Build affordable and communal neighborhoods

By Kristin M. Szylvian

To help "working families feel more secure in a world of constant change," President Obama recently announced his support for policies that would make it easier to purchase a house.

That's a good start, but equal attention needs to be devoted to the diversification of housing choices. There are too few cooperative and nonprofit market options available.

The Philadelphia-Camden region has a sprinkling of nonprofit housing corporations with a solid record of providing affordable housing and a community-oriented lifestyle. Three cooperatives, Audubon Park and Bellmawr Park in New Jersey and Pennypack Woods in Northeast Philadelphia, have served as pillars of the local noncommercial market for more than 60 years.

Those three developments, and their five sister communities in North Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas, were constructed in 1941-42, in the midst of an acute shortage of housing for workers employed in defense industries. They functioned as testing grounds for innovations in home finance, design, construction, and ownership. Three projects were in or near Philadelphia because so many "middle-income" defense workers were employed at the Navy Yard and by defense contractors. These workers didn't qualify for low-income public housing, were unable to find rental housing, and could not afford to buy houses.

John Green, the founder and president of the Camden-based Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, believed that defense workers needed cooperative housing because it combined some of the economic and social advantages of renting and owning. He helped refine a Federal Works Agency plan calling for the sale of defense housing developments to nonprofit corporations owned and controlled by the residents. Green helped select the Audubon Park site and became a lifelong resident.

In 1945, Walnut Grove in South Bend, Ind., was the first of the eight pilot projects sold to a mutual housing corporation. Pennypack Woods became the property of the Pennypack Woods Home Ownership Association in 1952, the same year Bellmawr Park was sold to its residents. The Audubon Park Mutual Housing Association purchased the 499-dwelling-unit community in 1953. Each sale was a long and complicated process that required the residents to organize, attend meetings, write letters, circulate petitions, and collect money door to door.

In their effort to comply with a seemingly endless and ever-changing set of federal requirements, the residents encountered resistance from members of Congress, local and state government officials, real estate agents, bankers, home builders, and others who feared their movement's potential impact on the commercial housing market. Allegations of communist sympathies and labor union radicalism were leveled against them.

The sale of Audubon Park and its seven sister projects inspired similar mutual housing associations. Today, there are at least 35 Roosevelt-era communities nationwide that are owned and managed by these associations.

These communities survive, but they are not free of the economic and social problems that affect most communities and neighborhoods. At the same time, however, they offer something that too few communities provide: affordable housing combined with a strong sense of belonging.

The Philadelphia region's three mutual housing associations suggest that the concept deserves a reexamination and perhaps a further opportunity to contribute to the realization of the national housing goal first set forth by President Harry S. Truman and Congress in 1949 and now pushed by Obama: a decent home and living environment for every American family.