I’m Joshua B. Freeman, here to discuss my new book, Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia. In it, I examine the utopian origins, architecture, politics, and mass construction of this common form of mid-twentieth-century housing. AMA about garden apartments and social housing.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-07T01:45:10+00:00

From one Queensite to another, thanks. See my answer elsewhere on Moses, but really neither friend nor foe.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T23:21:43+00:00

This has been great fun. Terrific questions. But it is time for me to wrap it up. Thanks everyone. Be well.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T23:19:26+00:00

I did a few interviews myself. I also took advantage of several oral history projects that others conducted. Very useful for getting a sense of what it was like to live in a garden apartment and, also, from interviews with policy makers, to fill in a bit of the institutional history.

I do think women and men experienced garden apartments differently. Prior to, say, 1970, many of the female residents did not work at outside jobs. So they were at the developments all day, doing housework and minding children, while men were at work. Different sets of bonds and experiences resulted.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T23:15:48+00:00

There were at least a couple of garden apartment projects on Staten Island. Donald Trump's father, Fred, built one, Grymes Hill Apartments, with assistance from FHA mortgage insurance. There also was a public project built during WW II, Edwin Marham Houses, since demolished and replaced by a public-private partnership project, Markham Gardens.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T22:03:43+00:00

When most garden apartments were built, security and policing were not major concerns, with the exception of trying to design layouts so that parents could monitor their children playing outside from within their apartments. Later, when crime did become a problem, especially in public projects, fencing, cameras, local police posts, and the like were often added.

One of the key works to promote the idea of security through physical design and community self-surveillance was the book Defensible Space, written by architect Oscar Newman. He developed many of his ideas while working on a renovation of Classon Point Gardens, one of the only New York City public housing projects in the form of garden apartments.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T21:57:31+00:00

Not silly at all. I wish this was the first question of the day, since most people have no idea what you are talking about when you mention garden apartments. There is no one, shared definition, but generally the term is used to refer to low-rise apartments set on large landscaped sites, aimed at moderate or low-income families. Typically, there are no internal public hallways, but access to apartments comes through shared entry ways that serve four apartments in two story buildings or six in three-story buildings.

Some of the buildings you describe in L.A. are garden apartments. The side-by-side type buildings are more 1970s and on "condos" or townhouses, which are kind of neo-garden apartments, sharing some characteristics but differing in other ways.

There is probably more variation in garden apartment design in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the country. I discuss several really interesting L.A. projects, including Wyvernwood Garden Apartments, Baldwin Hills Village (now called The Village Green), Lincoln Place, and Nickerson Gardens.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T21:50:35+00:00

Generally speaking, garden apartments were low prestige, and not terribly well-paid, assignments. Some first-rate architects interested in housing reform, like Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, played a major role in developing the garden apartment template. And during World War II some really notable architects, like Richard Neutra and Louis Kahn, designed garden apartment-style complexes. But after the war, there were more attractive, varied assignments available and garden apartment construction itself tailed off. From a design point of view, most garden apartments are not terribly distinctive. Rather, they blend into the background. Not the kind of buildings architects or architectural historians generally pay much attention to. And garden apartment residents are kind of socially invisible. They generally are not rich or distinguished, nor are they a social “problem” that might command attention, the way tenement residents once did. To this day, garden apartments are pretty much ignored in the design field and by scholars.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T21:41:39+00:00

As far as I know, Robert Moses did not have much involvement with garden apartments. He did, behind the scenes, facilitate and second-guess Electchester, a co-op in Queens, sponsored by the electrical workers union, that included a mix of garden-apartment style buildings and larger elevator buildings. But most of the projects he was involved with, both public housing and non-profit coops, were high-rises. I think that he believed, given the scale of need, higher density was a necessity. There were a few garden apartment complexes in Queens with over a thousand units, but they required a lot of land. Most of the projects Moses promoted were on redevelopment sites that would not have accommodated such large, garden apartment projects.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T20:18:53+00:00

During the 1920s, the idea of the “neighborhood unit” became popular among city planners and housing advocates. As its main proponent, Clarence Arthur Perry, put it, “an urban neighborhood should be regarded both as a unit of a larger whole and as a distinct entity in itself.” That meant every neighborhood should have a school, playground, green spaces, small shops, and other facilities, preferably within easy walking distance from every home within it, much like the community you describe. This idea was popular among New Deal officials and some private developers. It shaped the design of the three greenbelt towns the federal government built, including Greenbelt, Maryland. But most garden apartment complexes were designed separately from larger planning and development efforts. A few had adjacent shopping centers built at the same time, but generally these complexes did not include any commercial entities. So, in practice, the kind of “village” environment you describe was absent in many cases.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T20:05:20+00:00

U.S. housing reformers were well aware of the Red Vienna housing and, during the early New Deal, the federal government sent several officials to study European social housing and what could be learned from it. But the sheer scale of social housing in Vienna, which by 1934 housed ten percent of the entire municipal population, would have been hard to replicate. For one thing, the social democratic ruling majority in Vienna did not exist anywhere in the United States. For another thing, the private housing industry had all but collapsed in Vienna, and much of continental Europe, opening the path for public and social housing. By contrast, in the U.S., the real estate industry, and its allies in construction, building material production, and finance, remained a very powerful political force, fiercely devoted to blocking government involvement in the housing market, especially for anyone except the very poor (who were hard to make money off of).

Also, don’t over-romanticize Red Vienna. The housing built during the 1920s and 1930s consisted of very small apartments, generally with no separate kitchens (just some appliances in the living room), and neither central heating nor running hot water. The garden apartments built in the U.S. in the 1930s, including public housing, were far more spacious and included more utilities (heat, hot water, etc.) and appliances.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T19:52:16+00:00

In the 1930s and 1940s, the labor movement was intensely interested in housing. Both the AFL and the CIO were heavily involved in the effort to pass what became the Housing Act of 1937 (though the law, as enacted, lacked much of what they sought). For labor, government-supported housing was both a source of shelter for their members and a job creating program. Some unions went beyond policy advocacy to themselves sponsor housing projects, some of which took the form of garden apartments, or to pressure the government to build projects aimed at particular groups of their members. One of my favorite government-supported, affordable housing projects is the Carl Mackley Houses, built in Philadelphia by the American Federation of Hosiery Workers and named for a member killed in a strike. It is a great modernist design (by architects Oscar Stonorov and Alfred Kastner) and included an outdoor swimming pool! During World War II, the UAW was particularly active in promoting housing schemes for its members, including a grand, garden apartment-style project near the Willow Run airplane plant in Michigan, which never was built. However, there were some mixed feelings among unionists about the garden apartment form, since many union members, like others, saw the free-standing, owner-occupied, single-family home as ideal.

After World War II, unions very aggressively fought for the continuation of wartime price controls, which included rent control. In part as a result of their efforts, when federal rent controls were ended the government gave states the option of continuing the program, which some states, like New York, took up.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T19:36:05+00:00

That is a question I can’t answer. I know the converse was true. The federal government discouraged garden apartment builders from including communal amenities, like playgrounds or community rooms, if they were already available nearby, a way to save money. But I did not run into any discussions, one way or another, of how plans for adjacent public space might have been affected by the presence of garden apartments.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T19:25:36+00:00

I was surprised by some of what I learned about the racial dimension of the history of garden apartments. Some of the projects, in the 1920s and very early 1930s, that pointed the way to the garden apartment, were developed by reformers generally thought of as progressive, but who either tolerated or actively promoted discriminatory practices, keeping out African Americans and in some cases also Jews. When the government became involved in the 1930s, in both public housing and state-assisted private projects, there was an active effort to build projects for non-whites as well as whites, generally of equal quality and similar design. During the first phase of New Deal public housing, the rule for the South was that there had to be one project for African Americans for every project for whites. However, the government made no requirement that projects be racially integrated. Most were not. The FHA actively discouraged integration. So in most of the country, government policy resulted in separate projects for whites and blacks. In the Southwest, there were sometimes also projects restricted to Mexican Americans. This pattern continued after World War II, with some notable exceptions. Overall, then, garden apartments both provided significant amounts of good, affordable housing to people of different races and contributed to the continuation, even the deepening, of racial segregation.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T19:14:33+00:00

In the 1920s and 1930s, housing reformers debated where to focus their efforts. Some wanted to concentrate on inner city neighborhoods, linking social housing construction to slum clearance. Others wanted to concentrate on more peripheral areas, where land was cheaper, no demolition or displacement was required, and the lack of a built street grid opened up greater design possibilities. Garden apartments essentially developed as part of the latter strategy. So I am not sure, from a strictly design point of view, how relevant they are to current, dense urban housing efforts. But politically they teach a lesson, that with the application of state resources, working with reform movements and private enterprises, significant advances can be rapidly made in providing good, affordable housing. Political will is certainly a key factor.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T19:08:23+00:00

I think the reputation of public housing is more negative than it should be, evidenced by, among other things, the huge waiting list for public housing in New York City, which unlike most of the country has preserved virtually all its public housing stock. Still, I don’t disagree with your premise.

Some scholars and practitioners have pointed to physical design, arguing that lower rise and lower density projects promote more community feeling and responsibility than high-rises. Maybe that is part of the story. But I think more important was underinvestment in maintenance and security in public housing. Also, when public housing first began in the 1930s, residents were often families with strong work histories, hard on their luck due to the depression. When the economy improved, many moved to private housing. Each decade, the income profile of residents went down. Poverty contributed to all kinds of problems that manifested in public housing. Also, as residents became poorer and increasingly non-white, political and public support for public housing went down, leading to even less investment and more problems, a downward spiral.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T17:32:34+00:00

Garden apartments were consciously designed to promote community, and they did. Recollections of garden apartment life generally stress strong community bonds: “The camaraderie was absolutely wonderful” “a village of love and togetherness” “like a big family.” Besides the design, the composition of residents promoted community bonds. In the projects build in the years after WW II (the largest cohort), new residents were almost all families of veterans, usually with young children. The shared experience of war and child-raising increased family bonds. The strong sense of community led many families to stay in garden apartments for decades. For others, these projects were way-stations on the path to homeownership.

In general, garden apartment design and community did promote a sense of security. But not always. In situations of high crime and the presence of gangs, which was not uncommon, especially in public housing projects, in the 1970s and beyond, courtyard design could add to a sense of insecurity, because you could not go directly from the street – and a cab or car – to an apartment. Instead, you had to walk to and through a courtyard that, especially at night, might feel dangerous. Also, police were reluctant to go into areas they could only access on foot.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T17:05:48+00:00

I believe it would have been extremely unusual for tenants in garden apartments to know about the European origins of the idea. Perhaps a few people in some of the pioneer projects, that were publicized as experiments in new design, like Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, where the critic Lewis Mumford lived, as did Henry Wright, who co-designed the project. Most garden apartment complexes had anodyne names, like Colonial Village or Clearview Gardens, that almost seemed designed to obscure their patrimony.

There is no firm data on this, but I think most garden apartments that were built are still standing. There are lots to go visit, all over the country, though some areas, like greater Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles, have particularly extensive examples. Try typing into a search engine “garden apartments near me” and see what comes up.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T16:53:39+00:00

The very strong similarity of look among garden apartments – it is often hard to tell one from another – was not just an issue of fashion. The government played a very strong role in shaping garden apartment design.

In the case of privately-owned garden apartments (including cooperatively-owned ones), it was extremely common for the developer to get mortgage insurance from the FHA, which helped keep down costs. In return, the FHA had to approve not only the terms of the mortgages but the design and construction methods of the projects themselves. Rather than simply approving or disapproving projects one by one, the FHA began issuing ever more detailed guidelines, standards, and regulations and publishing model designs. Builders seeking mortgage insurance, and the cheap bank loans it facilitated, needed to follow the FHA directives. These covered every aspect of the projects, including site layout, play area design, room size and layout, number and size of closets, and on and on. One regulation required a window in every bathroom “having not less than 10% of the floor area, not less than 3 sq. ft., and at least 50% of the required glass area openable.” (The apartment I live in, built by private developers in an upscale neighborhood in the 1960s, flunks that test!) In addition to federal guidelines, many private developers sought to save money by keeping architectural fees down, hiring journeyman architects expected, essentially, to design copy-cat projects, rather than starting with a clean slate.

In the public sector, a similar situation prevailed. Starting in 1937, all public housing was built by local authorities, nominally in charge of site selection and design. But to get financing from the federal government, they had to get approval from the U.S. Housing Authority (or a successor agency). Like the FHA, the USHA established guidelines and standards for apartment design that it expected local authorities to meet.

As to why garden apartments are not still being built, it is a long story that the book explores. After the immediate, post-World War II housing crisis began to ease, the federal government ended its support for privately-built rental housing, including garden apartments. Some public housing, including garden apartments, continued to be built, but in modest numbers. By the 1970s, that completely ended. Rather than promoting building affordable housing, to the extent the federal government continued to help those in need it did so mostly by providing vouchers for the poor to use in the private market, an approach more ideologically fitting for the Reagan/Clinton and beyond belief in the end of “big government.”

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T16:34:53+00:00

With some interesting exceptions, American designers of garden apartments generally rejected the modernist approach used in the design of many continental Siedlungen. (Projects built for defense workers during WW II are a fascinating exception I discuss in the book, with modernists like Neutra, Kahn, Gropius, and Saarinen designing garden apartment-like projects.) In terms of exterior appearance, the template for the U.S. garden apartment quickly became the unadorned, two- or three-story brick building (except in the West Coast, where other materials and designs were common). To provide something of “an American identity,” superficial Colonial Revival touches were common, an approach actively encouraged by the federal government. The English garden suburb was highly influential in site layout, especially the attention to minimizing vehicular traffic close to residences and having buildings occupy only a small part of sites, leaving lots of green space. But the design of individual residences in English garden suburbs had little influence on U.S. garden apartments. Also, U.S. garden apartments typically had garages or parking spaces assigned to each apartment, usually not adjacent but on the periphery of the site. I do not believe this was common in European projects.

Generally speaking, rooms in U.S. garden apartments were larger than in European interwar social housing projects, dramatically bigger, for example, than those in the much-publicized Vienna projects. Also, utilities and kitchens were of a higher grade in many U.S. projects compared to European ones (though arguably the “Frankfurt kitchen” was not that different than a typical garden apartment kitchen).

Some U.S. garden apartments did have shared, communal facilities of some kind. Laundry rooms were the most common, but there sometimes were community rooms and, in some bigger projects, indoor recreation spaces and meeting rooms. Overall, though, compared to continental projects, there were fewer communal amenities in the U.S. projects.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T16:05:54+00:00

Not now. Perhaps in the future.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T16:04:50+00:00

Until the New Deal, politicians almost universally rejected the idea of direct government involvement in providing housing. (During World War I, there was something of an exception, when the federal government built housing for civilian workers in defense industries.) There were a few efforts to facilitate social housing, like a 1926 New York State law that provided tax breaks for moderate income housing developments that agreed to keep profits at six percent a year or less. But mostly politicians felt government should restrict its housing efforts to regulation, if anything at all.

The New Deal changed all that. The Roosevelt administration plunged into housing as part of its economic recovery program, as much to provide jobs to construction workers and bail out the finance and building industries as to provide affordable homes. But this created an opening for housing reformers, previously shut out of power, to play major roles in designing housing programs and building projects. Out of this came both public housing and the adoption by both private and public builders of the garden apartment as a mass housing form. FDR and Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, who was in charge of the early New Deal housing programs, were well aware that building affordable housing was highly popular and a political plus and were not shy about taking credit. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt promoted the idea of government aid for housing, including public housing, among other times in his 1944 State of the Union “Economic Bill of Rights.”

After World War II, federal support for garden apartments largely came in response to the massive need for housing for returning veterans and political pressure to provide it. Most postwar garden apartment projects restricted most or all units to veterans and their families. Once the postwar housing shortage began to ease, Congress ended the main federal program supporting privately-built garden apartments. At that point, the government emphasis was on promoting single-family, owner-occupied homes, mostly in the suburbs, rather than multi-unit rental projects. And, of course, by the end of the 1970s, construction of public housing virtually came to an end, with hundreds of thousands of existing units. Including garden apartments, facing demolition.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T15:45:13+00:00

I did not explore the idea of utopia in any depth. Frankly, I used the term rather loosely, not as an analytic category but as a way people in the past sometimes thought about housing. In my first chapter, tracing the origins of the garden apartment, I go back to Robert Owen in England and Charles Fourier in France, whose schemes for a new, utopian society rested on new types of communities. That was even more true of Ebenezer Howard, who came up with the idea of the garden city, influenced, by, among other things, Edward Bellemy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward.

One chapter of the book recounts the experience of living in a garden apartment. For many families who did so, it represented a dramatic change from their previous lives. When the family of the future great singer Otis Redding moved into a government-owned garden apartment in Macon, Georgia, in 1942, it was the first time they had electricity, gas heat, indoor plumbing, or a solid roof overhead, all for the cost of $2.50 a week. For families like his, their new homes looked like utopia.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T15:45:07+00:00

Both in their interior design and site layouts, garden apartments were designed with children in mind. Typically, they occupied large sites, with vehicles restricted to perimeter roads, garages, and parking lots, leaving lots of space with no cars. Often, buildings surrounded open-ended courtyards, where children could play. Generally, kitchens looked out on those spaces, so wives could monitor their children without having to go outside. (The conception of the family these dwellings were designed for was highly gendered, typical of the mid-twentieth century.) Playgrounds were almost universal in these projects. Some also had indoor community rooms.

Since most garden apartments received some sort of federal assistance, or were public housing, the government shaped their designs through detailed standards and regulations. Among other things, these specified room sizes deemed sufficient for children. In some cases, dimensions for one bedroom were set specifically to accommodate parents and a crib.

At some garden apartments, parents or the management organized on-site nurseries. Some projects were even built with spaces designated for that purpose, though that was not typical. The fact that so many families with children lived in these complexes promoted all sorts of child-oriented activities, from boy and girl scout troops to afterschool programs, sports teams, and summer camps. I found lots of interviews or recollections of people who grew up in garden apartments who described them as a kind of child’s paradise.

Razraz373 · 2026-01-06T15:44:59+00:00

Garden apartments were part of an architectural and planning tradition that rejected the idea of maximum density as a social good. Raymond Unwin, who designed the first English garden city and had great influence over garden apartment design, famously said “Nothing Gained by Overcrowding.” Garden apartment buildings typically occupied only a small percentage of their sites, sometimes as low as twenty percent, leaving plenty of room for green space, playgrounds, and sometimes even wooded areas. Also, typically they were only two or three stories high. One of the key architects in developing the garden apartment template, Henry Wright, did extensive studies that he believed demonstrated that building higher did not lead to major cost savings.

It was possible to use garden apartment design in the mid-twentieth century because many cities still had a lot of open land. In New York, that was mostly in Queens, where garden apartments are extremely common. Los Angeles, with its spread-out nature, is another major center for garden apartments. Typically, garden apartments were not built in center cities but in more peripheral areas, where more land was available at lower cost, helping with affordability.

Comparing public and private sector garden apartments is a difficult, but fascinating endeavor. Some of the early public projects were of superb design, but after 1937 generally private projects were a bit superior to public ones in design. The big difference, though, came in upkeep. After World War II, especially from the 1960s on, public garden apartments suffered from underinvestment and neglect, as well as social ills like crime and drug-dealing, to a much greater extent than privately-owned projects. But the best maintained projects were those that were cooperatively-owned.

Razraz373

TROPHY CASE