“Homeownership isn’t necessarily a good thing for working people. We need an alternative, right? Renting, we all know how irritating it is to hand the money over to the landlord, but on the other hand, do you want a mortgage on your back if your employment is uncertain, or you have a health issue?”

— Kristin Szylvian, 2017

In the latest episode of Doomed to Repeat, Alex talks to one of the coolest people in the world, Dr. Kristin Szylvian of St. John’s University, about one of the coolest subjects — the long-lost history of organized labor’s experiment with mutual housing in the mid-twentieth century. Her book The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class was published in 2015 by Temple University Press.