Mary K. Simkhovitch and the effort to create housing for all in New York City
A new book revisits the public housing programs of the 1930s.
Today, Mary K. Simkhovitch is little remembered. But in the first half of the 20th century, her name was everywhere. As an advocate for New York’s poor and a friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she appeared often in the press. As a leading member of the settlement-house movement alongside Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley, she founded Greenwich House, a bustling social-services and arts center. As the author of numerous studies on urban poverty and slum conditions, she became a prominent advocate for government-supported housing and helped launch New York City’s public housing system. Upon her death, The New York Times noted that she’d “occupied an important place in the life of this city for fifty years.” The NBC Radio Network broadcast a play reenacting her funeral, with a crowd of children standing outside the church, in rain and sleet, to pay their respects.
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A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing
Greenwich House is still going strong, but the ideas that once animated the settlement-house movement no longer have much purchase in a world of neo–social Darwinism and radical critiques of capitalism. In her new biography of Simkhovitch, A Slumless America, Betty Boyd Caroli attempts to recover the life of this formidable figure. Her book provides a window into a set of views that seem both hopelessly archaic and yet still useful in thinking about our future. We can learn much from the strengths and limitations of Simkhovitch’s approach to social change. For all her accomplishments, Simkhovitch’s efforts nevertheless left in place the social structures that continue to undermine further advances.
Like many settlement-house workers, Simkhovitch—née Mary Melinda Kingsbury—came from an old-line Protestant family, one not rich but thoroughly respectable. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, during the Reconstruction era, she lived into the early days of the Cold War.
Simkhovitch’s commitment to reform stemmed from her religious belief. A devout Episcopalian, she attended church almost every day of her adult life. As a 14-year-old, she first witnessed urban poverty when she volunteered at a Sunday school that her church sponsored in an African American neighborhood in Boston. During a post-undergraduate year she spent at the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College), Simkhovitch embraced the Social Gospel: the belief that religion had to go beyond a relationship with God to encompass helping others in need.
She began to put this idea into practice working at Denison House, an early settlement house in what is now Boston’s Chinatown. One of her Harvard Annex classmates, Gertrude Stein, went in a very different direction, but both represented a cohort of young women trying to carve out careers and identities independent of men. Settlement houses were meant to help poor city dwellers with education, social services, and cultural enrichment. But equally important, they provided an opportunity for adventurous middle-class women, who otherwise would have been restricted to domestic life, to live with their peers in female-led, cosmopolitan communities, secular orders for social reform.
A year spent at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin from 1895 to ’96 broadened Simkhovitch’s political perspectives. There, she was exposed to a brand of socialism centered not on revolution but on the expansion of the existing state to provide needed services to the citizenry. Rapid industrialization and urbanization had led to poverty, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions in many parts of Europe. State action, a growing number of German socialists argued, could alleviate suffering and stabilize society by providing housing, transportation, and recreation. Simkhovitch, after touring some publicly financed housing of the kind that the United States wouldn’t have for another four decades, declared that “the municipal socialism of Berlin” was “well worth copying.”
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It was at university in Berlin that the young American also met her future husband, Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch. Caroli devotes as much attention to Simkhovitch’s personal life as she does to her professional activity. In many ways, Simkhovitch—even as she embraced a politics of radical reform—remained remarkably conventional, true to her proper, middle-class, New England upbringing. Her marriage to V.G., as his friends called him, was the one big exception. Of Russian and Jewish background, Vladimir lived a life of grand gestures, some of them outside his means. Though he was very different in temperament and lifestyle from Mary, the couple remained loyal to one another, even in difficult times.
In 1902, after moving to New York City, Simkhovitch founded Greenwich House in what is now the West Village. It was far from the first such establishment in the city, and in many ways it was typical of the 400 settlement houses that would eventually spring up in the country. (Four hundred!) Located in what was then a poor, predominantly Italian immigrant neighborhood (and which, these days, you must be rich to afford), Greenwich House provided social services, a kindergarten, a wide array of clubs and classes, vocational training, and recreation to community residents. Like most settlement houses, it embraced a paternalistic ethos, with the assumption being that the poor needed to learn how to maintain a household, raise their children, and navigate society properly. Also, after initially serving white and Black community members, it succumbed to the norm and operated on a whites-only basis.
Simkhovitch, an able administrator and fundraiser, built Greenwich House into a powerful institution, with multiple buildings, a music school, a world-renowned pottery program, and much more. At the same time, she plunged into reform movements of all kinds, including women’s suffrage, the suppression of prostitution, improved maternal and children’s health, and support for labor organizing, widows’ pensions, and public housing. Meanwhile, Vladimir secured a position teaching economic history at Columbia University and became a well-known art collector and dealer as well. For long stretches, the couple kept their own living quarters and traveled separately, but they still seemed to draw sustenance and support from one another.
Simkhovitch’s career, interesting as it was, would not be very notable if hadn’t been for her deep engagement with housing, which Caroli foregrounds in her book’s title. Even before she founded Greenwich House, Simkhovitch had come to believe that government action was needed to reduce the cost of housing. Some reformers thought that government regulation would lead the private sector to eliminate slum conditions and address the severe shortage of affordable homes in cities like New York. Simkhovitch argued that it would take more; she believed, in Caroli’s words, that “safe, affordable housing was a human right, like water and air, and government had to provide it since private investors could not.”
One of Simkhovitch’s early involvements in housing came when she helped mount an exhibit documenting living conditions in the slums. Progressives of Simkhovitch’s generation believed that exposing social ills was the first step toward solving them: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” as Louis Brandeis famously wrote. Photography, especially the work of Jacob Riis, exposed the dangers of poverty, congestion, and tenement life to the better-off. Exhibits were another favored medium: The 1900 “Tenement House Exhibition” contributed to the passage the following year of a New York State law regulating tenements. In 1908, the Committee on Congestion of Population, which Simkhovitch founded with Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley, cosponsored an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History that featured photographs, charts, and full-scale models of tenement rooms. In 1934, the Museum of Modern Art reprised the effort with its “Housing Exhibition of the City of New York,” which juxtaposed photographs of existing housing for the poor with model rooms, put together by Macy’s, showing what was possible instead. It is hard to imagine the Museum of Natural History or MoMA mounting an exhibit to expose housing ills today—say, the subdivided units and basement apartments in Queens and the Bronx crammed with undocumented immigrants—but perhaps they should.
Throughout the 1910s and ’20s, Simkhovitch continued to demand state action on housing, mobilizing the networks of female reformers and settlement houses in which she played a leading role. But the results of these efforts were modest: The United States still didn’t have a single unit of public housing.
Then the Great Depression and the New Deal changed everything. Massive unemployment in the construction industry created an opening for reformers to push for government-funded housing as part of a national recovery program. Simkhovitch was well positioned to play a crucial role. For one thing, in 1932, she assumed leadership of the newly created National Public Housing Conference, a left-liberal alliance that included Socialist Party head Norman Thomas, Lillian Ward, and Fiorello La Guardia. For another thing, she had personal access to the White House.
Simkhovitch had known Franklin Roosevelt since he was a teenager—her family summered in Maine near the Roosevelts’ home on Campobello Island—and she’d also become friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who numbered Simkhovitch among the women who were “a constant inspiration and help to me.” Working with New York Senator Robert Wagner, Simkhovitch and other advocates succeeded in getting a housing program included in the massive 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. The upshot was the first federally funded public housing in the United States, starting with Techwood Homes in Atlanta, which opened in 1936.
Yet achieving a permanent federal housing program—not a temporary one as part of the recovery effort—proved a heavier lift. In spite of the lobbying by Simkhovitch and many others, such a program did not emerge until the passage of the Housing Act of 1937.
Some housing advocates had pushed for a capacious program that would fund homes built not only by the government but also by nonprofits and cooperatives serving a broad income range. Simkhovitch had backed a more modest plan, but what ended up being enacted, after fierce pushback by the real estate industry and its allies, was something even less extensive. Under the new law, federal funds for housing could go only to local government authorities for projects intended to serve low-income people, built to relatively low standards. Unlike broad or universal programs, such as Social Security and (later) Medicare, public housing ended up without a large natural base of political support.
When the New York City Housing Authority was established in 1934, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Simkhovitch as its vice chair. She and her colleagues moved with dispatch, picking the sites for the first two federally funded NYCHA projects in just six weeks, something unimaginable today. By the time Simkhovitch left her post in 1947, there were public housing projects in every borough of the city, including the Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the country, with over 3,000 units.
Simkhovitch brought elements of settlement-house paternalism to New York’s public housing. Housing assistants collected the rent in person each week and also acted like social workers to deal with perceived family problems, an arrangement the residents intensely disliked. (Such practices were not restricted to New York; in New Orleans, “home counselors” conducted annual inspections of public housing apartments.) More positively, Simkhovitch pressed for including community and health centers in public housing. When my younger daughter was small, she attended a daycare center in a purpose-built space in a nearby NYCHA project.
The title of Caroli’s book comes from a letter that FDR wrote to Simkhovitch in 1943, about how much he anticipated working with her after the war to achieve “a slumless America.” The term slum has since gone out of fashion, but the reality of inadequate, overcrowded, and unhealthful housing has not disappeared. For a vast number of Americans, the dream of affordable housing remains just that: a dream. To understand why, it is useful to consider the limits of the strategies—particularly coalition politics—that Simkhovitch employed.
It is striking how permeable the lines once were between the left and more mainstream liberal reformers. Simkhovitch was not a socialist, but she sometimes voted for socialist candidates, had no qualms about allying with socialists in coalitions for particular causes, and was greatly influenced by them as far back as the 1890s. She saw no contradiction between calling for extended social rights and public services, including public housing, and remaining friendly with leading financiers and capitalists, who provided much of the funding for Greenwich House.
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The Cold War led to rigid barriers between socialists and communists, on the one hand, and liberal forces, on the other, the result of a deliberate and effective campaign to isolate the left. But those barriers now seem to be breaking down, ideologically and organizationally. It has often been noted that Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism looks a lot like New Deal liberalism. As the Democratic Socialists of America has grown and, in cities like New York, become an electoral juggernaut, more and more liberal politicians have sought to curry favor with the group.
With new possibilities emerging for liberal-left alliances, we need to be clear-eyed about what they can accomplish. Broad coalitions were critical in advancing the cause of affordable housing in Simkhovitch’s day, and they still are. But perhaps they are not enough. Simkhovitch was not a single-issue reformer (a “houser,” as some public housing advocates were known). Rather, she engaged with many different issues, from women’s suffrage to trade unionism. But she never pressed for a fundamental change in the social system that led to so many of the ills she fought to cure. Arguably, that limited what could be achieved in housing. Without reducing the power of the real estate industry and its allies in finance and construction, public housing was doomed to be a crimped, flawed effort that served only people so poor that it was not possible to build profitably for them.
Yet even that was more than what we have now. In much of the country, public housing has been literally bulldozed away. Simkhovitch’s belief that government had an obligation to build good, affordable housing because the private sector wouldn’t sounds radical today, when almost no one asserts that so boldly and straightforwardly. However, her model for change faces the same problems now that it did back then. The extraordinary resources and political mobilization of the superrich against the kind of urban reforms that socialists had envisioned all the way back to when Simkhovitch was studying in Berlin suggest that a more frontal attack on class power may be needed.
It is encouraging to note that in several parts of the country, programs have been launched to build “social housing”: government-aided, below-market-cost dwellings. Also encouraging is the victory of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ran on a platform of housing affordability and won despite the tens of millions of dollars spent by real estate and financial interests to defeat him. But if social or public housing is just an add-on to the existing housing market, its impact may be quite limited. As long as the real estate industry, and the financial interests with which it is tightly intertwined, remains a dominant force in urban America, progressive housing programs will remain precarious. Through zoning, the courts, campaign spending, lobbying, media allies, co-optation, and other means, those who profit from the housing marketplace will undermine, push back, and limit efforts to develop nonmarket alternatives. Left unchecked, what the housing expert Samuel Stein calls “the real estate state” will continue to have its way.
It may be that, under current circumstances, providing decent affordable housing for all is a more utopian project than changing the underlying economic system. Mary K. Simkhovitch’s lifetime of effort benefited millions of Americans who were able to move into public housing—no small feat. But 75 years after her death, we still have failed to solve our housing crisis.
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