The underlying problems of the economy were not immediately obvious, however. Across the country, builders scrambled to ease a serious housing shortage. Six million new homes went up between 1922 and 1929, twice as many as in any previous seven-year period. Well over half were single family dwellings. Although fewer than half of all American families owned their homes, and brand-new houses were beyond the means of most working-class families, the growth of mortgage financing allowed more of them than ever before to become homeowners. Banks were not the only lenders; some employers provided low-cost mortgages to skilled workers, hoping to win their loyalty. A few unions also underwrote mortgages; the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, for example, sponsored cooperatively owned apartment buildings.

Residential patterns remained economically and racially segregated. As cities grew, better-off workers moved outward, while poorer families took over the neighborhoods they abandoned. Suburban areas grew twice as rapidly as the center cities. To keep out African Americans, Asians, Mexicans, and Jews, some suburban towns adopted zoning regulations or "restrictive covenants," special clauses written into deeds to regulate the sale of land and houses.

But wherever Americans lived, dramatic changes were taking place inside their homes. Oil furnaces, radios, toasters, irons, and wringer washing machines appeared even in working-class homes during the 1920s. Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, who studied daily life in Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, commented on the vacuum cleaner: "The homely broom, unchanged since the time of the early Egyptians, is giving way to an expensive piece of electrical equipment." Prepared and packaged foods could be found on many working people's tables; cleaning products were now purchased rather than made at home, as in the past.

Throughout the decade, as appliances multiplied, the use of electricity increased. Over two-thirds of U.S. households were wired by 1930­ double the proportion of a decade before. Some electric companies offered wiring services on the installment plan. As new power plants came on line, the price of power dropped by one-third between 1912 and 1930. At first, most homes used only a few electric lights, but as electricity got cheaper, people installed more lights, bought more appliances, and used more current. By 1926, more than half the houses in Zanesville, Ohio, had electric irons and vacuum cleaners, and one-fifth had toasters. Still, the average residential customer in 1930 used only 547-kilowatt hours annually; customers in the 1990s would use sixteen times that much.

Farm homes lagged far behind city ones in household technologies and utilities. Nearly three of every four urban families had bathrooms, but only one in three rural families did. Similarly, only about 10 percent of farms had electricity in 1930, compared with 85 percent of urban and small-town dwellings. Many prosperous farmers bought appliances that ran on gas, but almost three-quarters of the farm homes in the Midwest had no modern household equipment at all, although many had automobiles and tractors.

Farm women, like urban women, bought more clothing ready-made than ever before. Those who lived far from stores shopped from catalogs. "Tell us this," Sears asked on its 1927 order blank, alongside spaces for body measurements, "do you like to wear your garments loose-fitting or close fitting?" Answers and orders could be given in any language. Sewing -once a task that occupied most women's every spare moment- became a choice. The Lynds found that two-thirds of the working-class women in Muncie spent less than six hours a week sewing and mending. The head of the fabric department of Muncie's largest department store reported that demand for yard goods was "only a fraction of that in 1890."

Still, tens of millions of Americans lived outside the boundaries of the consumer economy, unable to afford new clothes, automobiles, or the many other products that were part of Americans' rising expectations during the 1920s. A third of all families lived in houses categorized by one expert as below "any decent standard." Times of unemployment, seasonal layoffs, or sickness threw blue-collar workers into hard times. "When my husband's working steady," a roofer's wife explained, "I can just manage, but when he's out [of work], things go back." First she stopped sending her wash to the commercial laundry and did it by hand in the kitchen sink. Then she cut back on food. Then, she explained, "the rent goes behind."