Row House

The row house of the Industrialization era was the great social engineering project of the nineteenth century — a standardized brick shell produced by speculative builders in their thousands to house the workers flooding into factory cities from the countryside. In Manchester, Birmingham, Pittsburgh, and the Ruhr, terraces of back-to-back brick houses stretched kilometre after kilometre: two rooms per floor, a shared outdoor privy, a coal cellar, and a fireplace that drew damp air through a house designed by economics rather than comfort. Reformers like Edwin Chadwick documented the health crises these conditions bred; gradual legislative improvement through the century slowly raised minimum standards. In the game the row house significantly expands population capacity, fuelling the massive industrial workforce that runs factories, staffs barracks, and supplies the armies of the industrial era. It is the fastest-built, lowest-cost residential building of the age — quantity over quality, exactly as history demanded.