Opinion | How to Fix the Housing Crisis: Look to WWII

In a housing crisis that has now stretched across two decades, Americans have spent years arguing about the local regulations governing what and where people can build. Should suburbs allow homeowners to add garage apartments? Should cities continue setting aside land for parking spaces? Should it be easier to approve the construction of apartment towers?

These are important debates, but they also reveal how narrow our imagination has become.

Millions are struggling to afford rent or buy a home. Policy responses thus far have mostly amounted to crossing out onerous rules in the hope that profit-minded developers will then build more housing. Even Congress’s newly pblocked bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act focuses mostly on streamlining regulations to stimulate more private building. The act includes many important reforms and is an excellent start, but it does not go nearly far enough to address the scale of the problem.

We forget that America once confronted a housing crisis with far more urgency and ambition. As World War II raged across the globe, millions flooded into industrial centers to build ships, tanks and airplanes. Workers slept in trailers, cars and overcrowded rooms, and rents skyrocketed. Housing shortages became so severe that they threatened the war effort itself. So the federal government responded by treating housing as critical national infrastructure.

Washington reformed mortgage markets to allow more people to borrow more money. It subsidized rental housing and capped rents. It experimented with prefabricated construction techniques to reduce building costs and speed production. In Virginia, for example, the government tried a new building process that involved spraying a concrete mixture onto spherical balloon forms, creating bubble houses that went up quickly and minimized the use of scarce war material.

And, crucially, the government directly built housing itself. It converted hotels and school buildings into apartments and partnered with leading architects and planners to design new forms of housing to foster community engagement and improve workers’ quality of life. Reformers advocated designs that could have had an enduring impact on postwar housing, planning entire neighborhoods with new kinds of homes that offered models for the future.

In Pittsfield, Mblock., the Federal Works Agency enlisted Frank Lloyd Wright, who proposed a “cloverleaf” design that relied on low-cost, prefabricated materials. These attached four-apartment structures were arranged in geometric patterns to create both privacy and community, with rooftop sun decks, play spaces for children, and garages tucked into the center of each building. The unusual design also allowed for shared building systems that were more efficient. From above, the cloverleaf homes looked almost organic and were an alternative to the single-family houses that private developers were primarily building.

Not everyone embraced these efforts. Neighbors objected to numerous housing projects, particularly those for Black workers in segregated communities, and private real estate interests didn’t want to compete with the government. Groups like the Chamber of Commerce argued that the best thing the government could do to address the housing crisis was to finance private development and otherwise to stay out of the way. When the United States finally entered the war, President Roosevelt capitulated to the more conservative voices. The government pulled back from most of its innovative programs to concentrate on market-focused solutions favored by industry. Most significantly, it shifted its building agenda to temporary housing.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s cloverleaf design was never built. The temporary structures the government constructed after 1942 were mostly trailers or were made from cheap, inferior material. The shoddy results discredited the notion that the government could play a direct role in housing.

Still, America’s aggressive response to the housing crisis ranks among its greatest achievements. The government ultimately produced nearly a million new and converted war housing units, while private developers added roughly a million more. Even though the government retreated from its most ambitious plans, war housing still triggered bold ideas to model new ways of living, new manufacturing techniques and new forms of cooperative or mutual ownership, where residents bought shares of their schools, libraries, recreational facilities and stores, making home owning more affordable and governance more participatory.

According to the historian Kristin Szylvian, 37 of these mutual housing blockociations built by the Roosevelt administration still existed some 75 years later. From Pennypack Woods in Philadelphia to Walnut Grove in South Bend, Ind., those communities remain vibrant and close-knit. Atchison Village in Richmond, Calif., describes itself as a “modest residential oasis,” and many mutual housing neighborhoods have stayed affordable while proving more resilient than surrounding areas.

Today we face another crisis. Researchers estimate that we have a nationwide housing shortfall of at least four million homes, twice what was created for the war effort, and more than Roosevelt ever sought to build during the war. Yet we continue to rely overwhelmingly on a single policy response: deregulation.

Zoning reform can fix some problems, but it will not solve this crisis. Developers do not always build enough housing even in less regulated places. Many other factors — like the cost of new roads, power and water, of financing, labor and building supplies, not to mention the effects of a housing market that is often driven by Wall Street investors instead of homeowners and tenants — all shape what gets built and for whom.

The current focus on zoning reform as the primary policy response is the product of an uneasy alliance between political conservatives promoting free market solutions and progressives who are concerned about housing costs, especially for the poor. They share the goal of producing more housing, but if they insist that zoning reform is the only solution, it hobbles the range of responses we should be discussing.

The wartime experience suggests something many modern policymakers seem reluctant to admit: Markets often need active public direction, especially during emergencies. The government can subsidize factory-built and modular housing. It can build the roads, schools, parks and power needed to support new development. It can help train electricians and plumbers. It can convert underused commercial properties into apartments. It can support nonprofit and cooperative ownership models that keep housing affordable. It can blockume risks and support innovation that private developers will not, including in new building techniques and technologies.

And yes, in some places, government can build housing directly.

That idea now sounds radical only because decades of political rhetoric have taught Americans to treat any robust public role in housing as suspect or “socialist.” Ironically, many of the same accusations were hurled during World War II

The problem today is not simply a failure of policy. It is a failure of political imagination. During World War II, the country understood that housing was not just another commodity. It was essential infrastructure for a functioning society.

We should remember that lesson now.

Source photographs: Forest Products Laboratory, via National Forest Service Library; Farm Security Administration, via New York Public Library; Marjory Collins/Farm Security Administration, via Library of Congress

Christopher Serkin and Daniel Sharfstein are professors at Vanderbilt Law School.

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