Object Lessons In Home Building

Abstract

Through the intersections of Japanese immigrant settlement and the aestheticization of suburban racial homogeneity, this paper examines real estate marketing at the turn of the twentieth century in San Francisco. In a small brochure, Object Lessons in Home Building, developers Baldwin and Howell promoted racial covenants as part of a set of deed covenants attached to a model planned gated suburb, Presidio Terrace. Deed covenants were used to ensure protection from the nuisances of uncontrolled growth following the 1906 earthquake and to create a community of “Caucasians” only in Presidio Terrace. Among such progressive urban design amenities as underground utilities, asphalt roads for automobiles, and private picturesque streets, racial covenants guaranteed racial homogeneity as an integral part of desirable suburban housing. Baldwin and Howell marketed Presidio Terrace lots by focusing comparatively on the settlement of Japanese immigrants in the Western Addition district of San Francisco as undesirable and blighted by racial pathologies. Following the 1906 earthquake, Japanese immigrants improved their housing through the re-use of older single-family homes rather than new housing which they could not afford and from which they had been excluded from living except as domestic servants. By relating these phenomena, this essay seeks to demonstrate how racialized real estate marketing represented, embodied, and defined access to property, citizenship, political power, and national belonging.