Company Town: Housing for Houston

The Company Town was a phenomenon of the early twentieth century in which a single corporation would build housing, commercial, and community facilities for its employees, providing for all aspects of its employee’s daily lives. Financed by industrial tycoons, these Company Towns often became mechanisms to police worker behavior and lifestyles, creating isolated communities hostile to labor organization and marked by class paternalism and monopoly economics. Ultimately, the Company Town model declined due to a combination of factors, not only its exploitative tendencies but also including the rising prosperity of workers, an increase in government-funded public facilities such as schools and libraries, and the affordability of private transportation [1]. These changes made the Company Town’s proximity between housing and factory no longer necessary, resulting not only in the dispersal of these workers but also in the loss of the concentrated power of their collective presence. Despite its failure as a model for urban settlement, the Company Town occasionally became a space of radical change for labor rights. The shared experience of workers uniting over common hardships produced significant victories for labor activists and worker unions, spurred on by organized action such as the Pullman Strike and railroad boycott in 1894 in Chicago [2]. Through the lens of the Company Town, the studio asked if this model of housing could offer clues to developing new forms of solidarity and support for one of the most precarious conditions of labor today: the seasonal Amazon fulfillment worker. By developing worker-owned housing adjacent to the Amazon HOU1 Warehouse in Houston’s outer loop, students proposed an alternative version of the Company Town, cooperatively owned and governed by co-workers rather than a corporate employer.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.56

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1