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Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting

from Providence, Rhode Island. Nothing so defines American society, politics, and economy,

like housing. It is an asset unlike any other, an unrivaled motor of the real and financial

economy around which racialized wealth, power, status, and security orbit. It powers the system

at the highest level and commands allegiance to it from below. What we have is a two-tier housing

system, with a dominant private market organized around private home ownership, overwhelming a much

smaller and heavily stigmatized, underfunded, and in recent decades, increasingly privatized public

housing system reserved for only the very poorest. This episode is my interview with Gayle Radford,

under 1996 book Modern Housing for America, policy struggles in the New Deal era, which in recent

years has been rediscovered and treasured by a new generation of housing and tenant organizers.

Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the labor housing conference, and the New Deal era

struggle to make the American housing system a radically social one. In place of the two-tier system

that went out, Bauer and her allies proposed a massive federally-backed system of non-commercial

...