This chapter delves into the challenges faced by the PWA's Housing Division in creating affordable housing during the transition to permanent public housing, including issues with funding, land acquisition, and political influences. It explores the contrast between slum clearance and greenfield development approaches, the intertwined relationship between American housing and slum clearance in the 20th century, and the shift towards affordable housing built by non-profit corporations. The chapter also discusses efforts to address the housing crisis in Harlem during the 1930s through grassroots militancy, elite responses, and the importance of creating mixed-income public developments.
Featuring Gail Radford on her classic book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the struggle to make the American housing system a radically social one. In place of the two-tier system that won out, Bauer and her allies proposed a massive federally-backed system of noncommercial housing that would appeal to and house the majority of Americans.
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Check out Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) by Eric Blanc haymarketbooks.org/books/1907-revolutionary-social-democracy