The state market relationship as a real estate technology: FHA multifamily development and preservation, 1934 – present

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between the 1930s and the 1950s the United States Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed a set of programs to spur the private development of hundreds of thousands of multifamily rental and cooperative units. To do so, the government crafted real estate technologies, working through iterative processes that weigh the social need for housing with what makes developers and investors engage. This technology generated units as well as a public-private approach to housing production. We use archival, government and journalistic sources to investigate these technologies in practice in early FHA multifamily programs, locate the housing stock it generated in New York City, and explore how real estate technologies changed over time. The discourse of state market relations transforms what is legally a mortgage insurance program into proto-neoliberalism. The FHA multifamily programs provide a lens to view one way in which the negotiation of effective real estate technologies shape state market relations.