Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the preceding Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.]

 

In covering the history of public housing using MIT Professor Lawrence Vale’s comprehensive study, From the Puritans to the Projects, we’ve seen that public housing arose from a Christian-charitable impulse, was adopted by the late nineteenth-century’s enlightened progressives, and first found expression as a government activity in the Great Depression, when the slums themselves were seen as the problem, and government slum clearance the solution.

 

[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).  Dozens of marvelous photographs are in the LaGuardia-Wagner archives.]

 

Though World War II interrupted this trend, it only suspended change, for the war’s successful conclusion unleashed two related forces that transformed America’s cities:

 

1.  The great migration (mainly of blacks) from the rural south to the industrial north.

2.  Returning GI’s and the baby boom.

 

Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Truman’s opponent in the election, at a 1948 groundbreaking for Al Smith Homes in New York

 

I’ve written elsewhere that slums arise inevitably when there is rapid urbanization in a strong economy, and precisely this occurred in postwar America.   Demand for housing was enormous, at every level and in every large city.  These demographic pressures, plus the pent-up consumer demand flooding back in to America, impelled Harry Truman’s Federal government to follow the lead set by his predecessor Roosevelt, and push the Federal government even further into housing.

 

Ribbon cutting, New York City, 1947

 

Truman (one of my favorite presidents, right up with Lincoln) believed in housing, and saw housing and civil rights as marching hand in hand, and took his surprise 1948 election as a mandate for change and to push the Federal government into housing.  The real estate lobbies – the National Association of Real Estate Boards and the National Association of Home Builders – were intensely opposed, insisting that public housing was “the cutting edge of the Communist Front,” “pure socialism,” and a step toward nationalization of all housing (!!).  An NAHB lobbying memo recommended:

 

“Accuse your housing authority of squandering funds, of being inefficient and failing to live up to promise.  Deride failure to clear slums and to house the poor.”  Page 238.

 

Remembering the Boston experience, where the good-government groups had used eminent domain to take large neighborhoods and transform them into public housing, the builders also sought to stop individual properties in their tracks:

 

“If you know about these steps – if you watch for them – if you take action when they are about to occur – you will have an excellent chance to stop socialized public housing projects in their inception….  Hit the public housing program in your city at each of these steps.”  Page 241.

 

Locals protesting potential new residents, New York, 1947

 

Feisty Truman was characteristically principled, furious, and direct.  As he said in the legislation fight:

 

“I do not recall ever having witnessed a more deliberate campaign of misrepresentation and distortion against legislation of such crucial importance to the public welfare.  These attempts to mislead and frighten the public and their representatives in Congress – these false claims designed too prejudice some groups of the people against others — these malicious and willful appeals to ignorance and selfishness – are examples of selfish propaganda at its worst.”  Page 241.

 

Truman’s 1949 housing act is one of the five landmark pieces of American housing legislation (the others are the 1937 NHA, the 1968 NHA, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and 2008’s HERA).

 

Will HERA be judged a work of art decades hence?

 

For public housing, the 1949 act had three enduring consequences:

 

1. Made “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing a national goal.  Truman irrevocably committed the Federal government to the business of housing quality, and this touchstone phrase is always referenced in any new legislation.

 

2. Set off the second wave of public housing construction.  Between 1949 and 1954, the Federal government returned to public housing in force.  As Professor Vale accurately puts it:

 

In Boston, virtually all of the city’s family public housing constructed by the BHA was completed in two waves – between 1938-1942 and between 1949-1954.  A modest amount of public housing for the elderly was completed later on, but the heyday of public neighborhood construction ended in 1954.  Boston’s pattern is similar to the peaks of public housing construction nationwide, although much more was built in other cities after 1955.  Page 167.

 

Moving in to Jacob Riis Houses, 1948

 

Significant for us is that nearly all the legacy public housing we see today is at least fifty years old.  In that half-century, there have been several revolutions in apartments and affordable housing, yet the public housing inventory remains largely as it was built.

 

Just remember, 1954’s idea of housing was like 1954’s idea of a trendy kitchen!

 

3. Public-private partnership.  Truman’s FHA was much more active than Roosevelt’s, and with programs like Section 608, the Federal government created the first public-private partnerships with private builders.  While it would take until 1962 for public-private to reach long-term rental (with the first HUD Section 221d3 properties), the introduction of a better ecological form would mean that future resources would flow not into more public housing but into public-private.

 

Throughout the 1950’s, public housing was the preferred replacement property for slum clearance and slum redevelopment.  As I’ve posted elsewhere, led by Bob Moses in New York the reformers brought their bulldozers, leveling ‘Obsolete Neighborhoods’ (as they were labeled on Boston City Planning Board diagrams) to make way for ‘New Plans’.  As Vale writes, “Instead of an environment that ‘undoubtedly impairs the mental and physical health of its inhabitants’, the Planning Board proposed ‘an environment of good physical and mental health’ which ’should be less of a financial burden to the city.’”  (Page 275).

 

Despite the lonely efforts of people like Jane Jacobs, the reformers knew they were right:

 

I can match their smug with my smug!  Jane Jacobs, circa 1965

 

“To people who have lived there a long time, the West End may not seem ’substandard.’  But the preliminary studies made by the Housing Authority show that it is.”  Page 278.

 

Today we would hoot at such hubris – or would we?

 

In any case, back in 1955, few foresaw that public housing was sowing the seeds of its own doom, but one who did was New York public housing advocate Charles Abrams:

 

“The policy of restricting eligibility to fixed maximum income has given an institutional character to the projects.  The occupants are tagged as people who earn less than a specified income, so that a tenant feels more like the inmate of a poorhouse than a rent-payer….  A rise in income due to increased earnings, which should be a cause for joy, may result in the family’s eviction….  The policy of evicting those who do improve their status drives out the more exemplary tenants, leaving a less successful residuum.”  Page 265.

 

Intoxicated with slum improvement, the reformers were apparently oblivious to the public ghettos they were building to replace the private ghettos they had torn down:

 

Chester Hartman, academic (1964): “For those who do relocate to public housing, the grouping of the disadvantaged, the stigmatization of projects, and the feeling of resentment at limited choice serve to exacerbate existing social and personal problems.  Neither the objectively superior housing nor the subsidized rents sufficiently compensate for these disadvantages of status and sociability….  Social and economic realities make it almost inevitable that the projects will increasingly turn into islands of poverty, segregation, deprivation, and despair.”  Page 282.

 

In fact, they ‘tipped’ from white to black with breathtaking speed.  In 1964, for instance, Boston’s six large public housing properties were 80% white.  By 1970, they were 70% black, as blacks moved in and whites fled to the suburbs.

 

 

 

[To be continued in Part 5.]

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