Columbus building regulation between the wars: what the division counted, 1925 to 1946

Columbus had a Division of Building Regulation through the whole of the period between the wars, and every year it printed a block of counts at the head of its annual report: permits by class, inspections by kind, jobs rejected, complaints, orders and condemnations. This page sets those counts out year by year for 1925 to 1946, with the office and the category as each report printed them, beside the smoke office's own reports, what the permits built, the surveys of the 1930s and the war years. Where the city's later printings disagree with the contemporaneous reports, every figure prints with its volume named and none is chosen. One year, 1943, has no volume in the collection at all.

Last updated September 2026 · The City of Columbus's own annual reports for 1925 to 1942, 1944 to 1946 and 1956, the Federal Register of April 10, 1942 and the Survey of Current Business of November 1934 were read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

What these reports are, and what they cannot say

Nearly every figure on this page has one publisher: the City of Columbus, writing about itself in its annual reports, which the Columbus Metropolitan Library has digitized. The Division of Building Regulation's report opens each year with a block of labeled lines, and the block has the same shape year after year: permits issued by class, inspections made by kind, jobs inspected and rejected, complaints investigated, violation orders issued, and in some years building permits revoked, buildings condemned and buildings to put in safe condition. Every count below names the report it came from, and each was read on the page image rather than on the collection's text layer, which shifts figures on these pages.

The collection holds a volume for every year from 1925 to 1942 and for 1944, 1945 and 1946, and none for 1943. Building permits are the one class left out of the tables here: the city's own building permit series, and the Census Bureau's separate count, are on the page on how many houses Central Ohio built each year. Each printed total below counts permits of all kinds, the building permits included.

The classes are not stable across the run, and the changes are themselves part of the record: a sewer permit line that stops after 1929, a miscellaneous inspection line that comes and goes, rooming house permits from 1939, rooming house inspections from 1941 and sign permits from 1942.

Six of the division's printed totals do not equal the lines printed above them, and the pages do not show which line is wrong. Every total here is the report's own printed total.

What the code these inspectors enforced actually required is on the page on the Columbus building and housing codes. How each of these offices came to exist is on the page on how Columbus came to inspect its houses, and how housing enforcement worked after the housing code of 1959 is on the housing code enforcement page. Which office issues a permit for an address today is on the office-by-office permit page. Every count here is the city's own, for work inside the city limits; what rules a house meets outside the cities, and when each township came to zone, is on the township zoning page.

Who ran the division, and what it was called

Bert Walter signed the division's reports as Inspector of Buildings every year from 1925 through 1931. Erwin Rossbach followed him, as Inspector of Buildings in 1932 and 1933 and as Chief Building Inspector in 1934 and 1935; the 1934 volume prints his name differently, as "Ervin Rossbach, Chief Building Inspector". George W. Matson was Chief Building Inspector for 1936 through 1939, J. Crompton for 1940 through 1942 and J. S. Stith for 1944 and 1945. The 1946 counts page prints no name at all.

The office's own name was not fixed either: the reports for 1929, 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1935 print Division of Building Regulations, in the plural, and every other report from 1925 to 1946 prints the singular. The same variation runs through the years on either side, where the city's plumbing permit and inspection counts appear under four office names between 1895 and 1970, year by year on the page on Columbus plumbing permits and fixtures. No predecessor name for the office appears anywhere in the run.

The city's hiring record shows the same office from another side. The civil service commission's results for 1946 list a competitive examination for Building Inspector in the Division of Building Regulation, in the group dated December 20, which six candidates passed and none failed, and one for Plan Examiner, which none passed and two failed. Those are examinations, not a headcount: the division's own pages never print how many inspectors it had.

Permits by class, 1925 to 1946

The reports print permits one class to a line, and not the same classes in every year. The table below prints each class as the reports print it, with the report's own total for permits of all kinds. None in a cell means the report prints no line for that class in that year, not a count of zero.

The 1929 report prints no total line at all: its class lines stand alone. And 1929 is the last year in this run with a sewer permit line, which most of these years call a house sewer permit; the 1930 block, and every later block read, prints none.

The 1932 page carries a second table of its own, Building and Installation Permits by Months, and its totals do not match the counts block above it for two classes: it prints 733 plumbing and 485 miscellaneous permits where the block prints 833 and 519, while its building, electrical and heating totals agree with the block. Both pairs are the same publisher's, on the same page, so both print here and neither is chosen. The table's own plumbing cells, as printed, add to 643, because its September cell reads 07.

The rooming house line arrives unevenly. In 1939 it is printed below the total and is not counted in it; in 1940 the line still sits below the total, but the total only comes right with those permits counted in; by 1941 it sits among the class lines like any other. Rooming house applications were counted separately: 3,191 issued in 1944, 3,708 filed in 1945 and 3,868 filed in 1946. Sign permits appear as their own line for the first time in 1942 among the blocks read, at 251 that year, 161 in 1944, 261 in 1945 and 603 in 1946, and the reports say nothing about what changed.

Wiring was the busiest class of work

The division made more electrical inspections than building inspections in every year read from 1925 to 1946 except 1926 and 1931, and by 1935 electrical inspections were nearly five times building inspections. The reports give no reason for it, and none is supplied here.

The ordinance that brought electrical work under this office is dated on the page on how Columbus came to inspect its houses. Section 101 of the Columbus Code of 1919, the wiring section that ordinance repealed, could not be read for this page: the City Bulletin's account of the 1919 codification does not print the code's text, and two library routes failed. So nothing here says what the city required of wiring before that ordinance. What wiring a Central Ohio house of this age has is on the wiring page.

Plumbing ran the other way. Plumbing permits bottomed in 1934, at the 623 in the table above, and plumbing inspections bottomed in 1933 at 1,525, against 11,493 in 1925 and 7,150 in 1942.

Inspections, rejections and complaints, year by year

The division counted inspections by the same classes it counted permits, and counted three things besides: jobs inspected and rejected, complaints investigated and violation orders issued. The table below carries the building and electrical inspection lines, the report's own total for inspections of all kinds, and the rejection and complaint lines. The heating, plumbing, miscellaneous and rooming house inspection lines are in the reports too.

Four of the inspection totals in that table are the reports' own printed figures and do not equal the lines above them. The 1931 report prints 31,949 where its five inspection lines add to 31,769; the 1934 report prints 14,980 against 14,990; the 1936 report prints 17,060 against 19,061; and the 1937 report prints 31,127 against 27,838. The permit totals do it twice: 1926's printed 29,423 against lines adding to 29,523, and 1938's printed 16,860 against 16,859. The last two inspection gaps are the wide ones, about two thousand in 1936 and about three thousand three hundred in 1937, and the pages give no clue which line was misprinted. Nothing on this page rests on either of those two totals.

Violation orders make a series of their own, and it runs down and then back up: 615 in 1925, 312 in 1928, 47 in 1933, 12 in 1937 and 6 in 1938, then 150 in 1944. The 1936 block prints no violation orders line at all, the 1931 block prints the line as violations orders issued, and the 1925 block adds a second line, violation orders complied with, at 555.

Condemnations are a count of buildings, and they run from 12 in 1925 and 57 in 1929 down to 2 in 1934, 5 in 1935 and 3 in 1936, then up to 83 in 1937, 86 in 1938 and 155 in 1941, and back to 36 in 1944, 16 in 1945 and 15 in 1946. The reports' condemnation pages name owners and addresses; none of that appears here, and nothing here says anything about a building behind those counts.

The blocks for 1933 to 1936 add a line the earlier ones do not print, buildings to put in safe condition, at 10 in 1933, 46 in 1934, 30 in 1935 and 51 in 1936, which the 1936 page prints twice with the same figure.

Rooming house inspections are a late line. The 1941 report is the first in this run to print it, at 5,097, and the later reports print 6,009 in 1942, 2,874 in 1944, 5,209 in 1945 and 4,870 in 1946.

What the permits built

The division also printed tables classifying what the year's housing permits covered. The 1930 report counts 429 housing projects for 572 families: 370 one-family dwellings, 11 two-family, 19 connected, 8 single duplexes, 15 double duplexes, 1 apartment building, 4 stores and apartments and 1 store and dwelling. The 1933 report, on the same tables, counts 25 projects for 26 families, 24 of them one-family dwellings and one a two-family apartment.

The 1938 report counts 534 one-family dwellings, 10 two-family, 7 of three and four families, 29 apartments and 2 stores and apartments, for 765 families, under a printed total of 589 projects. Those class lines add to 582, not to 589, and the report does not say which line is short; the printed total stands here as the report printed it. The 1944 report counts 65 housing projects for 69 families, 62 of them one-family dwellings, 2 two-family and 1 an apartment, among 1,301 building projects of every kind that year, a list including 907 alterations, 204 private garages and 16 brooder houses.

The same tables count the height of the dwellings permitted: 362 two-story, 19 of one and a half stories and 27 of one story in 1930; 334, 73 and 181 in 1938; and 3, 50 and 11 in 1944, the year the one-and-a-half-story house outnumbers the rest.

Frame outnumbered brick among new dwellings in every year whose construction table was read: 330 frame against 78 brick in 1930, 18 against 7 in 1933, and 1,199 against 165 in 1938, when the table also counts 64 of cement block, 6 of steel and 1 of stone. That 1938 table's own total, 1,435, stands far above the same page's 589 housing projects, and the report says nothing about what the table counts beyond its title. This is what the city's permits recorded in those three years in Columbus, not a description of the houses standing now.

One other kind of housing enters the record in 1940, on the planning commission's pages rather than the division's: the commission recorded Mt. Calvary, Rich Street and Lincoln Park as federal housing projects approved. Each is described there by the streets bounding it, and those descriptions are not carried here.

The smoke office, 1925 to 1946

The city's smoke office was separate from the building division, and its reports sit beside the division's in the same volumes. In 1925 it was a Bureau of Smoke Abatement, and its report begins from the premise that Columbus was "a railroad center where bituminous coal must be used", saying the bureau worked in an educational rather than in a coercive manner. It names private firms and their addresses as examples, and none is carried here.

A new Division of Smoke Inspection was, by its own statement, created May 16, 1928, under H. S. Needham as Smoke Inspector, and its first report covers that date to the end of the year: 1,274 stationary stack observations with 487 violations, and 1,415 locomotive stack observations with 366. In 1929 it counted 2,258 stationary observations with 391 violations and 5,726 locomotive observations with 531, and reported stationary violations down from 51 percent in May 1928 to 11 percent in December 1929, and locomotive violations from 53 percent to 2 percent.

The 1929 report counts what it took to get there. In the division's first nineteen months, by its own list, 150 stokers were installed and 40 old boilers fitted with steam air jets, 1,133 instructions were given on firing bituminous coal, and 217 smoke complaints were corrected.

That report is also where the ordinance's own limits are printed. It says the smoke ordinance then covered everything but residences and apartments of up to four families, and recommended covering everything except residences, for two reasons given together: many four-family apartments were being built with steam heating boilers that made a great deal of smoke, and the additional permits would bring the office more revenue. The 1930 report repeats the coverage sentence and not the recommendation. Neither cites the ordinance by number, so nothing here dates that coverage rule. The smoke ordinance of 1913 and coal heating are on the heating page, and the coal that came up from the Hocking Valley to be burned here is on the coal towns page.

The 1931 report is the last smoke division report found in this run: 3,233 stationary observations with 227 violations, 7 percent, and 5,870 locomotive observations with 106 violations, 2 percent. No smoke division report was found in the volumes for 1932 to 1946, but that absence rests on searching those volumes' text rather than on opening every page of them, so this page gives no date for the office stopping and none for it starting again.

In the mayor's annual report for 1936 the establishment of competent smoke inspection appears in a numbered list of improvements the city still needed. The planning commission's report for 1944 says a committee had been recommended to work for the elimination of the smoke nuisance in the city, and that the committee was functioning and studies were being made; that sentence is passive and names nobody who recommended it. And by 1946 the civil service list names a Division of Smoke Abatement: the commission examined for a Smoke Regulation Engineer in that division on June 18, 1946, and no candidate passed while four failed. The advisory commission the mayor appointed in 1937, and the division the city's later reports say was re-instituted in 1946, are on the inspection page.

The two examining boards the building inspector sat on

The head of the building division had a second job in these years, as secretary of the city's examining boards. In 1926 Bert Walter held that seat on the Board of Examiners of Plumbers, which met 35 times that year and granted 569 certificates of competency: 136 master plumbers', 292 journeymen plumbers' and 141 sewer tappers'. The board's other members were private citizens, and the report names them; this page does not.

By 1938 George W. Matson was secretary of both of the city's examining boards. The plumbers' board met 15 times that year and granted 310 certificates, 140 master, 124 journeyman and 46 sewer tapper. The Board of Examiners for Electrical Contractors met 17 times and granted 107. That board's own lines show how it used the examination: 34 applicants examined and rejected against 2 examined and approved, 18 complaints filed with the board, and 1 under the heading the page prints for revocations. Ohio's state plumbing license today is on the Ohio plumbing code page.

The war years

The division's pages for 1942 and for 1944 to 1946 print tables and no narrative, and they name no federal order. Among the volumes in the collection the 1944 report carries the lowest permit total of the war years, and with no 1943 volume there is nothing in this record to set beside it.

The federal order that governed private building in those years was the War Production Board's Conservation Order L-41, printed in the Federal Register of April 10, 1942 and issued the day before. It forbade anyone to begin construction outside the classes it listed unless specifically authorized, on the stated policy that construction not essential to the war be deferred for the duration of the emergency. It counted remodeling and rehabilitation as construction while excluding maintenance and repair, and let residential work go ahead without authorization only below a cost limit, which is not printed here, or to rebuild a dwelling damaged or destroyed after December 31, 1941 by fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, act of God or the public enemy. A builder who needed no priorities assistance applied at the field office of the Federal Housing Administration having jurisdiction over the location of the site. That is a national rule in a national record, and no Columbus report read for this page mentions it.

The one wartime materials statement found in these volumes belongs to another office: the 1944 Division of Electricity's report says restrictions on critical materials, because of the war, continued in effect and necessitated the postponement of construction and replacement projects.

The surveys of the 1930s

The decade's best-known housing survey did not reach Columbus. The Real Property Inventory of 1934 covered 64 cities, at least one from each state, and Columbus was not among them: in the table the United States Department of Commerce printed in its Survey of Current Business for November 1934, the Ohio rows are Zanesville and Cleveland, whose figures cover its metropolitan district rather than the city alone.

Columbus took an inventory of its own instead, as a federal work relief project. The city's 1936 report lists project 10-25-5052, Real property inventory, among Works Progress Administration projects started but not completed during 1936, and the city's 1937 report counts the real property inventory among miscellaneous projects completed that year. Neither says what the inventory counted; a 1938 federal summary that does, with the counts it printed for Columbus, is on the page on the 1930s housing surveys.

The health department's housing inspection, 1945

One more office counted houses in these years. By the city's 1945 report the housing code was enforced by the health department's Division of Housing and Sanitation, whose sanitary officers inspected dwellings, apartments, schools and swimming pools under Sections 108 to 210 of the codified ordinances, issued orders to correct unsanitary conditions, reinspected to see the orders were complied with, and followed failure to comply with prosecution and condemnation.

That division counted 24,847 inspections in 1945, among them 11,063 of dwellings, 4,816 of tenements and 2,393 of rooming houses, and recorded 17,192 violations ordered abated, 17,993 violations corrected and 80 dwellings and tenements vacated. Those are health department counts under health department headings, and none of them is set beside a building division figure here.

The city's later printings of the same years

The City of Columbus printed these years again in later volumes, and not always the same way. The 1956 report's table headed Building Operations 1925-1956 heads its first column Total Permits, but the column carries the building permit count: it reads 7049 for 1925, which is that year's building permit line rather than its total for permits of all kinds.

The same table adds a column headed Dwell. Units, and in every year checked here, 1930, 1933, 1938 and 1944, it equals the families total of that year's own housing classification. It reads 3185 for 1925 and 1702 for 1946.

Where the printings disagree, each figure prints with its volume named. The 1956 table gives 6015 permits for 1926, where the 1926 report prints 6,915 and the 1938 volume's own retrospective table prints 6,918. It gives 958 for 1934, where the 1934 report and the 1938 table both print 951. For dwellings it gives 1407 for 1928 and 837 for 1929, where the 1930 and the 1933 volumes' tables both print 1,497 and 761 and the 1938 table prints 1,407 and 761. None of that is settled here; the years' own reports are the contemporaneous printing and the later tables the same publisher writing long afterward. The retrospective table the 1942 volume prints carries the same kind of disagreement, and it is set out on the yearly count page.

What this record does not show

An absence in this record is not an absence in the city. There is no 1943 volume, so the division's counts by class for that year are missing. No block prints a count of inspectors on staff, and none prints an elevator or a boiler inspection line. Section 101 of the Columbus Code of 1919 was not read. No date appears here for the revocation of Conservation Order L-41, because it was not found in the Federal Register issues opened for this page. What the real property inventory counted was not found. And the 1928 and 1929 reports' own housing classifications were not opened, so the disagreement about those two years' dwellings cannot be checked against the year that printed first.

The division's reports also carry no account of what its inspectors found: they are tables under a one-line preamble, and the only narrative on the building side of these volumes is the smoke office's. The reasons behind a rise or a fall are not in the source, and are not invented here.

This page says nothing about the condition of any one house, and nothing about which office any one permit came from, because the permit decides that and this page does not have it. What a bathroom remodel in Columbus needs from the city today is on the Columbus permit page, and where every figure in this knowledge base comes from is on the sources and data page.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1925 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1925; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1926 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1926; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1927 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1927; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1928 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1928; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1929 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1929; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1930 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1930; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1931 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1931; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1932 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1932; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1933 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1933; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1934 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1934; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1935 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1935; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1936 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1936; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1937 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1937; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1938 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1938; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1939 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1939; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1940 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1940; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1941 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1941; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1942 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1942; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1944 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1944; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1945 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1945; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1946 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1946; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1956: Division of Building Regulation, table Building Operations 1925-1956 (digital collection p16802coll28), undated; the report for 1956; read September 2026.
• National Archives, Division of the Federal Register (War Production Board order), Federal Register, volume 7, number 70: Part 1075, Construction, Conservation Order No. L-41, April 10, 1942; read September 2026.
• U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, The Real Property Inventory of 1934, Survey of Current Business, page 16 onward, November 1934; read September 2026.

Common questions