page_title: Shotgun house
section_title: Decline and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Shotgun house / Decline and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: George Wall House on Onslow Street in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina. Wall, a former slave later employed by Trinity College (later Duke University), purchased the home and later became the namesake of the neighborhood. The house was built in the early 1900s.
context_page_description: A shotgun house is a narrow rectangular domestic residence, usually no more than about 12 feet wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other and doors at each end of the house. It was the most popular style of house in the Southern United States from the end of the American Civil War through the 1920s. Alternate names include shotgun shack, shotgun hut, shotgun cottage, and in the case of a multihome dwelling, shotgun apartment; the design is similar to that of railroad apartments.
  A longstanding theory is that the style can be traced from Africa to Haitian influences on house design in New Orleans, but the houses can be found as far away as Key West and Ybor City in Florida, and Texas, and as far north as Chicago, Illinois. Though initially as popular with the middle class as with the poor, the shotgun house became a symbol of poverty in the mid-20th century. Urban renewal has led to the destruction of many shotgun houses; however, in areas affected by gentrification, historic preservation efforts have led to the renovation of such houses.
context_section_description: The construction of shotgun houses slowed and eventually stopped during the early 20th century. The increased affordability of two technological innovations, the car and consumer air conditioning units, made the key advantages of the shotgun house obsolete to home buyers. After World War II, shotgun houses had very little appeal to those building or buying new houses, as car-oriented modern suburbs were built en masse. Few shotgun houses have been built in America since the war, although the concept of a simple, single-level floor plan lived on in ranch-style houses.
  The surviving urban shotgun houses suffered problems related to those typically facing the inner city neighborhoods in which they were located. The flight of affluent residents to the suburbs, absentee owners, and a shortage of mortgage lenders for inner-city residents led to the deterioration of shotgun houses in the mid- and late 20th century. Confusing ownership, passed down within a family over several generations, also contributed to many houses sitting vacant for years.
  Though shotguns are sometimes perceived as being prevalent in poor African American neighborhoods, many originally constituted much of the housing stock of segregated white neighborhoods. Many of these neighborhoods became predominantly black during the 1950s and 1960s, but many others did not and remain predominantly white.
  Regardless of who was living in them, from World War II until the 1980s shotguns came to be widely viewed as substandard housing and a symbol of poverty, and they were demolished by many urban renewal projects. This thinking is no longer so prevalent, with such cities as Charlotte establishing "Shotgun Historic Districts". Shotgun houses have even been praised as quality and cost-effective cultural assets that promote a distinctive urban life. Other cities, such as Macon, Georgia, experimented with renovating shotgun houses for low-income residents and, though there was indecision on whether it would be cheaper to tear them down and build new housing, some were rebuilt.
  There are many large neighborhoods in older American cities of the south which still contain a high concentration of shotgun houses today. Examples include Third Ward in Houston; Bywater in New Orleans; The Hill in St. Louis; Portland, Butchertown and Germantown in Louisville;  Cabbagetown in Atlanta and Village West of Coconut Grove in Miami where the last remaining 25 shotgun homes have been designated as historic structures. Their role in the history of the south has become recognized; for example, in October 2001 Rice University sponsored an exhibition called "Shotguns 2001". This three-day event featured lectures on and artistic paintings of the houses, as well as presentations and panel discussions in a neighborhood of restored shotguns.
  In some shotgun-dominated neighborhoods, property value has become quite high, leading to gentrification. Sometimes, a new owner will buy both homes of a double-barreled shotgun structure and combine them, to form a relatively large single house. Shotguns are also often combined to renovate them into office or storage space.
caption: The George Wall House, an original shotgun home in Walltown, Durham, North Carolina.
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