Historical Studies of Urban America

American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid

Nancy H. Kwak

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226282497
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Is there anything more American than the ideal of homeownership? In this groundbreaking work of transnational history, Nancy H. Kwak reveals how the concept of homeownership became one of America's major exports and defining characteristics around the world. In the aftermath of World War II, American advisers urged countries to pursue greater access to homeownership, arguing it would give families a literal stake in their nations, jumpstart a productive home-building industry, fuel economic growth, and raise the standard of living in their countries, helping to ward off the specter of communism. A World of Homeowners charts the emergence of democratic homeownership in the postwar landscape and booming economy; its evolution as a tool of foreign policy and a vehicle for international investment in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s; and the growth of lower-income homeownership programs in the United States from the 1960s to today. Kwak unravels all these threads, detailing the complex stories and policy struggles that emerged from a particularly American vision for global democracy and capitalism. Ultimately, she argues, the question of who should own homes where—and how—is intertwined with the most difficult questions about economy, government, and society.

One

Building a New American Model of Homeownership

Certainly the precedent of Britain drives us to the conclusion that if we go into the public ownership of houses and apartments, we shall strike dangerously at the American tradition of home and farm ownership, thrift, and the incentives to individual effort and to saving. . . . Must we drink from the same bitter cup as Britain? 1

Morton Bodfish, United States Savings and Loan League, 1949

There is nothing particularly American about owning a house. For most of this country’s history, the majority of citizens did not own their own abode, nor is it clear they uniformly aspired to do so given the financial risks and limitations. If Americans (like many others around the world) longed for security of tenure and for the peculiar freedoms that came with such tenure, they did not envision urban or suburban ownership in the specific form of a mass, government-backed, mortgage-based system until the twentieth century.2 It was only in the cataclysm of the Great Depression that the federal government birthed institutions powerful enough to generate this form of modern homeownership for a wide swath of American society. The government did so primarily to assure bank stability and to rejuvenate the construction industry, but newly accessible long-term mortgages and an enlarged federal assumption of risk also opened up for the first time ideas about a right to homeownership that breathed life into idealized discourses of previous decades.

The 1930s saw a wave of new federal policies putting into action homeownership aspirations articulated since at least the late nineteenth century. The idea of a right to homeownership would quickly be repackaged as a staple of the “American dream,” a longstanding reward for those Americans willing to work hard and do right. As a compelling symbol of “America, the Land of Freedom and the Home of peoples from all the earth, who have and seek the comforts derived from the pursuit of free enterprise,” the homeownership ideology spread quickly across national boundaries.3 American housing experts, itinerant planners, and aid givers exhorted others to adopt similar programs and institutions and to benefit from the comforts of free enterprise. Mass homeownership represented all that was best about American capitalism: more accessible, mortgage-driven homeownership could simultaneously strengthen democratic governments and global capitalism, fueling domestic savings and buy-in on the part of the populace while granting all citizens equal access to the good life. This chapter outlines the transition from progressive collaborations with European counterparts to a broader assertion of American leadership in the world, beginning with the transatlantic crossings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and moving toward a new American model and explicit rejection of “socialistic” housing experiments particularly in Britain in the 1940s and ’50s.

Background

From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, housing advocates had carefully considered the shelter policies of their European counterparts, borrowing and learning from what they often perceived as more “advanced” international standards. Transatlantic crossings had flowed more freely westward: philanthropic and voluntary organizations like the American Octavia Hill Society emerged as an offshoot of English institutions, for instance, emphasizing housing reform as a function of moral and social “uplift” for residents.4 Subsequent settlement house workers-turned-reformers like Lawrence Veiller exerted social control over slum dwellers in the late nineteenth century through housing codes and stringent regulations, and the 1901 Tenement House Law of New York served as a groundbreaking and prototypical product of this effort.5 Veiller himself made a point of keeping abreast of cutting-edge European experiments and using this knowledge to inform the American housing scene. Although he ultimately rejected any large-scale public housing as “socialistic and undesirable class legislation” that was “foreign to the genius of the American people,” Veiller nonetheless argued that European housing reforms set a “precedent” for Americans like himself, an example that would need to be regularly visited and observed.6 Likewise, those who challenged Veiller’s vision for housing reform relied on European examples to bolster their positions. Edith Elmer Wood, for example, probed the economic dimensions of working-class housing and for the first time advocated direct public housing provision for the poorest third of the nation by researching and comparing American housing with European examples. Wood praised Britain’s achievements above all, noting that country had “set the highest standard for her working classes, and done the most to realize it, of any nation in the world.”7

In the American housing scene, two different focuses emerged by the 1920s with respect to the urban slum problem, both fully engaged in transnational debates about how to improve housing in dense urban centers.8 The first—the Progressive reformers—included such outspoken and well-known members as Mary Simkhovitch and Helen Alfred. This group focused more on the protection of slum dwellers through careful regulation and, by the early 1930s, direct federal construction of public housing on cleared urban slum sites. By contrast, the second group sought an end to disorderly cities and burgeoning slums through a regional, community-centered approach to urban planning. Wood joined forces with other likeminded intellectuals like Charles Harris Whitaker, Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Frederick L. Ackerman, Benton MacKaye, and Catherine Bauer, eventually forming a small but very influential group called the Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA, 1923). RPAA members drew upon their extensive European studies to urge regional solutions to American housing problems as well as to encourage alternate forms of tenure type such as cooperative housing.9 Wood and Bauer were particularly enthusiastic and effective in their use of European research to reconceptualize American programs, although they were hardly alone in their embrace of modernist architecture, “garden city” experiments, or regional planning.10 Core members of the RPAA brought different aspects of American urban planning into closer conversation with European counterparts: Whitaker, for instance, published reports on British war workers’ housing in the journal of the American Institute of Architects beginning in 1917, and he sent New York City architect Frederick Ackerman to report back on further developments in British munitions towns.11 (Wood would later claim that Ackerman’s reports “prevented our war housing from taking the form of temporary wooden barracks.”)12 Mumford and Stein drew heavily from British garden city principles as well as German experiences to reconceptualize future design around principles of region-oriented development. Bauer, meanwhile, adeptly applied European lessons to the fight for public housing in the US. According to US Housing Authority administrator Nathan Straus, American housing laws could be directly tied to European examples, for the 1937 US Housing Act launching federal support for public housing was “modeled on the most successful public housing experience in the world, that of England.”13 Whether reformers emphasized stringent city government enforcement of housing regulations, or RPAA “housers” argued for good shelter developed along the periphery or outside city limits in entirely separate new towns, perhaps with alternate tenure types such as cooperative housing and with full property taxation, both groups nonetheless depended upon and responded to debates that were unmistakably transatlantic.14

There were at least two reasons why this transatlantic progressivism dissolved by the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. First, the rise of American economic power and the devastation of European cities created a new national hubris that reframed European cities as needy aid recipients rather than as laboratories for cutting-edge housing development. To many congressional representatives, Europeans did not look like they were in any position to teach others. Worse, openly subsidized housing programs looked alarmingly anti-American in the context of increasing Cold War tensions. Second, the public housing movement that had stimulated so much transatlantic research in the 1920s and ’30s had largely lost the fierce political battle by World War II, even as FHA- and VA-supported homeownership campaigns became more powerful and omnipresent in the US. Although the Housing Act of 1937 officially created the federal United States Housing Authority (USHA) and established deep government subsidies with federally managed local implementation, the successful legal installation of these “core elements” resulted, not in “European-style communitarian Bauhaus developments,” as some public housing advocates had hoped, but rather in angry debates over purported government extravagances, housing quality standards, and appropriate resident selection—debates that yielded austere, “generic, uninspired [public] housing blocks” by the mid-1950s, in the words of historian D. Bradford Hunt.15 Unfortunately, no new generation took up these issues, and even fiery urban critic Lewis Mumford ruefully noted the absence of “fresh ideas and objectives” within his own cohort by the late 1940s and early 1950s.16

While public housing faltered, the real estate lobby and business interests whittled away at existing programs and the USHA and its successor organization, the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA, 1947–65) shifted to monumental projects that broke dramatically with preexisting neighborhoods and that set the groundwork for a host of new difficulties for public housing residents. From the beginning, motives for this sort of architecture were problematic: housing officials gravitated toward such forms in the hopes that new projects would “‘dominate the neighborhood and discourage regression’ to slum life” through sheer size.17 Catherine Bauer wrote a particularly stinging critique of these programs in May 1957, decrying a public housing that “drags along in a kind of limbo, continuously controversial, not dead but never more than half alive.”18 While Bauer’s words cut too close for beleaguered public housing advocates, she did make the astute observation that public housing was unnaturally separated from FHA-financed, suburban single-family housing, creating a bifurcated housing system—what scholar Gail Radford would later call a dual housing market. Planners should not have unquestioningly implemented British garden city plans and Bauhaus principles without adequate local adaptation, Bauer observed in hindsight.19

Homeownership programs suffered none of the malaise permeating public housing campaigns by the 1950s, as more families adopted middle-class values and habits, including “a life style based on family housing with gardens, in a good general environment fairly near to the open countryside . . . involv[ing] a massive move towards the suburbs and the exurbs” with a heavy emphasis on family life and the rearing of children, as well as on the pursuit of consumption and the apparent comforts found therein.20 Riding on the federal legislative supports put into place by real estate interests, private developers like William Levitt helped transform the US into a suburban nation, converting a longstanding homeownership ideal from its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms to a very specific postwar reality. Perhaps one of the first nations to be directly influenced by US national homeownership efforts was Canada: one year after the creation of the FHA and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, the Dominion Housing Act of 1935 promoted long-term amortization and mortgage insurance as well as modeling the Canadian Home Insurance Plan on section 1 of the US Housing Act of 1934.21

The wane of transatlantic progressive exchange did not signal the end of American internationalism, however. Rather, market liberals and proponents of government-supported private housing envisioned a new role for themselves where housers and reformers had once flourished. In place of Edith Elmer Wood, Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, and other progressive planners and experts came increasing numbers of American private industry representatives keen on exploring new markets for American housing products, members of Congress eager to witness the gratifying effects of American housing aid, and real estate men intent on proselytizing a new American “tradition” of government-backed private housing. This rising wave of international interactions was marked by bolder assertions of American leadership and an active promulgation of homeownership with a downplayed government role, as opposed to forthright public provision. Government assistance needed to be framed as a temporary measure, as tax “relief” rather than government “provision.” Those progressives still active in international housing programs slipped into the language of this new American model: Jacob Crane, for instance, wrote extensive reports on urban land policies in German, Hungarian, French, and Italian cities, among others, but he also agreed with National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) executive vice president Herbert Nelson that “it is a mistake to assume that land policies in European countries derive out of circumstances comparable to ours in this country.”22 Indeed, as Crane argued in a separate postwar housing plan written with Hugh R. Pomeroy, executive director of National Association of Housing Officials (NAHO), “We, as a people, set this objective of adequate housing for all families, not because . . . England is committed to such a program for her people and, therefore, it must be good for us [but because] it is what we, in the United States, want for our people and know that we can have.”23 Future policy needed to respect “a deep desire on the part of most families to own their own home,” for “in this, rather than in slogans, lies the reality of our faith in democratic processes.”24

An American model thus took shape, one that elicited resistance and, at times, passionate opposition by European counterparts. This was not a moment of isolationism or retreat, but rather an era of heightened international exchanges and observation distinct from the transatlantic progressivism that preceded it. Assertions of national identity would be threaded throughout debates about best housing designs and layouts, and the American side of the debate would come to be dominated by proponents of single-family, mortgage-driven, government-supported private housing. Those Americans still promoting public housing or suggesting alternate housing schemes would find their voices drowned out by the chorus of realtors, bankers, investors, and free-market congressional representatives. Even supporters of cooperative apartments like John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Abraham Kazan in the 1920s and Herbert Nelson in the 1940s eventually lost the debate to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), which very effectively pointed out the high cost of direct loans for coop production in the midst of a Cold War—clearly “another excursion into Government-subsidized socialism,” from NAHB’s point of view.25

Reversing the Anglo-American Special Relationship

These changes did not come abruptly in 1945, but rather evolved slowly through the war years. The shift in perceived leadership can most clearly be seen in Anglo-American interactions in the early to mid-1940s. If the US and Britain had a historic “special relationship,” as Winston Churchill propos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Building a New American Model of Homeownership
• 2 Combatting Communism with Homeownership
• 3 Homeownership in an Era of Decolonization
• 4 Homeownership as Investment
• 5 Fair Homeownership
• 6 A Homeownership Consensus?
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index