Bauer, Catherine

Neither licensed architect nor credentialed planner, Catherine Bauer (1905–1964) had by the 1950s emerged as one of America's most influential voices in housing policy and urban planning. As the foremost advocate in the 1930s for “modern housing,” she played a dominant role in shaping the nation's first permanent public housing program. Throughout her long career as America's premier “houser,” Bauer stood for a “balanced” program of housing and regional development.

Born May 11, 1905 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, of middle-class parents, Catherine Lucy Stone Bauer graduated in 1927 from Vassar College. A postgraduate tour of Europe introduced Bauer to the ideas of Le Corbusier and modern “massproduced,” “machineage” housing. Back in America, living an “avantgarde” life in Greenwich Village and doing publicity for Harcourt Brace publishers, Bauer met Lewis Mumford. The philosopherurbanist became not only her lover but her entrée to the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) and its vision of “balanced” regional growth and nonspeculative housing in planned neighborhoods.

Bearing letters of introduction from Mumford, Bauer in 1930 traveled to Europe where she met such modernist architects and planners as Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe, and Ernst May. Gropius's streamlined bau haus complex Romerstadt outside Frankfurt am Main especially impressed her. With Mumford she visited Europe again in 1932, and 2 years later she published Modern Housing (1934). The book established her as a housing expert. In Modern Housing she argued that affordable, wellplanned, nonspeculative housing, like that at Romerstadt, derived from the active political involvement of the workers themselves. She extolled Europe's experiment with governmentaided shelter, much of which featured the streamlined Bauhaus architecture of the period. By contrast, American housing had popped up chaotically and did not provide sufficiently for the needs of the workers. Bauer believed that the United States, like Europe, needed to make housing a right and a public utility and that the impetus for reform needed to come from the workers themselves. Mass evictions and mortgage foreclosures during the early years of the Great Depression vindicated Bauer's fears about the inadequacy of American housing.

The Great Depression convinced Bauer that America was ripe for modern, governmentaided housing. In 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal created the Public Works Administration (PWA), whose Housing Division promised to rehouse America's ill housed in affordable, limiteddividend, bau haus-type complexes, such as the Oscar Stonorovdesigned Carl Mackley Homes built by the PWA for Philadelphia textile workers. The latter sparked the founding in 1933 of the Labor Housing Conference (LHC), which lobbied for a national housing program; Bauer served as its executive secretary.

Bauer and the LHC opposed linking housing and slum clearance and centralizing the administration of government housing in Washington, which were policies favored by the PWA's Harold Ickes. Instead, Bauer and the American Federation of Laborbacked LHC espoused the limiteddividend, workermanaged Mackley model. The public housing program spawned by the 1937 Wagnersteagall bill fell far short of Bauer's vision of modern housing as the crucible for working-class communalism. Nevertheless, in 1939 she directed the United States Housing Authority's Research and Information Division.

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