Kwak, Nancy, 1973- author.

A world of homeowners : American power and the politics of housing aid / Nancy H. Kwak.

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2015]
©2015

328 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Historical studies of urban America

The first significant intervention by US officials into overseas housing programmes began in Puerto Rico in 1921 when the local government, backed by United Nations and US advisers, issued some 4,219 loans to rural peasants and urban labourers to allow them to build their own homes on subsidised land. In the 1930s and 1940s, an additional 10,000 building lots were provided in what "would become a globally significant technique known as land-and-utilities", Nancy Kwak writes. Supply the land and provide utilities, and it was possible to make it look as if anyone and everyone, given the chance, could pull themselves up by the bootstraps and become a homeowner. Public housing was also built on the island at the same time, but that and the subsidies needed to make the building of private housing possible were both downplayed. What mattered to the Americans was to spread a myth that people could house themselves and did not need governments to intervene. It mattered to the Americans deeply because they thought that the only alternative on offer was communism. In 1946, the US sent advisers to Manila, a congested city in which refugees lived in squalor. The advisers suggested that the Philippines follow Puerto Rico's lead, but modified those plans to include subsidising the building of housing for private rent. Some 64 years later, the UK's chancellor, George Osborne, introduced similar policies in the UK to subsidise building by private landlords. It has taken just under a lifetime for US policies designed to counter the "socialistic" housing policy of Britain in 1946, and to prevent such policies being copied worldwide, to come to Britain itself. Because of its inefficiencies, private housing has always required a huge amount of hidden state support. Land becomes hoarded; properties may not be well maintained or built. But in the McCarthyite US, public housing was deemed "a breeding ground for communists". In Latin America, Scandinavian housing experts explained that "housing is too important a commodity to be subjected to the same general market conditions as other goods", but the Americans ridiculed such a stance. The Cold War was fought with bricks and mortar, not just small, hot wars in poor places and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Privatisation began in Malaysia in the 1940s; in West Germany, Taiwan, Burma and South Korea in the 1950s; India in 1964; Jordan in 1965; Brazil in 1966; Guatemala and Nigeria in 1967; and the Philippines (again) in 1968. In the 1960s, the US granted loans to expand the private housing sectors in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. They began housing projects in Rhodesia, Zambia and Mali. They moved into Senegal in 1972, Botswana in 1973, Tanzania in 1974 and Kenya in 1975 - all the while spreading the American dream. A dream can travel quickly when backed up by so much state money and so many advisers. There were exceptions. Singapore quietly rejected privatisation in 1965. Kwak mentions Japan only once, and most of Europe was more resistant. But US advisers helped to privatise housing provision around the world, with dire effects in many places - effects that became truly obvious when the US housing market itself crashed, after peaking in 2006. This is a gripping global story, well told and meticulously referenced. Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder professor of geography, University of Oxford, and author of All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster (2014).
Is there anything more American than the ideal of homeownership? In this groundbreaking work of transnational history, Nancy H. Kwak reveals how the concept of homeownership became one of America's major exports and defining characteristics around the world. In the aftermath of World War II, American advisers urged countries to pursue greater access to homeownership, arguing it would give families a literal stake in their nations, jumpstart a productive home-building industry, fuel economic growth, and raise the standard of living in their countries, helping to ward off the specter of communism. A World of Homeowners charts the emergence of democratic homeownership in the postwar landscape and booming economy; its evolution as a tool of foreign policy and a vehicle for international investment in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s; and the growth of lower-income homeownership programs in the United States from the 1960s to today. Kwak unravels all these threads, detailing the complex stories and policy struggles that emerged from a particularly American vision for global democracy and capitalism. Ultimately, she argues, the question of who should own homes where-and how-is intertwined with the most difficult questions about economy, government, and society.

9780226282350 (cloth ; alk. paper)
022628235X (cloth ; alk. paper)
9780226598253 (paperback)
022659825X (paperback)
(ebook)
9780226282497

Home ownership United States History 20th century.
Home ownership Political aspects United States.
Housing policy United States.
Federal aid to housing United States History 20th century.
Federal aid to housing Political aspects United States.
Logement Politique gouvernementale États-Unis.
Aide de l'État au logement États-Unis Histoire 20e siècle.
Aide de l'État au logement Aspect politique États-Unis.
Federal aid to housing.
Home ownership.
Home ownership Political aspects.
Housing policy.
Wohneigentum
Wohnungspolitik
United States.
USA

History.

Historical studies of urban America.

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