Burlingame Eichlers / Joseph Eichler
1900 – July 1974
He was forty-seven, and he sold eggs.
Joseph Eichler had no training in architecture, construction or development. He was an executive in his wife's family's wholesale dairy and egg business in San Francisco. He formed a building company in 1947, put up his first tract in 1949, and spent the next twenty-five years building about eleven thousand houses that looked like nothing else being sold in America.
About 11,000. Eichler Network, which knows more about this than anyone, puts it plainly: no one has an exact count. Sources also disagree on whether the tally stops at the 1967 bankruptcy or runs to his death in 1974. It is an estimate, and we print it as one.
Before the houses
New York, a business degree, and a dairy company.
Born in New York City in June 1900, to an Austrian father and a German mother who ran a toy store, and raised in Manhattan and the Bronx. A business degree from New York University. He married Lillian Moncharsh in 1925, and the couple moved west when her father took over Nye & Nissen, a San Francisco wholesale butter-and-egg business. Eichler worked there as an executive.
Sources put the move to the Bay Area at 1925 or 1927; one says 1940, which is almost certainly wrong. We are not going to pick.
The story everyone tells is the Bazett House — a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian in Hillsborough that the Eichlers rented in the first half of the 1940s, and which is said to have shown him what a house could be. He was a tenant, not an owner, and in 1945 new owners gave him ninety days to leave.
Handle that story carefully. Four incompatible date ranges are in circulation, from 1939 to 1945. And we could find no quotation from Eichler himself about the house's influence on him — the influence claim is his biographers' framing, repeated until it reads like testimony. It may well be true. It is not documented.
The part that matters
He wrote the racial restrictions out of the contract, and then defended it.
This is the best-evidenced chapter of Eichler's life and the least discussed in real-estate copy. There is scholarship behind it: Ocean Howell's The Merchant Crusaders: Eichler Homes and Fair Housing, 1949–1974, in the Pacific Historical Review (2016).
| When | What happened | How well sourced |
|---|---|---|
| 1949–50 | Racial restrictions removed from Eichler Homes sales contracts. The company never kept racial statistics on its buyers. | Single-sourced for the precise years; the policy itself is well attested. |
| 1950 | First sales to Asian American buyers. | Reported via Howell. |
| 1954 | Greenmeadow, Palo Alto. First sale to a Black family. A white neighbour complained. The company bought the neighbour's house back and resold it. | Reported via Howell. This buy-back actually happened. |
| 1955 | Terra Linda, San Rafael. A sale to a Black family drew protests. Eichler went door to door in person and offered to buy back the homes of anyone who objected. Nobody accepted. | Reported via Howell. Frequently confused with 1954 — they are two different events in two different places. |
| 1958 | Resigned from the National Association of Home Builders. The San Francisco chapter's vice president had publicly stated the organisation opposed a Sacramento court ruling banning discrimination in housing carrying VA and FHA financing, claiming minority races depreciate property values. Eichler threatened to resign, and did so when the chapter refused to withdraw. At that point the company had sold houses to twelve Black families and more than two hundred Asian American ones. | Eichler Network, citing House and Home (1958) and Eichler's own letters to Bay Area newspapers. |
| 1960 | Testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, arguing that open housing could be run at a profit. | Via Howell. There should be a printed hearing transcript; we have not found it. |
| by 1964 | The company had sold 30–40 tract houses to Black buyers. | Via Howell. |
Two corrections we would make to the usual telling. It was the National Association of Home Builders, not the National Association of Realtors — a widely repeated error. And we could find no documented position by Joseph Eichler on the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act or the 1964 Proposition 14 that gutted it. What is documented runs through his son Ned, who chaired a state housing commission and is credited by Howell with shaping California's fair-housing law. People attribute Ned's work to Joe constantly.
The end
The tracts did not kill the company. San Francisco did.
By 1960 Eichler Homes was producing around 900 houses a year and the tract business worked. What broke it was diversification into urban San Francisco — Laguna Heights, Geneva Towers, Visitacion Valley, Central Towers, and the thirty-odd-storey Eichler Summit at 999 Green Street on Russian Hill, where Joe and Lillian took the penthouse.
Rental buildings earn nothing until they are finished, the permitting was slower and the construction different, and the first of them completed into a weak San Francisco rental market in 1963–64. The Summit overran by around two million dollars.
In spring 1966 Eichler was hospitalised. Ned reviewed the assets and recommended Chapter 11; his father refused, calling it shameful. In 1967 Eichler Homes, Inc. filed for bankruptcy.
He rebuilt, smaller, under J.L. Eichler Associates and other names, and kept building until he died in July 1974. We could not establish what he was working on at the end — no source names a final project.
You will see 1965 given as the bankruptcy year in one place and 1966 in others. The weight of the evidence is a 1966 crisis and a 1967 filing.
Why this page exists on a Burlingame site
Your house was built by a company that was already bleeding, and it does not show.
Mills Estate was designed in 1963 and built in 1964–65 — which is to say, during the exact years Eichler Network identifies as the beginning of the end, when the San Francisco buildings were completing into a market that could not carry them.
From the tract side you would never know. These are among the largest and most architecturally confident houses the company ever built, with Claude Oakland fully in charge and the late-period vocabulary — galleries, courtyards, unusual roof forms — arriving all at once.
That is the thing worth holding onto about a Burlingame Eichler. It comes from the last confident moment of a company that had about two years left, and nobody building it seems to have been aware of that.
Where this tract sits in the run → · The full timeline → · The architects →
One correction while we are here
Joseph Eichler did not win an AIA award.
We looked, because it is asserted often enough to be worth checking. We found no AIA award or honour to Joseph Eichler or to Eichler Homes in any encyclopedia, architectural-archive or journalism source.
What is real: four Eichler neighbourhoods are on the National Register of Historic Places — Greenmeadow and Green Gables in Palo Alto, Rancho San Miguel in Walnut Creek, Terra Linda in San Rafael — and the X-100 steel house in the San Mateo Highlands was listed in June 2016.
And the AIA fellowship people half-remember belongs to Claude Oakland, the architect of this tract, who became an FAIA in 1979 — a fact recorded in the finding aid to his own collection at UC Berkeley.
Mills Estate is not on the National Register and there is no historic district here. Other claims that do not survive checking →
Talk to us
Have something from the period?
A letter, an advertisement, a sales contract, a photograph with a date on it. The documentary record for this tract is thin enough that one attic box would change it.