I was trying to do a little bit of research on the housing in Shaw but other areas definitely apply. From what I have seen a lot of the houses are multi unit currently but I was wondering if they were originally built that way. Does anyone know if a lot of the housing was built as single family and later converted to multi unit?

Also was looking for a good source of information on housing styles, construction methods, and discussion/reasoning behind changes.

Thanks

^That's my sense too. Conversions these days seem to go from multi-tenant to single tenant, not the other way around (also some 4-families becoming 2-families.

I was speaking with a gentleman the other evening who mentioned that a lot of four families used to be small room 8 families. Back in the 1940s and 50s a lot of those multi-unit properties held significantly more people than they do today.

It has been a recent trend to convert 2-Family to single family and four to two. Shaw is of particular interest because it is seeing a lot of rehab, and looking at the properties I am trying to see if it originally used to be a wealthy neighborhood, in which case it would make sense that the houses were single family. As far as i know the historic codes weren't put into place until recently anyway so there would have been plenty of time to make changes. The houses have undergone at least one major renovation already, since their construction around 1900, as many of them have more modern heating systems vs the fireplaces and coal burning radiator furnaces. These would have required complete gutting of the houses and allowed readjustment to then-current housing trends. I think the city probably has records somewhere but I don't know where and how easily accessible they are.

Pat,

Not sure how those eight family units would have looked due to the lack of doorways I'm seeing on these buildings. A lot of two family units have one door opening in the exterior wall with two doors split by a soft internal wall so it is easily and cheaply convertible.

flipz wrote: Not sure how those eight family units would have looked due to the lack of doorways I'm seeing on these buildings. A lot of two family units have one door opening in the exterior wall with two doors split by a soft internal wall so it is easily and cheaply convertible.

I used to live in a four family building that appeared it had been inhabited by 8-10 separate families at one point. In each unit, there were two front rooms and two back rooms, with each pair separated by a heavier interior door with dead bolts. It was clear the units weren't originally designed to be separated and used as two separate units, but that at some point they were likely used in that way. In my building, it appeared whole families had been crammed into sharing 1-2 bedrooms and that some of the units may have shared kitchen facilities because of the ad hoc separation of units, which probably was ok because the families sharing this building likely would've been related.

The city was pretty overcrowded in some neighborhoods in the first half of the twentieth century.