Announcing: Modern Housing for the 21st Century
A new, biweekly newsletter about social housing, both at home and abroad.
If you know me well, you know how much I love Catherine Bauer, the New Deal-era urban planner, houser, and labor organizer whose 1934 manifesto, Modern Housing, called convincingly for the end of speculative practices in the American real estate market 90 years ago.
In the nine decades since Modern Housing’s publication, and particularly in the six decades since Bauer’s untimely death in 1964, real estate speculation, rent-gouging, and overall financialization of the housing market have accelerated at a breakneck speed. As the federal government withdrew its investments in creating and preserving affordable homes, housing in America gradually transformed into an investment, or an asset, rather than a place where people lived. While this process has benefitted some — the white people who bought homes using federally-backed mortgages, slumlords, and for-profit developers — tenants and the working class have been left behind to struggle to find a decent place to live. In recent years, the costs of housing have skyrocketed more than ever. And as I’ve written in Next City, many in housing and planning circles have turned to Bauer’s work for ideas on how to resolve this crisis— policy proposals like the Social Housing Development Authority in New York State closely mirror many of her suggestions.
I believe that Bauer’s time, and perhaps more accurately, public and social housing’s time, has come — and I’m thrilled to be starting a biweekly newsletter writing about the path towards public and social housing from New York to Nairobi inspired by her work in Modern Housing. The first several essays will focus primarily on New York and the United Kingdom, including an essay that will be released on Substack later this week on how housing is driving the “cost of living crisis” in the U.S. and the U.K. Later essays this summer will focus on social housing projects I visited this April in London and Edinburgh, as well as developments I’ll be touring next week in Berlin and Amsterdam.
If you have suggestions, questions, or anything you’d like to learn more about, please reach out! I’m excited for this project and more than open to suggestions.
-Katelin