United States Housing Corporation

The United States Housing Corporation (USHC) was a federal agency that existed during World War I. Its purpose was to provide housing for wartime production workers near arsenals and shipyards.

With a massive wartime shipbuilding program underway, tens of thousands of workers flooded into the communities surrounding shipyards. Large amounts of new housing needed to be quickly constructed in order to carry out the war effort. However, rather than approaching the problem as one of temporary housing, the government saw an opportunity to create quality neighborhoods that would become integrated into the physical and social fabric of their surroundings.

The Council of National Defense, studying the question of how to provide housing for war workers, advised that the work be delegated to the Department of Labor. In the first half of 1918, Congress appropriated funds for this housing to be built, and on July 9, 1918, the USHC was incorporated, as a unit of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Industrial Housing and Transportation.

Within a period of two years, over 83 new housing projects in 26 states were designed, planned and had commenced construction. By the end of the war, a total of 5,033 acres had been developed into housing for over 170,000 people. Although some of the agency’s projects were small and consisted of only a few dozen dwellings, others were larger and approached the dimensions of new towns. For example, Cradock in Portsmouth, Virginia was designed on a 310-acre site with over 800 detached houses; Truxtun was the first wartime government housing project constructed exclusively for African-American residents in the United States. Mare Island, in San Francisco Bay, had 231 detached and 200 semi-detached houses, along with schools, community centers and stores on a 52-acre site.

These housing projects far exceeded in design and planning any immediate needs brought on by the housing shortage. The architects, planners, and engineers involved were also interested in testing out ideas that heretofore had been only subjects of theoretical debate. These ideas related to decentralization of the industrial city, promotion of regionalism, infusion of nature into everyday life, and improving the living conditions of the working class.

Today, many of these developments are still very much intact physically, though in some cases their social and cultural makeup has changed dramatically, for example in the Baker Yacht Basin neighborhood in Quincy, MA, the majority of current inhabitants are recent Asian immigrants.

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