Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

[For more on my views of public housing, see Public housing: the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (June, 2006), Public housing’s Gordian’s knot (December, 2006), and The essential housing authority (September, 2007).]

 

In our multi-part history of public housing [If this isn’t your cup of tea, see you next week! – Ed.] using MIT Professor Lawrence Vale’s comprehensive study, From the Puritans to the Projects, in Part 1 we’d covered nearly two centuries, from the first American affordable housing (Boston’s 1662 almshouse) up through the eve of the Civil War, when President Franklin Pierce had vetoed legislation intended to establish an ongoing subsidy stream for “the indigent insane” with the prescient warning:

 

“If Congress has power to make provision for the indigent insane … it has the same power for the indigent who are not insane.”  Over time, that would “make the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States.”  Page 99.

 

With Yankee moral fervor that preceded the Civil War and in emancipation found its validation, Boston’s enlightened affluent undertook – and not for the last time – to demonstrate the impossible proposition that affordable housing could be created and operated without any charitable or subsidy element.  The Model Lodging House Association (1854) was formed to build new five-story brick multifamily flats with rents “comparable to less savory buildings,” and promised to return 6% annually to their investors.

 

Prince Albert’s Model Lodging House, London

 

It never quite worked at any scale, because affordable housing always costs money:

 

This venture accommodated only forty families, however, and these families – with rare exception – were among the better-off of the American-born working class.  Another parallel effort later in the decade, sponsored by the estate of wealthy merchant Abbott Lawrence, added only another twenty apartments, and again priced itself beyond the reach of the most needy.  Page 63

 

That didn’t stop the reformers from trying again:

 

In 1871, Henry Bowditch founded the Boston Co-operative Building Company to replace “the kindergarten of future crime.”  Page 63

 

This is also the era of the nineteenth century’s most famous experiment in social improvement: the settlement houses.  As Professor Vale puts it:

 

Born out of a collaboration among universities, churches, and philanthropists –

 

The same natural allies that are trying to solve slum improvement today.

 

– the settlement idea spread to the United States in 1880s.  Established first in New York, houses soon opened in Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere.

 

The most famous of these is probably Jane Addams‘ 1889 Hull House, in Chicago:

 

A commitment to serve

 

Social settlements began in the 1880s in London in response to problems created by urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The idea spread to other industrialized countries. Settlement houses typically attracted educated, native born, middle-class and upper-middle class women and men, known as “residents,” to live (settle) in poor urban neighborhoods. Some social settlements were linked to religious institutions. Others, like Hull-House, were secular. By 1900, the U.S. had over 100 settlement houses. By 1911, Chicago had 35.

Because urban land’s value rises directly as cities grow and become more dense, the rise of cities is always accompanied by an upsurge in slums – and by a corresponding rise in reformers.

 

Hull House, the best-known nineteenth-century American social-housing experiment

In the 1890s, Hull-House was located in the midst of a densely populated urban neighborhood peopled by Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, and Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. During the 1920s, African Americans and Mexicans began to put down roots in the neighborhood and joined the clubs and activities at Hull-House. Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents provided kindergarten and day care facilities for the children of working mothers; an employment bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English and citizenship classes; and theater, music and art classes. As the complex expanded to include thirteen buildings, Hull-House supported more clubs and activities such as a Labor Museum, the Jane Club for single working girls, meeting places for trade union groups, and a wide array of cultural events.

 

Like others of its kind, Hull House subsisted on donations.  The Progressives were encountering the Law of Economic Gravity as it applies to affordable housing: affordable housing always costs money, because there is always a cost-value gap.  Markets always clear, and well-located urban land always has a value that prices it out of reach for affordability.

 

Late nineteenth-century poorhouse in Charlestown, MA

 

To a Progressive, a market force is something to be addressed through the power of (enlightened) government, and it wasn’t too long before the Progressives’ efforts bore fruit: the Massachusetts Constitution (older than the US Constitution, I proudly note) was amended to empower the state —

 

“to take land and to hold, improve, subdivide, build upon, and sell the same, for the purpose of relieving congestion of population and providing homes for citizens.”  Page 90

 

Inside the poorhouse, late nineteenth century

 

This is the first eminent-domain law that I’ve encountered for the purpose of slum improvement, and it’s significant that it includes two ideas: (1) improving urban neighborhoods, and (2) providing affordable housing.  Are we trying to fix busted neighborhoods, or are we trying to cure urban poverty?  Though they often overlap, they’re not the same at all as they lead to quite different interventions and quite different metrics of success – yet, as we’ll see, these two will be intertwined throughout the history of eminent domain, and are still intertwined today.

 

I’ve previously posted about the mentality that ‘those people’ are congenitally different.  In the Progressive Era, the notion of incorrigibility of human character was challenge by the environmentalist theory of social welfare.  As one commenter wrote in 1919:

 

The 1919 Glasgow general strike: with the war’s end came recession

 

“We are learning that a healthy, happy worker in a decent home is worth more, both to the State and to his employers, than one who is an unhealthy, unhappy wanderer from one factory and slum to another factory and slum.”

 

The best tonic for morality was ownership of a home, as captured in this spirited Own Your Own Home Resolution:

 

“I believe in the American home and its eternal power for good; I believe that it is my individual duty and privilege to own a home under the Stars and Stripes; I believe that Boston is one of the great home cities of the world; I solemnly resolve to make my best efforts during 1920 to become a homeowner in this great city [Boston], and thereby satisfy the cravings of my own heart and the desire of those dear to me in life; to make my own prosperity more secure, and also to stimulate through home ownership the industrial and commercial life of my own city.”  Page 120

 

 

As the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) put it, in a 1922 book authored by H. W. Folsom:

 

“Home Owning Breeds Real Men.”

 

 

If homeownership was salutary, excessive density or cheap rents was a magnet for ‘those people’: a 1926 Supreme Court decision Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. affirmed the Constitutionality of zoning with these ringing words of condemnation:

 

“The development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses,” and noting that such inclusion “has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes.  [The apartment house is a] “mere parasite, constructed to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.”  Page 117

 

The apartment feed on the body civic, engulfing healthy buildings

 

As is all too common, those focusing on slums and apartments conflated density (a phenomenon of urbanization) with unhealthiness, and unsanitary conditions (a phenomenon of inadequate infrastructure) with ethnic or racial character.

 

Clarence Arthur Perry, urban theorist, “framed the goals of slum clearance in terms of ‘the health of the district’.  Slum clearance “promotes not only ‘community prosperity’ (the welfare of the property owners) but it contributes to public health (better light, air and play space), public safety (less risk from street accidents), public morals (through community environment), and public convenience (better located shopping districts, among other things).”  Page 155.

 

Camden, New Jersey, 1938

 

[Continued in Part 3.]

Send post as PDF to