The secret weapon that fought the postwar housing shortage

Benamin Schneider: Hi, Professor Freeman. Thank you so much for making some time today. To start off, I think it would be really helpful if you could briefly define what garden apartments are because I think people might have different ideas about what it means. It’d be helpful to hear just your brief definition of this housing typology. Joshua Freeman: Yeah. I’m glad you asked because it is a confusing term, and a lot of people have either no idea what you’re talking about, or they think of it as something different than what I’m writing about. So what I’m writing about, the kind of garden apartments that I’m writing about are multi-family dwellings, typically two or three stories high, mostly built in the mid-20th century. And, very characteristically, either built around courtyards or positioned on sort of large sites with lots of open green space. They’re walk-up buildings. They typically don’t have any internal hallways but there are entranceways that give you access to two or four, maybe even six apartments. The term earlier on in the early-20th century was sometimes used to describe taller buildings — five and six story buildings built around courtyards. And it’s also, some people use the term when they talk about a garden apartment, they mean like an apartment in a single family home or a small building that opens directly onto the backyard. Like mother-in-law apartments. So it’s sometimes used that way. But that’s not what I’m writing about. Schneider: Let’s dig into the history a little bit. You write really beautifully about this sort of prehistory with the garden city movement in the UK and some of the early experiments with garden-style housing here in the States with the RPAA that was working on different radical new models of both architecture and financing housing. But to my reading, it seemed like the phenomenon really picked up starting in the ’20s when you have these big philanthropists getting interested in providing housing for the masses, and those are the initial garden apartment complexes as we might recognize them today that started to emerge. I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit about that early era, that 1920s philanthropic era and how those buildings were unique as compared to what would come a little bit later. Freeman: Well, this was the great surprise to me. I had no idea when I was talking about places with names like Glen Oaks Village, I had no idea that their roots lay in European radicalism. But I think I do show pretty convincingly in the book that the garden city movement in England and the tremendous growth of what was called social housing in continental Europe in the teens and ’20s had a huge influence on American housing reformers. Not on the broad public, who had no clue about any of this, but a relatively small group of active housing reformers who saw a tremendous need in the United States for housing. Many of them were very concerned with the problem of slums, urban congestion, and they were looking for a kind of model, and they looked to Europe and they saw that. And, as you mentioned, the early experiments in the 1920s were often philanthropic. They often followed a kind of model of self-limited profits. They were not seen as strictly charity, but they were seen as efforts to show that you could build what we would call affordable housing if you restricted your profits. The number tended to be six percent, imited dividends. Some of these were called garden apartments at the time, although it’s a slightly different usage than later becomes popular. These are five and six story buildings built around courtyards. And New York and Chicago were the centers of them. In New York, the key player here was John D. Rockefeller Jr. He took over a project that had been started by a union that wasn’t working up in the Bronx, which is up there called Thomas Garden Apartments. It’s on Grand Concourse, it’s worth visiting. And it’s built around a courtyard. It was designed by an architect named Andrew Thomas, and Rockefeller was so enamored with him, he named the project after him. And as was true of many of these projects, it was racially segregated. So that project was only for white residents. But Rockefeller decided to build a parallel project for Black residents, which is the Dunbar Houses in Harlem, which were quite a well-known project. In Chicago, you had the Marshall Field Apartments. Marshall Field was a department store heir. It’s similar, on a design level, in fact, that was designed by Andrew Thomas. The Rosenwald Garden Apartments, again, that was another department heir. So you had a bunch of these projects. The one that’s the closest precursor to what I’m writing about is Sunnyside here in New York because that’s a low-rise project. It was designed by Henry Wright and Clarence Stein, who from the architectural point of view, are really the key players in the development of the garden apartment. And it was sponsored by a limited- dividend corporation that was primarily designed to promote this model of housing as opposed to making money, and they were very influenced by the garden city idea. But garden cities were at least initially conceived of as kind of set off in the countryside. This, as the Sunnyside Gardens creators understood, was not really exactly that, but could you sort of apply that model to a more urban setting? It’s mostly two-story buildings built around courtyards, interior courtyards, in some cases front-facing courtyards. And it developed this model, the design model in which you keep a large part of the property as open space, shared communal open space. Half the people who moved into Sunnyside Gardens moved there from the Lower East Side of New York. And I think how dramatic a change that was, it’s a little hard for us to envision. People are coming from these unbelievably congested places. There are still backyard tenements. There are rooms with no windows still. If you ever go to the Tenement Museum, you get an example of what this is like. Sunnyside Gardens is meant to be a revolutionary replacement at least on a design level for that. And it became a kind of first step in the development of what would become the garden apartment. Schneider: Well, can you say a little bit more about the role of those very wealthy philanthropists in this kind of housing? I’m interested also just in light of our present moment where we are also living in a new Gilded Age where there’s some very wealthy people and I think people in the housing world have fantasized about them being more interested in housing. So I think in light of that, what caused that previous generation to care about this issue? Freeman: Yeah, I think for Rosenwald and Field and Rockefeller, it’s funny, they were philanthropists. They wanted to do good. They wanted to provide housing for people. But they also, I think it’s particularly true of Rockefeller, wanted to show that you didn’t need the state involved. There was no public housing in the United States in 1920s. But there was talk of it, particularly New York State. And they were opposed to an expansive government. They were anti-socialist. These were capitalists. Some of the sponsors of the philanthropic housing, they in a sense were trying to create demonstration projects that could show philanthropy could do this. Now, in the cases of those projects, they were initially quite successful, but when the Depression came along, in 1929, when the stock market crashed and it collapsed the economy, pretty quickly those projects got into big trouble, because tenants couldn’t afford the rent. And in some cases they suffered like the Marshall Field Houses in the North Side of Chicago, a lot of vacancies. And so in some ways they were seen by a lot of the housing people as proof that you need — exactly the story that the sponsors were trying to refute — that you needed the state involved. And even Marshall Field and Rosenwald sort of said that themselves in the face of this. So this was a model that is very important on a design level, on a level of like let’s see if we can make this happen, but it did not prove sustainable through hard economic times, nor could you really scale it up. So, with the beginning of the New Deal, I think there was much more support for an idea that had previously been pretty much off the table that the government’s gotta do it. Schneider: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about those New Deal experiments, or at that point they were less experiments and more full-fledged programs, that constructed a good deal of garden apartments. First you’ve got the Public Works Administration, and then you’ve got the US Housing Authority building public housing for moderate income people. And as it turns out, a lot of the housing that was built under both of those programs was garden apartments. So, I’m wondering if you could just gloss that story of these government programs and why they gravitated towards garden apartments, and how that fits into the broader narrative that maybe most people think of when they think of public housing in America. Freeman: You know, it’s a funny story in the sense that the origins of the mass state involvement with housing is not really primarily a concern about housing. It’s a concern about employment. There’s massive unemployment. A third of the country’s basically out of jobs. Particularly hard hit is the construction industry. Basically, no one’s building anything, so the entire industry collapses, as do people making steel and bricks and all the things you need to build housing. So, the government was very interested in getting people back to work and creating jobs, and one way to do that was to get the housing market going again. The New Deal never sets up one agency to do things. They set up five competing ones, and that’s what happens. The public housing part starts out as a small piece of a much, much larger employment program, the Public Works Administration, that was building bridges and building schools and building dams, but they had a little bit of a housing program as part of it. Their initial idea was we’ll provide very favorable financing for nonprofits, and they’ll actually build the housing. And they did sponsor a number of projects like that, some of which were garden apartments, some of which were very interesting. There’s one down in Philadelphia which I thought was fascinating called the Carl Mackley Houses, sponsored by a union. There’s one in St. Louis called Neighborhood Gardens. And these, by the way, these buildings are all still there, and you can go visit them. Schneider: Yeah, I’ve been to Mackley. And actually, just to cut in briefly, I’m particularly interested in why these government programs focused on garden apartments, or at least why the builders that were getting funding focused on that typology. Freeman: Well, some of these were people who were very influenced by the garden city movement, which was a whole social reform movement, but it was also a design movement, and it was very much, escape the overcrowded, congested slum. Raymond Unwin, who was the architect most associated with it, he had this phrase, I think it was something like, “Nothing gained by overcrowding,” or something like that. So, they were very committed to this idea of the restorative power of greenery, of open space, of good ventilation. Roosevelt himself was kinda into this. He was rural-oriented in a lot of ways. So there’s a whole kind of moral, aesthetic outlook. And then the other thing is that you could put them up quickly and cheaply. I mean, to be honest that’s a big piece of it too. So, they moved in that direction. But this initial model, which was a model that was widely used in Europe, which is you have the government, through financing and other assistance, have nonprofits build what was called social housing, which is housing that would be affordable to the typical working class family, that was actually very quickly abandoned for various reasons. It was sort of hard to scale up. The United States just didn’t have organizations and architects who knew about social housing, so no one was clamoring at the door. At least people who were clamoring at the door were not deemed to be very qualified to build this stuff. And also, Harold Ickes, who was the head of the Interior Department but also ran the Public Works Administration, he sort of thought, “Wait, we shouldn’t be reactive to other people bringing us plans. We should come up with our own idea and just try and build it.” So, that’s what they started doing, and that is the origin of what we call public housing. Housing financed, built and operated by the government. And a fair amount of this from the get-go were garden apartments. In fact, none of it was high-rise in the beginning. And, the first project, the first I guess what you’d call federally funded public housing project in the United States was a place called Techwood in Atlanta it was low-rise. And it went on from there. So that’s one piece of the story, but then there are other pieces too. And the piece that in the end was the most important was to try to get private developers to build garden apartments by getting capital flowing to them. And the way that the government did this was through the Federal Housing Administration. Now, people have heard of the FHA, but they’re mostly associated with single-family homes. And the FHA, its business is to provide mortgage insurance, which means that if you’re a bank and you provide a mortgage to let’s say to someone buying a home, and you have FHA mortgage insurance associated with that, if the person that buys that home can’t pay back their mortgage the bank doesn’t lose money because the government, as the insurer, pays back the bank. So there’s no risk, essentially, for the bank or the financial institution. And this was conceived as a way to get capital flowing into the housing market. And it was brilliant, and it’s really what shaped the American landscape in the nearly 100 years since the FHA was created. But the part of the story which I didn’t really understand, and most people don’t really get, is that they also promoted multi-unit rental housing. They were gung ho on the idea. And, most typically, this was garden apartments. And the FHA did more than just financing stuff, because like any insurer, they wanna make sure the project’s gonna be a success because if not, they’re on the hook. So they at first they sort of started a one-on-one approval process: Does it cost too much? Is it well designed? This that and the other. But you can’t do that if you’re trying to do literally tens of thousands of units a year. So then you start developing guidelines and you say, “Okay, if we’re gonna insure it, it has to cover no more than a certain percentage of the site. The rooms have to be this size.” And the FHA had enormous power because they had the power to provide or not to provide mortgage insurance. And a few garden apartments that were among the earliest FHA insurance garden apartments, like Colonial Village is one in Arlington, Virginia, just across from Washington, became the template. Very early on, they were very successful, and basically the FHA said to other people, “You gotta make something that kinda looks like that.” So one mystery I was trying to always figure out is why they all look the same. Part of the story is FHA guidelines. Schneider: Yeah. Well, I wanna zoom in on one really big piece of this, which is the Section 608 financing mechanism, which is really from a public policy standpoint, a remarkable program that I hadn’t heard of, and I think is really important in America’s housing and economic development history. As I understand it, it was an addendum to the National Housing Act that created a new mortgage underwriting program for multifamily housing for veterans, and as you mentioned, the design requirements in the program effectively mandated garden apartment-style complexes. And then as for the cumulative impact, by the mid-’50s, this program had produced something in the realm of 469,000 units, all from a $5 million initial capitalization that kind of kickstarted this fund. Is that all basically correct? Freeman: Yeah. It is. I will say two little amendments. This is not just starting from scratch. Before the war, the FHA is already involved through its rental division in providing mortgage insurance for garden apartment-type rental housing. Then most civilian construction stops during World War II. 608 originally starts in 1942 as a way to encourage private developers to build housing for war workers, a lot of defense areas like around Oakland, California or wherever it might be. It wasn’t very successful actually for that purpose. But in 1946, Congress repurposes it and says, “We don’t need war workers anymore. This is for World War II vets.” And your description is absolutely right. It’s an enormously successful program. It only runs for four years in terms of accepting new projects, although it’s another four or five years till things are finished. So you’re basically talking about a decade, and they, for a remarkably small public investment, produced almost a half a million rental units. Schneider: Yeah, to continue on this vein, I wanna make sure I understand the terms of these deals, ‘cause that’s really interesting too. It was a pretty attractive investment for developers because they had pretty low capital contributions that they were required to provide to projects. And then the profit margins were higher than previous kinds of limited dividend programs. It was a six point five percent after-tax profit margin, which was better than, as you said, the philanthropic movement. And then the exchange for these favorable terms was that these projects would be under rent control for a certain period of time. So the developers couldn’t jack up the rents on tenants after the projects were completed. Freeman: Yeah. FHA had a tremendous amount of authority, including the ability to set rents, which they didn’t always use, but the idea was that they would peg rents to ensure affordability, but also, as you suggested, cap the profit rate at 6.5 percent. So, the the basic idea here is that you submit a proposal to the FHA, and you estimate what it costs at that moment. And the FHA will then issue a insurance for a bank or some insurance company, whoever’s gonna provide the money, for up to 90 percent of the cost of that project. So, at most, you’re providing capital for 10 percent of the project that’s not insured by the federal government. Sometimes it is zero. And the other little additional piece of it is that because the federal government really wants this thing to move and move quickly and in large numbers, they also set depreciation schedules for the taxes on these projects very favorably. So, you’re getting this mortgage insurance, you’re getting a projected return on income of 6.5 percent, but then your tax bill is gonna be lower than it normally would be because this is very favorable depreciation treatment. You put that all together and the proof’s in the pudding. Lots of developers are very eager to go ahead and build under this program. Schneider: So, a big feature of this program ultimately or, perhaps feature is not the right word, but a big aspect of it was the fact that many developers were taking out larger mortgages than they needed in order to basically pad their profit margins and those of their investors. And by the mid-’50s this became a huge scandal, which you write about and again is something I hadn’t heard about, but it seems like a pretty important moment in housing policy history. Can you just explain what happened there with that scandal and what the ramifications were? class=”speaker”>Freeman: Yeah. Just to make crystal clear, if you projected, let’s say that a project was gonna cost a million dollars, right? But you kind of in the back of your mind really realized it was gonna cost eight hundred thousand dollars, right? So then you get a nine hundred thousand dollar mortgage, ninety percent of your million, and you build the thing, and before the first person moves in, there’s a hundred thousand dollars left over from the mortgage. And the phrase that was used in the real estate industry was you could then “mortgage out.” You just take that hundred thousand dollars and it’s your profit. You made a hundred percent profit ‘cause you only put in a hundred thousand dollars before anyone moves in. So that was called mortgaging out. Most 608 projects that didn’t happen, but there’s a very large, significant minority of projects where that did happen. And it meant that the profit was seen not as coming from ongoing operations, but from these kind of financial maneuvers. The FHA paid very little attention to this problem. I didn’t get deep enough to figure it out. The United States Senate spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. How much of this was corruption, and some of it was, some of it was paying off FHA people or being friendly or taking them out to golf or whatever that might be. But there was also enormous pressure from the highest level of government, from Truman and the Truman administration, to get this stuff going quickly. And if it took a little bit of, you know, graft or unsavory ways for developers to make money, if they produced housing, let’s not get too bothered by that. So there’s a lot of avoiding looking too closely. Maybe that’s the best way to put it. Schneider: Yeah. It seems like this scandal perhaps poisoned public faith in these kinds of mechanisms, and there was some talk of continuing a program like this that ultimately didn’t pan out. Freeman: Yes, absolutely. The scandal breaks out in 1954 and it’s about this program, and there’s also a separate FHA program that provided loans to people doing repairs or renovations on their single-family homes. And both of them were portrayed somewhat correctly as having a lot of corruption. Actually, the h ome improvement program was even more corrupt. But it became a big scandal, and the Senate did a big, big investigation. And 608 had already ended by then. But there were lots of other government housing programs, including the big 1949 Housing Act, which was funding post-war public housing, it was up for renewal. Eventually there was a 1954 public housing act. But everything was put on hold during these investigations. And as you said, it soured, I think, the public and the political universe on the idea of government involvement in housing. It was seen as this sort of den of iniquity and corruption. It became the opportunity for a lot of conservatives. These were very prominent conservatives who were on the investigating committee, including Barry Goldwater and other people whose names no longer ring a bell, but in their era were big shots. It became, became an opportunity for them to come out against government housing, not on the principle, but because of all the history of abuse. And the Democrats had a hard time defending it because, I mean, there was abuse. And they had these hearings, and they brought up these developers and they looked bad. People who really had very little experience in housing made bucketfuls of money off of this. And some of the housing also had problems because builders could also increase their profits by building shoddily, by paying minimal architectural fees. And some of that showed up in the quality of the buildings that were built. So I think it definitely added to a turn against government involvement in housing. When I say government involvement in housing, of course, the biggest government involvement in housing, which was subsidizing single-family homes in the suburbs, that was seen as an entirely different universe. Schneider: To close the loop on 608, I’m curious to hear your overall evaluation of this, having studied it closely, it’s scandal and all, where are you left with in terms of how successful a program it was? And in that answer, I’d also love to hear you opine a little, if you will, about what the lessons are for housing advocates today in terms of navigating these kinds of public-private dynamics. Freeman: Well, I think it was, in a lot of ways, an extremely successful program. First of all, the immediate justification for it, we have to take seriously, which was that literally millions of soldiers and sailors were coming home, they had no place to live. And the justification, just like the GI Bill, which was a kind of social democratic program, is justified because it’s serving people who sacrificed for America. This is the housing version of the GI Bill, right? And you can get away with it because there’s a moral claim of soldiers and sailors. That’s a legitimate moral claim in my view. Of those close to a half million units built on this, almost all of them went to World War II vets and their families. And so it’s extraordinarily successful, and I think a lot of the housing served its residents extremely well. Is there another way you could have done it? Is there a better way you could have done it? Maybe, but I think the end product was pretty remarkable. And in our era, when it seems impossible to get anything done, everything seems just so mired in sort of molasses, this thing happened, it happened fast. It showed that if you could mobilize state and private resources, a difficult problem could be addressed quickly and effectively. I think in that sense, you have to give it credit. Now if you follow the timeline all the way forward, what happens to these apartments and so forth it’s a complicated story because the fate of these apartments is in the hands of private developers. The public didn’t really, through the form of the government, have control over what eventually happened to these apartments. Some places they were ripped down, other places they were converted to coops. You may think these are good or bad outcomes, but the public didn’t have a say because of the way this was structured. And rent control did eventually disappear. So, yeah, this is a private-public partnership that worked. I don’t think that says, well, the only way you can do things is private-public partnership. I think the most unusual thing about my book, and I didn’t even realize this till I wrote it and started talking to housing people, is I talk about public housing and private housing in the same book. And no one does that. I did that because the physical form of so much public and private housing look the same. And public housing garden apartments, the fate was bad. Most of them have been ripped down. But I don’t think that has to do anything having to do with their design. My story is not an argument that only private-public partnerships can build good housing ‘cause I have lots of examples of good public housing. Low-rise, garden apartment style public housing. New York area does not have them. There’s only one real project like that in New York, Classon Gardens up in the Bronx. But in most of the country, that’s what public housing was. So, I think the story does show that public-private partnerships can be quite effective. It also shows that it’s not the only way to do things either. Schneider: Well, one kind of dark side to this history is the segregation that was enshrined at a lot of these complexes, both public and private. I’m wondering if you could go a little deeper on that, connecting the design to that policy program of segregation. There can be kind of a self-contained and panopticonal quality to some of these garden apartment complexes, and I actually, in preparation for this interview, walked through a few of them in Queens, and Parkway Gardens is a beautiful and memorable one. And I felt like I was trespassing when I was going through there. And actually maybe I was. I’m not totally sure. But I’m curious how, through your research, did garden apartment dwellers view their connection to the broader community? Was there a self-conscious sense of separateness from the city and, the rest of the metropolis?

Freeman: That is a really interesting question, but I would separate it from the racial segregation question. Although I could see how they articulate and how they in a way complement one another. But I think the reason for the segregation was that American housing was segregated, and that the public entities building this housing were essentially not interested in fighting public standards. And by the way, this predates the New Deal. I was kinda shocked when I discovered that the groups that, for example, sponsored Sunnyside Gardens, not so much with Sunnyside Gardens itself, but some of its future projects, they also promoted segregation. Even in Sunnyside Gardens, although there’s no rule, and maybe there were one or two non-white families, they said, “Oh, that’s a different issue. Yes, there should be integration, there should be equality, but that’s not our issue. And if we take that on, it’s gonna destroy our ability to build public housing.” So there, even among the reformers, there was a tradition that you didn’t take this on. So, that’s one story. Now, that may have added to, but certainly didn’t contradict, a certain parochial quality, a certain inward quality. I think you’re absolutely right. I think we tend to have only a positive association with the word community, but communities have boundaries. And I think garden apartments communities had kind of physical boundaries. They were often large sites with few roads penetrating them. They were almost never actually gated, but they were designed to create communities among the residents. In that sense, they were kind of inward-looking. In both public and private projects, there was a tradition of not having commercial structures intermixed with residential structures. So there were no stores. I mean there might be schools, there might be auditoriums, but there weren’t stores. Now in some cases, the same developer, like if you go out to Glen Oaks, which is one of the biggest garden apartments projects in New York City. It’s way on the eastern edge of Queens. The same developer built an adjacent shopping center, but that was a little bit untypical,. They were often somewhat closed and I think that outsiders might not have felt welcome. And they sponsor all kinds of activities for residents: day camps for the kids in the summer, afterschool programs. A whole bunch of these projects create cooperative nursery schools, including Parkway Village, where you walked around, but they were for residents, And it created a sense of security, a sense that you could go anywhere within that project, and you were kinda home. It’s safe. Schneider: Well, I think this gets to Jane Jacobs’ critique too, which is a really fascinating little side note in this garden apartment history. She wrote of Chatham Village in Pittsburgh, “No child of enterprise or spirit will willingly stay in such a boring place after he reaches the age of six.” She saw garden apartments as part and parcel of her critique of modernist urban planning and this sort of bias against street life, bias against mixed use development with housing and stores integrated into one neighborhood. I guess I’m wondering how you respond to her critique. How much credence do you give it? Freeman: I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about Jane Jacobs for probably 40 years. And I gotta say that I think my agreement with her has been on a slow downhill slope for about 40 years. So I’m not completely aligned with her anymore. Look, on some levels she’s right. I think six is wrong, actually. But maybe 10 or 11 is right. You know, I grew up in a garden apartment until I was in I think third grade. It’s great. It’s perfect. She’s completely nuts. Like, you walk outside your apartment, there are a million other kids, it’s totally safe. You don’t have to worry about your parents. It’s a paradise for kids. Now, at some point, yeah, it’s a small universe and you want to escape it, and I think it depends upon the articulation of the project to its surrounding world. But, to me it’s a kind of simplistic view. By then I no longer lived in a garden apartment, but when I went to a high school in Queens, lots of those kids lived in garden apartments. It was a huge high school. It was class integrated, it was ethnically integrated, and actually because of a busing program was racially integrated. You could live in a garden apartment at the age of 14 and be exposed to a more cosmopolitan world than someone living in the West Village, frankly. So, I think it’s a little bit super… But it’s not totally off the wall either. She’s onto something. This idea, for example, of keeping out commercial projects. And it’s interesting ‘cause the very first public housing did have commercial spaces. Techwood in Atlanta, it had stores, it had gas stations that were part of the project, so the move away from that I think may have been negative and I think she’s probably right to pointing to that. Schneider: Yeah. Well, what is it about Queens that made it such an epicenter of garden apartment construction. And other places, what were the geographical attributes of the places where garden apartments tended to be constructed in this mid-century period? Freeman: Empty land in cities. Because garden apartments take up space. That’s the very idea of them is that they’re not compact. They’re aiming at 20, 25 percent site coverage for the buildings, so you need a fair chunk of land, and also to make the economics work, it’s very difficult to buy land that has existing buildings on it and then you knock them down and you rebuild. It’s just too expensive. So very rarely are garden apartments part of urban redevelopment, which is another thing going on at the same time. And so Queens had a lot of empty land still. Los Angeles, interestingly, was a big center of garden apartments. Cause it’s very spread out. There’s a lot of empty land. They’re building this freeway system after the war that’s opening up access or replacing the trolleys to get access to these areas. And it’s a really interesting place ‘cause there the garden apartments actually are very varied in their look, in their architecture, unlike in the East Coast and the Midwest. There’s some in Staten Island too. Donald Trump’s father built a garden apartment complex in Staten Island. It’s still there. Schneider: And didn’t you say Fred Trump was also one of the people who participated in the mortgage frauds thing? Freeman: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Fred Trump was a 608 builder. Fred Trump built a garden apartment complex in Staten Island using 608, and he also built red brick five, six story apartment buildings in Brooklyn using 608. So yeah, he was definitely part of this and a beneficiary of government support in his quite successful real estate career. So, garden apartments, they’re interesting. They’re urban, but they tend to be on the peripheries of cities. And not just big cities. Lots of small towns. I was driving to Catskill, New York a few months ago, a little place on the Hudson, and I got a little lost and boom, there’s a garden apartment. Schneider: They’re everywhere. I do wanna ask you to keep your speculative hat on for another moment here to ask about what a modern version of the Section 608 program might look like today. What are the pieces of it that you think would be fitting or appropriate still? What would be the optimal mechanisms to do something similar right now? Freeman: I think it’s tricky because the economics of urban housing have changed a lot. I could see 608 working in some parts of the country where there are very sprawling cities. Maybe a place like Tulsa, which is growing incredibly quickly, but also growing outward, you might be able to do it. But loan costs are so high in a place let’s say like New York or Boston, I’m not quite sure if it works anymore. Yes, the government provides support, but on stepping back, it’s relatively modest. They’re providing cheap mortgage insurance. And they’re giving a favorable tax treatment. We’re routinely giving much more all the time now to developers. You don’t have to pay taxes for 30 years. We’ll build you a platform for a billion dollars to build your buildings on. So, it was small change really in, in retrospect, and I think the housing economics have changed so much. Could you imagine public-private partnerships? There are lots of efforts to do this. I’m not a big supporter of a lot of them, but obviously the system of rezoning to allow developers to build bigger in return for some affordability, that’s a kind of equivalent of a public-private. I’m not a big fan of that for various reasons, but that is a version of that. You’re even seeing this in public housing with these efforts to semi-privatize reconstruction and maintenance and even to build new buildings. Our current mayor actually supports both these programs. It’s interesting, they really go back to the Bloomberg years and de Blasio and across ideology, people have looked at these kinds of public-private partnerships as a way to address this enormous need that we have. I’m not a big fan of the solutions they’ve turned to. I think there have been some small scale experiments, which I think have been pretty successful. They often do involve philanthropies or some of these tools, tax breaks, even using eminent domain, using mortgage insurance. There’s a whole array of possible ways that the government can promote and help lower the cost of housing, even if it’s being developed by a private entity, whether it’s a non-profit or for profit. And the history of social housing going way back to the things that people so admire in Europe, in let’s say, the Netherlands in 1920, is full of that. A lot of those projects were not so much for-profit, but private entities. You know, sponsored by a church, sponsored by a labor union. And we have that too, Abyssinian Baptist Church and groups like that. So I could see rethinking this, but I’m not a housing expert, so someone else would have to figure out how that actually would work. Schneider: The final, final thing I wanted to ask you about is this idea you briefly invoke at the end of the book, which is that garden apartment complexes continue to be built in very large numbers across the country. And that’s something that again, is happening under the radar of, I would say, most housing people, most architecture people, and yet it is happening. I’m wondering, based on your research on the contemporary side of this phenomenon- why do they continue to be an attractive model? Where is this predominantly happening? And what are the prospects for this housing typology going forward? Freeman: I think in some ways the underlying force is the same as it was going way back to 1946. But I think starting in the ’70s and going forward, people that in the past might have been seen as potential purchasers of single-family homes couldn’t afford them. So you came up, particularly on the West Coast, with the idea of the condo or the townhouse. So these would be attached buildings that were owned by individual owners. And they would have, often shared amenities, in LA, it’s the swimming pool or maybe even a tennis court or maybe a playground. And so in a way they’ve kind of converged on some of the same approaches that the garden apartment had to how do you combine privacy with shared amenities and do it in a way that’s affordable. So, I think that’s very similar. Now, the actual designs are somewhat different, and the real estate term, is often “garden-style apartments.” It’s so funny, you start out with garden cities in England 120 years ago, and then you go to garden apartments, now it’s garden-style apartments. There are huge numbers of them. They’re often built in suburban areas, particularly in the Southwest and the South. They’re often built by fairly large developers and then get bought up by even bigger entities. So for example, real estate investment trusts like Blackstone own vast numbers of these units. And they’re seen as a good long-term investment for the people who want to participate in that real estate investment trust. And again, somewhat like the garden apartments, I suspect, and I haven’t really done deep research, for many residents they’re a way station towards still achieving that A merican dream single-family home with the private yard and so forth. And for others, this is just where they live. And some of them are rental, many of them are rental. Again, from the point of view of something like a real estate investment trust, that’s a steady source of income, predictable. I mean, if there’s a terrible depression, people can’t pay their rent, that’s another story. It serves a slightly different clientele. Its setting is somewhat different. Its design features are somewhat different. But I think it’s a new iteration to address some of the same problems that the garden apartment addressed. And people who write about stuff, they live in places like downtown New York and Brooklyn. And they don’t have these things here. So if they don’t exist here, a lot of people think they don’t exist. Schneider: Well, guilty as charged. That’s why we gotta get out to Kew Gardens Hills every once in a while. Freeman: Absolutely. And even suburban Tulsa. Schneider: Yes. Well, thank you so much, Professor Freeman. This was really awesome. I learned a lot. And I really appreciate your time and you’re writing this book, shedding light on a topic that is a really important part of America’s housing history that I, and I think many other people who care about this did not know much about. So I’m glad it’s out in the world now. Freeman: Thank you so much. It’s a delight to talk to you about it.