For anyone who is interested in the history of housing policy in the United States, Gail Radford is a treasure. Radford is an academic historian who is based at the University of Buffalo.
Radford’s book Modern Housing For America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era, is 25 years old. In it, she documents the state of the housing market in the years leading up to the Great Depression and the policy and funding responses that were part of the New Deal, which was crafted to support the country’s economic recovery.
Katherine Bauer is one of the key figures in Radford’s book. Bauer lobbied hard for a publicly funded housing that would house low and middle income U.S. residents1. Radford’s book traces the forces and events that turned Bauer’s vision of public housing for the lower and middle classes into the public housing program which houses the poorest of the poor and badly at that.
Today, echoing Katherine Bauer, housing advocates are again pushing for publicly funded housing in the United States that would house low and middle income residents2. Daniel Denvir, who writes for Jacobin is one of those advocates. He recently interviewed Radford about Modern Housing For America. Denvir values Radford’s keen analysis of the political and economic challenges that faced public housing advocates in the New Deal era. Denvir sees Modern Housing as very relevant to the current public housing campaign. Reading the interview, which is published in Jacobin, is a good way to decide whether to read Radford’s book:
New Deal–Era Leftists Tried to Win Beautiful Social Housing for the Masses
Footnotes
- For more about Katherine Bauer, try: Good Housing You Deserve? Not Possible By Capitalist Speculation
- Try, for example: As The World Reconsiders Social Housing Need, Faint USA Cries of ‘Us, Too!’
