Don Parson's Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles offers an ambitious account of the political unraveling of a modern social utopia - Los Angeles' public housing. Parson has two objectives. First, he moves from the Great Depression through the McCarthy Era, detailing the emergence of a housing program designed to realize social democracy through urban residential life. More broadly, he aims to understand how the Red Scare revised urban space in ways that rendered social democracy unviable in the United States.

In contrast to other literature on the topic, Parson does not treat the failure of public housing in Los Angeles as inevitable. Instead, he provides an in-depth examination of the politics that made Los Angeles' early public housing a success, and those that ultimately shifted its urban development toward commercialization and suburbanization. The book's first three chapters situate modern architectural ideals within the social upheavals of early and mid-century America, including the Great Depression, deteriorating urban conditions, and the labor migrations during World War II. These chapters detail how struggles for better housing unified a left-popular front of organized labor, war veterans, women's groups and religious leaders. Later chapters demonstrate that anxieties about socialized housing became central to Los Angeles' post-war Red Scare, engendering a development climate increasingly steered by private commercial interests. A diverse array of source materials, including media reportage, oral histories, and case studies of two Los Angeles neighborhoods contextualize Parson's account. Such careful contextualization results in a rich narrative that is as comfortable with officials in city council chambers, as it is with activists pitching squatter encampments.

Parson's account of Los Angeles' ill-fated public housing program turns on an analytical divide between "community" and "corporate" modernism. Parson characterizes "community modernism" as a human-scaled aesthetic and social movement dedicated to civic culture, neighborhood-based identification, racial integration, common sociability and cooperative living. Parson argues that immediately before and following World War II, Angelinos' political organizing around housing, and the city's subsequent public housing construction exemplified "community modernism." Yet for Parson, Los Angeles' affair with "community modernism" was about more than housing. He suggests that it allowed the left-liberal coalition to enact policies and development based not on a race-based understanding of urban geography, but on a class-based understanding. Accordingly, Los Angeles' "community modernism" mitigated its housing shortages and racial tensions, all the while fostering social democratic reforms, and democratic dispositions befitting residents of a modern metropolis.

Parson opposes "community" to "corporate" modernism - private development focused on the large-scale, commercialization of central cities. He maintains that despite its political strength, following the War, Los Angeles' public housing program fell prey to an expanding private suburban housing market and a real estate lobby seeking a stronghold in the downtown. He argues that in Los Angeles, the Red Scare marshaled private homeownership as the primary conduit through which private commercial interests waged an ideological battle against the left. Through referendums, conferences, lobbying and the media, these private interests fomented local opposition to federal public housing commitments. Such opposition, Parson suggests, ushered in the more commercially friendly federal urban renewal program. More significantly, he argues that as organized labor endorsed pro-growth commercial dictates, the left-liberal coalition splintered, losing its capacity to build consensus by implementing humanitarian and social democratic reforms. Outside of the coalition's hands, Los Angeles' public housing program lost its capacity to encourage social and racial integration. Instead, Parson argues that it concentrated demographics considered inimical to modern Los Angeles' ascendant private commercial order - namely, poor minorities.

Parson's treatment of Los Angeles' transition from a city at the forefront of community-driven social housing to the hallmark of disconnected development and suburbanization has several strengths beyond its rich narrative. Where histories of urban housing are often localized, Parson's analysis cuts across municipal, federal and geopolitical scales. This purview meshes well with recent efforts by cultural historians to understand the role that basic commodities, such as housing, played in subjective experiences of Cold War era politics. Second, Parson's insistence that projects to "make a better world" through revising cityscapes were intensely political, class-based struggles challenges common treatments of such projects as the misguided efforts of idealists isolated from "real" urban life. Because he carefully contextualizes such idealism, Parson reminds built environment scholars that utopias are not dreamt, but rather made through complex political processes.

Parson's book still raises at least two major questions. Parson flags the racial dimensions of Los Angeles' Red Scare, yet he does not consider how and why these dimensions became so manifest in popular debates about housing. To be sure, these debates unfolded in a context of racism. Yet given that these debates related neighborhood living to integration, Parson might have closely interrogated how Los Angeles' public housing war racialized expectations of residential intimacy, making them central to development policies. Second, while Parson's categorization of "community" and "corporate" modernism efficiently organizes Los Angeles' changing investments in public housing, it tends toward inflexibility, and even confines his narrative. The book suffers from the same difficulty that plagues overly schematic theorizations of the "public"/ "private" divide: a reluctance to problematize this dichotomy by considering how social actors enact it to make arguments about their world. Parson's focus on mapping "community modernism" onto social democratic coalition politics glosses over moments in his material where Angelino's housing activists nest a complex of arguments that should not be reduced to class-based politics. Among other things, such moments include arguments about domesticity as a vehicle through which to imagine and stake out appropriate avenues for the political participation for women.

Making a Better World is a well-researched and impressively comprehensive work, and it will appeal to many different audiences. It adds to the history of development, progressive politics, and race relations in urban America. Moreover, it contributes to growing scholarship that considers how expectations about everyday spatial experiences shape social and political identifications, associations and movements. As America's public housing programs again undergo massive change, understanding how such expectations revised last centuries' cities will be critical.

Catherine Fennell, The University of Chicago

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