The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class by Kristin M. Szylvian (review)

Kristin Szylvian’s book explores a little-known chapter in American public housing history. Her focus is a relatively small group of federally funded projects completed in the 1940s with the goal of cooperative, or mutual, ownership. These projects targeted families who fell into the gap between qualifying for low-income public housing and being able to afford a house on the commercial market.

As responses to the Great Depression gave way to war mobilization, mutual housing came about through the efforts of a small handful of actors. Bureaucrats Lawrence Westbrook, John Carmody, and Milburn Wilson and labor advocates like Shipbuilding Workers president John Green made cooperative ownership a part of the New Deal’s scattershot approach to housing. Rapid construction of housing for defense workers authorized by the Lanham Act created additional developments that some policymakers hoped to turn into mutual housing after the war’s end.

Mutual housing had its enemies and stumbles along the way. Predictably, real estate, banking, and construction interests worried that such projects would impede on the commercial housing market. Labor was an unsteady ally. The projects won crucial early support from Congress of Industrial Organizations–affiliated workers, who hoped to live within their walls. But a reliance on nonunion relief workers and prefabrication techniques created tensions with some American Federation of Labor members. Even the United Automobile Workers later sacrificed its campaign for mutual housing in the Detroit area in hopes of facilitating contract negotiations. With the end of World War II, a number of veterans’ groups became strong proponents of cooperative housing, but this support waned somewhat as traditional homeownership grew more accessible through the GI Bill. Most significantly, redundancy among government agencies and resistance by some key federal officials curbed the mutual housing program’s growth.

The early projects employed private architects who embraced modernism. The developments prefigured postwar housing trends in their reliance on mass production techniques and prefabricated components. But other choices proved less exemplary for the commercial market. The mutual housing developments embraced the concept of shared public space, arranging dwellings to front on natural spaces with parking and utility access in the rear. They also boasted community centers with shared gathering spaces and sometimes child care centers. Designers privileged pedestrian traffic within developments by providing footpaths uninterrupted by street crossings. Most developments contained between two hundred and five hundred housing units.

In the immediate postwar years, lack of clear procedures or ready technical advice hindered the cooperative purchase of defense housing developments. Federal policy covering the disposition of Lanham Act housing vacillated between granting long-term mortgages and requiring cash sales. The challenge of finding sufficient private credit to finance a purchase proved an additional barrier for would-be cooperative developments. In addition to external opposition and federal indifference, at some sites residents were deeply divided over the prospect of mutual ownership.

Possibilities for cooperative housing as a mechanism to retain urban populations surfaced in the years of legislative wrangling leading up to the Housing Act of 1949. Ultimately, the law that emerged revived public housing construction for low-income Americans and provided federal funds for urban renewal programs. It made no provisions for cooperative housing. Subsequent efforts to pass legislation supporting cooperative home ownership for middle-income Americans also foundered; they met a combination of resistance from real estate interests, concern about already high government spending, and accusations of socialism. Red-baiting attacks on cooperative housing acquired a much sharper edge as the Cold War dawned. Altogether, opposition to the growth of mutual housing successfully shut a critical window of opportunity for the program in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Despite many obstacles, nascent mutual associations successfully purchased approximately fifty housing developments constructed by the federal government. These cooperatives offered shareholders a number of benefits, especially affordability and a built-in sense of community. However, they contained relatively small...