As America wrestles with a historic housing shortage and affordability roadblocks, one urban planning expert believes the solution may lie in a little-remembered agency born more than a century ago during World War I.
The U.S. Housing Corp. (USHC) — established in 1918 — was created to solve a growing housing crisis in areas overwhelmed by an influx of workers.
“They took a very different approach where they really looked at the long term, and they said, ‘We don’t know how long the war is going to last. Let’s build these communities in a higher standard, even though it was a wartime effort,’” said Eran Ben-Joseph, professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“What I see in the story here is how there was a more central government kind of approach to build housing when there was time of crisis. But their approach was very, very different than what we’ve seen later on.”
The USHC’s existence was short-lived. But its long-term impact, according to Ben-Joseph, was substantial — and perhaps even instructive for today’s housing challenges.
Birth of modern residential planning
With housing desperately needed near shipyards, Congress authorized the USHC under the Department of Labor, long before there was a Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Nearly 100,000 people were housed in developments that were not temporary or generic but carefully planned residential neighborhoods with homes, parks, schools, stores and modern infrastructure.
“They made a point to hire local architects,” Ben-Joseph said. “(Local architects) know the type of housing, the type of climates, the material. The construction was local too. They would go to the site to do supervision. At that point, there never had been any kind of planning blueprint to do this. So they invented, in a way, the blueprint that we have today.”
Ben-Joseph’s research into the USHC began with a deceptively simple question: Why do American suburbs follow such uniform standards?
“I was surprised to see that in many cases, there were certain standards, like a street should be 50 feet wide or the sidewalk should be six feet minimum,” he said. “All of these things, what we call subdivision regulations, have shaped most of the country.”
After digging through archives, he traced these planning norms back to a 1918 street diagram labeled “United States Housing Corporation.”
“That was the earliest street section that I could find in the United States. It was drawn in that it could eventually end up being copied in so many instances by various cities and included in subdivision regulations,” he said. “That’s the story and what actually attracted me to the research.”
Beyond physical design, the agency pioneered processes and principles that are still foundational to planning today.
“This was the first time there was a coordinated effort to build housing by any large entities. Before it was always small developers here and there,” Ben-Joseph said. “There was very little coordination. So they had to basically establish all the standards that we today take for granted — street width, setback for building, the type of building and so on.
“They developed an incredible set of standards and codes of how to build these communities.”
Scope of USHC projects
Planning ranged from regional site layouts and block configurations to architectural features of individual homes and even the placement of street lamps.
Congress allocated $100 million (roughly $2.3 billion in today’s dollars), Ben-Joseph said.
Communities sprang up from Virginia to California. In Dayton, Ohio, a 107-acre site was developed with more than 800 homes, including detached houses, row houses, schools, shops and parks.
Ben-Joseph referenced areas such as Aberdeen, Maryland; Bremerton, Washington; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and Watertown, New York, that still contain USHC-built homes. Many of them are occupied today by residents who are unaware of their origins.
Migrant workers gravitating toward port towns in search of shipbuilding jobs played a large part in pushing for the USHC’s creation.
“They would come and work, and they had no place to house them,” Ben-Joseph said. “It was actually the mayors of a lot of these towns who went to D.C. and started to petition in Congress that they need to figure out to solve the housing crisis.”
The result was a government program that prioritized proximity to work, family stability and architectural quality.
“Most of these communities were in walking distance to the shipyards so that people could walk to work,” he said. “Instead of saying, ‘OK, we’re going to put up tents and build temporary housing, let’s solve it in a different way.’”
Lessons for today, hidden legacy
At a time when the U.S. faces critical housing shortages and a growing affordability crisis, Ben-Joseph believes that there’s much to learn from the USHC’s example — not just in terms of design but governance and finance as well.
“I think it’s more about the government supporting local,” he said. “It’s not the government trying to control and trying to do one fix for the whole country. Every place is very different.
“Sometimes, in times of war, in times of emergency — maybe we can argue we’re in the same kind of situation right now — there is a time for rethinking and doing things a little bit differently.”
Despite its influence, the USHC remains almost invisible in most histories of American housing policy. Ben-Joseph believes its classification as a wartime effort led scholars to overlook it.
He has since digitized many of the materials — including site plans and photographs — and made them available through his MIT website.
As he continues work on a forthcoming book, Ben-Joseph hopes more policymakers will take interest in the USHC’s blueprint for coordinated, equitable housing.
“The government can help subsidize it and endorse it, in terms of money and the approach,” he said. “There’s also more modern examples like the (Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991) and others, where the (the government) said, ‘We will not make a decision of where to put (improvements), but we can help in terms of subsidies or in terms of support.”
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