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Home , Esther McCoy, Gregory Ain, Tract housing

COMMUNITY HOMES: RACE, POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE 77

Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar ANTHONY DENZER University of California, Los Angeles

After World War II, the national housing shortage solution to the ’s postwar emergency. was especially acute in Los Angeles. The city’s hous- ing supply was already stretched thin; first, due to As the cooperative grew, a majority of the new migration from the “dust bowl” during the 1930s, members came from Hollywood unions; others and second, because of the millions of industrial came from friendships developed through political workers that came during the war to work in de- organizations. Many were socialists or communists, fense industries. With a third wave, the resettle- and therefore, the project had an explicitly politi- ment of veterans, came a true emergency. For each cal character. Bill Hurtz, who was elected the of the next five years, according to market analy- cooperative’s president, had made his name as the ses, 100,000 units of new housing would be needed animator who led the strike against Walt Disney in 3 to satisfy demand. As a stop-gap measure, the city 1941. The cooperative was also racially integrated erected ‘villages’ of temporary in public from the beginning, and eventually, non-whites , such as Rodger Young Village, which con- made up about 6 percent of the 280 members, 4 sisted of 750 war-surplus Quonset huts.1 including the singer Lena Horne. In the context of postwar housing, to be organized as a coopera- A crippling shortage of materials intensified this tive was a fundamentally political act, but they housing emergency. Architect found found from the start that to be racially integrated “veteran after veteran turned up in his office for was truly radical. When the cooperative completed advice about a home.” He told them all their purchase of land, a local Race Restrictions the same thing: “Trying to build one small Board asked them to place restrictive covenants today is next to hopeless. Small builders can’t get on a portion of the property, but they refused. materials. Big builders won’t take small jobs. But if a group of veterans pool their plans and finances Architect Gregory Ain carried a reputation as “one 5 they might interest a big builder and stand some of the best modern architects,” but it was his chance of getting new homes.”2 It was amidst this politics that made him a fitting choice for this group; atmosphere of emergency and scarcity that, in at the time he would have been identified as January 1946, 15 members of the motion picture ‘sympatico’ or a ‘fellow traveler’. Having been raised cartoonists’ union met to discuss forming a hous- in working class Los Angeles, Ain spent part of his ing cooperative. childhood with his family at Llano Del Rio, an ex- perimental cooperative farming colony in the desert They called themselves “Community Homes.” north of the city, which has been called “the most Within weeks eighty-eight families subscribed, and important non-religious utopian colony in Western the group drew up a prospectus, by-laws, and American history.”6 He participated in Communist bought 100 acres of land, forecasting a commu- Party meetings in the 1930s; he was also publicly nity of 280 families. They began working with Gre- named as a Communist by the California Un-Ameri- gory Ain, the architect, who assembled a”‘dream can Activities Committee in 1947. Many of Ain’s team’ including planners, local housing officials, most important private houses were completed for and landscape architects. Community Homes was clients who were active in the party, and indeed to be the first fully conceived social and aesthetic many of these functioned as meeting 78 THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE/THE SCIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE

houses.7 In other words, there is an extensive measuring 2,016 square feet. Prices ranged from unreported history of a Communist architecture in $7,500 to $15,000. These were absolutely consis- Los Angeles, which was organized around Gregory tent with the market rate for new tract homes, but Ain. Community Homes, at least to an extent, no Los Angeles tracts exhibited this range. The shares in this identity. architecture, then, was oriented to a unique de- gree of socio-economic diversity. The houses them- The plan for “Community Homes” included 280 selves were designed in a modernist idiom of flat detached single-family homes, as well as schools, roofs and glass walls, and their floor plans included community buildings, and a , in several innovations which Ain had pioneered, based other words, a completely . In on feminist ideals and progressive theories of the typical private housing tracts of the time, the parenting. He advocated placing the kitchen at the physical planning emphasized automobile traffic center of the house and ‘opening’ it, which would and the privatization of land, a pattern with politi- allow the housewife to watch young children in the cal connotations. Bill Levitt famously said: “No man or backyard while she worked. He also who owns his own house and lot can be a commu- employed movable partition walls, which mitigated 8 nist.” But Ain and his team worked from a posi- the small size of the houses by allowing them to tion of criticism relative to these merchant-builders. be reconfigured according to changing needs. Ain The postwar housing emergency, Ain said, would called his houses “flexible,” and he argued that they be “a problem in planning, which, if not well solved would give older children a “greater independence now by the architects, will be badly solved later by and responsibility.”14 the jerry-builders.... Most contemporary work is done in a fever of ruthless money-making. That What made “Community Homes” extraordinary as attitude must be replaced by an entirely different work of design was the relationships between set of values.”9 Likewise, the project’s site plan- houses; the brilliant integration of planning, ar- ner, Simon Eisner, argued that designers should chitecture, and landscape design. The scale of the resist the priorities of the real-estate industry: “If community was broken down into nineteen ‘neigh- architects have learned anything during the past borhood groups’ of 14-20 houses each. Ain de- lean years it certainly should have been the need signed thirteen different house types, each of which to consider housing in terms of an overall pattern could be reversed, and this produced an immense instead of on the basis of a single unit.”10 array of possible combinations, like a mathemati- cal game. In his theoretical writings, Ain frequently The ‘overall pattern’ that Eisner and Ain developed spoke of “...the need to consider the relation of for Community Homes gave precedence to public one dwelling to another,”15 a philosophy which re- space over private, making it radically different from calls Eliel Saarinen’s comment of the same period: tract housing of the time. Sixteen acres of the one “Always design a thing by considering it in its next hundred total were given over to greenbelt parks, larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a pocket recreation spaces, and what they called ‘fin- house, a house in its environment, an environment ger-parks’, which were located at the center of each in a city plan.”16 block, connecting each family’s back yard. These fin- ger-parks, in combination with the plan’s “ingenious Ain also worked in collaboration with landscape street design,” allowed children to play in protected architect , and from the earliest con- areas, separate from traffic.11 A New York Times jour- ceptual stages, the two of them developed strate- nalist noted that “it will be possible to go from one gies to integrate the buildings and landscape. spot to another in any part of the property, on foot, Significantly, Ain’s first drawings for the project, tricycle or roller skates, without having to cross a submitted to the cooperative in April 1946, included street.”12 A city planning commissioner wrote: “In a short narrative which did not describe the fea- my opinion, this sub-division is the finest example of tures of the houses themselves at all, but instead land planning for individual home ownership which emphasized the spatial relationships between the has ever been presented to the Planning Commis- houses and the landscape:’“All houses have pro- sion for approval.”13 tected living gardens ... away from the entrance side. Garages are paired at alternate lot side lines, Ain’s house designs ranged from a 2-bedroom for minimum interruption of continuous front land- model at 784 square feet to a 4-bedroom plan COMMUNITY HOMES: RACE, POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE 79

scaping.”17 Eckbo clearly appreciated the intelli- “craft equipment for the teenagers,” and would also gence of the plan and embraced the problem of include an assembly hall for lecture programs, the working at different scales. He found that “the content of which can only be imagined. Most pro- houses had a repetitive clarity with subtle varia- vocatively, the cooperative planned for social struc- tions. They challenged me to exploit variations … tures oriented to the liberation of housewives. within overall unity.”18 On close reading it is pos- sible to infer from Eckbo’s statement of the prob- “Sitters will be superfluous,” lem that the designers faced a difficult balancing reported, “since each mother will take her turn at act, encompassing: first, the need for repetition of watching all the pre-school children of her neigh- 21 a few house types for economic efficiency; sec- borhood group.” In similar vein, Ain placed “two- ond, variations, to ameliorate the problem of ho- family drying yards” between pairs of homes, mogeneity; and again, thirdly, social unity, to make offering the opportunity for shared work. space that engendered a feeling of community. For all of their and orga- Eckbo, who became a member of the cooperative nizational skill, the cooperative failed to anticipate himself, developed street tree plans for the neigh- the conservative political position of the Federal borhood that sought to alleviate the mechanical Housing Administration (FHA), and this in fact feeling of the underlying gridiron pattern.19 He did proved to be the project’s fatal flaw. After a heart- so by making space, using techniques of modern- breaking period of more than three years of plan- ist painting. He used trees to expand blocks across ning, stops and starts, good news and bad news, the suburban pattern the way that Mondrian would during which time members simply waited through construct space beyond the frame of the picture. one delay after another, some living in trailers or He wrapped the landscape continuously around cor- other temporary accommodations, the cooperative ners, a reinterpreted treatment of the three-di- was finally disbanded and the land was sold in late mensional relationship between front and side, as 1949. None of the houses were built. in Picasso’s human figures. When Eckbo’s tree plan In part FHA opposed the project, according to co- was overlaid on Ain’s distribution of houses, the operative member Max Lawrence, because “they resultant interference pattern would mean that not thought we were all crazy radicals.”22 Certainly one of the 280 houses would be alike. this political identity was encoded in the architec- One of the common complaints about post-war tract ture itself. FHA was commonly hesitant to insure housing was that the uniformity of the mortgages for houses with flat roofs, refusing to seemed to deny individuality. , in consider them sound, long-term investments, per- his description of Levittown, described the pattern haps in part because was be- this way: ginning to be associated with socialism and communism at the dawn of the McCarthy era. Ain and other progressive architects frequently found “a multitude of uniform houses, lined up difficulty with restrictions they found capricious. inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform Architectural Forum reported: “Most“‘modern’ ar- roads, in a treeless communal waste, in- chitects who have encountered FHA processing habited by people of the same class, the agree that the most disheartening aspect of the same income, the same age group, wit- situation is official insistence on routine planning nessing the same television performances, with which they are familiar and a complete un- eating the same tasteless prefabricated willingness to try anything new.”23 At one of Ain’s foods, from the same freezers, conform- other housing projects, which was designed in a ing in every outward and inward respect similar architectural style, FHA repeatedly asked to a common mold.”20 that Colonial, Cape Cod, Italian and Spanish-style houses be included — styles that represented po- By contrast Community Homes projected a par- litical conservatism.24 ticular social life for its residents and, in effect, constructed different subjects. The community However it was Community Homes’ policy of racial building was intended to be outfitted with integration that ultimately caused FHA to reject the project. Ain, the architect, later recalled that 80 THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE/THE SCIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE

the project failed because FHA considered it “a bad color; a rather academic consideration in business practice”25 to provide mortgage insurance England or Scandinavia, and one present- to integrated projects. Drayton Bryant, the ing no difficulty in running a consumer’s cooperative’s treasurer, recalled that when nego- grocery store in the . Hous- tiations began with local FHA staff, he found “the ing is something else again, and co-opera- issue of importance, as stressed by them, was the tives should abandon not idealism but interracial character of the ... development.”26 naiveté.29 When local FHA officials surprisingly rejected the site plan four months after it was submitted, the There were, however, similar cooperative housing cooperative appealed this decision to the highest projects which did abandon their principles. In Los levels. FHA Commissioner Raymond M. Foley re- Angeles, Mutual Homes Association had a similar sponded in July 1947, by saying that, because the organizational structure and a similar membership project’s racial makeup significantly increased the profile including many creative artists from Holly- risk, “we are not warranted in accepting the risk, wood, but a very different physical plan and more regardless of the nature of the cause producing expensive houses. Like Community Homes, they that effect.”27 In other words, the cooperative could sought to be integrated but found that restrictive not escape the real estate industry’s position that covenants would be a requirement of FHA. After a integration constituted lower property values in the contentious debate, the Mutual Homes Association Los Angeles housing market, even though they voted to accept the race restrictions. They indeed themselves were oversubscribed at the time, for obtained financing, and the project was built in houses which did not yet exist. 1948-49, just as those restrictions were lifted. A happy ending? Not exactly. Mutual Homes was Foley did not issue a firm denial, but he allowed not integrated as of 1960.30 the cooperative to seek a private lender willing to submit an application. No Los Angeles banks would Despite FHA’s resistance, Community Homes do so, but a Chicago investment company agreed struggled fruitlessly for another two years seeking to loan Community Homes the three million dol- private financing even as its membership dropped lars it needed for . FHA then rejected off, and in February 1949, the story of the group’s this application on the grounds that the Chicago plight made it all the way to the desk of President company was not an approved mortgagee for the Truman. In a 21-page letter to the President on area. The cooperative, meanwhile, was “informally the subject of FHA’s racism, Thurgood Marshall, advised” that FHA would go along if restrictive cov- working for the NAACP, used the case of Commu- enants were placed on all but twenty of the lots; nity Homes to illustrate the bureaucracy’s resis- processing would be completed within two weeks. tance to integration. Marshall concluded: “The For the second time, the cooperative refused this achievement of racial residential segregation is the Faustian bargain. Ironically, race restrictive cov- purpose and the effect of FHA’s policy.”31 The long- enants would be struck down as unconstitutional term social implications of this are staggering to by the Supreme Court less than a year later in the consider. landmark case of Shelley v. Kraemer.28 Because it was not realized, the true character of While Community Homes could be commended for Community Homes will remain in the realm of its principled stand, it could also be criticized for speculation. Had it been built and inhabited, would naivety. Vernon DeMars, perhaps America’s lead- the neighborhood have attained the feeling of an ing authority on cooperative housing in this pe- artists’ colony, or would it simply have functioned riod, took the latter stance. In a special issue of like a typical suburban tract? It is impossible to Progressive Architecture, DeMars made this state- know. Ultimately the historical significance of Com- ment, which was in fact a thinly-veiled reference munity Homes is this: through its financial organi- to Community Homes: zation, through its political character, through its policies of racial inclusion, and through its physi- cal planning, the community projected a resistant Co-operatives have traditionally insisted on alternative to the to the corporate values of the nondiscrimination as to race, creed, and housing industry and the racist policies of the Fed- COMMUNITY HOMES: RACE, POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE 81

eral Government. Esther McCoy highlighted these 17. Notes from an unpublished drawing entitled “3 typi- issues when she wrote the project’s sad epitaph: cal contiguous lots” dated April 28, 1946, “Community Homes” file, Gregory Ain collection, Architecture & De- “Five years after Community Homes was dis- sign Collection (ADC), University Art Museum, Univer- banded and the property sold, [the neighbor- sity of California, Santa Barbara. hood] was the lowest common denominator of 18. Esther McCoy, “Garrett Eckbo: The Early Years.” Arts tract housing—no green belts or finger parks, just and Architecture [The Perception of Landscape] 1, no. 4 houses set row on row as exactly as markers in (1982): 39-40. a VA . In the cemetery, however, there 19. These landscaping plans, Eckbo recalled, were ap- was no [racial discrimination].”32 proved by the cooperative members through”“a thor- oughly democratic process.” Dorothée Imbert, “The Art NOTES of Social Landscape Design,” in Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living, (Berkeley: University of Califor- 1. Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories nia Press, 1997), 154. of Architecture and (Cambridge, MIT Press), 2001, 55, 172ff. 20. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, 2. Mary Roche, “Group Living for Veterans,” New York Brace & World, Inc.), 1961, 486. Times Magazine (August 4, 1946); 34, 21. Roche, 35. 3. For Disney, Hurtz drew the dancing mushroom se- quence in Fantasia. He was a founding member of the 22. Max Lawrence, interviewed by the author, June 15, United Productions of America (UPA), where he won an 2004, Bel Air, CA. Academy Award in 1951. He later directed the “Rocky 23. “ Boom...” Architectural Forum (January and Bullwinkle Show” for over twenty years. 1950); 104-105. 4. Eunice and George Grier, Privately Developed Interra- 24. “One Convertible Plan,” Architectural Forum (April cial Housing, An Analysis of Experience (Berkeley: Uni- 1949) 126-128. versity of California Press), 1960, 144. 25. Ain, quoted in, Esther McCoy, The Second Genera- 5. Frank Wilkinson, interviewed by the author, January tion (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), 121. 22, 2004, Los Angeles, CA. 26. Quoted in Grier, 148. 6. Quoted in Sebastian Rotella, “Llano Del Rio Coopera- 27. Letter from Raymond M. Foley, FHA Commissioner, tive Colony 1914-1918” (May 28, to Community Homes, Inc., July 3, 1947, quoted in 1989): B8. Thurgood Marshall, “Memorandum to the President of the 7. The connection between Ain’s politics and his archi- United States Concerning Racial Discrimination by the Fed- tecture is the subject of my doctoral dissertation, “Gre- eral Housing Administration,” National Association for the gory Ain and the Social Politics of Housing Design,” UCLA Advancement of Colored People (Library of Congress Department of Architecture, forthcoming. Manuscript Collections), February 1, 1949, p. 7. 8. Quoted by Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier 28. Shelley v. Kraemer 334 U.S. 1 (1948), decided May (New York: Oxford University Press), 1985, 231. 3, 1948. 9. Ain, quoted by Esther McCoy, in Contemporary Archi- 29. Vernon DeMars, “Co-operative Housing: An Appraisal.” tects, Muriel Emanuel, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Progressive Architecture 32 (February 1951); 77. 1980), 19-20. 30. Grier, 155; also need a note on Mutual Housing 10. Simon Eisner, “Future : A Challenge,” Arts and 31. Thurgood Marshall, “Memorandum to the President Architecture (January 1945) 31, 50-52. of the United States Concerning Racial Discrimination by 11. Grier, 145. the Federal Housing Administration,” National Associa- 12. Roche, 35. tion for the Advancement of Colored People (Library of Congress Manuscript Collections), February 1, 1949, 14. 13. Grier, 145. 32. McCoy, The Second Generation , 121. 14. Ain, “The Flexible House Faces Reality,” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine (April 15, 1951), 4-5, 23. 15. Ain,”“Designs for Postwar Living: Jury Comments,” Arts and Architecture (August 1943) 24-27. 16. Saarinen, quoted by his son Eero in Time, July 2, 1956.