In June 1985, as a graduate assistant at Carnegie Mellon University, I visited Electric Heights, a housing development in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, located on a hillside overlooking Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s East Pittsburgh plant. My professors were drawn to Electric Heights because its vibrancy stood in contrast to many working-class neighborhoods in the region, where the economic despair and social dislocation brought about by plant closures and relocations could be measured in the number of dwellings listed for sale. The networks of surveillance and mutual assistance—the “eyes on the street,” as described by author Jane Jacobs, functioned effectively.¹ Unemployed electrical...

In October 1934, theNew York Timesexcitedly announced that the Museum of Modern Art had opened a housing exhibit of “such importance and such urgent timeliness” that “every man, woman and child in this problem-haunted metropolis” should attend. The exhibit coincided with the publication of a seventy-eight page booklet, with the “desperately challenging title”America Can’t Have Housing, which featured leading housing experts and urban reformers explaining that the United States could have an adequate supply of affordable family dwellings if local, state, and federal governments accepted responsibility for the inadequacies of the private commercial market. Noncommercial housing opportunities,...

Mobilization brought economic recovery to home building. Chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board John H. Fahey reported that 1940 was the “best year of residential construction since 1928,” with 545,000 new family units started in nonfarm areas—a 16 percent increase over 1939. The home-building boom paved the way for a successful year for the “thrift and home-financing industry” with a 22 percent increase in new loans during 1940. “Lower interest rates, smaller down payments, and long amortization periods together,” Fahey said, “operated to make homes available at easier terms than ever before in the history of American...

In 1927 when the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union built its first cooperative apartment complex in the Bronx, it selected a site plan that allowed the new Tudor Revival–style buildings to fit seamlessly into the larger cityscape, ignoring the modern trends in residential development embraced by European municipal and trade union building councils. Abraham Kazan, the founder and president of Amalgamated Housing, believed that cooperative home owners could, and perhaps should, have dwellings that looked conventional.¹ Thirteen years later, when Lawrence Westbrook and John Green considered the architecture and site planning for the federal government’s inaugural mutual housing projects, despite...

From Camden, New Jersey, to San Pedro, California, defense workers greeted mutual housing with enthusiasm. In April 1941 CIO president Philip Murray told President Roosevelt that support for the Mutual Plan had “spread throughout the country, and unions in many sections have addressed inquiries or sent delegations to Washington to urge that it be used in conjunction with their local defense housing needs.” Murray wanted federal housing officials to make it possible for the residents of all Lanham-funded housing developments to have a chance to buy their homes on a mutual basis.¹

Union backing for expanded application of the Mutual...

The labor leaders and liberal architects, planners, and housing reformers who lobbied for the removal of DDHC head Charles F. Palmer and for the reorganization of the federal housing bureaucracy claimed victory on February 24, 1942, when President Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the National Housing Agency (NHA). Harry C. Bates of the AFL and Richard L. G. Deverall of the UAW agreed that this “heralded the beginning of a large-scale, rapid-action program of public housing for industrial war workers,” and they optimistically anticipated the “end of the hesitations, vacillations, and appeasement of real estate interests which had caused...

Lawrence Westbrook returned from the South Pacific in 1945 to find the new president, Congress, and the country preoccupied with the scarcity of affordable housing. Five months after taking office, in his September 6, 1945, “Message on Reconversion,” marking the “transition from the New Deal to the Fair Deal,” President Harry S. Truman pledged his support for a “decent” house for every American family. To realize what would later become a national goal, Truman gave his support to the bipartisan Wagner-Ellender-Taft (W-E-T) Bill, which allowed the FHA to insure long-term mortgages with reduced down payment requirements and provide loan guarantees...

In 1949, Elsie Danenberg publishedGet Your Own Home the Co-operative Way, offering 182 pages of “complete, authentic and up-to-date” information on the nationwide growth of the cooperative housing movement. Hers was “the actual story… [of the] more than 30,000 families” whose frustration with their commercial market choices prompted them to turn to “their community, their union, their church, their office, or even among their friends” for expertise and capital to form a housing cooperative. They achieved the American Dream of home ownership “by banding together into groups, or cooperatives, in order to purchase their land jointly, obtain materials in...

The communities of manufactured dwellings built between 1971 and 1973 as part of HUD secretary George Romney’s Operation Breakthrough did not spark a revival of interest in cooperative housing. The ill-fated experimental program discouraged further federal involvement in the creation of housing cooperatives. Across the United States, however, in the early twenty-first century, thirty-seven mutual housing associations are flourishing. They remain, for the most part, places where self-reliance and individualism strike a sensible balance, places where, according to aNew York Timesreporter, people “pitch in” for the welfare of their personal community.¹

Until very recently, most of the mutual...