Nancy Kwak

Housing security at the global scale: a history

When should the US become involved in the domestic housing policies of other countries? When is local housing security a concern for everyone?

The US became involved for the first time in global housing after World War II. It did so for specific political interests: US aid givers were interested in securing Cold War allies and creating a particular kind of pro-capitalist, democratic nationhood around the world. Yet these plans often went awry, with national leaders writing their own housing policies based on their interests and motivations. The results were a strange kind of Americanization that was at once parallel to the US system of mass homeownership, and yet also particular to each country.

Looking back, we can make sense of global housing crises today by untangling these historical relationships between housing and global investment, between politics and ideas of national security. There are historical reasons why cities around the world shared a particular vocabulary around housing, even if the eventual policies themselves emerged in different forms. Understanding these historical roots helps us to think more critically about what we mean when we talk about homeownership or about decent housing for all.

Nancy Kwak is an associate professor of history and urban studies and planning at UC San Diego. She wrote her book, A World of Homeowners: American power and the politics of housing aid, on the emergence of US housing programs around the world. Her second co-edited volume with Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, assembled some of the top scholars in transnational urbanist research to talk about the future of the field. She is now working on a book about the relationship between urban and rural in Southern California.