| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Don Parson. Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles. Foreword by Kevin Starr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 289. Cloth $70.50, paper $23.50.
In the early 1980s, when few historians seemed interested in public housing, independent scholar Don Parson began publishing articles about the history of public housing in Los Angeles. The policy debates about housing in the 1990s and the subsequent demolition of public housing in many cities seem to have piqued historians' interest. Since the mid-1990s many other scholars have joined Parson in exploring this topic. The book under review expands upon Parson's earlier research and makes his interpretation more accessible to a new generation of scholars.	1
Parson's book examines a series of episodes relating to the rebuilding of Los Angeles in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Parson argues that a "left-liberal popular front" worked with Mayor Fletcher Bowron and members of the city council to establish a federally funded public housing program in the late 1930s. Before U.S. entry into World War II, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles began the process of building more than 3,400 units of public housing in ten different projects. These projects were not simply places in which people would live. Instead, Parson insists, they "provided space for human interaction in the form of recreation, shared interests, neighborhood politics, housework, shopping, leisure, and a common sociability. They provided the skeletal framework on which an everyday life might fully flourish, and they reflected the Left's social democratic aesthetic of a planned civic culture" (p. 7). Parson uses the term "community modernism" to describe the Left's vision of modern Los Angeles.	. . .

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