Atlanta was home to the first fully federally funded public housing projects in the United States: University Homes (1937, for Black families) and Techwood Homes (1936, for white families). These New Deal projects, composed of low-slung brick apartment buildings set in footpath-crossed open spaces, became models for public housing built throughout the US in the years following the 1937 National Housing Act. They served as clearinghouses for innovative European social housing ideas and forms and yet also codified racial segregation and funding inequity in federal housing. The book favors University Homes to unfold a story of Black advocacy and uplift through governmentally supported housing despite the barriers of de jure and de facto segregation, while Techwood Homes serves as its white counterpoint. Read together, Atlanta’s housing projects remind us that intelligent site planning, human-scaled shared green spaces, community amenities, and solid construction can, and should, drive contemporary affordable housing design.

Christina E. Crawford is an architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, and associate professor of architectural history at Emory University. Her research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the twentieth century. Her monograph Spatial Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2022, winner of the Spiro Kostof Book Award) explores the foundations of early Soviet urban theory and practice, and her coedited book Detroit-Moscow-Detroit (MIT Press, 2023) examines architecture coproduced between the United States and USSR in intense interwar technical exchanges. Her current book project investigates the first fully federally funded public housing projects in the US, in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research and publications have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the College Art Association, among other institutions. Crawford received her PhD and MArch from Harvard University.