Designed by Russian-born, Philadelphia architect Oscar Stonorov, the 184-unit Carl Mackley Houses opened in 1935. Their efforts led to construction of the city’s first public housing units in North Philadelphia’s Juniata Park neighborhood. As director of the Labor Housing Conference in the early 1930s, Bauer joined with David Edelman of the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers to secure funds from the Housing Division for “modern,” limited-dividend housing for Philadelphia’s ill-housed working class. ( Historical Society of Pennsylvania)Īmong the leading voices demanding federal action was Catherine Bauer, whose writing on publicly funded modern housing complexes in Europe proved influential on the new Housing Division of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration. The Carl Mackley Houses, named for a worker killed during a 1930 strike, were commissioned by the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers and financed by a loan from the Public Works Administration. Washington disposed of these projects after the war and reverted to its tradition of staying out of the housing market until the crisis of the Greater Depression. The federal government became involved with Philadelphia-area housing during World War I, when the United States Housing Commission and the Emergency Fleet Corporation constructed well-designed communities for shipyard workers at Camden’s Yorkship Village and along Oregon and Elmwood avenues in South Philadelphia. However, by the 1930s housing codes, zoning, and home-ownership campaigns failed to appreciably better squalid housing conditions, and with the Great Depression jobless families faced evictions and foreclosures. Because government treated housing as a private commodity, it was up to voluntary organizations such as the Philadelphia Housing Association, formed in 1911, to identify the evils of fetid alleys and decrepit tenements and press city officials to pass and enforce stricter housing ordinances. Greater Philadelphia, like urban-industrial regions nationwide, faced a serious problem housing lower-income workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over the years, however, as needs as well as programs changed, the city and the region struggled to provide safe, decent, and sanitary living quarters when the private market failed to produce suitable alternatives. Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You BackĪs the dominant response to the housing needs of low-income residents since the 1930s, public housing in the Philadelphia region provided shelter for thousands.

Tasker homes