The City That Could Have Been

This chapter explores how Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on individualism ultimately led architects to reject an alternative vision of American modernity centered on public housing. Through a case study of Pueblo del Rio, a 1940s Los Angeles housing project designed by Paul R. Williams, the chapter reveals how progressive architects merged New Deal planning with racial uplift ideology in ways that could have complemented Cold War liberalism’s faith in expertise and managed democracy. While these California modernist architects believed government-funded, communal housing would become the template for postwar city building, McCarthyism and an emphasis on private property derailed their vision. The case of public housing demonstrates how social democratic policies in postwar America often depended on wartime imperatives. Initially legitimized as essential for housing defense workers, public housing projects became politically untenable once they became associated with socialism during the Red Scare. By the mid-1950s, modernist architects who began their careers devoted to public housing ended them building private homes for the wealthy, as the “midcentury modern” aesthetic was stripped of its progressive political vision and incorporated into a Cold War liberalism that accepted social inequality as inevitable.