Urban renewal: the scarlet letter of economic development

 

Oh, I used to walk down this street before.

But they’ve kicked out the folks I used to meet before.

And the neighborhood

Now is gone for good

There’s no street on the street where I lived.

(Sung to Rogers & Hammerstein “Streets Where You Lived” in Frieden and Sagalyn, 1991, p. 46)¹

Urban renewal is the scarlet letter of our profession—no one is willing to acknowledge its parentage. Blame and selective memories abound, but no one climbs the scaffold, like Roger Dimmesdale, to accept the shame and responsibility. The outline and chronology of legislation and programs will speak for itself. Part of the problem is that urban renewal is the last of several physical demolition/renewal phases that started in 1933—ostensibly to provide jobs and housing through slum clearance and public housing. Slum clearance for wartime worker housing followed, and at a later point the federal interstate highway program dug up large swathes of city neighborhoods while land was cleared for high-rise public housing. The last phase, “dubbed urban renewal,” led by business elites, dug up the CBD and intra-city “eds and meds” expansion. That last phase got going only in the mid/late 1950s–early 1960s. It may be there are so many fathers of urban renewal that paternity will be hard to discern.

We can all agree on one thing: it didn’t work. What slum clearance et al. was supposed to do, however, is not at all evident. Big Cities were dug up for a lot of reasons, including: emergency job creation; highway construction; amelioration of an affordable housing crisis; revitalization of the CBD; key institutional expansion in congested districts; and housing for workers to make tanks, planes, ships and bullets against the Axis. There is, however, a common thread that underlies many (not all) of these specific rationales: the goal of modernizing the central Big Cities so that they could compete with the rapidly developing suburb—preservation of the Big City hegemony over its hinterlands. That such modernization came at the expense of those least able to defend themselves, damnable as it is, should not be a surprise. Community development’s “public housers” and planners played an early leading role: chambers supported highways and CBD/eds and meds as well as worker housing; and local real estate elites bushwhacked the path to CBD revitalization. Plenty of goals/reasons; plenty of supporters.

Cheering off to the sidelines were the national and local media, the Policy World and mayors/city councils that approved the necessary legislation and funded the local share—and professions, including the yet to be called economic developers who staffed redevelopment and urban renewal agencies that did the deed. By the way, no one, in these years, was voted out of office because of all these shenanigans, and bond referenda passed easily while public opinion polls reveal strong citizen and voter support. By 1960 nearly every state in the Union had adopted some form of housing redevelopment and urban renewal legislation. As long as your house was not on the path of destruction, it sounded like a good idea. Slum clearance to urban renewal was no accident: it persisted for over 30 years; it was hardly a hidden conspiracy to achieve selfish ends. To atone for slum clearance, public housing, highway construction, worker housing and CBD renewal will require a “walk of shame” the size of a Fourth of July parade.

Over the intervening three-quarters of a century we smushed municipal and federal inputs, public housing and CBD-focused projects; forgot or discounted nearly 40 years of housing projects (over 1000); and overemphasized deleterious effects of CBD revitalization into a stereotype ideological, polemical straw man. The “thrust of the smush” has made “urban renewal the scarlet letter of our profession and policy area—merely a shameless real estate/corporate grab for profits that crushed poor blacks. Urban renewal has been defined as, and is judged by, its effects on neighborhood and resident communities—and that too has been smushed into “Negro removal.” Lost are the larger context of the era: the multiple goals intended to accomplish the more honorable policy intentions of its participants; the variation among projects, regions and time periods; and the lessons from more than 40 years of our historical experience. There is more to be learned from urban renewal than “just don’t do it.”

It is often forgotten in the midst of all this [controversy] that urban renewal is not a goal, but a tool. It is a method whereby a great variety of ends can be served, some good, some bad. Since the use of that tool is left largely in the hands of local communities, the number of different goals which will be served, and the probability that not all will be judged ideal, is rather large. … Given this welter of aims and achievements, it is understandable that urban renewal should mean very different things to different people. (Wilson, 1966, pp. xv–xvi)

In this chapter and others that follow we will try to provide some understanding (un-smush) of the chronology and pose questions:

+ Why is public housing and neighborhood slum clearance economic development?

+ What was the larger purpose (goal) of housing, neighborhood slum clearance and CBD redevelopment?

+ Was the federal government (and its legislation) the “tail end” of urban renewal, wagged by municipal-levels dogs?

+ How and why did urban renewal become the midwife of modern “mainstream,” governmental-based economic development?

+ What were the different “forms” of urban renewal—how did it vary among projects, cities, regions and period of time?

 

 

HOUSING AND PLANNING: THE SAGA BEGINS

By World War I’s end Big City worker/immigrant housing was in worse shape than ever. The previous housing reformer strategy, “Regulation of Multi-family Housing,” produced no additional units, and added to the cost of new ones—making them unaffordable to low-income households and immigrants. Low-income households crowded into outrageously deteriorated units in traditional inner-city neighborhoods. Edith Wood issued a call to arms: “Restrictive legislation is only negative. It will prevent the bad. It will not produce the good … at an [affordable] rent” (Wood, 1919, p. 20). The problem, as Wood saw it, was not greedy landlords or insufficient regulation; rather, it was the need for low-income workers to be near employment. Wood linked Big City housing reform to CD neighborhood-based movements. She advocated a national housing commission empowered to make loans to communities and “limited-dividend” private corporations. Following her, lead housing reformers shifted away from regulation of existing units toward the production of new, safe and affordable units.

Municipal governments either lacked the resources or the will to provide funding, so Wood pressured to enroll the federal government as a partner in local housing reform. She urged housing reformers to work with private, limited-dividend development firms (real estate firms/insurance companies that capped their profits by restricting interest paid to their investors). In 1931 Wood and other housing/community development activists formed the National Public Housing Conference (NPHC) to “promote housing through government loans and public construction.” The NPHC subsequently played a major role in future New Deal legislation.

Housing reformers concluded that deteriorating Big City slum neighborhoods could not be remediated by scattered-site rehabbing: “a single good building in a slum area is foredoomed to failure. The development of a whole block is only slightly better … little islands of good housing in a sea of slum.” Langdon Post, future chair of the NYC Housing Authority, asserted: “A complete neighborhood unit, large enough to create and preserve its own atmosphere, should be the minimum size of a development [in a slum]” (Fogelson, 2001, p. 337). Thus, by the late 1920s, housing reformers had shifted away from single-unit rehabilitation to physical redevelopment of slum neighborhoods. They also formed a commitment to produce housing owned by the public sector. For this to happen, however, housing reformers needed new tools and a strategy.

Large-scale redevelopment was out of their league, so housing reformers turned to private developers with the expertise and access to capital. Private developers, however, already recognized the opportunity and were busy developing their own business models. The two groups clashed publicly, and contested politically, how best to conduct slum removal and construct replacement housing. New York State was the primary battleground. In 1922 Metropolitan Life convinced the New York state legislature to allow insurance companies to invest in affordable housing, and in 1924 Met Life opened the doors of its first housing development. The state, earlier, had authorized ten-year real estate tax abatement on all new construction completed by the end of 1924. With this momentum New York City private developers in 1926 achieved their greatest victory to that date—state authorization to use eminent domain to “engage in slum clearance and provide low income housing”:

[Private] companies were given the power of eminent domain, and a partial exemption from state, and, if the cities approved, local taxes, in return for which they had to accept limits on rents and dividends [to shareholders] and strict supervision by the newly formed state board of housing. New Jersey followed New York’s lead in 1929, when the legislature passed a bill that permitted insurance companies to undertake slum clearance and low-income housing and authorized the cities to acquire the land for them by eminent domain. Under these laws only two projects were built in New Jersey and fewer than a dozen in New York. (Fogelson, 2001, p. 337)

Limited-divided corporations, with tax abatement and eminent domain powers, meant that neighborhood-level housing redevelopment was irretrievably linked to slum clearance, and set housing reformers on the back foot by favoring private limited dividend corporations with advantages that potentially neutralized their goal of publicly owned housing. It quickly became evident, however, that limited-dividend corporations could not produce in volume. This inability justified claims by housing reformers that slum housing redevelopment had to mean public housing. On the other hand, private developers needed to fabricate a HEDO that could overcome the inefficiencies of the limited-divided corporation. The two sides, intense rivals and ideological enemies, started slugging it out in Washington even before the Depression in the Republican Hoover administration. They fought over federal financial assistance to defund and fund a hybrid public/private entity. This struggle provided an opening for a federal role in local public housing, and triggered a perpetual, intense conflict between public housers and the private real estate sector. This competition/rivalry escalated into a major fault line in American economic development for the next 50 years.

While housing reformers shifted direction in the twenties, planners had also moved into housing as their next, best thing. Planners were essential allies in the 1920s. They possessed the tools (zoning, codes and comprehensive plans). Planners, as we discovered with the Regional Plan of New York (RPNY), however, had not figured out where the housing should be built—in the suburban garden or the central city. The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) planner wing, which arguably held the stronger hand in these years, advocating worker and even middle-class private housing, distanced itself from the “public housers” who were dedicated to redeveloping inner-city slum housing to provide affordable, safe, decent and government-owned/ operated housing to the most disadvantaged low-income city residents. The planner and public houser wings were divided by “class” to be served, ownership of the housing and location of their projects.

Confused as it was, private foundations (Rockefeller, for example) also entered into the fray with their own versions of housing—such as the NYC Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments in 1928, New York City’s first cooperative housing for African-Americans. Marshall Field in Chicago responded by building the Marshall Field Garden Apartments in 1929. Both RPAA and philanthropist initiatives failed to achieve their objectives: they wound up with houses too expensive to be affordable to workers, never mind new immigrants, and too expensive to produce on scale without some form of subsidy. They too became attracted to some federal role in housing.

So, on the threshold of the Depression/New Deal, public houses, foundations, planners and an antagonistic private real estate sector were locked into a common vision: to develop and acquire federal housing subsidies to their suitably defined HEDO, But there was no consensus as to who would lead; what structures, strategies and tools would be needed to accomplish their goals; and ultimately who would live in the housing. They didn’t even agree on why this housing should be constructed. This began a nearly two-decade intra-legislative struggle that was reconciled only with the Housing Act of 1949.

The Federal Government Becomes Involved

An initial observation might simply state the obvious—in the form of a question. Is this housing debate locally driven or has it already been taken over by Policy World elites? This is clearly not the ED of chambers which is jurisdictional bound, forged by local elites and implemented by local authorities. The Depression, not the New Deal, carried local policy-making to Washington. The mayors went through the Conference of Mayors, and housing advocates used their professional trade associations. An entirely different set of policy influencers play ball in DC—they are not from the neighborhoods or wards. Elites and upper classes are making policy for working and lower classes. There are shifts aplenty—before the New Deal ever steps foot into power. The federal government’s role is also clear: it is there to provide as close to free money as possible.

The Depression thrust the federal government into the position of being an indispensable player in state and local housing policy. In desperation, housers and real estate exchanges turned to their professional/trade associations to design potential legislation and advocate for its approval. Reflecting the policy fault line that housing had become, polarization between business and reform associations was intense and saw a good deal of controversy, infighting and bureaucratic rivalry. The National Association of Housing Officials (NAHO) became the principal advocate for housing and CD activists to press the federal government. The NAHO incorporated the planners’ perspective into its proposals so that planners became allies, joining (loosely) the public housing coalition. The National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB)²—the Urban Land Institute (ULI) after 1939³—and the Buildings Office and Managers Association (BOMA)⁴ handled business/real estate advocacy. Municipal governments per se were not involved in housing legislation.

Housing reform by 1932 meant neighborhood, multi-block slum clearance for which eminent domain and some form of tax-exempt bond issuance was required. The core ideological difference was that the private sector believed housing to be its exclusive preserve; government-built or owned housing was considered socialist—in those days a “fighting word.” Our longstanding issue of a hybrid EDO, and who would “control” such an entity, lurked beneath the various proposals that were advanced. Legislation (1) required provision for replacement housing and (2) conformity to municipal comprehensive plans; and (3) the expense of scaling up meant municipalities that had borne the cost to this point needed help to proceed to the next level. Their goal was to get the federal government to pay for as much of the project as possible. Also, municipal powers, tied to judicially approved public purpose—to “clear” slums and rebuild cleared land with private participation—did not exist (Weiss, 1985, p. 256). For various good and “bad” reasons, the private sector desired a broadly defined slum clearance that allowed “mixed uses” besides housing. Housing reformers (and planners) favored a single allowable use—housing—that fit nicely into zoning and building codes.

The first episode of the federal housing/slum clearance chronicle occurred during the last year of the Hoover administration (1932). At a Hoover-initiated conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (August 1930), a sub-committee, “the Committee on Blighted Areas and Slums,” issued a report on housing and slum clearance (April 1932).⁵ This report delinked slum clearance from housing—that is, cleared areas could be used for any purpose and, if used for housing, relocation of existing occupants was not required. The report advocated cleared land be leased or sold to private firms for redevelopment in accordance with a comprehensive plan adopted by the municipality. The committee’s report dovetailed nicely with NAREB’s perspective, but was not to the liking of Progressive housing reformers. Hoover’s loss in the November 1932 elections meant the battle was certain to be refought. The irony of the 1932 report is that it included much of the 1954 federal urban renewal Act.

Early New Deal: 1933 NIRA

Roosevelt as described in the last chapter was not an urban reformer—certainly not a community developer. His tendencies overlapped CD’s planned community wing, but his primary mission in 1933 was to get America back to work (Abrams, 1965, pp. 71–3). To that end, he would work with just about anybody—as evidenced in this inclusion of the proto-CED wing of the US Chamber. What came out of that process was the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA). Although housing was a small part of the legislation, federal inclusion of housing as a job creation initiative radically altered the path of housing and inner-city slum clearance—not to mention directly supporting a first-ever federally funded Planned Cities program.

Title II authorized $3.3 billion to the Public Works Administration (PWA) to fund local work relief projects to provide public jobs for the unemployed. A provision injected by New York Senator Wagner made eligible “low-cost housing and slum clearance” projects to limited-dividend corporations and direct loans and grants to states and localities to build public projects. Also included in the legislation was $25 million to a Division of Subsistence Homesteads (later transferred in 1935 to the Resettlement Administration) “to redistribute overbalance of population in industrial centers.” Each Act’s bottom-line goal was to “increase employment quickly” in the building trades, which were among the hardest hit by the Depression.⁶ Housing, under NIRA, was a public works job-creation program “designed to reduce unemployment and restore purchasing power by employing workers in the construction trades and from the building supplies industry.”⁷

The limited-dividend program was copied from Hoover’s proposed 1932 initiative. Upon release, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation attracted 600 applications for proposed projects; only one (New York City’s Knickerbocker Village) was actually built. The second release from the PWA’s Housing Division attracted 500 applications—only seven projects were funded. All completed projects housed whites only and built on vacant land (no slum clearance). The first to open its doors was Philadelphia’s Carl Mackley Houses (1935). Each was a three-floor Modernist style home. Hillside followed the Radburn designs and was developed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright.⁸ Like previous limited-dividend projects, the limited-dividend approach resulted in high-quality apartments that were too expensive for workers.

Most limited-dividend projects went to Planned Community CD developers. Harold L. Ickes, head of the PWA, suspended the limited-dividend program after only a few months in operation (in February 1934): “The results were disappointing. In the end only seven housing projects, with roughly three thousand units, were erected, about three-quarters of them in the outer boroughs of New York City” (Fogelson, 2001, p. 339). Like the RFC before it, the PWA [limited dividend] program was impractical during the Depression. Most applicants could not bring to their project even the modest 15% equity required by the law, and the limited profit requirement proved too burdensome to attract significant interest from private developers.⁹

The program, however, was the first federal housing initiative.

What Ickes wanted was better achieved by having the PWA directly build its own housing, in neighborhoods it had cleared. After February 1934, the PWA acquired the land, let out the contracts for slum clearance and construction (private builders), and owned and operated the completed housing. These PWA publicly owned housing projects built between 1933 and 1937 were multi-family, four story, low density, no elevator, low cost and organized around large open spaces on inner-city superblocks (formed from several city blocks). Fifty-one projects in 36 cities were completed; 21 housed blacks and six included segregated apartments for whites and blacks. One-third of its units were rented to blacks. Thousands were employed in the units’ design and construction. They housed over 22,000 families, and slum clearance removed 10,000 substandard units—at a cost of $130 million (Wright, 1981, pp. 222–39). The first to be completed was the 604-unit Techwood Homes in Atlanta (1936). Chicago constructed the most units (2414). Importantly, a major goal for Ickes’s PWA projects was to “seek out some of the worst slum spots on the municipal maps and abruptly wipe them out with good low-rent housing” (Ickes, 1934, p. 16).¹⁰ Ickes, in other words, placed slum clearance on an equal par to housing construction.

Ickes triggered a discussion within inner-city public housers regarding the role of slum clearance relative to the construction of public housing. Most public housers, like Edith Wood and Mary Simkhovitch, assumed the two activities were inseparable: “Slum clearance would not only eliminate the blight, but its replacement with new low-income housing would allow the poor to continue to live near the places of their employment” (Wood, 1936, p. 20). Local public housers preferred, to the extent possible, new construction (on vacant land) to slum clearance—the latter increased construction cost and delayed opening new units. The underlying tension between slum clearance and housing was if the latter came first, where would those displaced go? At this juncture one sees a profound distrust of replacement housing built using the profit motive by conventional private real estate developers. The lack of an effective HEDO (the limited-dividend company clearly not up to the task), the apparent distrust of community developers of used, “hand-me-down” housing alternatives provided by dynamics of neighborhood succession, and the strong almost rigid preference for government-owned replacement housing (and vice versa with the private sector) left little room for compromise—even during the thirties when neighborhood change and slums did not present a compelling racial dimension.

Opposition to Ickes’s approach came from Lewis Mumford’s RPAA Planned Community wing. Catherine Bauer, for example, believed that slum clearance only benefited the real estate industry, which would sell land at inflated prices.¹¹ New housing built on cleared land would “force the dispossessed tenants … to move into some neighboring run-down district and crowd it more thickly than it was before” (Bauer, 1933, pp. 730–31). Mumford stated that: “if we wish to produce cheap dwellings, it is too raw land we must turn … The proper strategy is to forget about the slums … When we have built enough good houses in the right places, the slums will empty themselves”¹² It was slum clearance, however, and federal eminent domain that spelled the end of the Ickes’s PWA program.

Ickes based his federal power to condemn local land under the authority of NIRA. A federal district court in (1935) United States v. Certain Lands in the City of Louisville (Kentucky) threw it out the window, stating it was not a proper (federal) “governmental function to construct buildings in a state for the purpose of selling or leasing them to private citizens for occupancy as homes.”¹³ Ickes never appealed the decision; from then on he built only on vacant land or land acquired without condemnation. It was clear to federal decision-makers that if slum clearance was to occur, it would have to be done by local agencies empowered by state authorization and judicial confirmation. Local housing authorities needed to be established post-haste. The initiative to create local housing authorities was already underway.

Ohio was the first state to approve legislation enabling its municipalities to clear slums, build and manage public housing (1933). The legislation, drafted by Ernest Bohn, “set up independent housing authorities that might move more expeditiously outside the confines of the municipal bureaucracy.” The housing authority was the public houser’s HEDO, and seldom has a HEDO been so easily created. There are several reasons: the essence of a HEDO confronting a physical development/ redevelopment agenda is that it possesses tools such as tax abatement, eminent domain, tax-exempt and revenue-bond issuance, and the right to own and manage property for a public, judicially approved public purpose. The port authority provided the model and the boilerplate. Since the property in question was to be government owned, lease/back or write down was not required.

Governance of housing authorities was usually dominated by private public housers, sprinkled with municipal officials. Public housing not being a central concern of thirties’ mayors or council leaders, political attention focused on intermittent controversies or elector opportunities presented, that is a degree of autonomy usually accompanied a housing authority. Of course, some mayors took more interest than others. The relatively rapid expansion/diffusion of housing authorities created the nucleus for a profession—and the need to write the proverbial instruction manual for public housing redevelopment. In 1933 the NAHO, a professional association for public housing officials, was established to provide technical assistance and to advocate housing policy. In 1934 at a Baltimore Conference the NAHO published “A Housing Program for the United States,” asserting that housing to be “essentially a local matter” with planning and management to reside at the municipal level. The federal government’s role was to provide a subsidy to the tenant for construction and rent. At the request of Ickes, in December 1934 FDR sent a letter to each governor requesting they approve legislation similar to Ohio’s. Senator Wagner translated the NAHO report into a bill dropped into the 1935 congressional hopper. It saw the light of day as the Housing Act of 1937. By 1938, 30 states, the District of Columbia and Hawaii passed such legislation, and nearly 50 communities had established housing authorities.¹⁴

The Housing Act of 1937

The 1937 Housing Act (aka the Wagner–Steagall Act) created the Federal Housing Administration which became a forum and a vehicle for the NAHO’s public housing proposals. Any resistance to NAHO/public housers (aside from conservative Congress) coalesced under Herb Nelson, NAREB’s executive director. It was not Nelson’s (or the real estate industry’s) finest hour—he lost badly. Critical to Nelson’s defeat was that the local business community had not yet focused on slum clearance and housing projects. The 1937 Housing Act was a public houser near-total victory, and proved to be the high water mark of CD-advocated public housing and slum clearance. Roosevelt in his second inaugural address provided rare, but general, support for the housing initiative: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill clad, ill-nourished”. The 1937 Housing Act created a federal public housing program to remove unsafe and insanitary housing conditions found in inner-city slums, replacing them with government-owned and supported public housing for low-income families.

The Act empowered the US Housing Authority to make loans/grants to newly created local housing authorities for the purpose of clearing slums and building low-rent housing. The law required a one-for-one demolition to new construction ratio. This requirement, introduced by Massachusetts Senator David Walsh—a strong proponent of slum removal through “demolition, condemnation and effective closing” of substandard units—highlights public houser determination that “slum clearance should remain a goal of public housing and not merely an afterthought.” By 1939 the program was extended to smaller cities (under 25,000), causing a new rush to establish local housing authorities. In 1939, 205 new local housing authorities were created—adding to the existing number. In the same year, NYC opened two projects (Red Hook and Queensbridge) that totaled almost 5600 units—the latter being the largest funded by the 1937 Act.¹⁵

Unlike NIRA, employment and job creation were not the primary objectives of the program. The 1937 Housing Act triggered an intensified interest in state legislation (tax abatement, bond-issuance, eminent domain and real estate ownership) to establish/ empower municipal/county housing authorities that made slum clearance and municipal-owned housing possible.

Under the Act … local authorities were invited to borrow money through bond issues; with the proceeds they were to acquire sites, clear them, and put up houses. The federal government would enter into “contracts” with local housing authorities … [and] would agree to pay enough money for the interest on the bonds and the amortization of the principal. Operating expenses … would come out of current rents. (Friedman, 1966, p. 648)

The Act essentially changed the role of the federal government from builder and owner (PWA) to banker. Over the five-year period the Act was authorized and funded (1937–42) more than 370 housing/slum clearance projects were successfully constructed by local housing authorities. Despite the one-for-one demolition clause, Nathan Straus, director of the United States Housing Authority (USHA), believing that a lesser ratio would increase supply of housing, thereby reducing rents, provided deferments upon request by local housing authorities. To reinforce that position, he appointed Catherine Bauer (of the Planned Communities wing) to head the process. Approximately, 100,000 new units were constructed and a bit more than 70,000 destroyed ¹⁶ 

While housing unit design continued along a “Modernist” or “International” motif, housing/slum clearance/housing projects came in two styles. In small cities and suburbs they were low-rise row houses whose residents were:

submerged [by the Depression] middle class and the projects were literally stepping-stones to middle class life and a home of one’s own. We may take as an archetype … Middletown Gardens in Delaware County, Indiana—a 112 unit low-rent, housing community built on an 80 acre outlying tract … [where by 1944] one-quarter of the families were able to own their own homes. (Friedman, 1966, p. 652)

Land in the Big Cities, however, was too expensive to follow this model:

The cost squeeze meant the end of low-rise, “home-style” housing projects. The buildings turned into towers [generally six stories] … twenty or more in New York and Chicago. Costs and the enmity of the outside world squeezed the buildings into the heart of the slums. The ratio of Negroes to whites increased radically. (Friedman, 1966, p. 652)

For the record, these 1937 Housing Act slum clearance and housing projects played a significant role in Hirsch’s Making of the Second Ghetto. The Act had a noticeable impact on community development. Obviously the two community development housing wings were elevated. Their status may not have matched chamber prominence or visibility, but for the first time professional employment in a semi-autonomous housing agency offered a paycheck; experience (real estate, property and construction management, tenant selection, relocation services, legal, budgetary, leadership); a body of knowledge; access to municipal decision-making; a role in the local policy system; and a cutting-edge strategy that promised to transform the Big Cities of the North and Midwest—if not the nation. With national and state professional associations in place, coupled with a friendly federal agency, local housing authorities were not totally dependent on municipal taxes and municipal oversight.

If the Philadelphia Housing Authority is a useful guide, the range of activities beyond slum clearance, housing construction and management included: planning both project and comprehensive, studies of poverty, building condition, neighborhoods, housing markets, public relations and program education. Within each project a set of services, not dissimilar from those offered by the early settlement houses and community centers, could be found. Boards of directors were recruited from sympathetic elements of the local business community, providing a two-way linkage into the local power establishment and a series of shared experiences/relationships that would prove important in later years. Community development had forged a niche from which future economic development would follow.

This burst of low-rent public housing did not last long. By the end of 1940, clearly threatened by imminent wars, funds were reduced; in 1942 federal funds attached to the 1937 Housing Act ceased. Chicago’s almost 1700-unit Ida D. Wells project, completed in January 1941, was the last 1937 Act project to open. Not to worry, however: a new federal housing program had already been established to continue federally driven local housing and slum clearance. Those 1937 Housing Act projects already in construction were transferred to the new program. Indeed, the USHA’s first re-jiggered defense housing project—Pensacola’s 200-unit Moreno Court, opened in November 1940— took just 87 days to build.

War Production Worker Housing

In June 1940 Congress passed the Defense Housing Act (Public Law/PL 671). This legislation turned federal housing funds away from low-income, low-rent units, building instead units for workers needed for new defense plants. Internal migration followed new plants, war contracts and job opportunities. Local housing authorities switched focus, cleared up their construction inventory and started building war production projects. Since private residential construction practically ceased during the war, these units were prized. A serious housing shortage only got much worse during the war.

In Washington, where the money originated, the policy and politics of war production and defense housing were torturous (Funigiello, 1978). Diffused and fragmented, defense housing policy was beyond coordination. Significant reorganizations and heavy-duty bureaucratic infighting were commonplace. The USHA was pushed to the side and a new defense worker federal bureaucratic nexus developed. Roosevelt lost what little housing focus he possessed, in favor of getting units built as cheaply and as fast as possible. The USHA, according to PL 671, was instructed to assist the hundreds of local housing authorities to cooperate with the Navy and the War Departments.

From spring 1940 to mid-1942, the National Defense Advisory Commission, “coordinated” by Charles Palmer—the Atlanta developer who, under contract, had opened the first PWA-owned housing project (Techwood Village)—coordinated the federal defense housing initiative. His first task was to draft a new housing bill, the Lanham Act, approved in October 1940. The Lanham Act waived the low-income requirement of the 1937 Housing Act, and suspended its one-to-one ratio of new construction to demolition. This, ironically, was substantially the position advocated by Mumford and Bauer. In the wartime environment, slum clearing was expensive and time consuming. The four pillars of defense housing accordingly became (1) cheap and fast, (2) temporary, (3) built on vacant land to extent possible and (4) funded by the private sector. In the course of the war, however, exceptions occurred and local housing authorities, for example in Philadelphia, did engage in substantial permanent housing construction.

In the last two years of the war, the issue of permanent versus temporary construction increased and conflict between public housers and the real estate sector intensified. Between 1945 and 1946 this struggle marginally tipped in favor of the public housers as federal officials recognized that the return of 12 million soldiers would create a spectacular housing crisis. Temporary housing was not always destroyed but kept active, and discussion in Washington concerning a new Housing Act intensified. The default to the private sector, however, continued as much of the federal war housing inventory was sold to private real estate firms. During these years it was not uncommon for Big City local housing authorities to work jointly with real estate firms in inner-city neighborhoods.

The volume of defense housing was huge. Between 1940 and 1944 defense housing programs built approximately 625,000 units, 580,000 of which were temporary (plywood dormitories and trailers). The cost exceeded $1 billion (Nenno, 1979, p. 238). USHA built an additional 45 projects as of February 1942 (Funigiello, 1978, p. 96). If one includes all sponsored defense housing, by the end of 1944 nearly 4 million units had been contracted for: 3,828,000 were in actual use; 82,000 were in construction; and 60,000 were on the drawing board. More than half were rehabbed existing structures, 26 percent privately constructed, 15 percent publicly financed temporary units and 6 percent for public housing unit permanent construction (Funigiello, 1978, p. 112). Temporary plywood and trailer defense housing on vacant land was located close to the newly built, mostly suburban war production factories. Gregory asserts that southern whites (during the war) resided more in northern suburbs (and that many returned to the South), while blacks settled mostly in inner-city neighborhoods (Gregory, 2005, pp. 82–112).

War production housing tempered considerably the civil war between business, Republicans and New Deal Democrats. Congruent with the report by Miles Colean, “Housing for Defense” (prepared by the Twentieth Century Fund), any defense housing financed by the federal government should not compete with private housing, and only as a last resort should federal housing be directly constructed by the federal government.¹⁷ Defense worker housing defaulted to the private (real estate) sector. As the war oozed to its conclusion in the later years, this fault line politics intensified as the private sector increasing believed defense housing, unless controlled by the private sector, would undermine the postwar housing markets. Coupled with a dramatic tapering off of public opinion that supported public housing (after 1938) and a Congress now controlled by southern Democrats and Republicans, the USHA and public housers were on the out by war’s end.

Let’s Regroup

The obvious impact of federal housing programs on our history is that they elevated the housing reform wing of community development as a full-fledged partner with older economic development actors such as chambers and ports. The housing authority had spread across the nation in four short years, and by the end of the war was found in almost all moderate-sized cities. Public housers and housing reformers had a place to work where they could “mix it up” with the big boys. To be sure, housing reformers were badly split, as shall be further developed in the remainder of the chapter. A significant wing of community development advocated a planned form of suburban development, abandoning the ghettos and slums to their fate, and the central city as well.

Public housers were committed to removing the ghettos and building new dwellings to house low-income households. But slum clearance, as a goal independent of public housing, captured both policy-makers’ and the general public’s attention during these years. After 1938, and certainly by war’s end, elite and popular opinion of the day strongly supported slum clearance—more than public housing. The sense of a “ghetto as a viable community” (according to US sociologist Herbert Gans) was still a generation in the future. In 1945, whether white or black, slums scared the average citizen, Big City or suburban. Nobody wanted to live in a slum or ghetto, and their elimination removed a significant barrier to Big City revitalization. Like it or not, slum clearance by war’s end had developed into a top urban priority independent of public housing.

Importantly, adequate and ample housing had been elevated to a public infrastructure—and, given the gap between public housers and the real estate sector, a huge fault line had emerged.

 

 

DECENTRALIZATION ACCELERATES: HOUSING AND SLUM CLEARANCE BECOMES ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

 

During the New Deal, Herb Nelson and NAREB might as well have been in the middle of the Gobi Desert. It was his job to press for private housing solutions to inner-city revitalization and defense housing. He had better success with the latter. Nelson had argued for eminent domain/bond issuance powers associated with slum removal to go to the private sector; instead they went to public housers and wound up in their housing authority. The 1937 Housing Act, an unqualified victory for public housers, demonstrated business weakness in New Deal deliberations. By the late 1930s, with decentralization negatively affecting the CBD, the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) entered the slum clearance/housing debate. BOMA provided Nelson what he needed most—a strategy to recoup policy leadership lost to the public housers.

Trouble Brewing in the CBD

The tale behind BOMA’s involvement was a decade in the making. During the 1920s the anchor of CBD retail, the department store, opened branches in suburban malls. This was worrisome enough, but in city after city downtown property values fell sharply even during boom retail years. Daytime population traffic, still the highest ever and retail sales at record levels, suggested loss of shoppers to the suburbs was not the problem. Downtown business elites believed that, no matter where people moved, they would shop, be entertained, work and spend their money downtown. In this “wishful thinking” vision, the car was downtown’s best friend, but downtown had to adjust physically (Fogelson, 2001, pp. 317–20). Better access, diffusion/traffic management and parking were the solutions downtown property owners advocated and pursued initially.

The Depression, however, was more concerning and chronic. Downtown property owners believed counter-measures were required—that CBDs:

would have to be at least as well organized as the outlying business districts … downtown business interests would have to form organizations devoted exclusively to the well-being of the central business districts, organizations of the sort that had already been formed in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (Fogelson, 2001, p. 234) So Oakland established its Downtown Property Owners Association in 1931, Milwaukee in 1935, Chicago and Detroit in 1939, and Baltimore in 1941. These ancestors of future Main Street and BIDs reacted to decentralization long before Levittown.

Downtown anti-decentralization initiatives included coordinated advertising campaigns to increase pedestrian shopping. Over-zoning surplus commercial space, excessive property tax assessments and stringent building/safety codes were also attacked. Downtown associations “grieved” property tax assessments, advocated for rapid transit and urged the construction of municipal parking garages. CBD property values, however, continued to fall. Worried about market and population dynamics, CBD property owners suspected decentralization:

was also “highly selective” … middle and upper middle classes were leaving the center [city]. But the lower classes made up in large part of ethnic and racial minorities, was staying behind … The central business district was losing many of its best customers, keeping many of its worst, and ended up surrounded by blighted areas. (Fogelson, 2001, pp. 231–2)

The worst fears of CBD advocates were confirmed by the 1940 census. During the prior decade, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and St. Louis declined in population. Most of the Big Cities had only inched upward:

Of the ten largest cities in the nation, eight had either lost population or grown at a slower rate than the country as a whole … only Los Angeles could claim to be booming … After more than a century of rapidly rising population, growth of the leading cities, especially … northeastern … United States seemed to be coming to a halt. (Teaford, 1990, p. 10)

The Business Slum

The skyscraper-lined downtown, visible symbol of the metropolitan region, seemed a natural starting point to reverse decentralization. The visual appearance of most Big City CBDs by the late 1930s spoke for itself. Big Cities were visibly suffering from downtown “dry rot” and transition zones bordering downtown set the tone. CBD blight removal could not avoid adjacent neighborhoods, and so “blight” entered the urban redevelopment debates in Washington. The blight torch was mostly carried by NAREB and its newly formed research subsidiary, the Urban Land Institute (ULI).

To counter CBD decline the ULI focused on two key issues: (1) acquiring federal funds to leverage municipal revitalization efforts; and (2) designing a hybrid EDO, separate from housing authorities (closed to most elements of the business community, and not trusted), that included the private sector (real estate) and possessed required public powers. The ULI argument portrayed blight as the defining characteristic of the “business slum” and demonstrated the business slum’s link to the declining CBD. Through blight and CBD decline, the ULI redefined slum removal (and housing) in terms compatible with mainstream, chamber-style economic development. ED and CD increasingly saw themselves as enemies.

While the ultimate, bottom-line goal was to preserve CBD (central city) economic hegemony over suburbs, the intermediate goal was CBD revitalization, i.e. modernization. “Re-functioning” the CBD was in its early stages at this point. CBD modernization had been a central core of mainstream economic development since the 1880s. Not to be lost in tradition, however, is the ULI’s strategic reformulation which, in effect, set American economic development in a sort of Big City civil war with Progressives, public housers and community developers seeking not simply to preserve early success but to restart it—and mainstream economic developers seeking to garner what federal resources they could for their CBD/economic development program. While not totally zero-sum, an important dynamic was that future Housing Act legislation compromised between these two approaches, probably to the disadvantage of both. The tension that developed between the two ED approaches no doubt shaped post-1950 evolution of the profession in Big Cities.

The blighted business slum was a district-neighborhood, usually adjacent to the CBD, that needed to be removed, not on the basis of deteriorated housing alone (although that could be an element) but also because it had lost its value to the local economic base and stood in the way of the central city’s capacity to counter decentralization. ULI-conceived slum clearance attacked downtown blocks with deteriorated housing/commercial structures, especially the so-called “lung blocks,” “Bedbug rows” and “Whiskey Islands”: [The] concern was the business slum created by the Depression-induced collapse of real estate values and investments, high interest rates, low municipal revenues and weak profits” (Beauregard, 1993, pp. 86, 231–2).

The Housing Act of 1937 did not address these downtown properties—they were not eligible for federal funds. New York City, for example, had conducted a dozen slum clearing projects with and without federal assistance between 1935 and 1942, but only two were in Manhattan—half were in Brooklyn and a quarter in Harlem. Slum clearance in Big Cities created acres of low-income public housing projects whose resident disposable incomes would do little to reverse declining CBD sales. Slum clearance as defined in the 1930s offered little to those interested in CBD redevelopment.

What downtown business interests needed was therefore a form of slum clearance that would wipe out not the worst slums, but rather the run-down neighborhoods adjacent to the central business district, some of which strictly speaking might not even be slums. A form of slum clearance in which the slums would be used not for public housing for the poor, but for private housing for the well-to-do, high quality housing that would attract the upper middle and middle classes … [with] great purchasing power. (Fogelson, 2001, pp. 345–6)

But building housing for the affluent is never an easy case to make. It was, after all, not the function of the government to subsidize affluent housing. BOMA and downtown business leaders countered that the land in question was priced very, very dearly. Affluent housing could pay for itself in areas adjacent to the CBD. Low-income housing should be sited in low-cost city peripheries, as Mumford and Bauer argued. What’s more, appealing to planners, low-income housing was far from the “highest and best use” for the CBD. This argument also appealed to Progressive mayors tasked with finding revenues for budgets and services. Fiorello La Guardia, a deeply committed public housing supporter, supported the ULI position:

slum clearance was designed “to provide decent homes in decent neighborhoods for American families,” the process will frequently leave land that should be used for a variety of purposes, rather than housing alone, and we should turn to good city planning for a guide to what these uses should be, as well as for the general physical pattern according to which redevelopment should take place. (Fogelson, 2001, p. 356)

NAREB/ULI’s (1941) Housing and Blighted Areas Report catapulted these issues into the federal arena—and challenged any housing reformer hope that a successor Housing Act would follow lines set in 1937. Authored by Herb Nelson, the task at hand was to confront obsolescence of Big Cities, and that was beyond state and local resources— federal funds were an absolute necessity. The report called for a tri-parte federal/ municipal/private partnership that alone could amass resources, powers and expertise sufficient to take advantage of the automobile (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 114–17). Slum clearance needed to be “redirected” from public housing projects. Also necessary was an administrative structure whose powers, leadership and capacity would be sufficient for the task of CBD redevelopment.

To remedy the latter problem, the report called for the creation of “metropolitan land commissions,” representative of the community (i.e. business) and accountable to the municipality and its political leadership. The key element was the inclusion of “write down” that reduced initially high property values downward, allowing subsequent new construction after demolition. The write down cost, Nelson proposed, would be shared by the federal, state and local governments. In a stroke of brilliance, the NARED/ULI proposal required that redevelopment of cleared land conform to a “comprehensive plan” adopted by the municipality The linkage of slum clearance–blight-removal–CBD redevelopment with comprehensive planning proved vital in attracting the support of planners and planning commissions (peeling them away from housing reformers) and to the state courts in justifying the use of eminent domain for land ultimately to be transferred to private parties for private use (Gelfand, 1975, p. 116).

THE SCENE SHIFTS TO THE MUNICIPAL LEVEL

After 1942 public housing and CBD redevelopment legislation stalemated until 1949. FDR and the New Deal had long run out of steam. Republicans, intermittently in control of one or both houses of Congress, and World War II priorities assumed center stage. Between 1942 and 1945, three major legislative debates attempted to amend the 1937 Housing Act. They were unsuccessful. Others followed in the postwar period. They too failed. No consensus between public housers and the ULI could be found. Left to their own devices during these years, the story of slum clearance, housing and now CBD revitalization finally “decentralized” to the municipal level.

The Redevelopment Agency

The ULI metropolitan land commission definitively nailed the coffin of the pre-1937 limited-dividend corporation. A structural alternative was independently being adopted by several Big Cities in the early forties. Big Cities did not take the results of the 1940 census lying down; nor were they willing to wait on Washington to get its act together.

Cities, more precisely large corporate leaders, devised their own responses to blight and decline. The earliest and most watched local initiative was New York City’s.¹⁸

The first known instance of a “CBD redevelopment-like agency” originated from a 1940 proposal developed and advocated by the New York City Merchants’ Association.¹⁹ In April 1941 the legislature approved the proposal that authorized municipal powers to “take” and raze land in the slums and blighted areas, and to lease or transfer ownership to private corporations to build housing projects (for all income levels) on the cleared sites (Teaford, 1990, p. 27). By summer’s end, three states with the largest urban populations (New York, Michigan and Illinois) had authorized city governments to join with private enterprise in CBD reconstruction.

Each measure authorized eminent domain and bond issuance for the benefit of private corporations willing to invest in housing projects for all incomes. If the plans of a private corporation won the city’s approval and the developer had already obtained more than half of the property necessary for the redevelopment project, then the municipal government or its agent was authorized to use eminent domain and condemn the remainder of the holdings in the project site. The New York law also authorized cities to exempt local real estate taxes for ten years on any increase in the value of the property improved by the developer.²⁰ During the war years, other states approved similar legislation: Maryland (1943), Minnesota and Pennsylvania (1945), Massachusetts (1946) and Ohio and Missouri (1949). Other enabling acts delegated non-housing redevelopment authority to public housing authorities: “Over the next four years [after 1941] thirteen additional states enacted basically similar laws. But little work actually resulted from this legislation. … The fatal defect of the laws was their failure, except in two instances, to provide any state subsidies for ‘write downs’” (Gelfand, 1975, p. 137).

Municipal redevelopment agency initiatives exploded in the postwar period. City after city established redevelopment agencies: Indianapolis in March 1945; Baltimore and St. Louis a few months later; Philadelphia in 1946. By the late 1940s almost all Big Cities had either established redevelopment agencies or turned housing commissions (in Detroit) or city planning commissions (in Minneapolis) into them (Fogelson, 2001, p. 366). Alexander von Hoffman reports that, between 1941 and 1948, 25 states passed redevelopment acts establishing a non-low-income housing redevelopment agency (Hoffman, 2000, p. 304). In the forties, this transition decade, the CBD-focused redevelopment agency, broke away from the slum clearance for low-income public or defense housing focus and moved into privately owned commercial property and housing for those not on low incomes. These projects were not eligible for 1937 Housing Act/Defense Housing funds and definitely outside the community development/public houser nexus.

Despite this flurry of activity, few projects went anywhere. Despite bond approvals, the complete financial package required to start a project was seldom assembled. Complexity inherent in implementing a very sophisticated series of actions was an issue. Also, many state supreme courts were fine with redevelopment agency authority exercise of eminent domain, but to lease/transfer the “taken land” to private parties was another matter entirely—and to transfer to private hands at “below market value” still another. As soon as a project commenced it was subject to a series of legal actions. Controversy followed—frequently paralyzing city councils and mayors. Contrary to today’s belief, local, ethnic and racial groups fought back with all sorts of action. States and state courts were inconsistent. The period between 1942 and 1949 was a mixed bag at best. Absent federal funds, most states and Big Cities couldn’t quite get it all together to commence CBD redevelopment. Few projects were even attempted; none were completed—except New York City and Pittsburgh.

Still, the period between 1940 and 1949 is critical to our economic development history. During these years one can examine four cities (Baltimore, New York, Pittsburgh and Hartford) and discern different paths. These very different paths found expression in other cities in later decades, and they demonstrate the remarkable diversity of something that came to be called “urban renewal”—the last phase of the 1920s’ slum clearance strategy.

The Baltimore Path

Baltimore follows a community development path. Its CBD-focused economic development will spin off only in the middle 1950s. In 1937 a voluntary organization, the Citizen’s Housing Council, was formed to monitor a Progressive-era housing ordinance “on the Hygiene of Housing” administered by the city’s Department of Health. Its focus, in an era of 1937 Housing Act slum clearance for public housing, was on the quality of neighborhoods, and housing in particular. In many ways this early private, voluntary, unstaffed organization bridged the transition from our “old style” community development to an early version of contemporary community development.

The (Housing Act) Baltimore Housing Authority was formed in 1937; in 1940 it opened its first public housing (Poe Homes). Ten additional projects were opened before the end of 1942 and two others before war’s end.²¹ There were 14 additional defense housing projects constructed during World War II (Williams, 2005, p. 99, Table 3.1). Baltimore, in short, followed a highly aggressive slum clearance/public housing program that in 2016 made the Baltimore Housing Authority the fifth largest in the nation. The Citizen’s Housing Council, however, moved in another direction. Concerned more with neighborhoods and their quality of life than with housing per se, it realized the Department of Health and the Ordinance on the Hygiene of Housing weren’t living up to hopes and expectations.

So in 1941 the Council expanded membership to include professional architects, planners and university professors, forming a new entity—the Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association (CPHA). Its purpose was “To foster good city planning, … better land use, … improve housing and living conditions … and correct urban decay … by means of research, public discussion, legislation, law enforcement.” It prioritized code enforcement, and its first major victory, in 1947, was the formation of a city housing court—the first known housing court in the nation (Lyall, 1982, pp. 21–2). A year later, it successfully advocated the formation of a Department of Planning charged with “mapping out a strategy for stemming neighborhood blight through … a master land use plan.” “For over a decade CPHA teamed with law enforcement and sanitation departments in a block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood effort to remove code violations, clean streets, and enforce the rule of law.” By the end of the decade it had achieved approval of the “Baltimore Plan” and had organized programs and neighborhood-based organizations in 104 neighborhoods.²²

Neighborhood/housing projects ran into considerable difficulty in rather short order. The path-setting Baltimore Plan launched in 1945 by Mayor Theodore McKeldin coordinated city bureaucracies in a hopefully sustained joint program we today label “concentrated code enforcement of targeted neighborhoods.” Committees of neighborhood residents were established to ensure sustained housing rehabilitation, and a housing court empowered to enforce it (1947). McKeldin also founded the Baltimore Redevelopment Commission in 1945 (with CBD-focused powers but with no private membership) in which he housed the various city entities conducting elements of the Baltimore Plan. Selected blocks were designated for new public housing. Philadelphia (St. Louis and Detroit also) followed with similar style initiatives. By the middle 1950s all had either failed or exhibited serious flaws. The housing–neighborhood model generated more than its fair share of acrimonious conflict and public discussion: “At first, [neighborhood organizations] served as the focus of local self-help, clean up, and fix-up efforts; but gradually they evolved into powerful neighborhood improvement associations.” Worse, the Baltimore Plan yielded few permanent results; Baltimore’s suburban exodus was in no visible way ameliorated.

In Philadelphia as in Saint Louis, Detroit and Baltimore, a blitzkrieg attack by city inspectors and an aroused grass-roots leadership were intended to galvanize blighted communities and rid them of their worst features. Yet in one city after another community organization and rehabilitation campaigns produced disappointing results. In too many cases effective community organizations did not perpetuate rehabilitation projects … Without these external supports the programs generally collapsed. (Teaford, 1990, pp. 116–18)

By the early 1950s several CPHA business members sought a different approach, visiting Pittsburgh to see its CBD model. Upon return they organized a CPHA public forum that prompted elite CPHA businessmen, notably James and Willard Rouse, to form the “vault-like” Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC). In 1956, with the Housing Authority charged with “corruption and inaction,” a new entity, the Baltimore Urban Redevelopment and Housing Agency, merged with the Redevelopment Commission. Its first CEO, Robert C. Embry Jr. (a CPHA member), became a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) assistant secretary in 1977. At that point Baltimore embarked on a formal CBD-focused urban renewal program, and its chief catalyst, James Rouse, went on to be economic development’s arguably most famous private developer. The CPHA survived these reorganizations and continues to this day as a well-respected, highly successful, city-wide, neighborhood-focused CDO.

New York and Robert Moses: Policy Innovation or Abuse?

A 1940 New York City Planning Commission plan offered a strategy:

to rehouse the poor, stabilize the dwindling middle class, and restore order to the city landscape with modern city-planning principles … “in accord with a master plan” and should include the assembly and clearance of slums and blighted areas, and their rebuilding for a variety of purposes—including privately financed housing for upper income and middle income groups, public housing for families of low income, commercial projects, recreational facilities, parks and playgrounds. (Zipp, 2010, pp. 15–16)

The plan, which was never approved (Moses blocked it in the Board of Estimates), captured the post-1938 movement away from slum clearance purely for public housing to commercial and housing for all incomes.

Manhattan’s Lower East Side was perceived as ripe for redevelopment, and to MetLife that spelled opportunity.²³ Between 1942 and 1943, the company formulated a plan to clear 18 blocks and replace residences, tenements, businesses and warehouses with two middle-class residential villages (Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper) to be built in Le Corbusier/Modernist style. The idea was MetLife’s (Frederick Ecker, board chair, took the credit). The project was perceived not only as an investment for MetLife but also as a way to “give back to the city.” The Stuyvesant project brought “life in the country in the heart of the city,” say it in other words, a suburb in the city (Zipp, 2010, p. 17). MetLife had a track record for projects of this nature. Parkchester, the largest private housing development in the United States (129 acres), had just opened in the Bronx in 1941. But “Parkchester was really a suburban development built on open land at the end of a subway line” (Zipp, 2010, pp. 77–8). Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper was redevelopment in its purest form—in the heart of downtown Manhattan. Business Week and MetLife insisted that the immediate problem triggering Stuyvesant was blight and slums, but its ultimate purpose was to halt “the process of decentralization which has been undermining the financial soundness of every major city in the United States” (Zipp, 2010, p. 83, quoting Business Week). What Ecker and MetLife needed to make this happen was not money, they had plenty of that; rather, they needed control of the real estate involved in the project.

Into that vacuum stepped Robert Moses. Without knowledge of MetLife’s plan, he saw the same Lower East Side opportunity and linked MetLife to it. Before meeting with Ecker, Moses got La Guardia on board with a revolutionary urban redevelopment framework. On February 1, 1943:

Ecker, Moses, city comptroller Joseph McGoldrick and Met Life’s general counsel sat down in Mayor La Guardia’s office and signed an agreement for ‘the redevelopment of a blighted area of eighteen city blocks … [in which] Metropolitan Life would ‘provide all the money necessary to execute the project. The company would buy as much of the area as it could, and the city would step in to acquire the rest through its powers of eminent domain and then sell it to Meet Life at cost’. The City would give Met Life “all lands in streets closed” … Met Life would give back to the City any land needed for its streets … [and] would build access roads, paths, landscaping, and buildings that could cover up to 28% of the land and reach a height sufficient to produce not less than 32,000 rooms and not more than 34,000 rooms. (Zipp, 2010, pp. 80–81)

MetLife’s tax bill would remain fixed based on the value of the property before redevelopment. And there we have it: the first known project memorandum of understanding (MOU) outlining a private–public partnership. The fusion of necessary powers and responsibilities took place in the housing/redevelopment agency.

Little of this was legal. New York’s 1941 Redevelopment Companies Law did not include all the elements specified in the MOU. A new law was needed. Off to Albany went Moses. Moses wanted to separate the Act’s redevelopment powers from the iron grasp that only public low-income housing could be built on acquired land. He wanted to delink slum clearance from housing and public housers. Also he stripped out the requirement to provide “adequate provision for displaced tenants’ (Zipp, 2010, pp. 81–2) and removed restrictions on profits and limited dividends (Mitchell, 1985, p. 261). Dutifully the state legislature agreed; the Hampton–Mitchell Redevelopment Companies Law was approved on March 30, 1943: “Stuyvesant Town was a crucial moment in the process by which downtown business interests transformed the housing reform movement into an effort offset decentralization and promote the central business district” (Zipp, 2010, p. 83). The New York City Housing Authority was empowered to conduct privately owned commercial housing redevelopment for middle/upper-class residents.

Approximately 10,000 low-income residents were displaced, and 24,000 mostly middle-class residents took their place in the high rises. Doors opened in August 1947, and were fully leased two years later. When the project was resold to BlackRock in 2015, the sale was hailed by Mayor De Blasio as the best way to preserve NYC’s affordable housing—time apparently heals all wounds. In 1943 there were wounds. Protests essentially no different than heard today immediately appeared. “Class warfare” it was called; noted housing reformers (like Charles Abrams) attacked the project and model vociferously. From day one private sector-led commercial/central business district redevelopment was not on CD’s agenda.

Pittsburgh

From the beginning Pittsburgh’s CBD-focused redevelopment was driven by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD). But ACCD’s beginning, under the guise of “the citizen’s group of the Allegheny Region,” crystallized around 1941 (Tarr and Stewman, 1985, pp. 63–4). ACCD was a private organization composed of and led by the one-percenters. It spun off from the Pennsylvania Economy League and the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA). Planning was a dominant strand and chief policy focus through each of ACCD’s predecessor organizations. Initially formalized as an EDO in 1918, the Citizens Committee on City Plan (CCCP), it changed name to the Municipal Planning Association (MPA) in 1920 and again in 1938 to the PRPA. In the 1920s the CCCP/MPA stressed the CBD’s adjustment to the automobile, concluding that decentralization threatened its vitality. Metropolitan federation was their preferred counter to suburbanization. Voters rejected the federation in 1929.

In 1939 RPAA brought in a consultant/planner, Robert Moses by name, to fabricate an “Arterial Plan for Pittsburgh.” It linked CBD to the suburbs through a network of highways. Moses was instructed to focus on “the Triangle,” which was to be the hub of the network and developed into a park. The Moses Plan’s bottom line was CBD hegemony. Moses stressed the need to eliminate the railroad yards that pervaded that sensitive area—also the elimination of congestion by removing trolleys from the CBD. Park Martin, director of the City Planning Commission, got his feathers a bit ruffled by the rather dominating role played by the PRPA business elites around the Moses Plan, but the Pittsburgh Chamber to set up a “Golden Triangle Division” with Richard K. Mellon as its chair. Its purpose was to “crystallize citizen effort behind a movement to stop depreciation of real estate values within the Golden Triangle by making it a better place in which to work and transact business” (Lubove, 1995, p. 105). The “godfather” behind the ACCD was always Richard K. Mellon, whose corporate empire included large financial institutions (Gulf Oil and Alcoa)—”a man of means, by no means.” Mellon lived up to his middle name, “King.” He was among the ten richest men in America. He served stateside in the army during World War II and at war’s end was discharged. In his early forties, he had recently inherited several businesses (including Mellon Bank). Mellon is representative of a generation of one percenters “coming of age” in postwar America’s business and political leadership.

ACCD by 1945 developed 12 committees, including “housing and neighborhood development” and “economic problems.” To coordinate advocacy and policy research, it hired executive director Park Martin (former Allegheny Planning Commission director—of ruffled feathers fame). Its “real guts,” however, was its executive committee, which included only CEOs of the most powerful businesses in the metro— attendance and voting were restricted to the CEO personally. As Moses had done two years earlier, ACCD’s first order of business to pursue their downtown-focused agenda was to acquire political clout. Just as the Baltimore Plan was the creature of Mayor McKeldin and Stuyvesant Town a partnership of La Guardia and Moses, Mellon needed a friend in City Hall.

The Republican Party machine had controlled state and Big City governments since the 1860s. That was fine with Mellon, who was a stout Republican. Pittsburgh, however, had broken from the machine and elected David L. Lawrence, the former Democratic Party state chairman. Elected mayor in 1945 to his first term, Lawrence served four terms, leaving the mayor’s office in 1959 and becoming in 1961 Pennsylvania’s first Catholic governor. Lawrence, born in the working-class Pittsburgh Golden Triangle neighborhood, committed himself in his campaign platform to working with Mellon and the ACCD. He personally committed himself to CBD redevelopment; one of his first acts was to appoint Park Martin to the city’s Planning Commission—creating a formal link between ACCD and city administration. Several top ACCD members possessed considerable informal access to Lawrence—Mellon was not Lawrence’s go-to connection.

Lawrence’s campaign platform and ACCD’s downtown strategy overlapped; they comprised three related simultaneous initiatives—“smoke” or pollution abatement, flood control and the Point Park (Golden Triangle) redevelopment. In 1945 and 1947 the state approved a series of empowering legislations, nicknamed the “Pittsburgh Package,” that both cleared the way for local action—authorization for municipalities to create urban redevelopment authorities for example—and satisfied necessary preconditions for private investment (smoke and flood control). To pursue these initiatives, with ACCD support if not instigation, in 1946 Lawrence created the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) (he was chair, the board included city council and business leaders). Lawrence’s personal assistant, John Robin, was appointed its first CEO. In later years two additional authorities, a parking and an auditorium authority, were created to conduct CBD redevelopment projects.

Within weeks of Lawrence’s 1945 election, Republican Governor Martin accepted Point Park as a state park, a decision which required the removal of several bridges and acquisition of land, followed by demolition. ACCD was designated the state’s administrative coordinator, and by 1949, with $7 million of state funds, the land (36 acres) had been assembled and demolition of 15 acres of freight yards, elevated bridges, railroad tracks, terminals, 26 commercial buildings and Pittsburgh’s old Exposition Hall commenced. Earlier, in 1946, a second Golden Triangle initiative (the 23-acre Gateway Center) started—funded by Equitable Life (MetLife declined). The 59-acre Point Park district was certified as “blighted” by the City Planning Commission in 1947. Construction commenced in 1950. Gateway Center redevelopment continued through 1964. First to be completed were three 20–24 story office buildings in 1952 and 1953. Mellon himself funded the new headquarters for Mellon Bank and another for Alcoa in the early fifties, outside “the Point”—intended to demonstrate his commitment to other private CBD investment. In 1949 the Mellon Foundation provided $4 million for a public parking garage.

Four years previous to the July 15, 1949 Housing Act, the nation’s first formal postwar CDB redevelopment program was on its way—with state, local and private funds. Today called Renaissance I, the two-decade (1945-65) initiative followed closely the 1939 Moses Plan:

By 1967, 19 renewal projects were completed or under construction. These encompassed approximately 1500 acres (765 clearance). Of the total acreage 465 acres were committed to industrial reuse, and another 103 to commercial office reuse. The total public costs were estimated at $171.5 million (including $112 million spread over 8 [post-1954] of the projects. According to the URA $125 million in tax assessments [resulted] … 50 industrial firms had been accommodated in new modernized facilities, and 55,000 persons worked in firms located in renewal areas. (Lubove, 1995, p. 128)

The United Nations Project

The United Nations Project has much to teach us about CBD redevelopment or the urban renewal strategy. First, the UN Project, whatever else it might be, is a CBD redevelopment project. Second, it is evident who the vanguards of postwar urban redevelopment are. Third, the UN Project exposes the seldom appreciated “soft side: of urban redevelopment—the popular culture and media, the optimism, the symbolism— and insight into how Washington policy-makers, devising the Housing Act of 1949, learned from New York City’s adventure in urban redevelopment. They negotiated the Act while the soft side, the golden years of popular, Policy World and media infatuation with the promise and the symbolism of urban regeneration were at their height.

Description of the UN Project is surprisingly simple. Big Four agreement at Yalta in February 1945 approved the UN. By the time the UN elected its initial leadership, secured financing and began searching for a site, it was the very end of 1946. New York City did not have a lock on the site—far from it. Paris, London and Geneva were very much in play, and Philadelphia (neutral ground from Wall Street and Washington DC) became the lead US site. Moses offered the 1939 World’s Fair (Flushing Meadows) site (where the UN had temporary headquarters); but the Flushing site “bored” diplomats, and soil composition issues complicated high-rise construction. The Moses site simply wasn’t acceptable.

In New York City’s favor, however, was that New York City was where the UN leadership/delegates wanted to be.²⁴ In December 1946, a week from the final decision, the UN had the votes to locate in Philadelphia, not New York. At that point, nationally prestigious NYC real estate developer William Zeckendorf got involved. Zeckendorf had been working on his “X-City” redevelopment project, a six-block site along Manhattan’s East River. The project was a massive private, commercial office redevelopment that would demolish the few residences that stood there (fewer than 200 families), along with mostly vacant apartments, warehouses, factories and a not so symbolic, huge, functioning slaughterhouse. Cows and pigs were literally herded through some streets to slaughter. Still in the design stage, Zeckendorf had purchased much of the site.

At this last moment Zeckendorf told Mayor William O’Dwyer he would sell the site to the UN if they wanted it. Moses and Trygve Lie (first UN Secretary-General) had previously walked the site, revealing Moses’ behind the curtain role. O’Dwyer didn’t have money, so he called Nelson Rockefeller. On the night before the final decision meeting, Nelson went to Dad, John D. Rockefeller, and asked the skinflint for money to buy the site, which he would deed to the UN. Generous soul that he was, Dad reached into his piggy bank and came up with $8.5 million ($85 million today), which did the trick—Zeckendorf sold the site that night, the UN leadership was notified and next day New York won the competition.

As to urban redevelopment’s nitty-gritty, the UN was certainly not a housing project, but otherwise was neither fish nor fowl: not commercial; built on land not subject to US sovereignty; functionally a mere office building, perhaps a corporate headquarters. Its ambiguity opened the door to all sorts of initiatives that offered hope for central city revitalization. While financing was private, the city brought to the table, through the good offices of Robert Moses, its usual incentives:

Robert Moses delivered a roster of municipal incentives … Moses … believed that the provisions necessary to protect United Nation’s investment—tax exemption [and] for site and street closures needed to form a superblock—would be the same minimum incentives necessary to encourage the private clearance and rebuilding of expensive in-town land for urban renewal projects to come. (Zipp, 2010, p. 51)

Tossed in were tunnels, and zoning changes. Design was by a team of the world’s most noted architects. Le Corbusier was a team member, and his design was selected. The city handled residential and business relocation (the latter so inconsequential it was done honorably, the former not so good). Site demolition, at UN expense, was also handled by the city. The site was not a slum (although virtually no one lived there) and did not meet the technical letter of being blighted (businesses were profitable and paying taxes); but much of the site was vacant. Compared to the UN, the existing uses were obsolete, inferior—and in the way. They needed to be demolished, and that was the message imparted to future urban redevelopers.

Blight was not a technical or legal description; it was an image of decay, obsolescence and a past that was no longer working (Zipp, 2010, p. 59). These elements, then, were incorporated into the popular, the business, the media and the Policy World’s rationale—the “story” of why we needed urban redevelopment. Successful redevelopment of six blocks along New York City’s East River would be visible proof that urban redevelopment constituted a viable strategy to restore the central city. Construction started in 1947, a financial crisis averted in 1949; UN staff started working in the building in 1950, and in 1952 the first session of the General Assembly was held.

And, since we mention the Policy World, despite misgivings by a few, the Policy World joined in the story as well: “Planners and architects ratified this symbolic linkage, claiming that overcoming urban disorder was not just the matter of cityrebuilding, but analogous to the United Nation’s fundamental mission” (Zipp, 2010, p. 59). Most urban-relevant and policy journals of the day supported the project and endorsed its promise as being the future for the city. Le Corbusier claimed that the United Nations and “the whole East River will be brought to life, will awaken … and will thrive as a ‘Radiant City’” (Zipp, 2010, p. 62). So did the New York Times. Even Lewis Mumford climbed on board. Despite initial skepticism and his general belief in dinosaur cities, by the end of the UN Project Mumford was gushing. The UN became to him a new opportunity to “found a new kind of urban community … A new city … could be carved out of an older metropolis ‘by a large-scale process of slum clearance, removal, and rebuilding, financed wholly by the United Nations’” (Zipp, 2010, p. 60). Coming from Mumford, this hopeful image of the future resulting from urban renewal shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Through the prism of the United Nations the reader can see the larger picture, the usually unspoken backdrop justifying urban redevelopment through slum clearance as the best hope of the central city. Infused with meaning:

[T]he United Nations [Project] and the ethic of city-rebuilding stood together in the minds of progressives and liberals. Both were legacies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s political idealism … Both seemed to many liberals to be the fruits of the struggle in World War II: replanned and rejuvenated cities went hand in hand with a world free from war and strife. Both, too, were imperiled. (Zipp, 2010, pp. 66–7)

The UN Project personified hope and a sense of urgency. Lost today is that postwar urban redevelopment rested on popular, not only business, consensus—a first order state and sub-state priority. While business elites blazed a path to urban renewal, they put their money where their mouth was. They were not merely greedy, self-interested, profit-seeking capitalists inflicting their miserable mentality—and the bulldozer—on poor and black people. That ignores an idealism: the soft side of urban physical redevelopment as the audacity of hope, embraced by most urban residents, political leaders and private business. Government, through partnership with the private sector, could remake the Big City and save it from Mumford’s extinction.

1. TAFT GOES TO WASHINGTON

The 1949 Housing Act Breaks the Logjam

More than a decade had passed since the 1937 Housing Act. The winds of public policy shift ceaselessly and there was little mistaking that by 1949 they had moved from public housers to a hopeful strategy of removing urban obsolescence, from public housing to slum clearance for urban revitalization. The opening lines of President Truman’s statement announcing his signing of the 1949 Housing Act into law set the tone:

I have today [July 15, 1949] approved the Housing Act of 1949. This far-reaching measure is of great significance to the American people. It opens up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome surroundings for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums. It equips the federal government for the first time with effective means for aiding cities in the vital task of clearing slums and rebuilding blighted areas.²⁵

In these pithy opening lines, one can see the essence of the legislation: (1) housing and slum clearance were linked; and (2) slum clearance and removal of blight were primary—wherever blight was found. The 1949 Act delinked slum clearance from public housing.

What finally forced passage of the legislation was that:

General public interest in housing and slum clearance legislation dated to the 1930s, but much wider interest was sparked and fanned by the severe nationwide housing shortage which prevailed during the years following the war? This shortage had resulted from the depression, wartime construction limitations and construction material shortages after the war. The housing shortage was universally recognized as a national emergency because of its special impact on returning veterans. (Foard and Fefferman, 1966, pp. 91–2)

The Act passed not because public housers and the ULI had forged some sort of compromise, but because Washington needed to respond to the housing crisis. With passage of the 1949 Act, “the game was on.” But the Act itself, from almost any perspective, was flawed.

The law was the product of seven years of bitter legislative stalemate and a shotgun wedding between enemy lobbying groups. It set lofty goals … but provided only the limited mechanism of public housing and urban renewal to meet them. The housing act was the only new liberal social legislation enacted during the Truman Presidency, yet its chief sponsor in Congress [Robert Taft] was a preeminent conservative. (Hoffman, 2000, p. 299)

The Act itself offered little that was new, excepting it refunded federal housing/local housing agency programs that had been unfunded since 1941. Specifically, Title II authorized the creation of 810,000 low-rent public dwellings over the next seven years. Federal funding was still linked to a municipally approved comprehensive plan and designation of blighted area; local match (in some form) was required; funds flowed through a housing/redevelopment EDO; temporary relocation assistance was required, as was a public hearing. The “revolution” hidden in the bill’s language was that the plan for blighted redevelopment area should prescribe initiatives for predominantly residential purposes (opening doors for non-residential CBD slum clearance and for housing for all incomes) and the form of federal funding (grants) to reimburse “two-thirds of the costs of purchasing, clearing and discounting the resale price of slum-cleared land” [i.e. write down]. It was anticipated that “Entrepreneurs, nonprofit hospitals, universities, and other private land developers planned and financed the actual rebuilding of the cleared project sites” (Goldfield, 2007, p. 357).

Whatever its accomplishments, the 1949 Act, compromise that it was, had created nothing resembling a smooth and sure path to any kind of redevelopment—housing or commercial. Catherine Bauer, sitting at her typewriter in 1951, lamented: “many of those concerned [with] the redevelopment program [believe it] has become a kind of combination obstacle race and maze, a tortuous process of finding some feasible route in a vast dim wilderness full of unchartered hobgoblins, stumbling blocks, and divergent paths” (Scott, 1969, p. 489). The Korean War created war production shortages, raising building costs. Worse, public housing enjoyed little bond referendum support, so few public housing projects were funded. Demand for CBD redevelopment projects was strong, but drowned out (Greer, 1965, pp. 17–18). The resulting shortage in alternative housing for slum residents generated rent increases in slum units, further increasing land acquisition costs—all the while suburbs were attracting more newcomers into sprawling subdivisions.

Municipalities had to lobby state capitals for enabling legislation,²⁶ and then endure state Supreme Court validation when contested.²⁷ At the local level a variety of application-imposed mandates (appropriate zoning, health codes, etc.) had to be satisfied before application could be made. In 1950 few cities had approved a general plan. Cities had to hire planners to meet obligations imposed by the Act.

Of the 205 localities that submitted requests, only 128 had official planning agencies, only 56 of these had full-time staffs. … Many of the cities required from a year and a half to two and a half years to bring their general planning work to a stage acceptable to the federal agency. (Scott, 1969, pp. 492, 495)

The legislation had not provided sufficient specificity in its requirements. The federal Division of Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment (Housing and Home Finance Agency) was unsure as to how to answer questions, and slow to approve submissions. The Eisenhower administration, not noted for being sensitive to public housing projects, seldom pushed its envelope. Local infighting between planning, housing and redevelopment agencies was common—the former were sometimes perturbed that the federal agency (complying with the provisions of the Housing Act) negotiated with the latter. Planning departments were poorly positioned to coordinate the array of activities and initiatives associated with both comprehensive planning and urban renewal program implementation. In the ensuing period of drift, cities like Baltimore and Detroit and states such as Illinois and California shaped their legislation to “dance to their own music”: the Sacramento Plan, the Baltimore Plan and the Illinois Urban Community Conservation Act. Moreover, redevelopment had clearly taken a radically different turn, into CBD/commercial revitalization using private funds (Pittsburgh, 1950) rather than public housing.

Things got so bad that the Public Administration Clearing House, the American Society of Planning Officials and the National Association of Housing Officials formed a committee, the Urban Redevelopment Study (1953), to make sense of why things had run afoul. The Urban Study inventoried what few advanced urban redevelopment projects it could uncover. The group cited the one in Pittsburgh (the Golden Triangle Project) which was not using the Housing Act at all; one in Chicago (New York Life Insurance  Company’s  100-acre  Lake   Meadows  residential  project),  also  privately financed; and a third in Detroit which, after having submitted a request to designate a 131-acre blighted area near the CBD as blighted, was stalled awaiting a federal response (Scott, 1969, p. 495). Only in New York City, where the Power Broker controlled the redevelopment policy system, were a significant number of projects in the making—but even there they had not gotten through the city approval process.

By 1953 Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) had spent only a fraction of Title I grants. Although an estimated 200 cities, of all sizes, had begun serious efforts to take advantage of Title I, only 60 had acquired any land, and a mere half-dozen had started to rebuild (Hoffman, 2000, p. 313). Instead of 135,000 public housing units, fewer than 25,000 per year were built. By the end of 1953, only 153,000 units had been built or were under construction (Goldfield, 2007, p. 357). Title I of the 1949 Housing Act was just not working. So, in September 1953 Eisenhower formed an Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs. Included on the committee besides Catherine Bauer were Colean, James Rouse (who headed the subcommittee on urban redevelopment) and Ernest J. Bohn, director of the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority. Its mandate was to figure out what was wrong, and prepare recommendations.

The 1954 Housing Act

The Advisory Committee’s recommendations were incorporated into the 1954 Housing Act. Influenced by Colean and Rouse, who borrowed heavily from the troubled Baltimore Plan, the Act called for “urban renewal,” not redevelopment, and it did not focus on the CBD but extended itself to so-called “conservation” areas—what others later will call “gray areas” that surround the CBD. These areas, along the lines of the Baltimore Plan, could be rehabilitated through loans and grants; installation of neighborhood infrastructure; spot demolition; code enforcement; and housing inspections and spot rehab. One- to four-family units were singled out. Conservation areas were separated from “project areas” where slum clearance was necessary. Section 220 provided relocation assistance funds. Public housing was required only for those displaced by slum clearance. Most urban renewal (housing or commercial) was to be implemented by the private sector through funding from new loan/mortgage programs for which they were eligible end-users (Sections 123 and 221). All this was wrapped into “a workable plan” that needed approval from federal decision-makers.

[T]he basic objective of the program is to eliminate slums and blighted homes, but also recognizes that no community can survive without an orderly plan for renewing its commercial and industrial areas. Urban renewal in its broadest sense would renew the entire living environment of the community including its commercial areas where families must shop and its industrial areas where families must work, as well as residential areas where families live. It is appropriate, therefore, that a reasonable percentage of Federal assistance should be used to assist the community in renewing non-residential as well as residential areas.²⁸

The 1954 legislation partially delinked CBD-focused redevelopment from neighborhood/housing slum removal. To be eligible for federal dollars, the project area had to include varying but substantial elements of low-income housing. Had federal programs not required this, many CBD projects would likely have included as few slum housing units as possible. Instead, a municipality seeking to redevelop a nonresidential/CBD blighted area had to configure the boundaries to include predominantly residential areas. Still, the Housing Act of 1954 was a ULI victory. Known as the ‘skid row amendment,” 10 percent of federal grants could be used for non-residential/housing projects—slum removal that did not result in housing.²⁹ The 1954 Act extended grant eligibility to cities of fewer than 25,000, making available a planning grant to kick-start their initial planning. This grant, later known as the “701 grant,” was the first step toward HUD’s “small cities program.”

The 1959 Act created special programs for “eds and meds.” Commercial, CBD and industrial end-use was easier. The FHAA was given powers to waive requirements, and congressional pressure generated a fair number of such waivers. Pilot funding (for new ideas that did not conform exactly to regulations) was authorized. After 1959, the Housing Act was amended almost every year into the first years of the Kennedy administration. Aside from being a moving target, all this might suggest that slum clearance, and even CBD redevelopment, contained quite a few constantly moving parts.

Having described two and a half decades of slum clearance to urban renewal, what have we learned?

URBAN RENEWAL?

Two long-term takeaways follow from this section. The first observation to the observant reader is that, concentrating as we did on Housing Acts, we did not include discussion of what may have been the most horrendously disruptive of all the various “urban renewal” initiatives—the Interstate Highway. That delightful tidbit will be discussed in a later chapter because it is not urban renewal at all—or Housing Act for that matter. Yet, as we all know, today it is usually lumped into urban renewal because they shared a similar chronology—and methodology (they dug up people’s homes and destroyed small business). That omission provides an opportunity to observe that there are many “urban renewals”—not a single monolithic truth that encompasses the incredible varieties of initiatives, projects, programs and goals that were implemented over the 30-year period included in the label. Ironically, the constant in each of the various programs was slum removal—and that is not even in our present vocabulary. After the 1970s, broad strokes replaced specific initiatives, ignored program goals, which level of government was the implementer and the time periods got smushed together. A generation of public housing/war production and slum removal simply was no longer discussed. Whether this is directly related to the urban renewal scuffle between CD and ED is problematic, but it is reasonable to suggest that a scuffle still lurks in the allies of our policy area/profession. The smush of urban renewal has developed into a paradigm-like mass of distortion perpetualized in the media, Policy World literature and classrooms—while being largely ignored in the Practitioner World.

The smush asserts the myth that urban renewal started in 1949 (first mentioned in 1954) and was restricted to business-led (growth coalition) and CBD projects. The impact of the smush falls almost solely upon those who lived in the Second (and Third) Ghettos. In these literatures all sorts of nasty villains roamed our Big City streets in the Dark Age of urban renewal. Urban renewal, never really defined, became a national urban morality play—one whose redeeming message seemed to be “what not to do.” One might observe from all this that urban renewal itself has become a fault line within the two approaches of our profession/policy area and that, to this day, our two ships still duke it out.

The second observation, perhaps more an impression, applies to intergovernmental policy-making/implementation. Just who drove the slum removal, public housing, war production and urban renewal dynamic? From this history, the correct answer should be no one—in different periods one or another led the parade, but implementation at the jurisdictional level is little understood. Business elites after an initial Washington victory went AWOL for most of the thirties, only to reappear in the federally dominant war production years. Mayors and local corporate elites in the forties largely ignored a non-existent federal role and developed on their own dime initiatives that later required federal monies in an urban renewal program. We continue not to mention the Interstate Highway system that overlapped with the urban renewal program. The contexts of each initiative and program were dissimilar and the goals intended by each level of government, never mind policy actor, were multiple and varied over time. Each level of government and policy actor was dancing to their own music. And the music changed to fit the mood of the day. The mess that resulted didn’t follow what any one wanted.

Much of the confusion and downright contradiction … result from the unsystematic mixture of three quite different goals. The older goal of increasing low-cost housing, [and] eliminating and preventing slums is mixed with the newer goal of revitalizing the central city; to both has been added the more recent goal of creating the planned American city through the community renewal program. But as these goals are translated into the actions of municipal bodies, based on local interests, they seem to be moving rapidly toward a program concerned only with revitalizing the central business district. (Greer, 1965, p. 165)

The various Housing Acts provided a label for this period, but the central drama that played out is that the Big Cities of the North and Midwest hegemony were entering a decentralization crisis period—and the crisis was only getting worse during, and after, the age. Encapsulated in these years were a variety of efforts and initiatives each city devised in response to its own perceived needs and policy forces. Federal programs provided federal money, and to the extent possible ways were devised to make them fit into the local strategies; but it is very clear that, as time elapsed, the original purpose of the federal programs—slum clearance for public housing—lost ground to housing for all incomes, and then to CBD regeneration and on to attracting a rising financial and service economy (refunctioning the central city). In this Transitional Age, the action was in Washington; but the dynamic, the leadership and the bulk of the money to regenerate the central city ultimately came from mayors and the private sector, not the federal government. The federal government was only one ring in a three-ringed circus.

Yet, if I am correct in observing, the one goal that all parties to urban redevelopment shared—to counter decentralization and preserve the heritage and hegemony of the central city—was an out-and-out failure. It certainly did provide public and war production housing—that had to be torn down in later decades. It removed slums, and that ultimately brought down the existing jurisdictional policy systems.

From the beginning. Federal urban redevelopment was a program better suited to stir hopes than produce concrete projects. A multitude of interests rallied behind the passage of Title I, each investing it with a different purpose. Central city business interests viewed it as a means of boosting sagging property values; mayors and city councils perceived it as a tool to increase tax revenues; social welfare leaders hoped it would clear the slums and better the living conditions of the poor … advocates of low and moderate income housing thought it would increase … decent, affordable dwellings … Catherine Bauer [thought] redevelopment won congressional approval ‘because different groups of people, like the blind men feeling the elephant made entirely different assumptions as to the essential nature and purpose of this legislation. (Teaford, 2000, p. 444)

NOTES

1. Sing to Lerner and Loewe’s “The Streets Where You Live” from My Fair Lady.
2. The National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) was formed in 1908 as the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges; since 1974 NAREB has been known as the National Association of Realtors.
3. The Urban Land Institute (ULI), set up by NAREB as its research arm in 1936 and headquartered in Chicago, published two initial reports on “decentralization.” In that year, the ULI held its first annual conference in Boston, with 207 in attendance. Panels focused on blight, reconstruction, planning and decentralization. In 1942 it produced “Outline for a Legislative Program to Rebuild Our Cities,” a report which marked its independent entry into Washington-based advocacy. In 1945 the ULI formed two sub-councils—the Community Builders Council (focused on suburban construction) and the Central Business District Council—which divided loyalties from the beginning.
4. The Buildings Office and Managers Association (BOMA), founded in 1907, became the first national advocate for stressed downtown areas.
5. Slums, Large Scale Housing and Decentralization: Blight Areas and Slums, Large Scale Operations, Business and Housing, Industrial Decentralization, the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership called by President Hoover, National Capitol Press, Washington, DC, 1932.
6. Ernest J. Bohn, “Housing as a Political Problem,” Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 1 (1934), pp. 176–84. http//scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol1/iss2/6. Bohn was chair of the 1933 National Conference on Slum Clearance and president of the National Association of Housing Officials.
7. “Public Housing in the United States, 1933–1949,” National Register of Historic Places, Section E, pp. 17–18.
8. , p. 19. All were completed by 1935 and included two unnamed projects in Altavista Virginia and Euclid Ohio; Bronx Hillside Homes, Philadelphia Carl Mackley Houses, Queens Boulevard Gardens, Boyland Housing in Raleigh North Carolina, and Neighborhood Gardens in St. Louis.
9. “Public Housing in the United States,” pp. 23.
10. , pp. 21–36.
11. Bauer in her Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, p. 34) attacked PWA essentially for concentrating on slum clearance rather than building new housing.
12. Lewis Mumford, “Break the Housing Blockade,” New Republic, 80 (May 17, 1933), p. 8.
13. 13United States v. Certain Lands in the City of Louisville, 78F.2d 684 (6th Circuit 1935).
14. National Association of Housing Officials, Housing Yearbook 1938 (Chicago), pp. 120–33; “Public Housing in the United States,” p. 36.
15. “Public Housing in the United States,” pp. 44, 46, 47.
16. , p. 42.
17. Miles L. Colean, Housing For Defense; A Review of the Role of Housing in Relation to America’s Defense and a Program for Action; The Factual Findings (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1940).
18. Like it or not, Robert Moses, probably the closest equivalent to Daniel Burnham, had served as a consultant to numerous major cities across the nation during the Depression and World War II. A leader in the profession, he vehemently opposed planning’s outsized impact on redevelopment. His unique role in NYC permitted him to be his own local bulldozer for redevelopment—which he commenced after the 1939 World’s Fair.

19. See Fogelson (2001, p. 364); Gelfand (1975, p. 137); and Teaford (1990, p. 27).
20. Teaford (1990, p. 35). Mayor La Guardia began a hard-sell campaign to win the cooperation of insurance companies with money to invest. Detroit’s Mayor Jeffries also appealed to insurance companies, and by 1942 the Detroit City Plan Commission had prepared a proposal for rebuilding a 111-acre site near downtown and had submitted it to interested investors. One week before passage of the Illinois law, the Chicago Plan Commission had approved the outline of a proposed clearance and redevelopment program. By October 1941 the Commission had published a booklet entitled “Rebuilding Old Chicago” describing the new law, the economics of redevelopment and accepted principles of neighborhood planning.

21. baltimorehousing.org/75th_timeline.
22. cphabaltimore.org/accomplishments; Lyall (1982, p. 22).
23. In 1942 MetLife was the largest private corporation in the United States with assets in excess of $6 billion (1942 dollars). Ecker was a long-time Progressive-style housing advocate; he linked philanthropy with housing reform to build housing for both workers and low-income households.
24. Moses is quoted as saying delegates wanted to be “in mid-Manhattan, with the restaurants, hotels, and the flesh-pots, and all the rest of it” (Zipp, 2010, p. 38).
25. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13246.
26. Between 1945 and 1952 (mostly after 1949) 34 states, four territories and Washington DC approved state legislation. The federal Division of Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment estimated 250 cities were taking steps to participate in Title I activities. Philip H. Hill, “Recent Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment Laws,” Washington and Lee Law Review, vol. 9, no. 2 (1952), Article 3, p. 173.
27. Several state supreme courts initially rejected eminent domain for private benefit (Georgia and Florida are examples). To our best knowledge, Illinois, overturning a previous decision, was the first state Supreme Court to approve eminent domain for urban renewal private benefit: People ex rel. John Gutknecht v. City of Chicago et al., Appellees, Supreme Court of Illinois, 1953 (Scott, 1969, p. 490). Following the Illinois decision, state Supreme Courts in California, Pennsylvania and Ohio piggy-backed on the finding. The United States Supreme Court (Berman vs. Parker) adopted a supportive position in 1954.
28. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, Housing Act of 1959. S. Rep. No. 41, 86th Congress, 1st Sess. 27 (1959).
29. The 1956 Housing Act expanded the exemption to 20 percent and relaxed the requirement that housing in the blighted area only needed “a substantial number of substandard dwellings.”