The federal property standards and the postwar Central Ohio house

A house in Central Ohio with an insured mortgage behind it was measured against a federal document that was not a building code. The Federal Housing Administration published property standards from 1935, edition by edition and for two decades state by state, and they set what a bathroom, a room, the plumbing and the heat had to be before the agency would insure the mortgage. This page sets out those editions in their own words and dates, what the Veterans Administration asked beside them, and what Central Ohio's own records say. Two editions were read at first hand here, one for Illinois and one for Florida; no Ohio edition was found, and no record read says any Central Ohio house was built to one.

Last updated September 2026 · The 1934 statute, the FHA's Illinois edition of 1947 and Florida edition of 1954, its 1958 annual report, the 2003 study written for HUD, the current federal rules, National Register records and three City of Columbus reports were read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

What these standards were, and what they were not

The law behind them is national, and it says almost nothing about houses. The National Housing Act is chapter 847 of the second session of the 73rd Congress, printed in the Statutes at Large under the date June 27, 1934, and its own title begins with the words to encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions. Title II, headed Mutual Mortgage Insurance, defined one mortgage it insured in section 201(a) as a first mortgage on real estate on which there is located a dwelling for not more than four families, while a separate section of the same title, 207, let the Administrator insure other first mortgages on property held by corporations formed to provide housing for persons of low income.

Nothing there is about a bathroom. The physical standards came from the agency, which said why it had them. The 2003 study written for HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research by the National Institute of Building Sciences quotes the FHA's 1936 property standards saying the agency had established standards covering the physical characteristics of property for two purposes: the act's aim of encouraging improvement in housing standards and conditions, and section 203's requirement of assurance that the project is economically sound. Those are national documents, as nearly everything below is; where a record is an Ohio or a Columbus one, this page says so in the sentence.

What the standards were not is written in the standards. The 2003 study quotes the foreword of the November 1958 edition: the standards are not intended to serve as a building code, and such codes are primarily concerned with factors of health and safety and not the many other aspects of design and use included as essential for mortgage insurance determinations. The same study nevertheless judges that the 1958 edition became what it calls a de facto building code, largely prescriptive and going well beyond local codes in specifying allowable building methods, materials, components and finishes as well as minimum dimensions and room sizes. That phrase is the study's assessment, not the FHA's, and it prints here as the study's.

This page never says that a particular Central Ohio house was built to an FHA standard, because no record read for it says that of any house. Which rules were in force where a house went up is a different question, owned by this site's pages on which building code a Central Ohio house was built under and on the city's own building and housing codes.

The first property standards, 1935 to 1941

The 2003 study for HUD is the spine of the dates here, because its appendix prints a chronology quoting each edition's own front matter. It says the earliest version was the FHA's Circular No. 2, Property Standards: Requirements for Mortgage Insurance under Title II of the National Housing Act, that the earliest copy in HUD's library is labeled revised February 15, 1935 at 16 pages, and, in the study's own words, that there may be an earlier edition. The revision of June 1, 1936, the study says, numbered its general minimum requirements section by section, among them ventilation of bathrooms and water closet compartments, privacy, ceiling heights, plumbing fixtures, water supply, sewage disposal, heating and electric wiring. None of those circulars was read for this page.

The 1936 edition explains why there is no single national book for these years: the minimum requirements defining its general requirements locally, it says, were published separately for each insuring office. A HathiTrust catalog record for the FHA's Property Standards describes editions of 1936 to 1940 giving requirements in particular cities or regions.

Beside the property standards sat a second document, about how a house was built rather than what it contained. The study says the state and district insuring offices began issuing Minimum Construction Requirements for New Dwellings in early 1937 from an FHA master text, at about 17 pages, and it quotes the preface on when they bit: where the specifications submitted were not specific or were lower than the requirements, where the applicable building codes were of a lower standard, and where there were no existing local building codes and regulations. The study reads that as making the FHA's construction requirements a default standard for deficiencies in local code enforcement. A later preface, under the Indianapolis office's edition revised December 1, 1937, was blunter: because building code requirements varied so widely, no attempt had been made to make the FHA's provisions comply with them, while strict compliance with local building code and sanitary regulations was still required wherever those were higher.

The state editions, 1942 to 1958

In January 1942 the FHA combined the two documents into one master text, which the 2003 study says was called Minimum Property Requirements, and a postwar master draft of about 180 pages followed in September 1945. Within about a year the state insuring offices were publishing and enforcing their own editions of it.

Two of those editions can be read in full today, and every requirement quoted on this page comes from one of them: the Illinois edition of July 1947, issued by the National Housing Agency's Federal Housing Administration through the Chicago and Springfield insuring offices, and the Florida edition of June 1954, issued through the Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa offices. The Florida title page says the edition includes MPR Revisions Nos. 1 through 48, and its notice tells holders they may take the book apart and obtain later numbered revisions from the FHA insuring office. Neither is an Ohio book: no Ohio edition was found in any full-text collection searched for this page.

How many editions existed is given two ways, and this page chooses neither. An FHA review of March 1959, quoted in the 2003 study, says 51 separate editions of the requirements were in use in 1951 and 21 by 1956. The FHA's own annual report for 1958 says the new national standards replaced 23 editions formerly in use. The figures are for different dates and nothing read settles the difference.

What an edition asked of a bathroom

Two editions read at first hand cannot show when the FHA changed a national position, and this page does not read them that way. The floor in both the Illinois edition of July 1947 and the Florida edition of June 1954 is one bathroom, and the bathroom is the one room with no floor area attached to it. The 1947 Illinois edition set minimum areas in square feet for a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and bedrooms, and for the bathroom said only that it be adequate for water closet, lavatory, and tub, with an arrangement of fixtures giving at least a 90 degree door swing. In a plan drawn to satisfy these requirements, every other room had a number to hit and the bathroom took what was left.

The Illinois window rule is a fraction of the floor rather than a fixed size, so a small bathroom got a small window by design; and by the Florida edition of June 1954 a bathroom with no window at all was possible where the chief underwriter accepted it.

The plumbing itself the FHA did not write. The 1947 Illinois edition said to comply with state and local regulations and, where the chief underwriter judged local codes inadequate or found none, with the Plumbing Manual, Report BMS No. 66, of the National Bureau of Standards. The Florida edition of June 1954 carried the same condition but took the lower bar of two documents: the least restrictive requirement of that Plumbing Manual or of the Report of the Coordinating Committee for a National Plumbing Code. The Illinois edition also says at section 200-B that its minimum requirements shall not be construed as lowering the standards established by local laws, ordinances or regulations, and that the more stringent requirement shall govern. What Columbus itself permitted and counted is on this wave's page on Columbus plumbing permits and fixtures by year.

What these documents asked for and what Ohio dwellings actually had are two different records. The counts of dwellings without a bathtub, an indoor toilet or running water in Ohio cities before the war belong to this wave's page on the Ohio housing surveys of 1934 to 1940. The bathroom's own fittings by decade are on the Central Ohio bathroom page, and the census counts of bathrooms per house on the bathrooms per house page.

One national standard in 1958, and the wind-down that followed

In November 1958 the FHA issued Minimum Property Standards for One and Two Living Units, numbered FHA-300, and one set of standards applied to the whole country in place of the state editions; the 2003 study says it covered the entire country for the first time. The FHA's own annual report for 1958 says the new standards were effective on an optional basis on April 1, 1959 and mandatory for use in FHA-insured transactions on and after July 1, 1959, and that they emphasized performance rather than method. The introduction, as the study quotes it, said a property complying with the standards was considered technically eligible in all FHA insuring office jurisdictions, while other factors, such as appropriateness to the site and the neighborhood and anticipated market acceptance, also had to be weighed in FHA underwriting analysis. The third of the basic determinations printed in the FHA's March 1959 Review says the standards would define the minimum level of quality acceptable to FHA and to VA.

The 1958 text itself was not read for this page, and that is the largest hole in it. HathiTrust holds the edition and its later printings in full view and answered the machine reading for this page with a challenge screen, so what the first national standard asked of a bathroom is not recorded here. HathiTrust's catalog records describe printings reprinted to include general revision no. 4, dated May 1963, and general revision no. 5, dated January 1965, the latter at 315 pages; a catalog record describes a revision, not what the revision required.

After 1958 the standards grew and were then taken apart. Congress created the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1965, and the 2003 study says that within several years the FHA's tradition as an independent agency with its own budget authority ended; by 1973 HUD published them in four volumes, the fourth a Manual of Acceptable Practices. Energy came in by statute: section 1735f-4 of title 12 of the United States Code, added in 1974, directs the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to promote the use of energy saving techniques through minimum property standards for newly constructed residential housing, other than manufactured homes. A 1978 amendment added that those standards establish energy performance requirements, and the words excluding manufactured homes were added in 1983. A manufactured home has answered to a different federal document since June 15, 1976, which this wave's page on manufactured homes and trailer parks in Central Ohio sets out section by section.

An updated edition followed in 1979, at 196 pages, and a library record gives it the handbook number 4900.1; the 1982 edition announced its own end: its foreword, quoted in the study, says this revision will be the last revision, that many livability and marketability provisions have been eliminated, and that it is a step toward phasing out the Minimum Property Standards for One- and Two-Family Dwellings because they have largely accomplished their purpose. In 1983 Congress let a model or local code do the job instead: section 1735f-4(b) says the Secretary may require that a property other than a manufactured home comply, with respect to health and safety, with one of the nationally recognized model building codes, or with a state or local code based on one of them or their equivalent. In 1984 HUD combined its standards into Minimum Property Standards for Housing, where the one- and two-family rules became a 31-page appendix printing 24 CFR 200.926.

What is left in the Code of Federal Regulations today says what it does not do. Section 200.926(b), headed Conflicting standards, says the requirements in section 200.926d do not preempt local or state standards, nor do they alter a builder's obligation to comply with any local or state requirement, though a property is eligible for benefits only if it complies with the subpart. The same rule ties the two loan programs together in one line: the standards apply to structures insured as new construction based upon a Certificate of Reasonable Value issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The Veterans Administration beside the FHA

The veterans' program was a separate one with a separate document. National Register Bulletin 46 records that the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly called the G.I. Bill, authorized the Veterans Administration to provide loan guarantees for home mortgages for World War II veterans, and the Ohio Historic Preservation Office's statewide historic context names the same act. The Veterans' Emergency Housing Act followed in May 1946, authorizing federal assistance in housing returning veterans and the home building industry. Ohio Modern, that statewide context, says Ohio's 839,000 World War II veterans were eligible for G.I. Bill benefits.

The relation between the two agencies' standards was a model rather than an adoption. The 2003 study for HUD says both the Farmers Home and Veterans Administrations at one time used the Minimum Property Standards as a model for their own housing insurance programs, and that the VA's Minimum Property Requirements, modeled after an older version of the MPS, no longer reference it. No record read for this page says the VA adopted the FHA's book.

No historical edition of the VA's own requirements was read, in any decade, so this page states nothing about what the VA asked of a house in the 1940s, the 1950s or the 1960s. What can be read is current. Section 36.4351 of title 38 of the Code of Federal Regulations says today that no loan for the purchase or construction of residential property is eligible for guaranty or insurance unless the property complies or conforms with the standards of planning, construction and general acceptability prescribed by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Chapter 12 of the department's lender handbook, VA Pamphlet 26-7, says it has established Minimum Property Requirements to protect the interests of Veterans, lenders, servicers and VA, that properties must meet these requirements prior to guaranty, and that they help ensure that the property is safe, structurally sound, and sanitary. Those are the department's words about its own underwriting today, not a statement about any existing house.

What that chapter asks is short where the FHA's state editions were long. Each living unit, it says, must have sufficient space for living, sleeping, cooking and dining, and sanitary facilities. The property must have a continuous supply of safe and potable water for drinking, bathing, showering and sanitary uses, hot water, sanitary facilities, and a safe method of sewage disposal. Heating must be permanently installed and maintain a temperature of at least 50 degrees Fahrenheit in areas with plumbing. No room size and no fixture list appears at those topics.

The small house bulletins, and what Central Ohio's records say

The FHA's house designs were published as a bulletin rather than as a standard. The National Park Service says the designs first published in the FHA's Principles of Planning Small Houses in 1936 were updated periodically, alongside circulars such as Property Standards, under a principle the Park Service and the Georgia Historic Preservation Division both quote: providing a maximum accommodation within a minimum of means. The Ohio Historic Preservation Office ties that bulletin to a house type built across Ohio after the war: the 1940s Cape Cod, it says, typically one or one-and-one-half stories and about 800 square feet, often followed the FHA's 1940 Principles for Planning Small Houses, with a living room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms inside. Those houses are on this site's page on Central Ohio house styles by era, and the firms that put them up on the page on who shaped Central Ohio houses. Subdivisions were covered separately, and there the federal requirement pointed back at the local one: the Park Service says the fifth of the seven minimum requirements the FHA set for new subdivisions is compliance with city, county or regional plans and regulations, particularly local zoning and subdivision regulations.

One Central Ohio place is named in the National Register as an FHA suburb. The registration form for the Hanford Village George Washington Carver Addition Historic District, in Columbus, describes it in its statement of significance as a FHA suburb composed of Cape Cod houses built for African American veterans in 1946-47, in the form's own wording. When the project received tentative FHA approval in July of 1944, the nomination says, a white civic association from a covenanted community a mile and a half away began an effort to stall the mortgage insurance process, including by demanding an investigation of the approval by the head office in Washington. The FHA afterward used the Carver Addition as an example of a successful African American suburb in educational and marketing materials. Those are the record's own historical words.

Two records disagree about which agency made the allocation behind it. The nomination says the National Housing Agency prioritized 400 homes for African Americans in Columbus, and that the Columbus Urban League urged the director of the Columbus FHA office to find a builder and use the housing allocations. The Ohio Historic Preservation Office's statewide context says instead that in 1944 the Federal Housing Administration authorized the construction of four hundred housing units in Columbus. Nothing read for this page settles which agency it was, so both statements print.

Even there, the nomination will not say the houses were built to an FHA design. It says only that, like the Levittown, New York subdivision, the houses of the Carver Addition may have been influenced by the 1940 version of the FHA Minimum House, a design the FHA considered to embody the minimum amount of space and amenities for small single-family houses. That hedge is the strongest statement any record read here makes about a Central Ohio house and an FHA document. Outside the mortgage program the preservation office records one Ohio project built to the agency's standards: the Cole Avenue Housing Project in Akron, authorized under the Lanham Act of 1940, was built in accord with the period's typical design tenets and with Federal Housing Administration standards.

Columbus's own reports use the standards differently again, as a target for fixing up houses the agency did not insure. A report of the city's Department of Development lists among the steps of a conservation project that rehabilitation staff works with residents to encourage them to bring buildings up to FHA standards, and it sets two tests side by side for the Dennison Avenue Conservation Project: the project would be complete when 75 percent of the dwelling units conform to the standards set for the project itself, which the report says are FHA standards for the most part, and 95 percent conform to the city building, housing, fire, health, and zoning codes. That report is undated; its own pages place it between August 1963 and early 1964. What the city did with its own housing code then is on the housing code enforcement page.

The agency was also in the room. The Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Commission's annual report for 1956 lists the Director of the Columbus Regional FHA Office among the members of the Technical Advisory Committee established under the Mayor in February 1956 to coordinate slum clearance and conservation projects with the city departments, beside the housing authority, the safety director, the fire prevention bureau, the health commissioner and the city attorney. The same report says that since the city met the requirements, it has obtained approval of 60 liberal FHA loans for relocation housing and conditional approval for 2,212 others.

One later city report carries a count. A Phase I community renewal program report prepared for the Department of Development by Hammer, Greene, Siler Associates says vacancy rates in Metropolitan Columbus were highest in the thousand or more luxury high-rise apartments built in recent years, in the almost 5,000 FHA-insured apartment units, a dozen projects built since 1948, and in older and less desirable parts of the stock. That report is undated and states its estimates for 1968; the universe is apartment units, not houses.

What the record does not show

No Ohio edition of the Minimum Property Requirements was found, so nothing here states what the FHA asked of a house in Ohio. The 1958 national edition's own text was not read, so what the first national standard asked of a bathroom is not on this page. No historical edition of the Veterans Administration's requirements was read, so the VA material above is current. And no Central Ohio record other than the Hanford Village nomination was found naming a subdivision, project or builder as FHA-insured or FHA-approved.

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.

• U.S. Government Publishing Office (United States Statutes at Large), National Housing Act, ch. 847, 48 Stat. 1246 (73d Congress, session II), June 27, 1934; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, National Register Bulletin 46, Historic Residential Suburbs: Guidelines for Evaluation and Documentation for the National Register of Historic Places, part 1, 2002; read September 2026.
• National Institute of Building Sciences, for HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research, Part 1, Minimum Property Standards for One- and Two-Family Dwellings: Part 1 of a Study of the HUD Minimum Property Standards for One- and Two-Family Dwellings and Technical Suitability of Products Programs, March 2003; read September 2026.
• HathiTrust Digital Library (catalog record), Catalog record: Property standards: minimum requirements, United States Federal Housing Administration, 1936-1940, undated; read September 2026.
• Federal Housing Administration (National Housing Agency), Chicago and Springfield insuring offices, Minimum Property Requirements for Properties of One or Two Living Units Located in the State of Illinois, FHA Form No. 2250, revised July 1947, July 1947; read September 2026.
• Federal Housing Administration, Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa insuring offices, Minimum Property Requirements for Properties of One or Two Living Units Located in the State of Florida, FHA Form 2225, revised June 1954, June 1954; read September 2026.
• Federal Housing Administration, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Federal Housing Administration, year ending December 31, 1958, 1959; read September 2026.
• HathiTrust Digital Library (catalog record, read through the Wayback Machine), Catalog record: Minimum property standards for one and two living units, Federal Housing Administration, Washington, 1963-1965, undated; read September 2026.
• HathiTrust Digital Library (catalog record, read through the Wayback Machine), Catalog record: Minimum property standards for one and two living units, Federal Housing Administration, Washington, 1965, undated; read September 2026.
• U.S. Government Publishing Office (United States Code, 2023 edition), 12 U.S.C. 1735f-4, Minimum property standards, 2023; read September 2026.
• HathiTrust Digital Library (catalog record, read through the Wayback Machine), Catalog record: Minimum property standards for one- and two-family dwellings, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1979-, undated; read September 2026.
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Minimum Property Standards for Housing, Handbook 4910.1, revised 1984 edition with change 1 issued September 8, 1986, 1984; read September 2026.
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (Code of Federal Regulations, eCFR), 24 CFR 200.926, Minimum property standards for one and two family dwellings (current edition), current as read September 2026; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historical Society (prepared by Gray and Pape, Inc.), Ohio Modern: Preserving Our Recent Past, Statewide Historic Context, section 3.0 Historic Context, September 7, 2010; read September 2026.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (Code of Federal Regulations, eCFR), 38 CFR 36.4351, Minimum property and construction requirements, current as read September 2026; read September 2026.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VA Pamphlet 26-7, Revised, chapter 12: Minimum Property Requirements, topics carry change dates of March 28, 2019 and October 18, 2019; read September 2026.
• Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation Division, The American Small House (slide script), undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historic Preservation Office, Ohio Historical Society (prepared by Gray and Pape, Inc.), Ohio Modern: Preserving Our Recent Past, Statewide Historic Context, section 4.0 Design Trends in Ohio, 1940-1970, September 7, 2010; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, NPGallery (National Register of Historic Places), Hanford Village George Washington Carver Addition Historic District, National Register registration form, reference number 13000980, 2013; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Development, from the Columbus Metropolitan Library's digital collections, Use of Conservation and Rehabilitation in the Problem Housing Areas of Columbus, Ohio, undated; its own pages place it between August 1963 and early 1964; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Commission, from the Columbus Metropolitan Library's digital collections, Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Commission: 1956 Annual Report (A Year of Decision), 1957; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Development (report by Hammer, Greene, Siler Associates), from the Columbus Metropolitan Library's digital collections, Housing Analysis and Preliminary Action Recommendations: A Phase I Community Renewal Program Report, undated; its estimates are stated for 1968; read September 2026.

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