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.
Ron W. Coan 