Nancy H. Kwak - A World of Homeowners (Historical Studies of Urban America)

We have built up in the minds of our peopleand of the worldthe belief that the American system makes it possible for all to live at least at the American minimum standard of decency.

Raymond M. Foley, administrator of the US Housing and Home Finance Agency (1950)

At the end of World War II, American advisors began urging countries around the world to embrace the ideal of mass homeownership. More accessible, mortgage-driven homeownership could simultaneously strengthen democratic governments and capitalism, they argued. The war had decimated some cities and left others with an excess of newcomers and a shortage of building materials. More housing, better housing, was needed everywhere. With large-scale national reconstruction plans in the works, what better time was there to rethink housing policy at the highest levels?

US dominance in the postwar global economy led traveling American advisors and experts to believe they could exert greater influence over the architecture of nascent housing industries around the world. In building a new international language of homeownership, however, these men and women did notindeed, could notimpose their own ideas wholesale. Newly independent or transitional states hardly welcomed another imperial power, and American experts themselves did not concur on all points. Rather, local implementation reflected processes of negotiation. At times, participants in this negotiation were highly unequal, as in cases where US aid money outmuscled local or national considerations; other times, Americans proved surprisingly powerless to implement their ideas on foreign soil. National prejudices could shape policy, but ideas also flowed readily across state lines, with actors observing best practices and learning from each other without regard for national origin. Misinformation and individual caprice played equally important roles in shaping the evolution of global housing finance. The commodification of homes, the legitimization of some forms of ownership over others, the transformation of housing into investment vehicles, and the expansion of global management of housing credit and debt were not inevitable steps in the evolution of capitalism, but rather the products of specific actors and institutions yielding highly variable outcomes.

If housing and financing programs varied greatly from place to place in actual implementation, Americans were nonetheless highly successful in one important regard: they persuaded many governments to push local, undocumented land uses to the margins and to consider formal homeownership as a long-term goal for the masses. In urging mass homeownership, American advisors often pushed at an open door. Given the practical limits of land and money, many governments willingly accepted that increased access to bank-based, state-regulated homeownership could build up a middle class which would, in turn, stabilize politics while nurturing local building trades and strengthening labor markets. This interconnected set of ideals and practical needs brought together ideas about democracywhether through widespread access to a consumer economy, a more diffuse sense of equality, or specifically anticommunist dogmawith a very specific, modern version of debt-driven, state-regulated ownership that gave at least the illusion of growing affluence and security. This was mass ownership of housing, but it was also something more: it had positive implications for the character of the state facilitating this sort of consumption. Citizens would surely applaud a government that installed a more modern, homeowning society.

Mass homeownership also proved a critical building block for a larger, more pervasive American model of capitalism that connected open markets to democratic institutions by the early twenty-first century.