The Unsung Story of Eichler Homes and How They Helped Integrate American Neighborhoods

The 20th-century postwar developer Joseph Eichler’s name is synonymous with the stylish midcentury-modern tract houses that his company brought to the suburbs of California. His role in fighting for fair housing policies and integrated neighborhoods, however, is lesser known.

Born in 1900 in New York City to German Jewish immigrants, Eichler founded the eponymous Eichler Homes, which built more than 11,000 residences concentrated in Northern and Southern California from the late 1940s through the ’60s. He worked with leading architects of the day—Anshen & Allen, Claude Oakland & Associates, A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons, and Raphael Soriano—to design the distinctive dwellings that are now simply known as Eichlers, and still coveted today.

Eichler was not unfamiliar with housing discrimination; there were developers of suburban communities who refused to sell homes to the Jewish middle class, among would-be buyers from other minority groups. He believed, however, that if a buyer was qualified, there was no good reason not to sell them a home. "I really do think Joe may have been motivated by discrimination against Jews back in New York," says Dave Weinstein, former features editor at CA-Modern (a now-retired quarterly magazine of the Eichler Network), and overall Eichler expert. "It was common not just in housing, but in society in general."

Eichler’s son and business partner, Ned, said the company began selling homes to Asian Americans as early as 1950 in some of its first subdivisions. (The exact date is unclear, as the Eichlers said they never kept statistics on the "racial characteristics of their clients.") Though Black buyers in the 1950s and ’60s were barred from suburban home ownership due to racist policies and practices like redlining, the company made its first sale of an Eichler in one of its tract developments to an African American family in 1954.

According to Ocean Howell, associate professor of history at the University of Oregon and author of The Merchant Crusaders: Eichler Homes and Fair Housing, 1949-1974, Eichler’s personal turning point was when he built a family home for Franklin "Frank" H. Williams, the lead counsel of the West Coast chapter of the NAACP, and a personal acquaintance of the developer, in 1951. Concerned that selling ahome in one of his tract developments to a Black buyer might jeopardize his financing from the Federal Housing Administration,Eichler built the house on a single parcel in Palo Alto. "Before that experience, Eichler held egalitarian ideals but was afraid of integrating a tract," says Howell. "After this moment he began to put those ideals into practice. He began to risk his own position in the pursuit of those ideals."

Selling a home to Williams invigorated the Eichlers and propelled them into greater activism opposing housing discrimination. In addition to organizing California’s convention on housing issues and helping to write the state’s fair housing law, the Eichlers consulted with the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, volunteering to be used as case studies in promotional materials. They also testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "Collectively, all of these activities demonstrate that they were doing whatever they possibly could to fight discrimination in housing, and to demonstrate by example that integration would not bring the private housing market crashing down," says Howell.

"Initially, it wasn’t really a concerted effort or a conscious thing; he just didn’t believe that there should be any sort of restrictions," says Darren Bradley, the architectural photographer behind the popular Instagram account @modarchitecture, who has researched the developer and photographed numerous Eichlers over the years. "He just became more militant about it as time went on."

In 1955, when the developer sold a home to a Black family in San Rafael’s Terra Linda development, some of the neighbors protested. Eichler responded angrily to their reaction and "went door-to-door personally to confront them and even offered to buy back their homes," Bradley says. However, no one took Eichler up on his offer, and after the new family moved in, no one sold their homes.

Eichler Homes eventually codified its policy to sell to any qualified homebuyer regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. By 1964, the company had sold 30 to 40 tract houses to Black buyers, according to accounts from Ned Eichler. This was an "open secret" in the industry; salespeople didn’t advertise the fact, but they didn’t hide it, either. 

"I think they were happy to be activists in the policy arena, but they wanted to draw a sharp line between those activities and their development business," says Howell. "It was a delicate balance they were trying to strike. They believed passionately in promoting civil rights, but saw that the best way to do that was to speak in different registers for different audiences. They could speak about justice to the Commission on Civil Rights, but in the very conservative business environment [of upper-middle-class, single-family housing], the best way to promote an egalitarian outcome was to quietly demonstrate that integrated housing worked just fine as a business."

So why is it that for the most part, Eichler’s legacy of integration isn’t better known? Eichlers are lauded for their indoor/outdoor atriums, expansive glazing, warm wood paneling, tongue-and-groove ceilings—an aesthetic that he popularized and brought to midcentury, suburban, middle-class housing. "Most books on Eichler don’t even really talk about it, which I always thought was shocking," says Bradley. "They always focus on the build and the designs, and they sort of touch on the history, but they don't talk about what a pioneer he was."

Weinstein points out, however, that accounts of Eichler’s progressive policies don’t slip past many diehard Eichler fans: "Among people who live in Eichlers, Joe’s commitment to nondiscrimination and his liberal views are very well known. You’d be surprised how often people told me they bought the homes because of that."

Top photo by Darren Bradley

This article was originally published on June 23, 2020. It was updated on February 6, 2025, to include current information.

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