A History of Workforce Housing

Workforce housing is a recent name for an old problem: how to house the people a local economy depends on, close to where they work. In the United States, responsibility for solving it has changed hands several times. Employers went first, building mill boardinghouses and company towns in the 1800s. The federal government stepped in as a builder during both world wars. After 1945, federally backed mortgages and mass-produced suburbs did most of the work. In recent decades, employers, school districts and local governments have returned to the task.

Each era ended for a reason, and each left a lesson that still shapes how workforce housing is designed. The phrase itself is new and loosely defined. The history behind it is about two centuries long.

Two Centuries at a Glance

Mill Villages and Company Towns (1820s–Mid-1900s)

Early American industry often grew where there was water power, coal or timber, not where there were homes. Employers who wanted workers had to house them.

Lowell’s boardinghouses

Lowell, Massachusetts, is one of the earliest large examples. The National Park Service (NPS) dates the city’s first textile factory to 1823. Most of its workers were young women from New England farms, and most lived in boardinghouses owned by the mill corporations. A typical boardinghouse had eight units, with 20 to 40 women in each.

Housing came with supervision. Boardinghouse keepers enforced curfews and strict codes of conduct. The arrangement did not prevent conflict: according to NPS, Lowell’s women workers struck twice in the 1830s, and the boardinghouses themselves became places to organize.

Pullman, the model town

The best-known company town is Pullman, built south of Chicago by the Pullman Palace Car Company, a maker of railroad sleeping cars. The company bought 4,000 acres, hired an architect and a landscape architect, and broke ground in the spring of 1880. NPS describes brick row houses with indoor plumbing that were well above the standards of the day. By the fall of 1883, more than 8,000 people lived there.

The town was also a business. George Pullman set rents to return 6% on the company’s investment, a target NPS says the town never reached. Homes could be rented but not bought, and the company restricted what residents could do in them.

When a financial panic hit in 1893 and orders fell, the company cut wages without a matching cut in rents. Because rent was deducted from paychecks, NPS notes, workers were left with very little. The sequence that followed is a landmark in labor history:

• May 11, 1894: Workers at the Pullman factories went on strike.
• Summer 1894: The American Railway Union boycotted trains carrying Pullman cars, which disrupted rail traffic across the country. The federal government obtained an injunction against the boycott and deployed U.S. marshals and Army troops. NPS reports that fighting around Chicago rail yards left dozens dead.
• Mid-July 1894: The boycott collapsed. President Grover Cleveland then appointed a commission to investigate.
• October 1898: The Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to sell all of its non-industrial land. Most of the town changed hands in 1907, with residents given the first option to buy.

Coal camps and mill towns

Company towns were most common in remote places. The West Virginia Encyclopedia estimates that the state had 465 coal company towns in 1930. They were not incorporated and had no local government. The coal company bought or leased the land and built the town on it, typically houses, a company store, a church, a school and a post office. Housing was assigned by rank, and Black and immigrant miners were often housed apart in less desirable locations.

Quality varied widely. The same source says some towns were better than nearby independent communities, while others were filthy and run-down or harshly repressive. A typical town lasted 50 to 75 years, or as long as the coal held out, and none remains company-owned today. What they shared was dependence on a single company for work, shelter and supplies.

World War I: Washington Becomes a Builder (1918–1919)

The federal government first built housing for workers during World War I. Shipyards and other war industries were expanding faster than nearby towns could absorb new workers, and Congress acted through two channels in 1918.

• Shipyard housing. A law of March 1, 1918, authorized federal loans to realty companies set up by shipbuilders. The program was run by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which the U.S. Shipping Board had set up in April 1917. A congressional chronology of housing laws records housing in 24 localities, including 9,000 houses, 1,100 apartments, 19 dormitories and 8 hotels.
• Housing for other war workers. Laws of May 16 and June 4, 1918, authorized and funded the U.S. Housing Corporation, which the Secretary of Labor established on July 8, 1918. The same chronology credits it with 25 communities containing more than 5,000 single-family homes, plus apartments, dormitories and hotels.

The effort was brief. The National Archives notes that construction stopped after the Armistice of November 1918, and that after July 1, 1919, the Housing Corporation was mainly selling off what it had built. Most of the homes went to private owners.

The design legacy lasted longer. According to an NPS history of American suburbs, the wartime agencies brought town planners, architects and landscape architects together and borrowed from English garden-city planning. NPS lists Yorkship Village in Camden, New Jersey, Union Gardens in Wilmington, Delaware, and Hilton Village in Newport News, Virginia, among the most influential projects.

World War II: Defense Housing and the Lanham Act (1940–1950)

The pattern repeated on a larger scale two decades later. As defense production expanded in 1940, workers moved to shipyard and factory towns faster than homes could be found for them.

Congress first let projects financed under the Housing Act of 1937, the law that created public housing, be used for defense workers. Then came the Lanham Act (Public Law 76-849), which became law on October 14, 1940. The act authorized the Federal Works Administrator to build housing wherever the President found that a shortage would impede national defense and that private capital would not fill the gap in time. Its main terms were:

• Who it served: enlisted military personnel, civilian employees of the Navy and War Departments posted at bases, and workers in industries essential to national defense.
• Starting budget: an authorization of $150 million.
• Cost limits: an average of no more than $3,000 per family home within the continental United States.
• An exit clause: once the emergency ended, the housing was to be disposed of as promptly as was advantageous.

In March 1941 Congress added a private-sector track, allowing the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure mortgages on homes in critical defense areas.

One surviving example of defense housing is Atchison Village in Richmond, California, built in 1941 for shipyard workers and their families. NPS notes that its homes are now privately owned and managed cooperatively by the homeowners, while many of the dormitories and temporary structures built during the war have disappeared.

The war had a cost for lower-income renters. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) notes that the Lanham Act halted new low-rent public housing development in favor of housing for war workers, and gave war workers priority for existing public housing.

In 1945, Congress opened the war housing to the families of servicemen and veterans. A 1947 law started a two-year clock for removing temporary structures, and the Housing Act of 1950 set rules for disposing of the rest. According to CRS, war-worker housing was eventually converted to public housing under that 1950 law.

The Postwar Suburbs (1944–1960s)

After 1945, federal policy shifted from building homes for workers to helping workers buy them.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, was signed on June 22, 1944. It had the Veterans Administration guarantee home loans for returning veterans. Combined with FHA mortgage insurance, which by 1948 could cover as much as 95% of a home’s value over as long as 30 years, the guarantee let many veterans buy with little or no down payment. The National Archives reports that 4.3 million home loans, with a face value of $33 billion, had been made under the GI Bill by 1955.

Builders responded with mass production. On Long Island, William Levitt began building houses for veterans in 1947. His firm broke construction into 27 steps, each done by a specialized crew moving from lot to lot. Levittown eventually held 82,000 residents in more than 17,500 houses, according to NPS. In today’s terms these were starter homes.

The benefits were not shared equally. The National Archives states that Black veterans were often unable to get mortgages and were overwhelmingly excluded from white suburban neighborhoods. Deed clauses known as racially restrictive covenants could no longer be enforced by courts after the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, but discrimination in lending persisted, a history tied to redlining. See redlining, segregation and fair housing for that history.

Congress also tried a rental program for the middle. The Housing Act of 1961 broadened FHA’s Section 221 mortgage insurance to low- and moderate-income families generally and let FHA insure rental housing mortgages carrying below-market interest rates. CRS lists that program among older federal efforts that reached households above the usual low-income limit.

The Modern Era: Local Programs, Employers and Public Employees

The most recent chapter has been written mostly below the federal level, by communities and employers whose workers could not find homes they could afford nearby.

• Resort communities. The Aspen/Pitkin County Housing Authority in Colorado traces its program to the late 1970s, when local officials grew concerned about housing being demolished for redevelopment. Programs like it often rely on a deed restriction to keep homes available to local workers. See workforce housing in resort and rural communities.
• Employers. The National Housing Conference dates modern employer-assisted housing to 1991, when the mortgage finance company Fannie Mae introduced a benefit for its own staff. Unlike a company town, these programs usually help employees buy or rent homes the employer does not own.
• Public-safety workers and teachers. In the 1990s, HUD created sales programs for homes it had acquired, aimed first at public-safety employees and law enforcement officers and, from December 1999, at teachers. Good Neighbor Next Door followed under rules published in November 2006. It offers law enforcement officers, teachers, firefighters and emergency medical technicians a 50% discount on designated HUD-owned homes in revitalization areas.
• School districts. Santa Clara Unified School District in California says it has housed teachers since 2001 at Casa del Maestro, which now has 70 apartments. California’s Teacher Housing Act of 2016 was written to make it easier to build and preserve affordable rental housing for teachers and school district employees. See teacher and public employee housing.

Some older occupation-based programs continue alongside these. CRS points to federal farmworker housing programs, military housing benefits, and the housing that federal agencies furnish to employees at remote duty stations, including National Park Service field staff.

The vocabulary is still unsettled. CRS reports from March and September 2026 both note that workforce housing is not defined in federal statute or regulation. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (Public Law 119-101), which became law on July 11, 2026, directs the Government Accountability Office to study the subject and recommend a definition, with a report due to Congress by July 11, 2027.

In the meantime, state and local programs commonly set an upper limit of 120% of area median income, and several add a floor, commonly at 60% or 80%. Some programs, such as teacher housing, set eligibility by occupation instead, an approach often aimed at essential workers.

What the History Suggests

• Tying a home to a job concentrates risk. In Pullman, one company set both the paycheck and the rent, and residents could not buy their homes. Many modern programs avoid that arrangement by helping workers purchase homes of their own. Where an employer does own the housing, the lease terms matter.
• Speed is possible in an emergency. Twice, the federal government planned and built whole communities within a few years. Both times the program ended with the war, and the homes were sold, removed or converted.
• Financing can do as much as construction. Postwar mortgage guarantees reached millions of households, far more than the World War I building programs did. They also show that how a subsidy is delivered decides who is left out.
• The target keeps moving. Mill hands, shipyard workers, veterans and teachers have each been the focus in turn. The underlying question, who can afford to live near the work that needs doing, has stayed the same.

The Bottom Line

Workforce housing did not begin as a policy term. It began with employers who needed workers nearby, passed to the federal government during two wars, and then to the mortgage system that built the postwar suburbs. Today’s programs for teachers, first responders and resort workers draw on all three traditions. Most try to avoid the company-town arrangement in which one party is both the boss and the landlord.