Have you ever read a book that you hated so much that you just had to finish it? My prior most recent experience with this when I read To Shake the Sleeping Self in 2022, a book about a rich white guy biking from Oregon to Chile seeking to reinvent himself, only to make it to Chile and change literally nothing about his life. Since then, I’ve read books that have been mostly pretty good, or at least minimally annoying. Evidently, this streak of good luck has come to an end.

A Paradise of Small Houses by Max Podemski was given to me for Christmas by my sister’s fiancé, and it’s got an intriguing premise. A series of historical vignettes about American (plus one Canadian) cities through the lens of a specific urban housing type? I was genuinely excited about it. But my excitement quickly faded as I read a series of absolutely outlandish historical inaccuracies. I’m not a stickler for dogmatic adherence to facts, and I enjoy my fair share of narrative flair, but I just have to express that this book has some truly egregious flaws.

Little Problems…

Writing down the number of small things that were wrong in this book would require a few thousand words. I’ll spare you this, and just leave you with a few of the most ridiculous ones, just from the chapter about Chicago:

• Claims that Chicago was part of the Louisiana Purchase
• Refers to the L as “for streetcars”, even though it was owned and operated by independent elevated railway companies and directly competed with the streetcars
• Says that the depression partly caused by the Chicago Fire was “a mild nationwide depression”, when it was the Panic of 1873, a severe global crisis that Americans called the Great Depression before the 1930s.

Other chapters have similar issues. In the one about Portland, he spends a whole lot of time talking about how SE 16th in the Buckman Neighborhood is characterized by “the broad porches of bungalows … pushed back from the sidewalk by rhododendron-filled gardens”. There certainly are some bungalows, but here Podemski severely overstates his case. SE 16th has an eclectic mix of small apartments, middle housing plexes, cottage courts, and single family homes. Yesterday, I walked to Worker’s Tap to do some actual school work and counted two more multi-family housing structures between Morrison and Ankeny than single-family housing structures. Hardly exemplary of the kind of scene Podemski is imagining.

While SE 16th is primary residential – hardly unusual for a given street in any city this side of New York, even one so close to a central city – it’s not exclusively. At SE Ankeny, there’s a small cluster of offices and a small distribution business. At Hawthorne, there’s a mattress store and McMenimans. At Belmont/Morrison, there’s a former hummus drive through and a community center. It seems hardly different than S 15th in Milwaukee or E 15th in Minneapolis, two Portland-sized cities that are fairly significantly older.

And I was willing to forgive some of this stuff. Minute details about the history of the Chicago L aren’t exactly relevant to a discussion on housing. I figured once I got to Los Angeles, the author’s expertise as a resident and transportation planner would make for a compelling chapter – but of course, I was faced with more of the same. A bold claim that Pacific Electric Red Cars fell out of favor because “traffic was so bad that trains took as long to get through a handful of blocks downtown as to then reach their final destination in Santa Monica or North Hollywood” is just not true. If we consult a PE timetable from 1934, we see that it took Santa Monica bound trains about 20 minutes to get from the Subway Terminal to Vermont and Hollywood, a distance of about 5 miles. Which is about how long a drive on the same route takes today.

Ironically, traffic congestion did seriously hamper the PE, just the destinations the author specifically names used the downtown subway. Not every line used the Subway Terminal, and trains to Long Beach certainly would have faced serious congestion issues in downtown LA. This wouldn’t bother me if the author wasn’t a transportation planner in the city of Los Angeles, but since he is, I feel that it’s not too much to ask that he at least consults this very good map of old PE lines and infrastructure before writing a book.

And of course, since he lived in LA I figured he would correctly attribute the word “dingbat” to the typographic glyph adorning classic dingbats. I mean I know about this from an Architectural Digest YouTube video with like 5M views and it’s in the Wikipedia article on the housing style. Instead, he prefers to use a different definition – that of a term of disparagement.

… Lead to Bigger Ones

Outside the flatly wrong minor details about LA and Portland, egregious mostly based on the author’s personal relationship to those cities, there are far more worrying issues present in the book. Historical events are warped, misused, and generally abused to fit his narrow view of how housing has shaped events. This leads to some truly hilarious quotes, like “the tenements of the late nineteenth century [New York] were therefore an artistic provocation, mixing high and low in a way that would not be seen again until Andy Warhol’s soup cans three-quarters of a century later” and “mill workers organized using existing networks of neighbors within the city’s triple decker apartment network“.

These are ridiculous things to say on their faces. Managing to erase a rich history of early 20th century subversive art while also shoehorning how workers organized in the triple decker apartment network as if the housing, rather than the workers were the primary drivers of their destiny, reveals a certain lack of humility. Bold claims about how this one neat type of housing shaped the course of human history just rub me the wrong way. And it’s out of place even within the book. The author goes to great lengths to say how immigrants used urban real estate development to join the nascent middle class, adding a bunch of fluffy words about how the physical aspects of this housing drove important events rather than the agency of the people he seeks to highlight is maddening.

But these two quotes are mostly just revelatory of the author’s perspective in hindsight. There are far more egregious issues with the way he frames history than just laughably outlandish claims that do surrealism erasure.

The housing focus of the book is not an issue, but it is an issue when the author claims that the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City were a “referendum on the city’s housing”, rather than an expression of working class racism. I know this is partly because I just read The Wages of Whiteness (a good book worth reading), but it’s naive at best to downplay the racist motivations of the (largely) Irish working class in New York at that time. To call it a referendum on housing, rather than an expression of both racism and class consciousness undermines the historical relevancy of the event. I think it’s important to link modern working class racism with historical working class racism if we are ever to get out the political quagmire we’re in. Podemski prefers to reduce hugely important historical events to how they may relate to his pet ideas about housing, and offers Gangs of New York as a source to learn more.

And it doesn’t end there. When talking about Boston, Podemski boldly claims that the Boston Brahmins tolerated the Irish working class owing to a shared language and history dating back to the British Isles. Which is not literally true – as the first language of most Irish immigrants was in fact Gaelic, not English – and deeply wrong. The “shared history” of the Irish and English is one of genocidal colonization of the Irish at the hands of the English. It’s hard to imagine that this shared history would lend itself towards toleration, as the virulent anti-Irish rhetoric of the time clearly shows.

Podemski misses the mark completely and is clearly out of his depth when considering the history of race and class in the US. His perspectives on historical events are read through an obviously modern lens – which the piece on the toleration of the Irish by the Boston ruling class clearly shows. The modern elite of Boston revere it’s Irish working class roots – hence the name of their NBA team – but this is a result of a long cultural process of assimilation, not because the Boston Brahmins of the turn of the twentieth century tolerated Irish culture.

This would be less of an issue if a central theme of the book wasn’t the history of housing as it relates to racialized, working class immigrant groups. But since the author is seemingly interested in exploring that, I expected more than just tired tropes about bootstraps, thrift, and hard work being ruined by a ruling class conspiring against them. Of course, this is part of the story, but it’s not the full picture, and I came away from this book feeling frustrated that major urban historical events that get little oxygen in our society are seemingly thrown in for clout to make some minor point, but left to suffocate afterwards.

Parting Thoughts

I was going to wrap this review up with a stirring indictment of how shallow books like this do more harm than good, and how the author yields their moral authority as a planner to improve the health and welfare of the people writ large by surrendering to market forces, but I just don’t have the juice for it.

Instead, I’ll just recommend that you don’t read this book. If you want an interesting book about urban issues, pick up City of Quartz or Dead Cities. If you want an interesting book about US race and labor history, pick up The Wages of Whiteness or Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. If you want an interesting book about housing, pick up The Dawn of Everything and read the chapter on Teotihuacan. And if you want to learn more about the housing issues that face the place you live, go on a walk and observe.

Thanks for reading. ‘Til next time.