J. S. Fuerst - Public Housing in Europe and America

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: HOUSING POLICY AND HOME OWNERSHIP

Volume 6

PUBLIC HOUSING IN EUROPE AND AMERICA

Edited by
J. S. FUERST

First published in 1974 by Croom Helm Ltd

This edition first published in 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1974 Croom Helm Ltd

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-64519-9 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-313856-3 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-67895-1 (Volume 6) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-313329-2 (Volume 6) (ebk)

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Edited by J. S. FUERST

First published 1974

1974 by Croom Helm Ltd

Croom Helm Ltd, 2-10 St Johns Road, London SW11

ISBN 0 85664-053-0

Printed in Great Britain

by Ebenezer Baylis & Son Ltd

The Trinity Press, Worcester, and London

Bound by G. & J. Kitcat Ltd, London

It has been estimated that man, in the temperate zones, spends about 80 per cent of his lifetime in relatively large containersin residential and non-residential structures. It is mainly in these containers that he performs the various functions that fill his life spacework, play, education, religion, sleep, etc. Moreover, his containers, primarily his housing, provide him with securityprotection against inclement weather, ravages of nature and depredations of fellow men. Yet throughout the world, in the economically advanced as well as in the developing areas, large housing deficits are to be found, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Especially is this true for low and moderate income groupswhich include the preponderant proportion of the population in the less developed nations. This is the case, however, even in the United States, the most affluent of all nations.

The economically advanced countries have, for more than a century in some instances (England, France, Germany, Denmark and Sweden), been attempting to improve the situation for the ill-housed by various forms of government intervention, direct and indirect. In the United States, possessed with its frontier traditions of self-reliance, independence, and resistance to the welfare state, government did not begin to play a significant role in attempting to improve the housing of its poor until the depression of the 1930s. Although successive housing enactments in the USA have increasingly promised much, relatively little has been accomplished through government action on behalf of the ill-housed. Moreover, as has become increasingly clear, what has been done in respect of public housing in the United States has ranged from the inadequate to the disastrous.

Mr Fuerst in this volume presents a comprehensive review of social housing programmes in Europe and in the United States. It is an informative work for everybody throughout the world interested in social housing, and must reading for all those in the United States concerned with finding new directions away from the public housing morass into which this nation has blundered.

I have been associated with public housing since 1946. At that time, there were already great difficulties in the way of the programme: hostile local communities; antagonistic real estate and banking groups; and, of course, the ever present racial prejudice with which we had to contend. Nevertheless, the programme in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and many more cities hobbled along under a group of well-meaning, and in many cases able, executive directors and commissioners. By 1955, however, the number of good authorities dwindled to a handful, and the programme was on its way to becoming all-black, segregated, high-rise, and poverty-oriented with the seeds of its ultimate destruction evident.

Around this time my active participation in the programme was lessened because I went into private business where I remained for some fifteen years. During this period I continued to be deeply interested in public housing generally, and specifically in programmes in New York, Puerto Rico and Pittsburgh, where the programme was still vital, though winding down and I also followed the programmes in many other countries. I visited Europe, Israel, Puerto Rico to evaluate the programmes in action, and I observed how mistakes that we in the United States had made were frequently being avoided in Europe. Where basic mistakes were made, they were more often rectified because there was less built-in antagonism to public enterprise. It has always seemed to me that we in the United States have been extremely parochial about utilising the contributions of other countries, at least in our public enterprises if not our private ones. We report their activities in our periodicals or news media, but we utilise their techniques infrequently.