In A World of Homeowners, Nancy Kwak offers scholars interested in the history of capitalism and housing policy a fresh perspective that exemplifies the broader trend toward internationalization in many fields of historical inquiry, including urban history. Unsurprisingly, Kwak is a founding and active member of the Global Urban History Project launched in 2017. Readers familiar with the roles of U.S. government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration or Department of Housing and Urban Development, public–private bodies like Fannie Mae, and private industry groups like the National Savings and Loan League or Mortgage Bankers Association may gain entirely new insights into the global reach of such actors and their active participation in post–World War II American foreign policymaking. Drawing examples from all around the world, Kwak demonstrates a keen understanding of the period’s shifting geopolitics as she deftly treats nuances of localized economic development and unequal growth amid rapid urbanization.

The book’s chronological arc and overarching conclusions are as follows. By World War II, U.S. officials were already exhibiting a confidence that the emergent American ideal of mass homeownership—buttressed by New Deal–style subsidies and economic incentives—was superior to the European approach, with its greater emphasis on direct provision of public housing. With the country’s postwar turn toward internationalism and the rapid onset of the Cold War, American-style homeownership was considered an effective means of building a middle class and hopefully stabilizing politics in nations within the U.S. geopolitical orbit, while simultaneously promoting anti-Communism and facilitating American business opportunities. A key objective here was to promote property rights and streamline real estate procedures while encouraging countries to implement investor-friendly, debt-based financing of large-scale housing and infrastructure projects. Similar to stateside housing programs, the policy makers’ approach favored indirect supports such as guaranties, which reduced costs and preserved the appearance of governmental noninvolvement (typically characterized as the “free market” or “self-help”). Overall, these homeownership initiatives had a mixed record of success; Kwak notes difficulties across the board in providing access to the lowest-income segments of the population and explains why the United States could not completely disregard local conditions and impose its will. Despite surviving the Cold War, this long-running policy approach took a hit with the mortgage meltdown of 2008, an event Kwak hopes will continue to inspire “lively public debates about [the] real costs and benefits” (8) of homeownership on the American model.

A key strength of the book is Kwak’s ability to categorize and parse patterns and outcomes among many different examples, as she moves the lens from distant corners of the globe onto underdeveloped areas within the United States itself. Kwak demonstrates how housing aid was apportioned according to Cold War geopolitical priorities, with the earliest and most ambitious projects outside Europe aimed at Taiwanese dockworkers and Seoul residents, whose preferences in the latter instance forced U.S. officials to seek local expertise and incorporate design considerations extending beyond just cost-effectiveness. Contrastingly, American engagement in less strategically significant Burma was pragmatic and barely noticeable, involving subsidies for aluminum sheeting to upgrade Rangoon’s existing, improvised housing. Kwak debunks the “tropical research” paradigm that American advisors arbitrarily deployed in an attempt to give the appearance of neutrality and avoid accusations of neocolonialism; the preferred approach to emerge here, pioneered in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and subsequently exported, was to underwrite the cost of utilities on government-supplied land where residents themselves provided the construction materials and labor in a long-term, lease-to-own plan. Ironically, however, Puerto Rico built a substantial amount of public housing—also an approach settled upon, notably, as the keystone of Singapore’s housing policy after officials there considered but ultimately declined to follow U.S. advice. Particularly striking is the successful lobbying by the National Association of Home Builders, United States Savings and Loan League, and National Association of Real Estate Boards in favor of internationalizing the secondary mortgage market. Accelerating with the establishment of the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, such guaranty-backed housing investment initially focused on Latin America, building on earlier experiments with model housing development and savings deposit insurance in Peru. In Kwak’s most thought-provoking chapter, one in which the specific lines of international influence sometimes feel more implicit than explicit, she argues that American experience with low-cost housing provision abroad, combined with a growing international critique of U.S. racism, drove homeownership initiatives on American Indian reservations and in the form of inner-city “homesteading” by the 1970s. As in the other cases she profiles, Kwak peels back official declarations of success to expose the programs’ shortcomings—a high rate of Native American homeownership by 2000, for example, consisted largely of poor-quality and mobile homes. With the conclusion of the Cold War, the “Washington Consensus” on economic development had seemed regnant, with the World Bank as perhaps the most avid promoter of American-style homeownership—although Kwak notes skepticism about its benefits from squatters and others lacking resources to participate that would soon come to the fore with the global financial collapse.

There is so much here, in a book that hews to a manageable size. Kwak discusses a vast array of programs on an international scale without getting bogged down in excessive detail—surely a risk, which is hinted at in the captions accompanying the illustrations that sometimes carry the discussion further than in the text itself. A World of Homeowners is a welcome addition to ongoing discussions about the economics of homeownership and succeeds in broadening our historic perspective on the global reach of American capitalism.