“Modern Housing” begins with a history of the Depression-era housing crisis that will sound familiar to contemporary readers. The supposed prosperity of the nineteen-twenties masked rising rents, stagnant wages, and a significant shortage of low-income and middle-class housing. Only the “upper-third income group” could afford the new homes being built, Bauer writes. The problem, she argues, was not so much the real-estate industry as the basic function of the free market. The cost of housing is tied to the value of land, which is determined by “the most intensive”—which is to say, overcrowded—“future use to which a speculator estimates that the plot can be put.” The price of land thus reflects “the lowest housing standards permissible,” driving down standards of living even for the affluent, and consigning the poor to the slums. This is the basis of Bauer’s core argument, which is that housing must be decommodified. Good housing that is “available to the average citizen is not a ‘normal’ product of a capitalist society,” she writes.
The dwellings Bauer aspired to see in America, which she terms “modern housing,” must therefore be “non-speculative”: owned by public entities or nonprofit coöperatives. They must be affordable, with the help of government subsidies, to people on the lowest incomes, while also attracting middle-class residents, who will find them airier and more attractive than the free-market alternatives. That these groups should have access to equal amenities was axiomatic for Bauer. “If you start with sun and air and biological requirements, you cannot say that because this family has only half the income of that family, they should have only half as good an outlook or half as big a playground or half as much water or half a toilet,” she writes. Modern housing cannot be designed one building at a time but rather must be conceived as a town or neighborhood, a practice that controls costs while maximizing shared green space, granting “sunlight, quiet, and a pleasant outlook from every window.”
Such places existed, though not in America. During the twenties, while the U.S. doubled down on a laissez-faire notion of economic prosperity, European nations responded to a post-First World War housing shortage by building at least six million state-subsidized dwellings, four and a half million of which, by Bauer’s calculation, housed “about one seventh” of the families in England, Holland, Germany, and several other countries. (Some survive: more than sixty per cent of residents of Vienna live in social housing today.) The centralized planning of these communities was intended to be more than aesthetically pleasing. Bauer wrote that no modern housing development was complete without a nursery school, and probably also a café. As the historian Gail Radford notes in her classic study of New Deal housing policy, “Modern Housing for America,” Bauer would later promote these shared amenities in the hopes that they would form the basis of “cross-class coalitions” between residents, which could then be converted into political support for more modern housing.