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?
Ron W. Coan 