The origins of the United States’ twentieth century Garden City Movement dates back to nineteenth century Europe. In response to growing industrialization, Ebenzer Howard convincingly wrote of the need to eschew urban centers for new planned communities on the city’s outskirts. Nearby in Germany, the Zeilenbau promoted the development of superblocks to create interior-facing communities. Beginning in the 1920s United States, urban planners Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright applied these concepts to address the housing needs. In 1923 Stein and Wright, along with leading figures including Lewis Mumford, Catherine Bauer, Benton MacKaye, and Alexander Bing, founded the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). The RPAA saw urban planning and housing design as tools that could powerfully impact communities’ health, well-being, and even values. The principals they identified would guide decades of garden apartments: superblocks composed of modest, uniform residential buildings oriented around shared green space and connected via a series of internal pedestrian paths. These planning principles directly responded to the “social ills” associated with dense urban settings and the automobile by creating a bucolic setting meant to foster health and connection. 

While early garden apartments were privately funded developments for middle to upper-class residents, federal housing policy brought Garden City Movement ideals to a wider audience. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was born in 1934 out of President Rooselvelt’s “New Deal” and, among other responsibilities, began to insure housing developments. While most FHA-backed residences were single-family, there were numerous garden apartments that targeted higher resourced residents. The United States Housing Act of 1937, which led to the creation of the County and City of Los Angeles Housing Authority (HACLA), made garden apartments more accessible to lower income residents. By 1942, HACLA funded nineteen public housing developments, all garden apartments. Notably, many of these complexes were intentionally racially integrated. 

World War II significantly altered the development of garden apartments. In 1941, HACLA issued a policy prioritizing defense workers for units in existing public housing, and supported the creation of several developments specifically for defense workers. 

The post-war period brought another, final, era of garden apartments. World War II halted most domestic housing production, bringing the U.S. to the brink of a housing crisis in 1945. Racially-motivated slum clearance only exacerbated this crisis. The Housing Act of 1949 encouraged the creation of more public housing. While Garden Movement principles are evident in some of these developments, higher unit counts and denser complexes signal a shift from the garden apartment typology. The period of significance for garden apartments in Los Angeles ends in 1955.