Your mid-century house, and mine – just like 13 million solid ranches, tidy Levit cottages and charming post and beam homes built across the US between 1945 and 65 – might not strike you as “public housing.” But they ARE our country’s solution to a housing crisis.
You may be aware we’re having another housing crisis right now. But so far … we do not have another big solution.
I’ve been thinking a lot nature of housing: what shapes it takes, and who gets access when there’s not enough. And I’ve been thinking about public housing. We could define that as housing subsidized by the government those who need help to afford it.
OR we could simply see it as homes made affordable TO the community BY the community. In that context … we might see your mid-century house and mine AND our larger community with fresh eyes as a form of public housing.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Public Housing / Supporting people into homes
Essentially, if we think about public housing without stigma as just the ways that a community helps individuals to afford safe, secure, pleasant places to be at home … the mid-century building boom absolutely qualifies in my opinion. It was fueled by the 1934 Housing Act (created the FHA and set up federally insured mortgages), the GI bill (helped vets buy homes), and the 1954 housing (provided for a 30 year mortgage that had a lot more buying power).
These choices powered a wave of post war housing construction that transformed our landscape and created all the sweet mid-century houses we love so much around here! Check out this post on the 1955 Parade of Homes for more on that.
This shift allowed more people to buy bigger, more modern homes, which is why we start to see two-car garages, split-levels, and even powder rooms showing up in homes during this period. Builders wanted to showcase how much house you could get now that your cost was spread over a 30-year loan.
Comparing US (public) housing choices to other places
I’ve been finding it so interesting to contrast the housing style generally but also the public housing philosophies of England and the US.
Before my recent trip, I was not very well-versed in our public housing policy in the US. That’s partly my own ignorance and partly that we don’t have a very rich history of public housing and policy compared to England. But visiting so many architecturally interesting housing estates there made me wonder about the housing project and other public housing endeavors here.
(I love travel because it ALWAYS gets me thinking about home and comparing lifestyles and transit systems and history and building typologies. It’s more than just seeing pretty buildings. It’s about learning the why behind the buildings.)
Why does Public Housing always look like a concrete tower
Well, it doesn’t, always. But … it often does!
Speaking of the “why” behind buildings, the platonic ideal of a mid-century public housing estate/project is such a clear image. It might be one of the places I snapped on my London walks
Or one of the now-demolished American by-words for the projects like Cabrini-Green in Chicago or Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis or Howard Roark’s perfectionist and incredibly stark design.
They nearly all share the same design DNA and descend from the design philosophy and in some cases the literal design of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation which I happened to visit on a different set of travels back in 2013
Public Housing in Britain in the post war
After WWII the brits leaned hard into the concept of the welfare state. They created a National Health Service, beefed up support for public transit and started building public housing! As recently as 1977, 50% of the population lived in social housing. (Today only 15% do.)
I was fascinated. This was such a different approach to taking care of a population.
Here in the US, the mid-century era was ALL about supporting single family home ownership as both social welfare and wealth building.
Why have we not leaned into public housing here in this country? Well, a couple of reasons:
Why don’t we have more public housing in the US?
Different stories about who needs help and why
Particularly in the post WWII world (my own personal are of interest) there have been two very different narratives of community and what we owe to each other there and here.
England had a very rough time in the war with a huge lost of life, displaced and separated families, everyone terrorized by the blitz bombing and overwhelming shortages and deprivation. At the end of the war they told themselves a story of “blitz spirit” and community cohesion about how they were a people who looked out for each other.
The US actually lost more people during world war II but a much smaller proportion of our population. Instead of suffering fear of invasion and damage to our public and private infrastructure, we built up a huge war machine and came out of the war – as a nation – feeling like winners and ready to turn the factories producing planes, parachutes and meals-ready-to-eat into cars, wall to wall nylon carpet and shelf stable cooking staples. Our story was about prosperity and conflating hard work with success.
And also … capitalism wins: Rising housing prices depend on shortages
When we buy into narratives about how public housing “doesn’t work,” it’s important to remember who has a finger on the scales at all times. The for profit real estate industry DOES NOT want there to be enough housing for everyone.
Part of what holds up the bottom of the prices for rental housing and for the housing purchase market in this country everywhere is a fundamental lack of enough house.
When there’s too much it’s hard to keep the price high. When there’s enough, it’s hard to keep the price high. Why does the price go high when there is not enough. And this really gets us into taking the bottom out of the housing safety nut.
Ironically FDR’s 1934 housing act set up both suport for home buying with facilitated mortgage and also a (direct) public housing authority but severely limited it’s power to relieve a housing shortage by requiring that older (deemed unacceptable) units must be demolished for every new public housing unit created.
So … now what?
So what does that mean for you and me and our mid-century homes?
Well, first off, let’s be mindful that the so called good fortune of our rising home values is tied to the lack of there being enough housing around for other people. Acknowledging it can’t hurt.
And you don’t have to give up your charming MCM home. But we can all be a little more involved in the policy driving what is growing and changing around the edge of MCM neighborhoods.
Go downtown to City Hall and check on what’s going on in your local civic legislation around zoning policy, around new homes construction, around what is allowed to be built where. Make your voice heard as a homeowner, as a member of the the single family home owning populace that you don’t mind density. That you would like to have more community construction, more access to the commensurate social services and public transit benefits and things like that that come along with them.
Because there’s absolutely nothing that says that great mid-century, single family homes -the kind of houses we live in -can’t dovetail nicely with density.
I’ll have to do a podcast soon on the history – and the BRILLIANT success of Madison’s own University Hill Farms neighborhood.
It was built with some really good ideas of mixed use development, diversity, and density baked in.
It has a little shopping mall. It has a little government and city building district. It has both private and public mid and high density housing, as well as a number of gorgeous single family homes, including two designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and some other just great, great, great houses.
The whole neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015 for its remarkable appearance, but also its remarkable construction philosophy and planning philosophy.
Public Housing Reading List
American Public Housing
The Towers Came Down and with them the Promise of Public Housing (New York Times Magazine Feature by Ben Austin 2018 or the book version High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing by Ben Austin
Escaping the Housing Trap: the strong towns response to the housing crisis Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges
Housing the nation: social equity, architecture and the future of affordable housing edited by Alexander Gorlin and Victoria Newhouse
High Rise Stories: voices from Chicago Public Housing edited by Audrey Petty
In Defense of Housing by David MAdden and Peter Marcuse
British Public Housing
The Architecture Academy Podcast ep 08. THE HOUSING CRISIS with Kate Macintosh and Peter Barber
The Council House by Jack Young
Mid-Century Britain: Modern Architecture 1938-1963 by Elain Harwood
Read the Full Episode Transcript
So your mid-century house and mine, just like the 13 million ranches, Levit cottages and charming post and beams built across the US between 1945 and 65 are our country’s solution to a housing crisis. You may be aware we’re having another right now, but so far, not another big solution.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of housing, what shapes it takes who gets access when there’s not enough. And spoiler alert, I’m not going to solve a housing crisis today, but let’s talk about public housing, housing subsidized by the government for those who need help to afford it, or put another way, homes made affordable to the community by the community. And let’s try seeing your mid-century house and mine and our larger community with fresh eyes.
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match your mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2109.
Before we dive into the history the future, the philosophy of public housing. Let’s do two pieces of practical how to improve your home remodel process, advice and some news. We’ll start with the news. This week is my birthday, and if you’ve been around for a couple of years or listened to the archives on binge you might know that every year, in June, I plan a little gift for you the mid mod remodelers.
We’re doing it again, a birthday sale, which is my age, as a discount off the ready to remodel programs, a percentage discount. This is both the self-study version and the Office Hours supported Plus Program. It’s a gift for me to you, because everyone needs a little more organization and support to plan a great remodel. For so many of us, our own home remodel is the first one we’ve ever directly experienced. This is not a place where you want to cross your fingers and trust to beginner’s luck.
And if you’ve remodeled before, you know how chaotic and stressful and overwhelming it can be. You know even better that it’s great to have a framework, a system, a philosophy, and a whole bunch of examples and systems to get you going in the right direction. What I want most in my professional life, at least, is to save every mid-century home out there from an under baked, poorly planned remodel.
You know the kind, I mean, the kind of remodel that’s dated in 10 years, maybe before it’s even paid off, the kind of remodel that spins out of budget halfway through and gets paused forever in the middle the kind of remodel that forever erases the mid-century charm that was there just needing a tune up.
And what I want for you is to experience the joy of planning and leading a remodel that’s actually right for your life, tailoring your home to your dreams. So my gift to you is a birthday sale, and your gift to me is taking good care of your mid-century house. If you missed this last year, take advantage of it right now.
In fact, in this year, I’m going to do the tradition one better the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, ready to remodel and plus, will be 43% off. But tomorrow, if you’re listening to this live, that is on Friday, June 6, I’ll be sharing a half off discount code only to my email list. Are you on my email list? If not, go get yourself signed up.
You’ll get a weekly podcast reminder with tips, handy resources and half off on ready to remodel. Sign up and save on the program and then save on your entire remodel price tag by brilliantly planning and letting every dollar go further. So I’m going to spend the rest of this episode talking about something that is totally impractical from a direct remodel your mid-century House perspective. That’s the present to me.
I want to talk to you about the things I’ve been ruminating on for the last month and a half, the social history of housing, the history of social housing policy in the United States and England, where I just traveled, and where I think that they in, at least in the past, had been doing a much better job of certain things, or how we can learn from the past and maybe do it even better with less social complication, with less misogyny, with less racism, and just generally, be a nerd about housing and design and the way we live in our homes.
So if you’re in a more practical moment in your life, I don’t want to leave you high and dry. I want to point you to two excellent things. The first is a resource. We’ve just been in the process of collating a bunch of our best topics into individual pages. So we started with kitchens, and I believe we’ve also done one for bathrooms and bedrooms.
Go to the show notes page for this to find all of those links, but go to mid mod midwest.com/kitchen and you’ll scroll down past not just my free PDF download, but all of my favorite kitchen resources, the best episodes we’ve done on kitchens for the podcast, some videos we’ve done for the YouTube page, the best examples from case studies, recent and long ago, of kitchen projects and just a bunch of our favorite kitchen how to resources. It’s a wonderful place to go if you’re looking though for more than sort of topical how to advice.
If you’re looking for the framework, the way to make every step of planning and leading our model easier, I want to just point you to ready to. Model, which is the distillation the process for everything I do for my one to one clients. It’s everything I believe in and the ready to remodel. Plus program comes with so much more support, including the monthly office hours with an architect call. That’s our other practical tip I want to give you today.
Very exciting, but the remodel planning tip that I want to share with you this week is actually embedded in the way that that first question was asked, the question about, How can we improve the curb appeal of our house? And to send the question in, this homeowner had put together a PowerPoint. Now, not really like a PowerPoint presentation, but it was a PPT document and or pptx, I don’t know. I’m actually not a PowerPoint user myself, but this is the point. They clearly are. PowerPoint is a way that they communicate regularly in their professional life. It’s an easy and already on their computer program that they’re conversant with.
I want to extract something that just happened on Monday’s call. We had such a fun Deep Dive. Two good questions were asked, one about how to create better curb appeal, both with paint and colors and details spinning off. This was a ready tree model student who came to the curb appeal clinic and then was applying all the information to their own house. And then the other one was a more detail oriented question about materials in a bathroom or model that is about to be kicked off with a local contractor.
And so what they’d done is they put together a number of pages, I think it was about 10, with images of the house as it is. Now, a couple of example images they diagrammed over the house with some drop in clip art shapes. They had put color blocks on to show different options for repainting jobs and amassing for different seasons of when they could put in plantings.
All of it documented in this nice way. It could have had links attached to it had a bunch of different graphics assembled in a logical way, and it was all stored and put together in an easy way. Now to me, if I was going to put together information on my house, I wouldn’t use a PowerPoint document. I would probably, these days, I might use Canva, because it’s an ever increasingly available, handy online resource, but I would also go directly to like Adobe InDesign, because I’ve worked in graphic design and design Adobe Creative Suite my whole career.
That doesn’t mean that it’s the right choice for everyone else. Another kind of person might have pulled all of those things together, printed them out and put them into a three ring binder notebook. But the point is, assembling the information doesn’t have a right medium. It doesn’t have a right program or tool. That’s perfect.
What matters is that you think about the way that’s most easy and accessible for you to assemble information. And I just think people can get too hung up on if you’re worried about how to go about documenting changes to your house or even thinking about you want to draw a floor plan of your house, but you don’t think of yourself as an artist.
You don’t have the right drawing materials. That doesn’t matter. You can scribble on a tablet. I have had clients make passable, functional floor plans of their homes using the squared off cells in an Adobe in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I more than once, actually, more than one client who clearly uses spreadsheets every day in their daily life is nothing is an easier program to them than a spreadsheet, has used Microsoft Excel to create a floor plan of their house, to annotate it, to make multiple layout variations. Are there other better programs out there? Sure, but if that’s the program that they were able to just jump right in and use, that’s the right program for them.
So what am I what do I want to make sure you take away from this? Two things. One, don’t be precious about how what perfect formatting, graphics, media you’re using to assemble ideas about your house. To document good ideas, you had to save up the right suite of things, to ask a question, to me a design professional, or to a contractor, to show someone what you’re thinking.
And also, while you’re not worrying about what medium to choose, make sure you document your ideas whatever medium. Make sure you’re writing them down. Make sure you’re jotting them into your computer. Make sure you’re putting sure you’re putting them into your smartphone, your tablet. Make sure that you’re not having a good idea, thinking you’re going to remember it, having your life get busy and then losing it.
This process is essentially a micro format of the master plan method, pulling ideas together, keeping them all in one place, and then letting them simmer and develop over time is the ultimate essence of everything that I teach inside the program, and it was such a helpful jumping off point for us to then we spent about half an hour of that office hours call looking through, focusing on micro details that had been recorded on various pages of that PowerPoint presentation, and really deep diving into everything, not just the verbal question they had written about a paragraph long question to submit for the office hours, but we were able to remind them, remind have them remind me of everything that had come up related to this question as we went back and forth through that document.
So this documentation process doesn’t need to be fancy to be effective but does need to happen to be effective. Yeah, and that’s, I think that’s the practical thing to take away, to put in your back pocket, as you’re thinking about your home, as you’re walking around looking at it the spring, as you’re just bumping into something that irritates you over and over again, rather than just have a thought again and again about what you might change document that thought start the process of your master plan, even in PowerPoint format today, or maybe Excel. Who knows?
I’m curious actually, what is your go to might not even officially be a graphics program, but what is your official go to program, your personal favorite program to put together information to share or save. Don’t forget to check that your email is in good standing on our email list, so that you can get your discount code for ready to remodel, or anyone you know can join ready to remodel now this year, because you want to get things done this year, next year, in the years to come, it’s the right time to start planning your remodel the right way.
You’ll find any other information you need links to get on the email list, all of the photos and reference books that I’m going to mention in the podcast episode to come on the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/2109 I will see over there. Now let’s get into it.
So what is public housing, publicly subsidized housing, and what are really the differences between housing and homes? In this country, we draw a lot of lines around the difference between renting and owning, the values that we place on those two different activities, and yet we fail to acknowledge that there’s a very real way in which all of us that own mid-century homes are living in publicly subsidized housing, in public housing, because these houses were built With the assistance of public funds. Now it wasn’t necessarily dollars given back in rent or suppressed rates. Sometimes it was a matter of just stretching out a low interest loan over a long period of time.
But it’s worth acknowledging that it’s such a privilege to have it, and I mean this in the good way that all the good connotations, it’s a privilege to be here. Thanks for having us. I feel so fortunate, but also the kind of privilege that needs to be acknowledged to be in a mid-century house to own one today is requires a certain amount of luck that it exists at all and that it belongs to any individual person or family.
These houses were built and paid for in a capitalistic market, but the loans on these individual houses were taken out by families that were supported by the government, and they weren’t available in a way that was equally distributed across the American populace at the time. That’s not today’s topic.
But for more on that, if you want to jump off from the mid modern model topic podcast, you might want to check out two episodes I did in a pair. Oh gosh, five years ago, on the topic of housing discrimination and racism in mid-century American Housing that would be episode 309, on the dark side to the mid-century era that we love, the overt housing discrimination and redlining, which cut black Americans out of decades of post war prosperity building. And the second one a little bit lighter. Episode 310, on Collier heights, which is a neighborhood built for and by black professionals in the Atlanta area when they weren’t permitted to live in areas developed under the redlining rules.
So when I talk about public housing and we are, you know, this is a podcast devoted to remodeling and improving on privately owned housing, I think it’s just helpful to remember that we each have our own stories of hard work to get where we are, and also good fortune and good luck. And home ownership tends to run in families. It’s not an accident. It’s part of the system that we decided to create, that I’m going to talk about way back in the 1940s and 50s, when America decided to prioritize building a nation of homeowners.
When I think of my own family’s history on my dad’s side, as far as we can tell, I had to call him about this. Neither of his grandparents were homeowners, at least until the mid-century. I’m pretty sure that the Hansmann’s and the Kriegs on the Stevens Point side were all renters, and my grandmother’s family lived in New York. Again, there’s no way to check, but we’re pretty sure their place in Queens must have been rented later. Grandma and Grandpa Daru lived in one of the earliest Levittown communities, and they stayed there until they died in the 60s.
But the very existence of those Levitt communities certainly owes a lot to us. Housing mortgage subsidies. I knew that my dad’s parents’ house had been built in 43 but he reminded me that they didn’t move into it until he was two years old. So that means it was almost certainly a purchase made using the brand new 30 year amortized mortgage system, which came online in 1955 and had just been set up by act of Congress in 54 in a very real way, I have the home ownership of those grandparents to thank for my own home ownership.
They helped all three of their kids with their own first and subsequent home purchases, offering them low interest loans that made it easier for them to jump in New harbing markets, and that support made it easier for my parents to support me through my young adulthood and to help me get to where I am today. My mom’s family’s pre mid-century history is a little more scattered. Mattered, but she actually knows more of it her.
Let’s see her father’s mother Isabel, lived in a house that her family had owned for a while and probably was sold when she married. She had supported herself for a long time as a teacher and had her own model a car that she would drive home on the weekends. She was kind of an adventurous woman until she married, and the man that she married, William Thornton, had a little house in Sadorus, Illinois, where he’d raised his first family. When he showed it to Isabelle, she said she could not live in a house without a basement, so he raised the house and dug a basement for her.
Eventually, the two of them decided that they really wanted to be more secure, and they saw that as being achieved through land ownership. So they went after a foreclosed farm, I think, in the Great Depression outside Monticello, Illinois, to make the payment, they had to sell almost every movable object that they owned. And then they owned the two little the house and the farm for many years.
Eventually, they sold both and moved to Florida. I can picture the charming little Florida modern mid-century home that that must have been. They eventually helped their son buy a home, and at one point he and my grandmother built a house out of a combination of two Sears catalog kit garages that they sort of mixed up the plans for and hacked together. It’s wild to me to think about how affordable mid-century, individual single family homes were, particularly in the earliest days. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. I
if you go and you look at those ads from the late 40s, the early 50s, people were buying and building houses for something on the order of 10,000 of $15,000 even in today’s money, those are ridiculously affordable prices. So but all of that pre mid-century history, owning a little bit of land outside a small town in rural Illinois, hacking together a house from two kit homes, those were affordable houses.
But what really made mid-century houses affordable housing was the choice that was made, the series of choices that were made governmentally, to support and reinforce mortgages and to provide government backed mortgages. First a 15 year amortized, and then, like I say, what really jumped my father’s family into home ownership was in 1955 when the 30 year amortized mortgage was introduced that allowed the dollar you were spending on your home to go so much further for people who couldn’t have afford homes before to afford them, and for people who could have to afford better, nicer, larger houses.
And we see this in the history of the buildings that were created during that era. This is something I’ve been studying since I got obsessed with mid-century homes back when. But whenever I travel, it gets me thinking about homes across the world, comparing lifestyles, comparing transit systems, history and building typologies. And it’s more than just seeing pretty places. It’s about learning the why behind the buildings.
And for me, since my college days, since even before I knew I wanted to spend my life thinking about architecture. The way I learned I wanted to be an architect was travel. It’s seeing how people do their homes differently in other places that makes me reflect on and freshly see how we do houses, homes, housing here in the US. So I was just in England, as I’ve mentioned, and I talked about some of the specific amazing buildings I saw there, particularly the Barbican, which I featured on an episode about a month ago.
But I’ve been finding it so fascinating to contrast the housing style generally, but also the public housing philosophy, the housing of getting people into houses or housing in England and America, and I know the most about the housing history of this country. I’m not actually that well versed in our public housing history, and I’ve been learning more about that over the last month or so. But if I wanted to set up the most extreme contrast between American public housing policy and another place, I probably wouldn’t pick England.
I would pick Sweden or maybe Austria, where a number, a significant number of the population still lives in publicly subsidized housing. But there’s two reasons why I think England makes a good foil for the purpose of today’s episode, and for me, my own interest. The first is propinquity. I’ve been a lifelong anglophile. I love books about England. I’m deeply enmeshed in the history of England. I was just there and was just seeing public housing projects in or states in England. So it’s top of mind.
The other reason is that they both in England and in the US. We made a big push towards a move in getting people into houses, into housing post war that then our level of care and our level of effort toward that diminished dramatically after the war, so they have somewhat shared our trajectory in the post war era of having once made strong moves towards social security and public welfare, and I mean those two terms, not in the percentage of your paycheck that’s being docked the word Social Security you see on your paycheck or welfare, meaning dollars going to specific people. I mean, in the true sense of those words, a security is in a social network and the welfare of people. Sorry, I’m getting sidetracked.
But in America, we’d had a first move with FDR and the New Deal, and then we had this post war renewal into home ownership. And in England, with the Labor government that they had come into office right after World War Two, they set up a huge number of social oriented systems with a goal, a big goal, of providing for people solving a crisis. And then in the gung ho capitalism of the late 70s and 80s and beyond, both places have sort of been consistently undermining them ever since.
So anyway, that’s my why I’m going to be talking about public housing in England and America for the rest of the episode. And I talked when I was when I was saying I’d been in England, I was looking for mid-century England. And in the US, it’s very easy to find mid-century houses. You just go to the outer edge of any major city or check out any new suburban development from the post war era, and you will find clusters and circles and neighborhoods and towns of mid-century development in the larger cities that would have established well before World War Two, like Milwaukee or Chicago. There are fewer examples of mid-century buildings in the city proper.
A few infill things here and there, but rings of entire suburbs of mid-century development that boomed in my hometown, Madison, Wisconsin, more than half of our current housing stock is mid-century era development because the industry, the university and the government population requirements after World War Two were so significant. And I’m sure that there are ring city developments of mid-century houses in England. But I didn’t happen to make any effort to go see them. And I was able to find mid-century public, civic, private, business architecture everywhere I went in the infill to rebuild after the damage done by the German Blitz.
So there were literal craters all over the urban landscapes. And then there is urban infill. Mid-century, individual buildings and entire housing developments are commercial sites everywhere you go. The funny thing to notice about that was that the rebuilding was sometimes mid-century in style, but not always. The very first day I was in England, my sister and I were getting the lay of the land in Plymouth, and we took a ferry across from the city of Plymouth and in the town the county of Devon to a National Trust site on the Cornwall border across the water in Edgecombe. And we visited it primarily for the pretty grounds. I go traveling to photograph houses, and my sister goes traveling to photograph gardens.
So this was a day for her. I didn’t even bother to suggest that we go pay for and take a tour of the historic house, which was the center of that property, because I knew I would be trading on her goodwill and dragging her to plenty of modernist architecture sites later in the trip. But as we were walking past, we read a little placard that that made it clear that the house itself had been almost completely destroyed during World War Two. Very sad.
There’s a smile on my face, but that’s just because I was surprised by this. It had been completely rebuilt to the historic standard after the war. So Edgecombe house is a mid-century building. It’s just one done in an 18th century style, and I’m sure that we went past many other buildings of mid-century origins that look as if they had been much older, because there have always been artisans and craftsmen in England who are qualified to repair historic buildings to historic standards, and they were able to turn their talents to remaking historic buildings in their own original styles.
But by and large, most of the post war construction was done in a modernist style. And it thrills me. It does not thrill everyone. Funny anecdote, we made another detour to a green space. We went to Hampstead Heath so we could walk across the heath, which I enjoyed, and it was for my sister. And on our way, we passed an architectural site, the Erno Goldfinger house at two Willow Road, which is a National Trust site.
We didn’t go in because, again, her moment, but I did stop and photograph it and told her the story of how it had so enraged the neighbors for just absolutely destroying the neighborhood character that one of them, who happened to be Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, named one of his greatest bombed villains after the architect and owner of that house, Goldfinger. It’s wild. I’ll throw a picture of the two of the gold finger house and the historic house next to it onto the blog post so you can judge for yourself.
Yes, it is a modernist home. Yes, it is a little blocking and perhaps startling but enraged the neighbors, I don’t know. I find it. I find it a little hard to see myself. But then, of course, for us, even though we use the term modern housing, I think I said this on the Barbican episode, we’re used to it. We may. People still dislike it.
People still complain about it. Prince Charles. When he was Prince Charles, spent a lifetime campaigning against modernist housing, modernist architectural design. But we are used to it. We’re aware of it, so it must have been quite startling to the first people to encounter it. Anyway, when I was visiting buildings in England, I spent less time looking at individual mid-century houses, and a lot more time looking at public housing built in the mid-century era group housing, which was not at that point, privately owned, although now a great deal of it is the part of that huge move that came in after World War Two to set up the welfare state in that area, the National Health Service and the transit system and building 150,000 social housing units every year, starting right after the war.
As late as 1977 nearly half the population of Britain was living in socially assisted housing. That has to have had an influence on the way people thought about living in social housing. It has to have been less stigmatized to live in public housing as it would probably have been referred to, and that time and place council housing, and obviously in a capitalist society, people generally prefer to be homeowners. People prefer to have more rather than have less.
But just knowing that half of everybody lives in social housing, you can’t be doing that bad. You’re right at the average. I was listening learning some of these facts. I was listening to an episode of the architecture Academy podcast. I cannot find the host’s name on the internet, but episode eight is about the UK housing crisis, and it’s interviewing social architects Kate McIntosh and Peter barber on their experience of building social housing back in their youth. They’re clearly of the sort of baby boom generation back when it was more popular, and what they think about this situation of social housing today.
They talked about how the dramatic changes that were made under the Thatcher government, starting with a 1977 act that made, I think was colloquially referred to as right to buy, which made it possible for people who lived in socially provided rental housing to purchase their house, whether it was an individual home or an apartment from the council, and then have it themselves. It was meant to be a wealth building provision, but it was also very much meant as an attack on the concept of society provided housing, or society assisted housing.
And I come out of a tradition of American home ownership. I own my own home, and I’ve always thought of that as the sort of the pinnacle, the desired outcome. But I had my mind absolutely blown when one of the two architects interviewed, Kate McIntosh, commented that really the concept of ownership, the desire, the need to own something or to own more, is in some way, just a lack of faith in the stability of your society. And it blew my mind, because I live in America, the land of the free but also the land of no guarantees and a desire to own your home is what we think of as stability. The value in your house is wealth building. It is your safety, it is your requirement. It is the choice I’ve made own my own home, and it really is our system here. But does it have to be it pulled me up short.
Actually, it didn’t, because I was listening to that podcast in the middle of a 10 Mile Run. So it didn’t stop me in the slightest. But I spent the next couple of miles plotting through the UW Arboretum, thinking about what it would mean to live in a community so trusting that you did not need to own that you could, that you could rely on, on the community to support you through your whole existence, and it’s sort of anathema to the way that we go through things.
And when I look at the big modern problems of today, it always feels like when people get to the tippy top of wealth building in this society, they seem to get more and more interested in protecting what they have and maybe taking it with them to Mars, and less and less interested in sharing it with people who need it to survive. So it’s, I don’t know it’s interesting, but a society built as ours is on the idea of ownership. That means you are accumulating wealth, and specifically property, in order to ensure against a time when society doesn’t have enough for you.
That’s very American. It’s a very American story. And the more that I have been diving in the last month or month and a half since I was in England, into the nitty gritty of the history of public housing in recent generations, both in England and the US, the more I realize it’s driven by the stories we tell ourselves, the specific kinds of optimism in the general public and the post war in America and in Britain, and the way we talk about what is hard work and what is deserving and what makes people worthy of assistance. I have talked a bunch on the mid mod remodel podcast about the ethos behind the design decisions that exist in our mid-century.
Houses that are easy living and light and cheerful materials and bright colors and jaunty shapes, and they break down the formal symmetry, so that even that even modest houses had in the 1920s and 30s trying to emulate wealth they didn’t have, and they were just about sort of a casual lifestyle that didn’t require a lot of external support. You know, the way that our stories happen affects our buildings and then vice versa.
For example, the way that mid-century houses have a more open floor plan is a reflection of the changing employment demographics and labor costs in that era, because before the mid-century, before the depression, certainly, even the moderately middle class families were generally able to and needed to afford at least day labor, household help, which made it more comfortable to create a back part of the house and a front part, a service part, which had the domestic staff person moving around in it.
And then the family living part as a separate space. And going forward into the post war era, there was no longer people did not have a desire to work in someone else’s house, and it was more possible to make a good living working in an office or a factory. And therefore it was unaffordable for a middle class single family income household to employ someone so single family houses change. They become smaller, easier to take care of, and more open plan, which means that one person, and we know who that is, could keep things tidy, keep things going in the kitchen, keep an eye on the kids, all at the same time. This was theoretically made easier by the influx of new technology, the washing machines, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner.
Although anyone trying to keep a house perfectly by themselves know how, knows how, not actually easy that is. But coming back to the story, there was a belief in America, a story that a hard working family should be able to afford a single family home of their own, and therefore we manifested it politically. We passed a host of bills, labor unions advocated for wages and acceptable free time, and we made that belief a reality.
But unfortunately, we also manifested our belief and our story in racial inequity as a culture, and we did a lot of work to ensure that affordable, comfortable, single family income life, the kind of life that means building security through generational wealth and home ownership only really was available for white families, like I said, upsides and downsides. But there were other ways in which our American belief system, our stories, were influencing housing policy. And I’ve been reading about the history of our public housing, our sort of underlying Puritan work ethic, the belief structure that only hard work deserves reward with security and comfort, and that if you have security and comfort, you must have worked hard to get it.
That sort of chicken and egg story makes it really hard to advocate for or to fund any kind of public housing affordability. Anytime that you pop into our history and you find a place, a group, an organization, a city, that was moving towards publicly supported affordable housing, you’ll find that it gets off to a good start when there’s some kernel, some energetic moment, and then it’s rapidly undermined to the point of inevitable failure by politicians and by the people that vote for them, ultimately, just not really believing that everyone deserves to be safely and securely housed.
It feels like we need to do a bigger deep dive at some point into that history. I think I might need to. I was going to talk about Cabrini Green and Pruitt Igoe in this episode, and I can see that it’s already kind of spinning out of control. So that might, I might have to come back around to this. But in this moment, I’m thinking of why we reacted that way, and why they were able, in England to come up with the compassion, the energy, the impetus to create, instead a welfare state in the post war, rather than in the New Deal, which happened during our American depression or after it, as a result of it. How did they in the post war moment, do that and that?
I think it’s actually because America and Britain had two very different wars in America. If you studied World War Two in school, you probably learned about victory gardens and war bonds, and certainly people sent their loved ones away to fight and maybe die. Resources were strained. There was a certain sense of pulling together women going out to take the factory jobs that had been left behind by men or maybe getting to take those jobs.
Certainly, they took those jobs without kind of the infrastructure support to help them watch their kids or keep their house running, or any of the kind of wifely backgrounds that had supported workers outside of the home in the past, again, a different topic, but we did not experience any kind of mass civic destruction or loss of local localized life. The attack at Pearl Harbor blew up a naval base, but there were no. Attacks on the continental US, and we lost nothing of our physical infrastructure during the war.
We also felt differently about it for several years going forward, we just kind of looked at it like a movie watching tensions rise and then blow up over the Atlantic Ocean. People who were paying attention to the newspaper stories, I’m sure, felt a sense of international instability, and there were arguments and debates about it, but basically, we had a cultural narrative of that’s going on over there, and now we’re going to go over there and take names and kick butt. And we didn’t win every battle, but we certainly won that war in our own opinion.
England had a very different story. Their involvement was a war that started out on a high note. We’ll send our boys over to France. We’ll be back by Christmas. That very rapidly, did not turn out to be true, and it was a shocking moment of destabilization and identity for a culture that had thought of itself as the pinnacle of empire and rapidly realized that they didn’t have the punching power that they’d imagined themselves to and then the war came to them. I talked a lot in the episode about the Barbican, about the physical destruction of World War Two, the German blitz attacks, overnight bombing raids on cities that destroyed homes, civic buildings, sometimes entire areas.
Their loss of life was much more significant, and families were broken up and separated, with children being located on to trains and sent to the countryside to board with strangers with no real communication back and forth with their family. The dangers of being in concentrated population standards were very large, food and fuel were rationed, and there was a legitimate fear of invasion.
So the British did not spend World War Two feeling like winners, but they did work hard, and they pulled together. This is a concept that’s often referred to as blitz spirit, and they made collective sacrifices. Mixed up their class and urban and rural structures in ways they had never done before. So from the royal family on down, everyone was kind of pulling together, and depending on their neighbors, they also didn’t bounce back from the war the way that we did in again, we’ve talked about this on the mid modern model podcast many times in America, we had to geared up this huge machinery of production to create war munitions factories generating planes and bombs parachutes.
And after the war, that turned into factories creating cars and fertilizer and nylon wall to wall carpet. But in England, their situation was, they hit the end of the war, depleted of resources, exhausted, depressed. They maintained food rationing well into the 1950s and in the aftermath of that war, their ethos was, we are a people who look out for each other. We are in this together. And that resulted in a transformative, although brief, political shift.
The conservative party that had been in leadership during the war was out and the Labor Party was in, and in just seven years, I think they took that and created the modern welfare state, Public Health Service, public transit and public housing, en masse. So yeah, again, by 1977 half still half of the British population living in public housing. Just a few years after that Labor Party takeover, the beginning of the welfare state, Churchill was back in power and immediately began undermining every decision that had ever been made by the previous government.
Did it all work out perfectly? Of course not. There were infrastructure issues and racial clash issues. If you want to learn more about that, look up the Wind Rush generation. The thumbnail outline of that is that in order to bolster the population and in order to get people to support all these new public services, England reached out to its colonial nations and asked largely people of color to come and work in England to get a new lease on life, a new opportunity for their families.
They made a lot of big promises, and in the end, did not keep them the people who came at enormous personal sacrifice and risk to run the busses and keep the hospitals going and sort of work in these housing construction projects were disrespected and disregarded, and they and their children have experienced a lot of generational racism ever since. So I don’t want to paint a rosy picture and say everything about post war public housing in England was good and everything about American Housing Policy was bad, but I do think it’s really fascinating to examine what are the roots of these two systems of post war housing.
Why did we start out this way, and where has it taken us? So in England, they were really quick off the mark to start creating social services for people who had suffered in the war, and they set up a system that was so robust that it took 20 years of Conservative government to bust it back up again. In America, we built differently, and we shaped our entire landscape differently with a more spread out approach that was based on individual ownership of houses and cars to get you out to those individually spread out houses.
So now we find ourselves in cities that are hard to build transit systems for, and neighborhoods that can feel cut off from social activities and services and sometimes isolated in our homes in a way that feels very strange and inhumane to all Europeans when they come to check out what might be cool about America. How did we get here? Why did we choose that? Well, the American government decided to thank its returning soldiers with the GI bill providing education and working opportunities and affordable housing.
To many people, although, again, caveat this focus on white people mostly, partly because, at the same time, there was a very concerted pushback against both civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement, there was a societal feeling that women and people of color had taken a giant step forward during the war, and that our boys coming home. Why are our boys the only people that matter here?
But whatever our boys coming home needed their jobs and their respectability and their paternal authority back, so a huge push and pull through the mid-century era, the civil rights movement, people of color in this country asking for more respect and opportunity and winning it at great personal cost and sometimes very grudgingly. And the women’s history of this. Part of this is that there were some advancements in women’s rights after the war, some of the women who had seen what they were capable of with proper education and working fought to keep what they had.
But in general, there was a social and cultural movement to pull people back into out of the women out of the workplace, by encouraging them to stay home and nuclear family structures as the makers of the new individual nuclear family oriented, single family housing, and turning the machinery of industry and war production into consumer goods. And those consumer goods often aimed at effectively being a kind of bribery towards families, towards women, to say, Sure, you can’t have a job anymore, you can’t go earn a living wage in a factory, but you can have an all pink or an all blue bathroom. Wouldn’t that be cute?
We’ve always really struggled in this country with the concept of how anti-capitalist and anti-American it must be to provide housing to families. And going back to, as I said, The New Deal to Roosevelt in the 1930s establishing the public housing authority as a federal body. There was always a lot of debate around who it was for and who deserved it, and if they were deserving enough to deserve it. We’ve always had caps on my understanding is that in a lot of public housing in England, there may or may not be any regulation that says you can’t continue to live in publicly housing if you earn more than you should. You just have to. You are supported less in it.
But in a lot of public housing, and most public housing projects in the US, there’s always been a cap on what you could earn to qualify to be in that space at all, which has been then criticized as de incentivizing people to work hard at all. But I would say it’s actually just a really tricky line to thread to be able to earn enough to support your family and get all the things you need without unqualifying yourself for the support that makes it possible to make ends meet. There’s a great article that gets that ties together the history of US public housing policy with the specific story of the Cabrini Green towers. I will link to it in the show notes.
The title, if you’re just going to Google for it, is the towers came down, and with them the promise of public housing in New York Times Magazine, and it is you don’t have to have a subscription to read this one. This is where I learned that it was the same Depression era law that first created not the 30 year mortgage, but the concept of a federally insured mortgage, and the idea that homeowners could put down as little as 10% and then pay off their mortgages over time, and that was done in the same legislation that created the first public housing complexes, but they were meant for two different kinds of people, and they were also very controlled for who was going to be getting into them. The earliest public housing developments weren’t big towers in parks.
They were brick row houses and duplexes. They were required to be milked to minimum safety standards, but they were also required to be intentionally, I don’t know how to put this, not very nice, so they wouldn’t compete with the private rental market. And you really have to ask yourself, who was lobbying for that to be the case? Was it perhaps the owners of the private rental homes? I think so. But particularly, once we got through World War Two, people started to look at
areas that they felt were disadvantaged or unsafe. They started to talk about old, crumbling, decrepit housing stock as a blight on society and a blot on the city, and that we should for public safety, relocate people out of those old tenement style houses and or housing structures and into new, publicly provided housing. Now I am not going to argue with you that this was always altruistic or always a good move.
There was a lot of racial feeling that was up in this moving people from disliked backgrounds or social groups, out of wealthy areas or out of areas that were gentrifying. There’s, there’s a lot of dark sides to this, but I will say that you know, per the per the records that have been archived, when people first moved into public housing projects like Cabrini Green, they were delighted. COVID, they thought that this was new and fresh and orderly and easy.
They felt a sense of community. They were proud of their homes, and they sort of looked after their neighbors and kept up with things. It felt like a huge process of refreshing. It felt like opportunity but then lack of interest and funding in upkeep and maintenance in these places, and also perhaps the lack of long term thinking that went into the construction of them, and certainly in each of these public housing projects, the sort of there had once been thoughtful motions towards racial integration, and as there were racial tensions rising in public housing, it sort of becomes more and more problematic.
And you hear the story in several different places. Another opportunity. If I think about Cabrini Green, which is the byword of the danger and the badness of public housing that I grew up around, because I grew up in the North Chicago suburbs, and I didn’t think of Cabrini Green as a public housing place. I thought of it as a dangerous place that was in the news as bad things have happened again, and where have they happened? They’ve happened in Cabrini Green and then it was torn down.
There’s a lot of unlearning that I have needed to do when I hear, when I read about the history of these structures, about the people that lived there, about the people that planned them and organized them, and who they were for to me, it’s sometimes easier to study this history in the example of Pruitt Igoe in St Louis, because I didn’t grow up hearing bad things about it on the news, and it was actually demolished long before I was paying attention to any of these things. But Pruitt Igoe quick history was designed with the best of intentions by Minoru Yamasaki, an excellent mid-century modernist architect who has had really bad luck with the buildings he designed.
He was also the architect of the Twin Towers in New York, which is not a building I thought I would talk about today, but that they were lovely until they were designed destroyed on 911, he’s also designed many other buildings that still stand, notably today, the science project, the science museum near the Space Needle. But he designed Pruitt Igoe, like all the other big housing estate projects, to solve a housing shortage and dramatically improve on existing conditions. A lot of the existing housing stock in the St Louis area was also dramatically out of date. One communal toilet out of date, and white middle class families were leaving the city for their newly built, redlined suburbs, and the intention was to replace the so called slums with clean, new high rise housing.
So let’s take all of this with a large grain of salt and assume that there was probably not a lot probably not a lot of community input in the design and planning process. But interestingly, Yamasaki initially proposed something that sounds a lot more like a British housing estate. He wanted a mix of both high rise buildings and a collection of walk up and mid-rise buildings with landscaped areas and parks surrounding them. It probably would have been very nice, but budget considerations in the initial build boiled back.
Um, that goal to kind of a harsh domino grid of aggressively aligned high towers set in a parking lot cut off from the surrounding urban fabric. Was also supposed to have a lot of ground floor businesses in the original design, but ended up being zoned as housing only in the end, a combination of maintenance failures and racial tensions created a situation which was unsafe, uncommunity oriented, and then just got a lot of bad press, and the buildings ended up being dramatically dynamited, I Think less than two decades after they were built, stories like this, constant news articles about dangerous, bad things happening in this kind of public housing project, really contributes to a sense that there is an inevitability to the failure of public housing.
But this, I’m going to switch back and talk about an England public an English public housing project, public housing estate which has also gotten a lot of really bad press based on a terrible tragedy which occurred there, but which, if you dig under the surface of it, a little bit, has nothing whatsoever to do with publicly provided housing, and everything To Do With capitalism, real estate markets and government oversight and repair and maintenance. The case of the Grenfell tower, it was part of the Lancaster West estate, which a housing a public housing complex in North Kensington in London.
The original tower block was designed in 1967 and it was concrete, but it had been re clad in the 20 teens with a new sort of plasticky facade that was, frankly, just meant to it was supposed to be better insulation and better environmental performance, but honestly, it was largely done over at the request. Of neighboring private housing towers that didn’t like looking at it and thought it could be made more attractive.
Just a few years after that, in summer 2017 a fire broke out, and it ended up burning for 60 hours. It was a huge smoke plume. 70 people died and more were injured, and it was the worst UK residential fire since the Blitz in World War Two, and it was started by a simple electrical problem in a refrigerator. But the failure, the list of failures that sort of pop up, is that it had been getting poor maintenance and safety reports for years.
There had been maintenance failures, including the failure of the fire doors to close properly, which should have made it possible for firefighters to get into the building and deal with the fire more quickly and put it out more safely. As after every one of these tragedies or failures of a public housing project, there’s a lot of blame put on.
Well, I guess we just can’t have public housing. I guess it’s bad and dangerous. But what actually had gone wrong was not anything about public, social, oriented thinking. It was about privatization, because in the interviews and analysis that took place in the aftermath, it was clear that there had been maintenance failures and there had been an inspection failure because the inspection the safety of the building had been farmed out from the local government body to a private organization which was an arm of an insurance company.
And they interviewed the person who had signed off on the effectiveness of the most crucial safety measures which failed in the fire, and later he told interviewers that he was at pressure for losing his job from the contractor who was doing the work to say that he inspected it and it was okay, and even though he knew it wasn’t, having a job in the private sector meant he could be pressured by the very people he was supposed to be overseeing, and that makes it a fundamentally useless process to inspect, which is not to say that a civil servant couldn’t also make a bad call, couldn’t feel pressured or hustled, couldn’t be bribed.
But when someone works for a for profit, separate contracted organization, they have almost no incentive to call hot halt, to do the right thing. So this is a sidebar that building inspections are important and the building code is important, and it must be respected and followed, and that we in our private remodels, should think about our safety and public safety and follow the code rules.
But I just, I think each and every one of these examples, which has become a whipping boy in public press, in the popular media, ultimately, what’s gone wrong have been failures, not of architecture or of the concept of public supported, public financed housing, but of maintenance and support of proper inspection, of regulation.
So I don’t know, I don’t know what we do about this. I just want, I just want to reexamine, I think it’s made me think more deeply about what is the nature of public housing, and what is our history of it? Why don’t we have very much of it here in the US? Why do they have so much more of it in England? But why is it diminishing and less accessible than it was, and why is it not worried about and supported and protected with legislation and inspections and maintenance the way that it should be? Why don’t we have a story anymore as a society, that this is a good thing.
And I do have to say blame where blame is due. Some of that does have to do, I think, with the over heroic thinking of architects and architecture in those early days of public housing, or at least in the early, I should say, in the early days of post war of mid-century, public housing, because there’s been, there have been public housing estates and publicly supported social housing in England, going way back before World War Two.
This is something I’ve been reading about, probably won’t get into in this podcast. But while that’s not a concept that’s ever been common in America, in this country, everyone who’s ever come to this country has kind of come with an ethos of, you get off the boat. You’re on your own. There have been good social movements in the indigenous people of this land, but the people who have emigrated here have, by and large, known they were rolling the dice.
And there’s always been a sort of a wild west phenomenon of it’s on you to keep a shelter over your head and to not starve to death in the winter. And sure, small towns sometimes have good communities, but there is a sort of a sink or swim attitude built into our culture. In England, there are the remnants of a feudal society which did have nobody really wants to, no one wants to go back and be a serf. But there was an understanding that surf was provided with housing and food as a matter of course, not necessarily great housing and food, but housing and food. And there have been public housing movements in Europe and in England, specifically before the war. But circling back around from my little digression here, I.
Post War public housing in England and in the US has been very informed by modernism, by architects, by big movements. This is actually, if I highly recommend you go check out the article in The New York Times about Cabrini Green, which reminded me that one of the most famous architects in literature, Howard Roark, Hero pren, question mark on pren of The Fountainhead, the monumental building that he’s working on is a public housing project, and his heroic architect goal is to make it as stark and bleak and minimalist as possible.
And he’s furious when he finds out that it’s been junked up with a bunch of dumb features like balconies for the residents and gymnasium and extra doorways, and that is what causes him to speak His truth and ultimately dynamite the building. So great, great stuff. Great stuff. Architects from Howard Roark, I think I have to jump across to founder of the modernist public housing. Let’s transform society with a building that makes everyone be everything that we want them to be. Guy Charles Edouard Generat, otherwise known as Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusier was a Swiss French architect who was one of the pioneers of modern architecture. He also famously came up with the idea that a house is a machine for living. And if you want to Google what he meant by that, go look at some images of the Villa Savoye, which he built between 1923 and 1931 this is this sort of white elevated pavilion. You walk up into the house from a ramp. It has these glorified open plan spaces and a ribbon of Windows that look out at the surrounding landscape.
It’s very pretty and kind of cold, and it is the precursor of just everything modernist that you can see going afterwards, but the sort of foundational building of his public housing projects would absolutely be what he called the Unite de habitation. Please pardon my terrible lack of being able to speak French, which was built first. He had a couple of these built, but the first one was done in Marseille, and I made an effort to go visit it when I was on my European travels little over a decade ago.
I’m going to put a bunch of pictures of it into the show notes for this blog post, because it’s really interesting. It’s a gorgeous building from the outside, in places on the inside, the rooftop, which was meant to be the sort of major public space of it is lovely, and it very much, is a tall object, building in a park. It is the forerunner of every modern public housing estate, public housing project.
And he meant he had big dreams for it. He wanted it to be a village and a building with a school and shops and public spaces. He designed what was really quite clever in terms of its housing structure, a skip stop elevator and stair system by which there would be a hallway that would run down. Not every floor had a central hallway, but every other floor had a central hall.
Actually, I think every third floor has a central hallway, and then from those hallways you go in a door and you either go into an apartment that’s halfway half of the building width and then goes down and you can run across. You’ve got windows on both sides of the building running right through it or goes up.
And same story, having visited the building, I will say, I’m going to show you very pretty pictures of it. My experience of being there was very dead. I went on a weekday, during the day, and because it has public spaces in it, I was able to walk around all the building except for inside the houses, the apartment units. But I did not run into any other people. I think I probably saw five people in this so called village anywhere. It was very haunted feeling. And all of those corridors which let you go into very light filled apartments felt like tunnels.
They were, yes, wider than average, but also that made them feel very squat. It did not feel light and bright. It felt oppressive and squished. So he had some great ideas, but like all architects with big ideas, he had maybe more ideas in his head than he was able to manifest in reality. That does not mean that he did not generate good things. I think a lot of the public housing projects in public housing estates that I passed through in England had some really interesting developments on that. But they do all kind of share the DNA of we should gather people together densely in a tower, run it up into the sky, and then there will be room to sort of play and walk around and have a park like atmosphere on the ground.
And that works really well when it’s properly maintained, and it feels nice and as long as you don’t mind going up and down stairs. But if it is poorly maintained. Tamed, a tower can start to feel like a trap, and a park like lawn atmosphere can start to feel like a parking lot.
And you can, you can lose some very nice things, so pros and cons, and for those of us who live in American mid-century houses which are designed to flow you into the outside of your house from every angle, it can seem like a very harsh and unforgiving environment. So I’m going to put some photos of American housing projects, of Cabrini Green when it was young and beautiful, of Pruitt Igoe before you know when it was conceptualized and how it was lived in first of the Le Corbusier Marseille building, the Unity de habitation that I took myself, and some of the housing projects that I or housing estates that I visited in England, I think they all have a lot of really interesting things to contemplate.
And the reality is that it’s easier to build an individual house than it is to build find the land for find the permission structures for create from scratch, something that houses more people than that. I’m not suggesting that you sell your mid-century house and find publicly funded housing to move into. We don’t have a system that supports that here in the US, and at this point, from my research of what’s been going on in Britain, they don’t have they don’t have that system over there, really anymore. What a shame.
But what I want to take away from this episode, really, is the idea that there are more ways to be housed than just in houses, and that we should remember that the individual houses that we have bought and paid for or are paying for now, also benefit from public subsidies, from tax structures, from loan backing, from familial wealth building that are part of a tradition of supporting a community, supporting the housing of other people in a community. And what else can we take away from the concept of public housing?
I think we can look at our homes as places that spin us back out into the world, and we can advocate for more homes and the right kind of new home construction that’s going to be good for everyone in society without getting too bogged down in a fear of what that’s going to do for the home values in our own neighborhood, and maybe with the bravery to contemplate that, yes, more houses in our development, more houses in our area, might lower or reduce the increase in our home values, but that might be better for our society in general.
I’m still thinking about that kind of mind blowing comment that that I quoted Kate McIntosh making at the beginning of the episode, that a desire to own something, to own a home, to own property, to own more, is just intrinsically a lack of faith in the stability of society. And I think this came up a couple of times in that interview.
It was a question of British social housing, and the motivation to create social housing, that it needs to be supported by people who care about it, and that we need to choose the people who are in charge of who are maintaining and supporting the idea of public housing with care and not let that policy and our warmth and our spirit and our story about that be influenced by other folks whose ultimate financial goal is to have just enough affordable, subsidized housing attached to their Perhaps their private housing to keep those real estate values going up, part of what holds up, the bottom line for prices in rental housing, for the housing purchase market in this country, in America, is the fundamental lack of enough homes.
When there’s too much, it’s hard to keep the prices high. And when there’s enough, it’s hard to keep the prices high. So why does the price go high, it’s when there’s not enough. So that really gets to us taking out or never, creating a stable base for the housing safety net. It’s part of the wealth building strategy of home ownership in the US that you don’t just pay off your house, but the value of the house goes up, and that has in the past, I think felt like it’s part of inflation, like it’s part of costs go up, but we’ve seen in the last 10 years, in the last five years, huge increases in home values, which I think has to people who are in a house can feel sort of thrilling or interesting or detached from anything you’ve done to the house or to your neighborhood.
It can just feel like it’s happening in isolation, but it’s part and parcel with the housing crisis that we’re dealing with right now. And I’m not saying that the answer is that we should lower those home values or that we should, all you know, like, I say, not move out of our individual homes and into Public housing projects that don’t exist.
But we should be mindful that the so called good fortune of our rising home values is tied to the lack of there being enough housing around for other people. So what can we do in an activist sense? Well, we can. Oh, it’s one more thing to call your congressperson about but maybe more importantly, to go downtown to City Hall and check on what’s going on in your local civic legislation around zoning policy, around new homes construction, around what is allowed to be built where, and make your voice heard as a homeowner, as a member of the individual home, the single family home populace that you don’t mind you would like to have more community construction, more density, more access to the commensurate social services and public transit benefits and things like that that come along with them.
Because there’s absolutely nothing that says that great mid-century, single family homes, the kind of houses we live in, can’t dovetail nicely with density, with transit, with those other things. So to take all of this and put it into a little bit more of an optimistic sense, I’ve been talking about how they were getting things right in England, and then they got them wrong.
And we’ve just been we’ve just had this weird, selfishness oriented policy where our national story doesn’t allow for supporting our families most in need in the US. For since forever, there are still optimistic opportunities to look at the bright side here. And I think one great example that can be a model going forward of how to retrofit mid-century neighborhoods is the university Hill Farms neighborhood here in Madison, Wisconsin. I
t’s actually just, I’m not in it, but it’s the next door neighborhood to mine, and it was constructed. It was baked in with some really good ideas of mixed use development. It has a little shopping mall. It has a little government city building district. It has both private and public density housing, as well as a number of gorgeous single family homes, including one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, maybe two, maybe two, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and some other just great, great, great houses. The whole neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015 for its remarkable appearance, but also its remarkable construction philosophy and planning philosophy.
So I think this is going to be a whole other podcast episode to talk about the buildings, to talk about the history, talk about how they got it done and why that is one of the healthiest, densest neighborhoods in an era when here in Madison, the East Side mall and the West Side mall, East town and west town malls. Here in this town are ghosts of their former selves, the littler mall, Hilldale shopping center that is located with this inside University. Hill Farms development is thriving recently, sort of overhauled itself and turned itself from more of an inner corridor mall to an outdoor walking court Mall.
Go down there any evening or any weekend of the year, and you will find it active, full of people. It’s on transit routes. The Apple Store moved there. The target set up shop next to it. It’s the place to be. So there is opportunity. We don’t have to have all or nothing. We don’t have to live in our beautiful, comfortable, individual, single family homes and just feel like, well, that’s the compromise we’ve made, and there’s no opportunity for density or transit or social housing near us. It’s a tradeoff. It doesn’t need to be.
So that maybe is the lesson I had so much fun circling back to the top of the episode. Why did I start thinking about all of this? Because I traveled, and I compared how people live in another place to how people live where I live. I had so much fun walking around in high density London, getting around England in general, on trains, bopping about from where I wanted to be to where I also wanted to be, without reference to a car or gas mileage or any of those things, that that kind of density is more achievable here.
We can build it back in. I really believe that we can, and we can think about it as we continue to develop and redevelop our built environment around us. So I’ll leave you looking forward, I hope, to an upcoming episode, maybe later this summer, maybe in the fall, on the university Hill Farms neighborhood and some of its gorgeous houses and its interesting development history. And the meantime, maybe thinking a little bit differently about the history of your house, and if you, like me, grew up in an era of just hearing big, bad, scary news stories about public housing, maybe reconceiving the way that you respond to that kind of memory when you think of it.
I’m also going to share the reading list, the book list that I’ve put together podcast episodes, a number of books, these, I think, aren’t going to go on my mid-century ranch reference reading list, although, if you want that, if you want a jumping off point of mid-century history, design, architects, ideas, products, whatnot, you can always get that free PDF by going to mid mod midwest.com/resources, but I’m going to put a list specifically on the show notes page for this episode, which you can go to mid mod midwest.com/ 2109 and I will share the podcasts, the books, the links, the newspaper articles that I’ve been accumulating as I’ve been digging more deeply into the history of public housing here in the US and in Britain.
I would love to hear your thoughts on public housing, on England, on your experiences of how traveling has changed the way you think about your life here in the US. So reach out to me. Send me an Instagram message. Say happy birthday if you want to, but also just say what you thought about this episode. I would love to hear about it.
And one last reminder, if you are not already on the email list, go on over and sign yourself up. Sign yourself up for the resources list, and then you’ll get the email tomorrow about the huge, wonderful discount on the ready to remodel program and ready to remodel, plus which is going to be available only to the folks who are signed up on the email list and only tomorrow until next year, maybe or not.
Who knows. Anyway, have a lovely weekend. Have some fun scrolling through the photos of beautiful public housing projects in their youth and let me know what you think I was.