In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco’s official relief agency undertook two ambitious housing programs, which were conceived as disaster relief but represented the first American efforts at subsidized or social housing.

The previous Portals told the story of how a grant-loan program made it possible for 1,571 San Francisco families of moderate means to buy their own houses. The second housing effort faced many more challenges, but housed even more people.

Officials began discussing building “earthquake cottages” in June 1906. According to the 1913 Relief Survey, a comprehensive evaluation of the city’s relief effort, the cottages were intended to provide protection from the coming winter rains for the 5,000 impoverished San Franciscans who were housed in tents or other temporary shelters, and to give the estimated 5,000 others who had fled the city someplace to come back to.

Most of those who ended up in cottages were working San Franciscans. About a third of them were Irish and Italian immigrants and their children, whose tenements in the poor, heavily ethnic South of Market and North Beach neighborhoods had been destroyed. The city feared that if it didn’t find a way to house them, a large portion of its laborer workforce would vanish.

“Shelter had to be provided against the rainy season in order that there might be held in San Francisco a population of working people,” the Relief Survey said.

The second goal of building the cottages was more ambitious: to make it possible for poor working people to own homes for the first time. As the Relief Survey said, “The proposal also was intended to carry to workingmen the opportunity to own a house of such character as should serve to set a standard for sanitary and attractive dwellings.”

Construction of the cottages began in September. By March 1907, 5,610 had been built and placed in every one of the 26 official tent camps across San Francisco, with the exception of tiny South Park, where 19 two-story tenements were built instead.

Most of the cottages had three rooms and measured 10 by 18 feet, while about a quarter of them had two rooms and measured 10 by 14 feet. They were constructed of redwood, fir and cedar and painted park-bench green, and cost the city about $150 each.

Two earthquake cottages are displayed behind the post office in the Presidio. About two dozen others are known to exist in neighborhoods in San Francisco, the largest number in Bernal Heights.

For many of the approximately 15,000 refugees who ended up moving into them, these tiny houses represented an upgrade over the squalid tenements where they had been living. What’s more, they were free: The city initially charged $6 a month rent, but that was refunded once a cottage resident purchased a lot, and those were cheap. Residents were responsible only for moving the cottage.

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The cottages allowed many working-class people to remain in a suddenly overpriced San Francisco. As Joanna Dyl notes in “Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake,” rents in the unburned Western Addition doubled. In other places that survived the fire, they rose 350%.

But if the cottages could in some ways be seen as a precursor of today’s public housing developments, it would be unwise to carry the comparison too far.

As both Dyl and Andrea Rees Davies, author of “Saving San Francisco: Relief and Recovery After the 1906 Disaster,” note, American attitudes toward the poor in the early 20th century were complex and contradictory. A new, “scientific” conception of charity was ascendant, focusing on the progressive concept of “rehabilitation.” But there was no tolerance for those who did not work, and the notion that resources should be distributed equally was restricted to a tiny, radical fringe.

The refugee camps in which the cottages were located soon became the focus of controversy. Everyone was willing to give the most vulnerable victims of the earthquake and fire a temporary hand, but except for providing them with tiny houses, almost no one wanted to make that help permanent.

Critics charged that the camps were breeding slackers. In July 1906, The Chronicle ran a story headlined, “Few idlers are found in the camps,” and the press would return to the subject again and again.

In October 1906, Park Commissioner William Dingee said, “Refugee camps are an evil and should be abolished. As there is employment at good wages for every man and woman in the city able and willing to work, they are unnecessary.” A Chronicle editorial on Oct. 15 stated, “There has always been a truculent element in some of the camps which well justifies a careful looking into. ... The Grand Jury’s recommendation for a chain gang should be promptly carried out and every vagrant should be set to work in it.”

By spring 1907, half the cottage residents had moved their small homes out of the camps, and calls to remove the remaining structures intensified. Middle-class San Franciscans demanded the camps be cleared so they could resume “fresh air outings” to the parks. Rudolph Spreckels, head of the camps division for the group leading the city’s relief effort, promised to remove the camps “if he (had) to have the buildings torn down over the heads of refugees.”

Despite such fulminations, the last camp was not closed until June 1908, more than two years after the quake. The vast majority of the cottages were moved by their owners, most of whom continued to live in them.

A 1908 follow-up study of 680 families makes it clear how hard-pressed the owners were. Only 16 bathtubs had been placed in the cottages, just 40 percent of the buildings were connected to the water mains, and a mere 15 percent had toilets.

In part for these reasons, in part because they had been forced to leave their neighborhoods and communities, 82 percent of cottage dwellers polled for the report said they had preferred their old dwellings.

Nor did the earthquake cottages always offer a long-term solution. Between 1908 and 1915, about half of them were condemned as substandard and torn down.

Yet in the end, the cottage program must be considered a success. At a minimum, it provided better shelter for 15,000 refugees than tents. And it allowed many working-class people to remain in San Francisco and own their own homes, tiny as they were. Imperfect as it was, for its time the cottage program was a remarkably enlightened program — America’s first attempt at social housing.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com