The Weimar Republic's construction of public housing has never been fully appreciated. It was the pacesetter in public housing in the interwar years, especially in the 1920s. Even before World War I, Germany had been the model for the British Town Planning Act of 1909 and the zoning laws of New York City. The collapse of the construction market during World War I made housing a national issue, and the republic's governments vowed repeatedly to remedy the problem, breaking from the imperial past in which housing construction had been a matter for the private sector or state and local governments. During the Weimar years, it became a public policy, a harbinger of the social republic of the future. Article 155 of the Weimar Constitution pledged suitable housing for all Germans. In 1926, a centrist coalition chose to begin a major public-housing program instead of relying on a free-market approach that would have required abolition of war-time rent controls. This article will argue that the pledge on housing was redeemed to the tune of more than a million units. However, I will also suggest that this success led to a larger perception of failure. The housing shortage persisted. The government simply did not anticipate the increased demand that burdened the supply of new and modern dwellings. While the government was trying to satisfy an existing demand, the curve unexpectedly moved because the new apartments were qualitatively better. The depression aggravated the problem by creating a homeless population unable to afford the new public housing or crowd into the old dwellings that had escaped demolition.
