Modern Housing Corporation Addition Historic District

The Modern Housing Corporation Addition is one of a small number of examples in Michigan of well preserved residential developments designed, financed, and built by auto-manufacturers to ease housing shortages for their workers in Michigan's fast-growing cities after World War I. The General Motors Corporation in Pontiac, Michigan took a major step in alleviating a local housing shortage when it entered the field of housing construction in 1919. Boom times for the automobile industry, following World War I, seemingly forced General Motors to create housing for its workers and their families. Without the new housing, General Motors could not have grown.

Thus, GM established the Modern Housing Corporation as a subsidiary for the development of the Modern Housing Corporation Addition Plat to provide workers' housing. The Modern Housing Corporation Addition Historic District reflects a unique concentration of architect-designed workers' housing and portrays the economic, political and social perception and power of a fast growing automobile company in a post World War I industrial town which would become important in the history of the automobile industry on the local, state and national levels.

General Motors planned and developed the sixty-one acre Modern Housing Corporation Addition Historic District beginning in 1919 to provide housing for its workers and their families. The portion of the Modern Housing Corporation Addition plat now being nominated is marked by rectangular, diamond, triangular and trapezoid shaped blocks adapted to the cross axis of Perry Street, which runs on a diagonal from southwest to northeast, and Joslyn Avenue, which runs north and south. Three public spaces, two of which are located on the interior of blocks, are also an important part of the area. This portion of the Modern Housing Corporation Addition contains 261 modest, well-built homes -- all but twelve constructed in sixteen repeated identifiable forms.

Each of the other twelve houses has a form that is unique within the district. The district contains only three buildings -- small modern commercial structures -- which do not contribute to its historic character.