog was 322 pages long and sold everything from syringes to refrigerators. By 1908, when Sears started its Modern Homes program, more than one-fifth of Americans subscribed to a catalog that at its peak advertised 100,000 items on 1,400 pages.

Searching for Sears

Although kit homes were a relatively small share of the housing market, there is a modern-day network of enthusiasts, including Hunter, who travel the country to identify those that are still standing. So far, Hunter and other aficionados have documented about 11,500 Sears homes in 44 states, Washington, D.C., and Alberta and Ontario, Canada. The most Sears homes — 2,500 — have been found in Ohio, followed by Illinois with 2,200.

Sometimes it's possible to identify a kit home by comparing it to a picture in a catalog, but Sears modified some designs and many homes have been renovated over the years. And sight alone is not enough, as Sears intentionally mimicked popular home designs of the era. To authenticate a Sears home, enthusiasts look for mortgage records or for numbers stamped on the plumbing or lumber. In some instances, homeowners have found the original leather book of blueprints in the attic. No one knows how many homes are still out there, but Andrew Mutch, who with his wife, Wendy, maintains what collectors consider the definitive list of authenticated kit homes, estimates that about 70 percent of the homes Sears shipped out still exist today.

How do kit-house hunters know where to look? "Any town that had major middle-class growth in that era is going to have kit homes," says Hunter. Many kit homes also are located in neighborhoods known as "streetcar suburbs," which developed as electric streetcars enabled people to move farther away from the city center. (The first electric streetcar went into service in Richmond, Va., in 1888.) Kit homes also tend to be located within a mile or two of a railroad station, since the homeowners had to transport everything from the train cars themselves.

Washington, D.C., is a case in point. Between 1914 and 1919, the city's population grew from around 350,000 to more than 520,000, as World War I drew soldiers, civilian volunteers, lobbyists, and new federal workers to the city. The city was served by several railroads, and multiple streetcar lines had spurred the development of suburbs such as Mount Pleasant, Anacostia, and Chevy Chase. More than 300 Sears homes have been identified in Washington, D.C., and Washington real estate agents Catarina Bannier and Marcie Sandalow estimate that there are hundreds more by other manufacturers throughout the city. They have authenticated about 100 kit homes in the Chevy Chase neighborhood alone. In 2017, a "Pomona" model by Aladdin in Northwest Washington sold for nearly $1.4 million.

Aladdin's 1915 catalog advertised the Pomona for $1,365; a second floor was available for an additional $138.

Manufactured Affordability

Plenty of pricey homes have been sold in Washington, D.C., recently. In June 2019, median home prices reached $620,000, a new record for that month. A similar story is occurring across the country: Nationwide, housing prices are 15 percent above the 2006 peak, pushed up by a lack of supply and rising costs for labor and materials. (See "The Missing Boomerang Buyers," Econ Focus, First Quarter 2017.) This is especially true for the lower end of the market; since 2014, prices have increased faster for the bottom fifth of homes than for homes overall.

The dearth of low- and mid-priced homes is driving renewed interest in factory-built housing, which is typically much less expensive than traditionally built homes. Not including land, the average new manufactured home costs $55 per square foot as of 2018. The average new site-built home costs $114 per square foot. Despite the low cost, manufactured homes account for only about 10 percent of housing starts, due in part to perceptions about quality, zoning restrictions, and traditional mortgage lenders' reluctance to offer financing.

Since the late 1970s, however, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has implemented a number of construction standards to improve the durability, safety, and energy efficiency of manufactured homes. And the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade group, notes that technological advances have made it possible to produce a wide range of architectural styles and exterior finishes. In June 2019, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation that would allow state and local governments to include manufactured housing in their plans when they apply for HUD funding. The previous summer, Fannie Mae announced a new program to purchase loans for manufactured homes that met certain criteria, with the goal of making more financing available. Freddie Mac has launched a similar program as part of its "Duty to Serve" initiative, which focuses on affordable housing and underserved markets. But to be eligible for either program, homes must have features including permanent foundations, pitched roofs, and architectural details such as porches or dormers. Such homes typically cost between $150,000 and $250,000 and thus still may be out of reach for many households.

A million-dollar modernized Sears home is almost certainly out of reach for most households. But it's still possible for some people to live in Sears housing — after a fashion. Although the retailer filed for bankruptcy in 2018, its former catalog printing plant, in Chicago's Homan Square, has been redeveloped into 181 affordable apartment units.

Readings

Brocker, Michael, and Christopher Hanes, The 1920s American Real Estate Boom and the Downturn of the Great Depression: Evidence from City Cross-Sections." In White, Eugene N., Kenneth Snowden, and Price Fishback (eds.), Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. (Chapter available with subscription.)

Hunter, Rebecca L. Mail-Order Homes: Sears Homes and Other Kit Houses. Oxford, U.K.: Shire Publications, 2012.

Thornton, Rosemary. The Houses That Sears Built: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sears Catalog Homes. Alton, Ill.: Gentle Beam Publications, 2004.