| The modern community housing movement of the 1920s and 1930s aimed at changing urban residential patterns in the United States in order to lower housing costs and increase neighborhood life. In part, this reform effort can be understood as the American expression of the international mass housing movement--characterized by a commitment to raising general living standards and concern for strengthening social bonds within large urban centers--which emerged in many of the industrial nations after World War I. In the United States the movement built on a number of native traditions of housing reform, and on previous attempts to create a greater sense of community.;The movement gained adherents in this country partly because, even in the midst of the prosperity of the 1920s, shelter conditions for large numbers of Americans were unsatisfactory and not improving much. In the early 1930s social and political conditions allowed for more radical initiatives in housing than before or since, and ideas associated with the modern community housing program influenced the design and administration of some publicly financed residential developments. The dissertation investigates how these reform ideas worked out in practice, both socially and architecturally, based on documentary evidence and oral history interviews with early residents in two prototypical housing complexes constructed in this period.;The first case study concerns the Carl Mackley Houses, a development sponsored by the Hosiery Workers Union in Philadelphia and constructed with funds loaned by the Public Works Administration (PWA). The second deals with the Harlem River Houses, built by the PWA in conjunction with the newly-formed New York City Housing Authority. The union housing had its roots in the "new unionism" of the 1920s; the Harlem development was a product of social movements initiated by urban African-Americans.;The study contains an analysis of the political forces which later pushed federal policies in another direction. It concludes with a discussion of the ways in which elements of the modern community housing program have remained influential, particularly in relation to efforts in the 1980s to improve the quality and expand the supply of affordable housing. |
