The Mutual Housing Experiment

"Highlighting little known connections between New Deal visionaries, labor leaders, and modernist architects, Kristin Szylvian’s important book tells the story of an ingenious WWII-era housing initiative aimed at America’s middle-income families. Mutual Housing offered a new kind of homeownership based on cooperative principles, community design, and cutting-edge construction techniques. Szylvian presents engaging vignettes of the experimental communities, some still in existence, organized on this basis. The Mutual Housing Experiment is a must-read for everyone interested in the history of American housing policy and design, as well as everyone searching for solutions to the housing problems of today."
—Gail Radford, Professor of History, State University of New York at Buffalo, and author of Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era

"Kristin Szylvian has made an important contribution to the literature on the role of government housing betterment. She has produced a well-crafted study of the history of the Mutual Housing Movement that explains why this project that seemed so promising to some never came to full fruition despite strong support from unions and veterans groups. The Mutual Housing Experiment is an incredibly thorough study based on extensive research, well organized and effectively written. This book will become indispensable for those wanting a clearer understanding the tensions surrounding wartime housing policy."
—Robert B. Fairbanks, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington, and author of The War on Slums in the Southwest: Public Housing and Slum Clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, 1935-1965

"Szylvian treats readers to the fruits of her extensive research locating and piecing together the records of many government agencies and individuals...to tell the story of the mutual housing program during and immediately after WWII. The Federal Works Agency created the Mutual Plan, but the WWII housing crisis (the 1940s are an understudied era in housing policy) provided a critical opportunity for reformers committed to cooperative housing. Szylvian traces the origins of the Mutual Plan and then focuses on eight projects in five states.... Primarily, though, the author’s intent was to detail policy struggles and widespread lack of political support; mutual housing projects remained an 'experiment' rather than a stepping-stone to a new housing policy. The epilogue provides a look at a few of the communities today and includes statements from the residents themselves, emphasizing the connection between policy and people. Summing Up: Recommended."
—Choice

"Expanding on the complexity of federal housing policy, Kristin M. Szylvian examines experiments on the public housing side of federal policy during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in The Mutual Housing Experiment . In addition, Szylvian attaches the housing policy narrative to the life story of Lawrence Westbrook, an advocate whom today political scientists would call a policy entrepreneur.... Szylvian does great service...in tracking down the histories of the eight residential communities built under Westbrook’s Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division and the thirty-five mutual housing associations that still manage Roosevelt-era communities."
—American Historical Review

"Kristin M. Szylvian's meticulously researched study of the mutual housing movement from the New Deal to the 1950s provides rich insights into urban conditions of the time and national public policy debates. She illustrates ably that the movement for a national mutual housing program (with lodging built by the federal government and sold to resident-owned cooperatives) faced so many challenges that it is remarkable that any communities were built."
—Journal of American History

"The Mutual Housing Experiment, a valuable addition to the planning history literature, examines how this New Deal strategy evolved and how its residents have fared."
—Journal of the American Planning Association

"Professor Szylvian is to be congratulated for presenting a slice of housing history that many housing scholars and historians will find illuminating.... The book also reveals several nuggets of information that have been lost over the decades and that have contemporary relevance..... This book will be of interest to housing and urban historians, as well as to housing policy academics who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of a forgotten chapter of the housing story."
—Journal of Urban Affairs

"Kristin Szylvian’s book explores a little-known chapter in American public housing history. Her focus is a relatively small group of federally funded projects completed in the 1940s with the goal of cooperative, or mutual, ownership.... Overall, The Mutual Housing Experiment is impressively researched and carefully written. Szylvian’s detailed accounting of the course of mutual housing in the United States adds depth to our understanding of how midcentury housing policy was shaped, for better or worse."
—Ohio Valley History

"The growing affordability crisis should inspire a renewed interest in housing cooperatives, and this book can provide crucial historical context to help future initiatives avoid the pitfalls of past efforts. By excavating this often-forgotten history of mutual housing, the book demonstrates that other housing policy futures are possible—if our leaders would think boldly and carefully about how to enact them."
—Journal of Planning Education and Research

"The political era of the New Deal was nothing if not exceptional.... In conditions of crisis, politicians, experts, and labor organizers drew on both expertise and tacit knowledge to develop and test out new programmatic ideas. One such experiment, chronicled in Szylvian's excellent book, was the construction of cooperative housing under the auspices of the Federal Works Agency (FWA).... Szylvian's narrative forces us to reexamine the New Deal as a moment of government experimentation delimited by powerful market actors."
—Political Science Quarterly

"Thoroughly researched, richly documented, nicely illustrated, and effectively laced with oral history (a testimony to her rich background in public history), Szylvian brings what might have been a tedious administrative history to life. She believes in her subject and introduces a new hero to American housing history: Lawrence Westbrook. Her enthusiasm carries the narrative boldly forward. The book successfully rescues the history of mutual housing from a once stygian darkness."
—Buildings & Landscapes