Few things so define US society, politics, and economy like housing. It is an asset unlike any other, an unrivaled motor of the real and financial economy around which wealth, power, status, and security orbit. It powers the system at the highest level and commands allegiance to it from below.

The United States has a two-tier housing system, with a dominant private market organized around private homeownership and a much smaller and heavily stigmatized, underfunded, and — in recent decades — increasingly privatized public housing system reserved for only the very poorest.

In her 1996 book, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era, Gail Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the New Deal–era struggle to make the American housing system a radically social one. In place of the two-tier system that won out, Bauer and her allies proposed a massive federally backed system of noncommercial housing that would appeal to and house the majority of Americans in beautiful homes and vibrant, socially connected communities.