“Housing for, of, and by Workers”

Revisiting Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the fight for Modern (Public) Housing

Editor’s note: this is the first in a run of three essays on the question of the professional and housing crisis. In this essay, Arielle Lawson recovers Catherine Bauer’s political program, which at times betrayed her own position as part of a rarified group of professional reformers. Bauer’s theory that successful non-market housing solutions could only be realized through the organization of workers to demand them should be considered, alongside her ‘failed’ public housing legislation, a critical part of the Housers’ legacy. Next week: “A Manifesto on Housing” by Alice Armstrong, Meghan McAllister, Heather Dunbar, Ashton Hamm and Alodie Girmann for The Architecture Lobby.

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BY ARIELLE LAWSON

Public housing has a complicated history in the US. Today it is often portrayed as a political, economic and social failure: a top-down system of control — at best patronizing, and at worst, a racist system of government-sponsored segregation. Ultimately a place of last resort, its current falling apart conditions are taken as a sign of the inevitable failure of government “intervention” in the market. Yet the fact that thousands of people still spend years on a waitlist for a falling apart building — and keep fighting to defend their homes as they crumble around them — represents a much stronger indictment of the failures and inadequacies of our housing system as a whole. Today’s narrative of public housing’s “failure” not only conveniently deflects from the real role of government in upholding a two-tier housing system — subsidizing homeownership above all else, while continuously targeting and undermining the barest social safety net it offers — it leaves out the larger framework of the housing crisis itself and, perhaps most importantly, the varied struggles of how public housing was (and continues to be) imagined, enacted and fought for. 

As championed by its early advocates — informally known as the “Housers” — during the early 20th century, public housing was seen as the only real solution to addressing the housing crisis. Pointing to the inherent limits of a profit-driven market to ever meet the needs of poor, working class and even many middle class Americans, they argued that only government had the power and also the responsibility of meeting the true scale of the crisis through the direct provision of public housing. Though a marginalized interest within the actual implementation of public housing policy, and today often overlooked or dismissed as an “idealist” group of reformers or detached professionals, I argue that the Housers, and especially the efforts of Catherine Bauer and the union-backed Labor Housing Conference, provided a deeply grounded rationale and political vision — ultimately outlining a system and strategy for holistically democratizing housing — which remains incredibly relevant today. 

Returning to this early period of public housing history leading up to the 1937 Housing Act provides an important context in which to situate and understand these broader dynamics and simultaneously “recover” alternative models and organizing efforts that envisioned the transformative potential of public housing. Focusing on the work of Catherine Bauer and the Labor Housing Conference in particular demonstrates a much fuller picture of the underlying ideas, values, and coalitional organizing involved that are today too often missing from the picture. As a strategic attempt to intervene in the debate of market-based “solutions” to the housing crisis — and increasingly government's role in underwriting market profitability through subsidizing individual homeownership — they fought for an alternative, collective "American Dream.” Calling on government to directly address the crisis through sponsored housing production, their model for “modern housing” was an explicitly universalist policy aiming to provide high quality, non-speculative housing at the community scale to meet the needs of a large sector of the American public while creating good union jobs in the process. 

Bringing together new coalitions of progressive architects, planners and labor unions with the goal of mobilizing “experts” but most importantly building real grassroots pressure of workers and consumers, they pushed for housing as a “public utility” — planned, democratically governed by workers and residents, and with ample community amenities — beyond what they saw as the growing speculative chaos of suburbanization and individual homeownership. While their demands were not ultimately realized in the final implementation of public housing, the Housers’ rationale, objectives and even strategies — their forms of organizing, advocacy, coalition-building — for a more equitable and democratic housing system remain as important lessons as we address the ongoing housing crisis, the lasting racial injustices of the homeownership model, and the precarious future of public housing today.

Beyond the old pattern of reform: Catherine Bauer’s “Modern Housing”

While not professionally educated in the field, Catherine Bauer became one of the most influential and representative “Housers” of the New Deal era. As a prolific writer and “super-connector, spanning many worlds,”¹ she played an important role in promoting and mobilizing for government supported housing across a wide range of audiences. Published in 1934, her book Modern Housing was a key intervention in the housing debate, providing an in-depth account of European government-sponsored housing projects to make the case for the necessity and potential of a similar model of “modern housing” provision in the United States. Connecting a critical analysis of the inherent structural failures of private housing and associated land speculation with new architectural and planning ideas circulating in Europe, she took on the issue of housing from a holistic perspective, envisioning a systemic intervention that would change the design, role and value of housing in society and in turn reshape basic tenets of the existing social and economic order.² 

Explicitly in contrast to the inadequacies of the speculative (capitalist) system, she advocated for housing to be treated as a “planned, public utility.”³ Combining new scales of production as well as design and planning, this “modern housing” would represent “a new standard of human environment, and a new technique for achieving it.”⁴ Building on examples from Europe, the “unit” of housing was envisioned from a comprehensive community perspective that went beyond material shelter to ultimately providing a “place to live” — including communal amenities, social infrastructure and the active involvement of residents. While providing an in-depth historical, economic and technical analysis rooted in a design and planning context and rationale, Bauer pragmatically recognized the residents themselves and the demand for housing as ultimately key. This was both ideologically and strategically grounded, as she saw the critical political necessity of grassroots stakeholders and collective action for any social progress. As she summarized: “There will never be any realistic housing movement until the workers and the consumers and the unemployed themselves take a hand in the solution.”⁵ Elevating housing’s unique socio-spatial political potential, Bauer’s vision of “modern housing” outlined a democratization of housing at the macro-economic level as well as through the infrastructural and social scale explicitly in contrast to the dominant individualistic framework. She concludes her book with a pointed comment, “If only a small part of the vast energy which was once directed toward individual home-ownership were now organized to demand a realistic program of modern housing — the best dwellings that planners can plan and that labor and materials can build (and we have an abundance of all three) — then there would be an American housing movement indeed.” ⁶ 

Beyond Paper Plans: Building a Workers Movement

Beyond an academic or theoretical level, Catherine Bauer also identified the “method of attack” that “modern housing” would need in order to be successful: an organized political demand on the part of workers and consumers that would be “strong enough to over-balance the weight of real estate and allied interests.” Positioned within the architecture and planning world herself, she played an important role in bridging across silos and centering this social imperative. Noting that it had often been the “neutrality” of reformers and experts that has stood in the way of actual progress, she laid out the necessity of mobilizing and leveraging “expertise” in coalition with a real grassroots political constituency. Writing for the MoMA housing exhibit of 1934 with many other housing experts of the time, Bauer put forward a call to action, titled “Housing: Paper Plans, or a Workers Movement,” that outlined this rationale and a path forward from her position with the newly founded Labor Housing Conference, a union-backed lobbying effort to campaign for a national housing policy based on the principles of modern housing. 

Figure 1: Cover of 1934 MoMA exhibition catalog depicting the Siemensstadt Housing Development in Berlin, designed by Walter Gropius. The photo was taken from Bauer’s newly-published Modern Housing.

As she wrote: “a whole World's Fair could be constructed out of paper covered with irrefutable proof that ‘housing’ is both necessary, logical and desirable,” yet the housing crisis persists. She recognized this problem as not about lack of facts or technical planning, then, but about real political power to make change, especially since at the scale of change needed “bitter and organized opposition is not only unavoidable but perfectly natural.” As she asks: “Where can the motive power needed to put such measures into practice be found? It cannot come from disinterested public-spirited citizens, most certainly, nor yet from some little group of experts sitting in a Washington office. But it will come — and it is coming —from those who are the most directly and vitally interested, families who need better houses to live in and workers who need work building those houses.” She argued that labor was the only organized body in the U.S. that could take this on and that “the trade unions must take the lead in making the demand for better housing effective.”⁷

Joining forces with the small team of progressive architects and union organizers connected to the union-built Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia and “self-tasked with organizing a workers’ housing movement,” Catherine Bauer switched from researching and writing to organizing and lobbying efforts with the Labor Housing Conference. Officially endorsed by the American Federation of Labor, the Labor Housing Conference was a small but ambitious project to build a real working class housing movement. By connecting local labor chapters and developing a unified message, they strove to mobilize a base of grassroots support to lobby for a national housing policy of union-built government-sponsored worker housing projects. The involvement of organized labor was not just seen as a way to pressure government, but as critical in creating an effective program overall by democratizing public housing. As Bauer wrote: “there can be only one reliable means of insuring that public utility housing be carried out in the real interests of workers and consumers. Namely, that bona fide workers' and consumers' representatives must be delegated real power and responsibility in every department of the housing operation, from surveys and policies straight through to administration.” ⁸

A New Model of Housing: the Carl Mackley Houses

Though politically ambitious, the “modern housing” model endorsed by the Labor Housing Conference was grounded in and inspired by on the ground experiments taking place at that time, including perhaps most importantly the Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia. Bringing together a unique intersection of progressive collaborators and supporters — from the architecture and planning community to the labor movement and from within government — the project aspired not only to provide affordable worker housing but ultimately, as one of the architects wrote, “to establish standards of living in a new mode of living quite different from what individual speculative activity has created.”⁹

Undertaken by the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers, the Carl Mackley Houses was one of the first housing projects funded through the Works Progress Administration’s new Housing Division. Growing out of the “new unionism” movement, the Hosiery workers followed the lead of the Amalgamated union in New York City — that had constructed cooperative worker apartment building in the 1920s — to build their own high quality and affordable worker housing.¹⁰ Designed by architects Oscar Stonorov and Alfred Kastner, who had both immigrated from Europe, the project incorporated the aesthetics and social amenities of European public housing to promote an intentional communal atmosphere. Based on a survey of workers' needs and wants, the facilities included a central swimming pool (one of the most requested features!) as well as roof terrace laundries and play areas, a kindergarten and childcare, cooperative stores, an auditorium and carpentry and craft rooms. In particular by focusing on these new collective amenities and the social potential of the physical environment, they “believed that multifamily dwellings could become a part of the American dream in housing.”¹¹ 

In response to the growing dominance and ideal of homeownership (even among workers), which seemed to “reinforce the privatism of US political culture,” this project represented a concerted effort to embody and advance an alternative. Rather than houses serving as “fortresses of individualism,” to quote Storonov, these organizers focused on collective amenities and shared (social) ownership. As Radford summarizes: “They wanted to create environments that would allow first-hand experiences of what they viewed as the advantages of the collective provision of goods...the group saw new forms of housing as a step towards creating a better kind of modern industrial society — one able to diminish the power of the market over key spheres of life.”¹² Likewise, this project was also a realization of the early progressive aspiration of the PWA Housing Division itself, which strove to “make the most of the opportunity to learn how to build a community of the spirit as well as one of brick and stone,” in the words of one of its directors.¹³

While how this all played out in implementation was much more complicated, the grassroots spirit still carried through the project. One resident’s editorial in the first edition of the tenant newspaper stressed the importance of continued participation and possibility: “For our community is not merely a new fangled housing scheme benevolently bestowed by an allegedly friendly government. Rather, it represents the efforts of a progressive trade-union in conjunction with non-profit taking effort of a few inspired individuals to exploit every possible method of improving the living standards of the great mass of workers and kindred groups.”¹⁴

As a model and inspiration for the Catherine Bauer and the Labor Housing Conference, the Carl Mackley Houses represented a pragmatic and implementable form of “modern housing.” Demonstrating a democratization of housing production as well as design and function, it also provided a core group of supporters and pointed towards a broader strategic coalition of stakeholders. Even while this was a part of a comparatively small scale undertaking, Bauer believed that these kinds of model projects could give “incipient radicals a more concrete idea of what they are fighting for.”¹⁵ Ultimately, as the progressive aspirations of those involved in the project demonstrated, the hope was for a much broader systemic transformation that would prioritize social values over that of the market. As friend and collaborator, Lewis Mumford declared “...a far more radical departure than government loans and government subsidies for the lower paid workers must be made: nothing less than a revolutionary shift in the distribution of income and wealth and a readjustment of the entire productive mechanism so as to ensure the production of vital goods in their order of importance.”¹⁶ For these progressive reformers, housing was an important point of intervention and means towards broader transformative and redistributive goals.

Figure 2: Carl Mackley Houses, photographed in 2010, source: wikipedia.

A Two-Tiered System: Public Housing Realities

Ultimately these struggles over government-supported housing represented larger fights over the role of government and the relationship to the market, the rights of citizenship and ultimately models of democracy and the “American Dream.” As JoAnn Argersinger writes, “Both critics and advocates of public housing drew from international experiences and imagery in positioning the home as a constitutive feature of citizenship in American democracy.”¹⁷ In the face of increasing government support of the private housing market and promotion of homeownership such as the policies of the FHA and even (racist) propaganda campaigns like President Hoover’s “Better Homes in America,” the supporters of “modern housing” were fighting for a unified public policy that would represent the best interests of the majority of Americans through decommodified and democratized housing.¹⁸ To correct a common misconception, public housing was not controversial because it represented governmental “intervention” in the housing market, but rather because it was the first to advocate for an alternative to the supremacy of the market.  

While the 1937 Housing Act passed, launching the United States Housing Authority and public housing did in fact end up getting developed, it was compromised from the beginning. Real estate interests and the growing conception of homeownership as the “American Dream,” effectively undercut the New Deal legislation of the Housing Act. The Labor Housing Conference itself clearly laid out the concerns. As they included a letter to their 70 local labor housing committees: “The danger is now that the sentiment for public low-rent housing will be diverted by the administration through pressures from the real-estate and financial interests to a program which will sound like worker’s housing, but will in effect benefit only banks, private builders, and non-union labor.”¹⁹ As Madden and Marcuse conclude, “The public provision of housing was used by the state as a tool to achieve other goals.”²⁰ Ultimately set up to support, not compete with private housing, this sidelined and undermined the key concerns and social objectives of the Housers. 

In place of Bauer’s democratic vision, the government introduced a two-tiered racist system of housing welfare programs. Government-backed mortgages and tax breaks subsidized homeownership for white people — propping up the increasingly speculative housing market — while public housing was a limited and austere option for the poor tied to slum clearance measures.²¹ This divided its base of support and often contributed to displacing the people it was meant to help. Reflecting back in her highly influential article from 1957, titled the “Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” Catherine Bauer herself critiqued and recognized the limitations and failures of public housing as it is played out. While noting how its original social vision had been opposed and undermined, she also points to its continued lack of a broad and mobilized base of grassroots support that she knew to be critical: “public housing, after more than two decades, still drags along in a kind of limbo, continuously controversial, not dead but never more than half alive.”²² Particularly as subsidized private homeownership became the ticket to the white middle class, the racialization and stigmatization of public housing correspondingly intensified and the democratic vision of a broad working class coalition for modern housing was never able to be realized. 

Conclusion: Housing Strategies and Lessons Learned

Over 80 years since the original Housing Act of the New Deal, revisiting the early history of and vision for public housing provides an opportunity to better understand the process, lessons and limitations from this transformative period. Representing both a substantial step forward in formalizing a public federal housing program, the concessions given simultaneously cemented it into a marginalized and inferior relative position as homeownership and the government support of the private market truly carried the day. This conflicting legacy of public housing within a two tiered housing system continues to demonstrate not that public housing in the United States failed, but that we never truly gave it a chance to succeed.

While the transformative dimensions of their ideals were never fully realized, there’s a lot to learn from the Housers’ efforts that today are too often overlooked. Their work both points to the challenge of what is truly needed to be effective in providing housing in the context of a racist and capitalist housing market (actively supported and upheld by the state) and the overall scale of the oppositional forces at play, but also importantly outlines the transformational potential of housing and the continued faith in (and necessity of) the collective power of people to realize it. 

In looking back at the vision, ambition and strategies of Catherine Bauer and the Labor Housing Conference in particular, these efforts emphasized a systemic reimagining and transformation of housing in society: through strategic pressure and organizing using the power of government to ensure the provision of shelter based on need, rather than the speculations of the market. As Bauer’s work demonstrates, the overarching goal was to decommodify and democratize housing from production and management to design and function. This vision of “modern housing” was importantly framed as a comprehensive and democratic program, associating it with a larger vision and mandate of social, political and economic rights that make up an alternative “American Dream.” More broadly, they recognized housing as a strategic node within a larger capitalist system — as a centerpiece of its continued growth and as a demonstration of it’s core (il)logic and inherent inefficiencies in serving people’s actual needs and overall welfare. In this way housing production was uniquely tied to and a part of a much broader political strategy and vision that could directly and powerfully connect issues of labor, social reproduction, ideas of publicness and relationship to the state through the concrete medium of housing.

As we continue to face the acceleration of the housing crisis and the failures of the market in adequately meeting our most basic human needs, public housing remains a critical and too often overlooked part of the conversation. In the context of an increasingly inequitable, financialized and privatized housing market, the historical trajectory, strategic analysis, and ambitious vision of early public housing advocates — and the stakes of what they were up against — are more relevant and needed than ever. 

1.  Penner, Barbara. “The (Still) Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.” Places Journal, October 1, 2018.

2.  Penner, Barbara. Intro of Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) viii

3.  Ibid, xvi.

4.  Bauer, Catherine. Modern Housing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

5.  Ibid, 255.

6. Ibid.

7. Bauer in  Aronovici, Carol, ed. “America Can't Have Housing.” Pub. for the Committee on the Housing Exhibition by The Museum of Modern Art (1934), 22.

8. Ibid, 23.

9. Radford, Gail. Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124.

10. Ibid, 115.

11.  Sandeen, Eric J. “The Design of Public Housing in the New Deal: Oskar Stonorov and the Carl Mackley Houses.” American Quarterly 37, no. 5 (1985): 645-646.

12.  Radford, 123-4.

13. Robert Kohn in Aronovici, Carol, ed. “America Can't Have Housing.” Pub. for the Committee on the Housing Exhibition by The Museum of Modern Art, 1934, 14.

14. Qtud. in Radford, 136.

15. Radford, 102.

16. Lewis Mumford in “America Can't Have Housing,” 18.

17.  Argersinger, Jo Ann. “Contested Visions of American Democracy: Citizenship, Public Housing, and the International Arena.” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 6 (August 2010): 792–813. 

18. Radford, 59.

19.  United States Housing Act of 1936. Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor. Washington: U.S. Govt., 1936, 50.

20.  Madden, David, and Peter Marcuse. In Defense of Housing: the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso, 2016. 127.

21.  Penner, Barbara. “The (Still) Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.” Places Journal, October 1, 2018.

22. Ibid.