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Journal of Urbanism

ISSN: 1754-9175 (Print) 1754-9183 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjou20

The lost history of urban renewal

Alexander von Hoffman

To cite this article: Alexander von Hoffman (2008) The lost history of urban renewal, Journal of Urbanism, 1:3, 281-301, DOI: 10.1080/17549170802532013

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17549170802532013

Published online: 26 Nov 2008.

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RESEARCH PAPER

The lost history of urban renewal

Alexander von Hoffman*

Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Contrary to common understanding, the US government’s policy of ‘‘urban renewal’’ was conceived as an alternative policy to slum clearance. Bitterly opposed to public housing, conservative housing-industry trade associations sought a way to reform the urban redevelopment formula of clearance and public housing established in the Housing Act of 1949. In the early 1950s, the industry groups seized on citizens’ neighborhood fix-up efforts, particularly the Baltimore Plan, to conduct a national campaign to popularize code enforcement, rehabilitation, and private low-cost housing development as methods to restore and stabilize city neighborhoods. At conferences organized by House and Home magazine and in the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, the housing industry associations fashioned policies, now named ‘‘urban renewal,’’ which were codified in the Housing Act of 1954. But private industry’s venture in urban policymaking failed in implementation. Home builders proved reluctant to participate in the new programs, public housing hung on, and hundreds of thousands of homes fell to the wrecking ball. As urban renewal became synonymous with slum clearance, neighborhoods continued to decline. In the end, ironically, housing rehabilitation reemerged as a populist tool for reviving the inner city.

Keywords: urban renewal; housing policy; code enforcement; rehabilitation; slums

Introduction

For much of the 20th century, the people who cared most about the health and form of

cities in the USA – including city planners, government officials, and downtown businessmen – considered dilapidated and deteriorating neighborhoods as among the most

vexing of problems. The solution they chose was ‘‘urban renewal,’’ a term which today is

commonly understood to mean the government program for acquiring, demolishing, and

replacing buildings deemed slums.

In fact, the original meaning of the term ‘‘urban renewal’’ was quite different. The policy of slum clearance, along with authorizations for public housing intended to replace

the demolished homes, was established in the landmark Housing Act of 1949 as ‘‘urban

redevelopment.’’ Five years later the Housing Act of 1954 instituted the policy of ‘‘urban

renewal,’’ which was intended to supplant the earlier law with a comprehensive approach

to the problem of blighted and slum neighborhoods. In contrast to urban redevelopment,

urban renewal stressed not clearance but enforcement of building codes and rehabilitation

of substandard buildings. Instead of public housing, it emphasized privately built housing

for low-income and displaced families.

This new approach originated in local citizens’ movements to use code enforcement

and rehabilitation to stabilize and regenerate physically deteriorating neighborhoods. The

*Email: [email protected]

Journal of Urbanism

Vol. 1, No. 3, November 2008, 281–301

ISSN 1754-9175 print/ISSN 1754-9183 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17549170802532013

http://www.informaworld.com

major trade associations of the housing industry seized on one such effort – the Baltimore

Plan – as the basis for a national campaign to spread code enforcement and rehabilitation

to rescue blighted neighborhoods. Bitter opponents of public housing, the trade

associations wanted to establish the new approach, dubbed ‘‘urban renewal,’’ as a

national policy. Working out their ideas in round-table conferences hosted by House and

Home magazine and an advisory committee to President Dwight Eisenhower,

representatives of the housing industry virtually wrote code enforcement, rehabilitation,

and new private urban housing programs into the Housing Act of 1954.

Yet when it came time to implement the Housing Act of 1954, this attempt to

fundamentally shift urban policy failed. Housing codes spread, but enforcement was

spotty at best. The new urban housing programs did not catch on with home builders,

neighborhood campaigns proved unable to stop the spread of urban blight, and cities

continued to pursue the old formula of slum clearance and public housing. As a result, in

cities large and small the wrecking ball destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes – many

of which were occupied by working class and minority citizens and never replaced. In the

popular mind, the distinction between the 1949 and 1954 Laws was lost, and urban

renewal became synonymous with demolition. The idea of rehabilitation survived, not as a

free-enterprise substitute for public housing, but as a way for grassroots and nonprofit

organizations to restore and revive urban communities.

The precise origins of the urban renewal program in the Housing Act of 1954 have

been lost even to many historians. Although several scholars have credited the writer Miles

Colean with the original idea and noted the influence of private industry through

Eisenhower’s advisory committee, few, if any, recognized that trade groups formulated

much of the 1954 legislation before the advisory committee was formed (Friedman 1968,

Scott 1969, Gelfand 1975, Mitchell 1994, Biles 1996, 2000). 1

In his article ‘‘The origins and

legacy of urban renewal,’’ Weiss (1985) reflects a common misunderstanding by dismissing

the 1954 Act as merely changing the name of the 1949 urban redevelopment program. This

assertion ignores the housing industry’s adamant opposition to the 1949 law and fervent

support of the 1954 Act and, conversely, the public housing advocates’ enthusiastic

support for the 1949 Bill and cool attitude toward the 1954 Law. Most importantly, this

interpretation overlooks the different intent and programs of the two laws.

To cure the city

During the twentieth century, observers of America’s cities became increasingly

apprehensive. Since 1920, population growth in most of the nation’s great urban centers

had slowed from the previous century’s breathtaking pace to a crawl, and during the 1930s

some cities – notably, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St Louis, and Boston – even lost

population. Affluent urban dwellers were defecting to the suburbs, which threatened to

undermine the downtown commercial districts and the posh residential areas which

depended upon them. Big-city newspaper publishers, department store owners, members

of the chambers of commerce, and government officials became alarmed that the loss of

tax revenues endangered the economic survival of America’s cities.

Urban experts and leaders associated the ‘‘decentralization’’ of people and businesses

from the city to the suburbs with the spread of slums and ‘‘blight,’’ areas which appeared

to be losing economic value and potentially could evolve into slums. To retain middle- and

upper-class residents and reverse the spread of blight, the defenders of the American city

called for upgrading obsolete building stock, redrawing inadequate street plans, and

promoting new downtown development (Teaford 1990, pp. 10–43, Beauregard 1993,

pp. 79–157, Fogelson 2001, Isenberg 2004).

282 A. von Hoffman

Concerned downtown businessmen, leading real-estate investors, and elected officials

focused mostly on downtowns and nearby areas, which often contained grimy factories,

train yards, and the homes of industrial workers. The private real-estate industry –

particularly the sector that dealt in ‘respectable,’’ that is, high-end properties – felt that

industrial and lower-class areas depressed nearby land values and therefore should be

redeveloped either as expensive residences or impressive-looking commercial or office

buildings. Obtaining slum real estate was difficult, however, for the paradoxical reason

that it was valuable – because demand for homes and businesses was high near the

downtown where slums were often located. Consequently, slum landowners – generally

small businessmen some of whom themselves rose from or lived in the same benighted

neighborhoods – were often reluctant to sell their lucrative properties.

From the 1930s, the housing industry, under the leadership of Herbert U. Nelson,

Executive Director of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), sought a

viable method of urban redevelopment that would allow private entrepreneurs to acquire and

rebuild deteriorated sections of the city. To get around the high cost of acquiring inner-city

and industrial land, in 1941 Nelson and leading urban realtors called for metropolitan land

commissions armed with the power of eminent domain to obtain properties in blighted areas

and then sell them to private developers at prices below the current value. The realtors

proposed that government provide subsidies or ‘‘write-downs’’ to cover the difference

between the purchase cost of inner-city lands and their future value when redeveloped.

In the following years urban redevelopment gained in popularity. Enticed by the

notions that planning agencies would coordinate redevelopment and that blighted areas of

all sorts could be redeveloped, land-use attorney Alfred Bettman and the city planners

came on board, and by 1948 25 state legislatures had adopted urban redevelopment

enabling acts. Following the well-publicized example of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance coalition

of Democratic mayor David Lawrence and Republican financier Richard King Mellon,

mayors, businessmen, bankers, and the like in cities across the country formed pro-growth

coalitions, which pushed for urban redevelopment projects in the name of civic

improvement and local boosterism. The proponents of urban redevelopment, however,

said little about the inhabitants of the slums and blighted areas and where they would live

after their homes were demolished (Bettman 1943, 1945/1946, Gelfand 1975, Mollenkopf

1983, pp. 112–120, Teaford 1990).

The supporters of urban redevelopment in the main ignored issues of race and class

that contributed to the changes in inner-city populations. In the 1920s and 1930s, most

perceived that blight and slums were located either in old immigrant quarters – such as

New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side – or African American areas,

such as Harlem or Chicago’s Black Belt. The onset of World War II and the consequent

demand for a labor force in the wartime industries triggered large migrations of low-

income peoples – blacks and whites from the South, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans – to

America’s cities. As working- and lower-class migrants replaced economically better-off

residents, some inner-city neighborhoods declined in appearance and value. Moreover, the

movement of African Americans – of any income level – into new areas of settlement

instigated virulent reactions among whites, who used local institutions and political

leaders or even violence to resist the influx of blacks into their neighborhoods. Until the

civil rights movement of the 1960s tore off the veil of silence, most white urban leaders

rarely spoke of racial conflict in public, preferring instead to pursue policies of racial

containment by keeping African Americans in historically African-American neighbor-

hoods, conserving or redeveloping blighted city neighborhoods for whites, and promoting

suburban development for whites (Hirsch 1983, Bauman 1987, Sugrue 1996, Freund

2007).

Journal of Urbanism 283

Long before realtors began dreaming of redeveloping the slums into respectable

properties for well-to-do whites, reformers of a different sort had laid claim to the problem

of the urban slums. As far back as the 1840s, religious, moral, and sanitation reformers exerted themselves to improve or eliminate the congested living quarters of the poor in

New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other large cities. Convinced that these unpleasant

physical environments corrupted the health and morals of their inhabitants, housing

reformers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries campaigned to impose

building and sanitary regulations on inner-city properties and demolish the most crowded

and unhealthy residences. The reformers worked to replace the slums with parks and

model housing projects, but made little progress in breaking up the crowded urban

warrens. By the early twentieth century a small band of housing reformers and city planners became impatient with the regulatory approach and began urging Americans to

adopt measures similar to the recently enacted government-sponsored housing programs

in Europe (Lubove 1962, Culver 1972, Jackson 1976, Rodgers 1998).

In the 1930s the Depression’s flood of mortgage foreclosures, collapsing real estate

values, and massive unemployment conferred a sense of urgency on the housing question.

Blaming the creation of the slums on private enterprise, a growing number of reformers

insisted that only government could provide adequate shelter to the American masses. Urban liberal politicians concurred that the government should help hard-working citizens who

through no fault of their own had to live in decrepit and possibly dangerous structures. While

the public housers, as the advocates were known, differed on the urgency of demolishing the

slums, they knew that arguing the need for slum clearance was a winning strategy for getting

low-income public housing. With the political muscle of organized labor and the Catholic

Church and the support of social workers, architects, and planners – the public housers

managed to persuade the Roosevelt administration and the Congress to create a long-term

public housing program in 1937 to help clear the slums and better house the American people (McDonnell 1957, Radford 1996, von Hoffman 2005).

The private housing industry, however, adamantly objected to public housing. It did not

matter that government munificence in the form of the Federal Home Loan Bank System had

helped rescue the savings-and-loan associations or that government insurance for private

residential mortgages provided by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) had stabilized

the home real-estate business. From the 1930s onwards, private housing financiers, real-

estate brokers, and builders denounced the idea of the government directly helping Americans of modest means to obtain homes. It was, they cried, not only a socialistic plot,

but also an unjustified give-away to a select undeserving group of people. It soon became

evident, if it was not already, that self-interest, as much as ideology, fueled the hatred of the

leaders of private industry for public housing.

The fight over urban redevelopment and low-income housing

During World War II, the soaring demand for homes for defense workers precipitated a

political struggle over wartime housing policy. As part of the mobilization of the USA to fight the Axis powers, the government expanded or built from scratch industrial and

military sites across the country, overwhelming nearby areas’ capacity to house the

employees who came streaming in. To organize war production, the federal government

curtailed normal residential development and took over the job of issuing housing

contracts for the defense workers. Galvanized by the prospect of the government building

all defense housing itself, the leaders of the home building industry in 1941 formed the

Home Builders Emergency Committee to ensure that private industry would share in the

contracts for defense housing. In 1943 the specter of a government-built housing program induced two rival factions of home builders to form the National Association of Home

284 A. von Hoffman

Builders (NAHB), which soon became one of the country’s most influential lobbying

groups (NAHB 1958, pp. 14–22).

The private industry lobbying appears to have paid off. At first, before the industry

fully organized its lobbying efforts, federal government administrators embraced

cooperative ownership, public defense housing, regional and local planning, and

modernist design, with the thought that these could contribute or serve as prototypes

for postwar housing programs. After the reorganization of federal housing departments

into the National Housing Agency in 1942, however, the government changed directions

and pushed the production of inexpensively constructed temporary dwellings. The

representatives of the home builders, realtors, and other industry lobbyists pushed for the

new policy, while the housing reform and organized labor interest groups protested that

after the war the cheaply built war workers homes would become slums and bring all

public housing into disrepute (Szylvian 2000). This battle set the stage for the long struggle

that followed.

As World War II came to an end, the liberal housing reformers and the real-estate and

housing industry commenced a bitter political fight over the federal legislation for urban

redevelopment and particularly whether it would include public housing. Interest groups,

including those representing organized labor, city officials, and social workers, lobbied for

public housing and slum clearance as ways to rid the cities of slums and place low-income

Americans in decent homes. Answering their call, in 1945 Senators Robert A. Taft,

Republican of Ohio, and Allen J. Ellender, Democrat of Louisiana, joined the aging

liberal leader Robert Wagner of New York to sponsor legislation that combined urban

redevelopment based on slum clearance and ‘‘write-down’’ grants along with a provision

to authorize a new round of public housing. On the other side, the real-estate and housing

industry groups fought to eliminate public housing, or for that matter, any form of

government-provided housing. Seeing that the proposed legislation contained a provision

for more public housing, NAREB, the organization that had initiated the idea of urban

redevelopment, joined with NAHB and other trade associations to fight the bill (Public

Housing 1944, McDonnell 1957, Keith 1973, Hunt 2005b).

The two sides fought inside and outside of Congress for four years until 1949 when the

growing popularity of urban redevelopment, a severe postwar shortage, and the

Democrats’ victories in the 1948 election provided enough political pressure to pass the

Taft–Ellender–Wagner bill. Renamed the US Housing Act of 1949, the bill established an

urban redevelopment program by funding slum clearance and, as part of the goal of ‘‘a

decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,’’ authorized

810,000 new units of public housing over six years. Both Taft and the liberals believed that

only the government could provide decent homes for low-income city dwellers and that

therefore public housing was needed to replace the homes demolished in urban

redevelopment projects. Although the 1949 law did not specifically tie public housing to

urban redevelopment projects, it did provide that sites be ‘‘predominantly residential’’

either before or after redevelopment. The clear implication was that clearance projects

would involve re-housing slum dwellers either on the site or elsewhere and that only public

housing could provide shelter for low-income households (Foard and Fefferman 1960,

Davies 1966, Gelfand 1975, Weiss 1985, von Hoffman 2000).

Having lost the battle to prevent the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, the housing

industry organizations, especially NAREB and NAHB, launched a ground war against

public housing. The trade groups distributed colorfully written and illustrated pamphlets

aimed at fanning resentments of programs targeted for low-income people. In the anti-

Communist fervor of the time, the enemies of public housing were not above attacking the

program as socialist. Armed with anti-housing literature prepared and distributed by the

Journal of Urbanism 285

trade associations in Washington, affiliates of the realtors and home builders organized

local political campaigns to shut down their public housing authorities, stop projects, and

cut off appropriations (NAHB 1949, Realtors’ Washington Committee 1949, Journal of

Housing 1950a, 1950d, Davies 1966, Freedman 1969). Yet the leaders of the real-estate and

building industry knew that to eliminate slum clearance and public housing once and for

all, they would need a completely different approach to combat the deterioration of urban

neighborhoods.

The Baltimore Plan

As luck would have it, there emerged during the late 1940s and early 1950s an alternative

approach to salvaging slums and preventing neighborhoods from becoming slums. In a

score of cities across the United States, local institutions and citizens’ groups prodded their

governmental officials to stop urban decay by enforcing building codes and rehabilitating

residential structures. In Chicago, block clubs and local planning commissions used

‘‘conservation’’ to save neighborhoods from becoming slums. The Philadelphia

Redevelopment Authority sponsored Operation Fix-Up in 1949 and incorporated

rehabilitation in its redevelopment schemes, an approach which observers likened to the

cure of penicillin as opposed to the surgery of clearance. At least twelve cities – including

Charlotte, Milwaukee, and St Louis – implemented codes to raise the health and safety

standards of existing buildings, and Boston, Detroit, and Miami were among many urban

centers that executed rehabilitation programs to supplement or supplant slum clearance

projects. Many of these efforts attempted – usually in vain – to prevent, reverse, or slow

down changes in the racial and/or class composition of the population, but, as mentioned

above, the public discourse generally ignored this aspect of neighborhood conservation

(Journal of Housing 1950b, 1950c, Architectural Forum 1952, Metropolitan Housing and

Planning Council 1953, Siegel and Brooks 1953, Bauman 1987, Teaford 1990).

But by far the best known of the citizen neighborhood campaigns occurred in

Baltimore, Maryland. The ‘‘Baltimore Plan,’’ as it was known, originated in the shocking

report of a social worker, Frances Morton, on the atrocious living conditions in the

Monument City’s poor neighborhoods. A series of vivid newspaper articles published in

1936 spurred the city government to enact tougher sanitation laws and hire an aggressive

chief inspector, G. Yates Cook, to enforce them (Millspaugh and Breckenfield 1960).

These actions failed to satisfy Baltimorean reformers, who, led by Morton, in 1941

organized the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association of Baltimore to deal with the

city’s slums. Criticizing the government for its lax execution of the city’s zoning ordinance,

the citizens’ association urged the creation of an independent city department – free from

political influence – to set and enforce minimum housing standards, and, where necessary,

demolish delinquent buildings. The reformers further called for a Rehabilitation

Commission that would acquire and rebuild substandard structures and then sell or lease

the improved buildings (Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association of Baltimore 1941).

Baltimore officials insisted that the existing agencies could handle the job of cleaning up

the slums, and, after some notable accomplishments, the citizens and officials fell to

fighting each other over the best way to make ‘‘the fix-up idea’’ work (Seligman 1957,

p. 3).

Businessmen tackle the slums

Despite the conflicts in Baltimore and the reformers’ support of public housing and rent

control, the housing industry turned the Baltimore Plan into a national symbol of code

enforcement and rehabilitation as a way to transform blighted areas into gleaming safe

286 A. von Hoffman

communities (Figure 1). Two leaders in the Baltimore citizens’ effort, Guy Hollyday and

James Rouse, were prominent members of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America,

and Rouse in particular was adept at garnering national attention for the Baltimore Plan.

The National Home Builders Association produced a film that cost US$20,000 on the

Baltimore Plan as well as magazine articles that pushed enforcement of building codes

(NAHB 1948, Report from ACTION 1956, Bloom 2004). NAREB, which had been

experimenting with rehabilitation since the 1930s, also jumped on the Baltimore Plan

bandwagon (Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association of Baltimore 1941, NAREB,

Committee on Rehabilitation 1952).

Fortunately for the housing industry, the presidential election of 1952 gave it an

opportunity to play a role in shaping policy. As a candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower had

consulted on housing policy with three men affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of

America – its spokesman, James Rouse; its counsel, Samuel Neel; and its consultant, Miles

Colean (Colean 1979, Biles 1999). As president, Eisenhower created a business-centered

housing agency by filling the top posts at HHFA with industry representatives (Keith

1973).

Turning from their efforts to defeat public housing, NAREB and NAHB both

launched coordinated national campaigns to spread the gospel of code enforcement and

rehabilitation. In 1952 the successful leader of an anti-public housing campaign in Los

Angeles, developer Fritz B. Burns rolled out ‘‘Build America Better,’’ a ‘‘three-fold attack

on urban blight and slums led by the nation’s realtors.’’ It consisted of enforcing health,

Figure 1. Three stages of code enforcement and rehabilitation in the Baltimore Plan. Baltimore,

Maryland (Cook 1953). Courtesy of the National Association of Home Builders. Used by

permission. All rights reserved.

Journal of Urbanism 287

building, and sanitary standards; attracting new construction on cleared or vacant sites

through accelerated property tax depreciation; and improving infrastructure such as

schools, parks, and streets. The plan kept the federal government out of the picture and

said nothing about creating new housing (NAREB 1953, Davies 1958, Keane 2001). From

1952 to 1954, Burns made hundreds of appearances at local chambers of commerce,

realtor organizations, and civic groups, while NAREB distributed such publications as A

Primer on Rehabilitation under Local Law Enforcement and Blueprint for Neighborhood

Conservation (NAHB, Committee on Rehabilitation 1952, Build America Better Council 1954).

The home builders declared their own campaign, A New Face for America, which

closely paralleled that of the realtors. In 1953, the NAHB set up a Department of Housing

Rehabilitation and hired G. Yates Cook, a former Baltimore inspector, to direct it. In a

hard-hitting pamphlet, A New Face for America – A Program of Action Planned to Stop

Slums and Rebuild Our Cities, Cook (1953) laid out a prescription for a slum rehabilitation

program that almost matched that of the realtors, except that it included an independent

‘‘Blight Commission’’ like the one the Baltimore reformers had advocated. Not content to

exhort, NAHB in late 1953 sponsored a pilot program in New Orleans with the mayor and local businessmen to rehabilitate a block of slums. Cook also organized a code-

enforcement-and-rehab workshop for city officials and home builders and an NAHB

Housing Rehabilitation Committee to convince home builders to emulate the New

Orleans slum rehab in their own cities (Brockbank 1953, Cook 1953, Spiegel 1953,

Washington Letter of the NAHB 1953, Millspaugh and Breckenfield 1960).

As committed as they were to the code enforcement and rehab plan to save America’s

cities, the home builders went further. To ‘‘halt the march of blight and provide decent,

low-cost homes for the great bulk of our people,’’ NAHB leaders called for an effective

secondary mortgage market to be organized by Fannie Mae and a host of new mortgage

insurance devices to be issued by their favorite agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The home builders hoped that new legislative tools for the

FHA would open the credit gates and allow them to build one million homes a year. Most

of these would be in the suburbs, of course, where discrimination in private lending

practices and government underwriting would discourage minorities from buying houses.

Among the NAHB ideas were the ‘‘trade-in house’’ (in which builders purchase and

remodel old houses and resell or rent them); long-term modernization loans on reasonable

terms for slum rehab sites, and to further urban redevelopment, easier terms for the FHA

program (Section 207) to insure mortgage loans for constructing rental housing.

Renewal: a theory

Although many invoked the enforcement and fix-up approach as a policy for solving

America’s urban problems, it was the industry consultant Miles Colean who melded the

disparate ideas about blight, code enforcement, and rehabilitation into a coherent theory of urban change. In his 1953 book, Renewing Our Cities, Colean made the case for

rehabilitation. Colean thought of the problems such as ‘‘flight from the central city,’’

‘‘suburban spread,’’ downtown congestion, slums, and blight as an interrelated set of

economic problems. Writing from a conservative economist’s perspective, Colean worried

about raising real-estate values in order to increase urban prosperity (Colean 1953,

Gelfand 1975).

For Colean, slums were a part, but only a part, of the illness facing American cities.

Rather than simply replacing slums with new housing on a particular site, Colean urged

‘‘comprehensive renewal’’ that would revitalize the city as a whole. In regard to housing, he echoed the realtors call for conservation and rehabilitation over ‘‘root-and-branch’’

288 A. von Hoffman

clearance. And like the realtors, Colean said little about developing new housing, implying

that rehabilitation would leave enough homes to supply the urban population. Yet Colean

insisted that cities would have to adopt large-scale planning and improve their schools,

traffic, and public works if they were going to revive their economies and beat back blight.

In essence, he kicked the neighborhood problems of slums and blight upstairs to

metropolitan planners and government administrators, which rendered any real action

highly unlikely. Ultimately, comprehensive urban planning would remain out of reach so

that Colean’s main contributions to national policy were to popularize code enforcement

and rehab as an anti-slum strategy and to coin the phrase ‘‘urban renewal’’ to describe it.

The housing industry makes policy

With plenty of ideas about what to do about housing in America, the housing business

interests met to fashion a national policy for the incoming Eisenhower administration.

Time, Inc.’s new trade publication, House and Home, provided the setting for

representatives of the housing industry groups to meet at three conferences – round-

table discussions – held between late 1952 and late 1953, from which the editors then wrote

up a set of recommendations. 2

The publisher and editors of House and Home convened the

first two round tables, which were dedicated to housing the low-income family and

housing polices for the new Eisenhower administration respectively. The home builders,

realtors, and mortgage bankers’ trade associations liked the round tables so much, they

requested that House and Home organize another conference, held in the fall of 1953, to

lay out a detailed description and plan for counteracting blight and slums (House and

Home 1952, 1953a, 1953b) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Conservation and rehabilitation round table, 1953 (House and Home, 1953b, p. 100).

Courtesy of Hanley Wood, LLC. Used by permission.

Journal of Urbanism 289

The round-table talks served as a precursor to the President’s Advisory Committee on

Government Housing Policies and Programs, which crafted the main provisions of the

Housing Act of 1954. The man credited with suggesting the idea of a housing commission

to Eisenhower, Aksel Nielsen, attended the round table held in Rye, New York, in

December 1952 as a representative of the Mortgage Bankers Association. He, fellow

round-table participant Miles Colean, and HHFA chief Albert Cole selected the members

of the advisory committee (Keith 1973, Hunt 2005a). Almost half of committee members

they chose had been round-table conferees. More importantly, influential industry figures

– such as Richard Hughes and Rodney Lockwood of NAHB and Jim Rouse of the

Mortgage Bankers Association – played leading roles in both the round-table conferences

and on the Eisenhower committee. Hughes, a vociferous exponent of private enterprise

housing programs, and Rouse, a tireless advocate for anti-slum measures, participated in

all three round-table conferences. Lockwood and Rouse served as chairmen of the

presidential commission’s subcommittees where they successfully pressed their points of

view on their fellow members. (House and Home 1952, 1953a, 1953b).

The House and Home round-table talks laid out goals and programs, many of which

NAHB and other trade associations had proposed earlier and which the President’s

Advisory Committee would adopt or refine in its report. The round-table participants

drew up several targets that were elaborated later in the advisory committee. One was

producing a high volume of new homes – at least one million a year – chiefly by

guaranteeing the flow of capital. The conferees recommended loosening credit

instruments, especially on FHA-insured mortgages, and improving the secondary

mortgage market administration by the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie

Mae).

The industry representatives emphasized the goal of a national housing policy to end

slums and provide homes for low-income families. This should be met, they stressed,

primarily through code enforcement, rehabilitation, and privately developed low-income

housing (House and Home 1953a). The conferees did carry forward elements of the original

urban development program by recommending clearance of the worst slums to carry out

comprehensive neighborhood and city-wide plans and, remarkably, by allowing as a last

resort, municipalities to build some sort of temporary and locally financed public housing

(House and Home 1953a).

The industry men did not hold unanimous views on every matter. In the round-table

discussions, the issues of federal support for industry and the purpose of federal programs

divided the participants. In one camp were hard-core economic conservatives – anti-New

Dealers and generally bankers – who dreaded the intervention of the federal

government into business activity and even more so if that intervention was aimed at

social reform. The conservative bankers called for removing FHA and the Home Loan

Bank from the umbrella agency, HHFA, where they had been placed five years earlier,

so they would not feel ‘‘pressures based on political and welfare state considerations

rather than sound economics’’ (House and Home 1953a, p. 121). On the other side were

reformers, such as mortgage bankers Rouse and Ferd Kramer of Chicago and home

builders Dick Hughes and Emanuel Spiegel, who believed that government should

intervene to overcome both business obstacles and social problems. The activist

businessmen called for expanding FHA programs to include mortgage insurance for

slum areas and low-income families and proposed that the FHA should assess credit

risk in a deteriorated neighborhood ‘‘based, not on its present state of decay, but on its

condition after the rehabilitation’’ (House and Home 1953b, p. 107). Both parties agreed

that in contrast with programs such as public housing, direct government subsidy

should be avoided at all costs.

290 A. von Hoffman

Eisenhower’s Advisory Committee goes to work

The President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs met

in the late fall of 1953 (President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies

and Programs 1953). Following the line adopted by the participants in the House and

Home round tables, the advisory committee urged that the government take action in five

major areas: attacking and preventing slums; maintaining existing homes; increasing the

volume of new residential construction; assisting low-income families to get homes; and

reorganizing the federal housing agency to become more efficient (President’s Advisory

Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs 1953).

Of all its recommendations, the committee declared, those for urban redevelopment

were the most important. Borrowing the phrase ‘‘urban renewal’’ and other ideas from

Miles Colean’s book, Rouse and the subcommittee he chaired – significantly titled the

Subcommittee on Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, and Conservation – drew up a

new approach to eliminating slums and halting the spread of blight (Subcommittee on

Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, and Conservation 1953, Bloom 2004, pp. 72–73).

Under the scheme, a new federal Urban Renewal Administration would provide loans,

grants, and technical assistance to local communities for planning and renewal projects.

The committee insisted that grants for renewal projects go only to cities with a code

enforcement program and urged rehabilitation rather than demolition wherever possible.

When land was cleared, however, such sites could be used for their logical best use, which

was not necessarily housing. Emphasizing planning, the subcommittee recommended that

jurisdictions be required to justify their projects by submitting ‘‘a workable program’’

based on analysis of the housing stock and the demand for housing (Subcommittee on

Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, and Conservation 1953).

No doubt reflecting Rouse’s familiarity with citizens’ groups and publicity, the

committee also urged the formation of a private national organization to educate and

mobilize public opinion for urban renewal based on conservation, enforcement, and

rehabilitation. Finally, the urban redevelopment subcommittee also asked for a program

for long-term FHA financing in urban renewal areas on terms at least as favorable as

those available elsewhere in the city. Reflecting the coordination of thinking on the

advisory committee, two other subcommittees – for FHA-VA and low-income families –

offered ideas that answered this request for private housing programs.

The FHA-VA subcommittee produced a battery of recommendations that particularly

dovetailed with the proposed urban renewal program. Under the chairmanship of home

builder Rodney Lockwood, the subcommittee essentially restated several earlier NAHB

proposals to promote rehabilitation and reuse of urban housing. These included FHA

insurance for repairs of existing single-family homes, loosening the requirements for

insurance of existing multifamily dwellings, and bettering the terms on such old NAHB

favorites as open-end mortgages (to allow for home repairs and improvements without

processing and fees of a new loan), the ‘‘trade-in house’’ program, and FHA insurance for

rental housing (such as the Section 207 program) (Subcommittee on FHA and VA

Programs and Operations 1953).

In the area of urban housing, Lockwood unveiled proposals for FHA-insurance of

urban renewal and low-income housing, which the NAHB had been calling for since the

round-table discussions. The subcommittee recommended a new Section 220 of the

National Housing Act (of 1934) to allow FHA insurance of loans on liberal terms for the

rehabilitation of existing homes and construction of new dwellings in urban renewal sites.

To expand private development into the low-income market served by the public housing

program, the subcommittee also put forward Section 221, which would offer FHA

insurance for 40-year, 100% loans to build homes for sale or rent to families displaced by

Journal of Urbanism 291

urban redevelopment (or rehabilitation) or whose income forced them to live in

substandard homes (President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies

and Programs 1953, Hunt 2005a).

The banker-dominated subcommittee on housing credit facilities also echoed the round-table conferences by calling for an effective body to run the secondary mortgage

market and purchase and participate in loans so as to ‘‘level peaks and valleys in remote

areas of the mortgage market.’’ And as they had in the round-table conferences, the

bankers took a narrow approach that shunned any social-welfare functions for the

financial system. They called for a new entity – not Fannie Mae – to be entirely privately

financed (President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and

Programs 1953, pp. 349, 352–353). The subcommittee’s conservative recommendations

sparked a forceful minority dissent from Richard Hughes, the incoming president of the NAHB. Calling for a ‘‘progressive and forward-looking mortgage market,’’ Hughes

argued that only a government-financed agency – to wit, Fannie Mae – could pay for the

expanding of FHA insurance to cover rehabilitation of the slums and housing for low-

income families. Congress, it later turned out, would decide in favor of the NAHB official

(Subcommittee on Housing Credit Facilities 1953, pp. 356–366, 360).

The advisory committee offered private industry an ideal opportunity to eliminate

finally the public housing program, but – as Bradford Hunt has recounted – it flinched. In

an effort to protect public housing, the low-income housing subcommittee recommended

two FHA low-income housing programs and continuing public housing until the day that

private enterprise actually served very low-income families (Subcommittee on Housing for

Low-income Families 1953). Members of the full committee ignored the subcommittee’s

report, however, and proposed selling off public housing. Ironically, Lockwood, one of the

leading foes of public housing, saved the program. Lockwood proposed substitute language calling for his new Section 220 and 221 programs and keeping public housing for

the interim until the new private programs took hold. Lockwood’s support for continuing

the public housing program, Hunt relates, shocked the committee. But after heated and

confused discussion, the advisory committee voted to continue this most liberal of New

Deal social programs (Hunt 2005a).

The Housing Act of 1954

Eisenhower, in his first term and feeling his way to a middle ground between fiscal

responsibility and the New Deal government he inherited, embraced the advisory

committee’s report. The President gave a special address on housing based on the

committee’s findings. The administration then proposed legislation based on the

recommendations, and the after some debate, mainly over public housing, the Congress

passed the Housing Act of 1954.

The congressional hearings in March of 1954 over what would become the Housing

Act of 1954 reflected new political alignments. Not surprisingly, the industry trade

associations, led by NAHB and NAREB, generally backed the urban renewal proposals.

On the other side, the liberal lobby groups – led by the public housing, labor, and mayors’

organizations – supported the new program, albeit grudgingly. The National Housing

Conference, for example, endorsed rehabilitation but warned that urban renewal was no substitute for redevelopment and public housing (House and Home 1954).

The new FHA housing programs associated with urban renewal continued to divide

the industry representatives between those who accepted government intervention and

those who resisted it. Not surprisingly, the activist trade organizations, NAHB and

NAREB, endorsed Section 221, the new FHA venture for housing displaced and low- income families, and asked that the legislation raise the ceiling value on loans to cover

292 A. von Hoffman

those – such as to low-income borrowers – that carried greater risk. The various banking

associations and the US Chamber of Commerce opposed the new measure as unsound.

In contrast to the mossback banking associations, the pro-public housing groups

agreed with NAHB and NAREB and endorsed the new low-cost housing program and concurred that the maximum limit on its loans was too low. The new approach to urban

redevelopment housing had created an area of agreement – if not exactly a close coalition

– between the left and right.

The political stances at the congressional hearings startled observers. ‘‘Strange as it

seemed,’’ the trade journal House and Home reported, ‘‘NAHB took a position closer to that of the CIO and AFL than to any other segment of the private industry (except

realtors).’’ Perhaps more astounding was that ‘‘builders, labor, and realtors were in

general alignment with public housing in advocating more and more government aid to

housing.’’ This might have overstated the matter – a few of the trade groups, notably

NAHB and the Mortgage Bankers Association, simply did not comment on the program

they had long opposed. Nonetheless it looked at the time like a cease-fire in the public

housing wars (House and Home 1954).

Despite the novelty of the urban renewal and FHA programs, public housing as before

provoked the greatest struggles in the legislature. Eisenhower had asked for authorization

of a relatively modest 35,000 public-housing dwelling-units annually for four years.

Liberal organizations asked Congress to raise the number of authorized units to

something on the order of 200,000, but arch-conservative Jesse Wolcott led the House of

Representatives to remove all public housing from the bill. Nonetheless, the Senate voted

to restore the original 35,000 figure, and the conference committee upheld that number (Housing a Nation 1966, Biles 1996).

Other than that, the Congress pretty much transferred the advisory committee’s

proposals to the Housing Act of 1954. It replaced urban redevelopment with urban

renewal, specifying that voluntary repair and rehabilitation could be adopted instead of or

along with clearance and rebuilding schemes. To ensure that municipalities adopted the

new approach, the law required they submit a ‘‘workable program’’ to receive urban renewal loans or grants. To allow the flexible planning that Colean had called for and

weaken the link to public housing, the act reduced the ‘‘predominantly residential’’

provision of the 1949 urban redevelopment program by allowing ten percent of the federal

grants to support non-residential projects and enlarging allowable project sites (Gelfand

1975). 3

To promote private development of housing on urban renewal sites and for

displaced and low-income families, it contained the new sections 220 and 221 of the

National Housing Act as special mortgage insurance programs, which the NAHB leaders

had devised. Also following the home builders’ wishes, the 1954 Act liberalized mortgage terms on FHA-loans and allowed FHA to insure open-end mortgages for home repairs. It

reorganized Fannie Mae to carry out a secondary-mortgage market operation, and – as

NAHB’s Hughes had wished – included a provision for ‘‘special assistance function’’ by

which it could, if needed, purchase sections 220 and 221 mortgages. Only the arch-

conservative banking lobbyists objected to the social provisions that Colean and they

called ‘‘barnacles’’ on the hulls of the FHA and FNMA (Cole 1979, p. 294). For them the

status quo policies, in which the FHA served the suburbs and fostered white

homeownership sufficed.

The policy falters

The housing industry’s first sustained venture into national policy making produced mixed

results at best. Armed with the new federal policy they had done so much to create, the activist trade associations continued to pursue their enforcement and rehabilitation

Journal of Urbanism 293

campaigns. To encourage its members to develop urban renewal housing projects, NAHB

sponsored dozens of local informational meetings and distributed thousands of

information kits. NAHB officers urged their members to attend workshops on

rehabilitation, develop low-income housing – if for no other reason than to forestall

public housing – and even pushed for minority housing. NAREB continued to pursue its

Build America Better program, offering consultation services to cities that wished to take

up a rehabilitation program. In 1955, James Rouse helped found the American Council to

Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), the national citizens’ organization that he had

proposed in Eisenhower’s advisory committee to sponsor research and spread news about

neighborhood conservation efforts.

Nonetheless, the implementation of the new urban renewal policy quickly ran into

trouble. Despite the NAHB leaders’ enthusiasm for urban renewal and the new FHA

housing programs, interest among the home builders never materialized. Home builders

complained that the construction cost limits and loan terms for Section 221 projects

encumbered their efforts, even after Congress liberalized the loan terms. Home builders

who tried the Section 220 and 221 programs found it difficult to obtain land from

government agencies and to carry out their projects. And, like public housing authorities,

the NAHB developers encountered the resistance of middle-class white neighbors who

feared that the projects would bring lower-class African Americans. Despite the easing of

loan requirements, by 1960 builders had produced just 15,550 dwellings under Section 221

and 1,500 houses under Section 220 (NAHB, Public Housing Committee 1957, NAHB,

Urban Renewal Committee 1958, 1959, Fairbanks 1989, pp. 173–174, Mitchell 1994, Hunt

2005a).

A fundamental problem was that the operations and experiences of most home

builders were not suited to urban renewal projects, which posed difficulties in land

acquisition, took a long time (thereby driving up interim costs), and required both

technical knowledge and political skills. The developers who took on urban redevelopment

projects were usually large-scale national operators who specialized in complex

development projects. Men such as William Zeckendorf and James Scheuer had access

to large amounts of capital and could negotiate confidently with pro-growth mayors and

their redevelopment authorities (Keith 1973, p. 120). In contrast, most home builders were

small-time businessmen who built a small number of houses each year and worked in local

areas with which they were familiar. With the exception of a few socially committed home

builders such as Leon Weiner of Wilmington, Delaware, home builders found it easier and

more profitable to build on vacant lands in the suburbs, where they often received

financing from local FHA officials.

Nor were home builders much interested in the rehabilitation program. The business

of repair and remodeling old houses and apartment buildings was by its nature

idiosyncratic and therefore did not lend itself to efficient replication. Only experienced

contractors were willing to tackle this kind of time-consuming and unpredictable work.

Stumbling at the gate, NAHB disbanded its Department of Housing Rehabilitation only

two years after the passage of the 1954 housing act. Since, as one close observer argued,

‘‘strict code enforcement will never be possible until a great deal more housing is available

to low- and middle-income tenants,’’ the sluggishness of the new programs in combination

with anemic appropriations and ugly site battles for public housing did not bode well for

economically declining urban neighborhoods (Seligman 1957, p. 129).

As for code enforcement, both local and federal governments honored it more in the

breach than in the observance. As had been the case in Baltimore and other cities, local

inspection departments proved reluctant to insist that landlords comply with the housing

codes. The federal government undermined code enforcement by failing to insist that local

294 A. von Hoffman

governments implement their workable programs. HHFA officials could not bring

themselves to deny funds to cities applying for urban renewal funds, and as a result, local

governments felt little inducement to enforce housing codes. Starting in 1955, the federal

housing agency repeatedly certified workable plans for San Francisco, Cincinnati, and

Philadelphia only to discover in 1968 that the vast majority of residences in those cities’

code enforcement areas violated local housing codes (National Commission on Urban

Problems 1968, Bloom 2004).

By the end of the 1950s, the grassroots movement for neighborhood conservation

seemed to falter. No city created the kind of centralized authority over building codes and rehabilitation efforts that the Baltimore leaders concluded was necessary for success. A

survey of neighborhood enforcement-and-rehab campaigns found only one that had ever

succeeded in truly mobilizing local residents and landlords. Meanwhile, the expansion of

low-income minority groups into previously all-white middle-class areas gave a sense that

the problem of blight and slums was worsening (Millspaugh and Breckenfield 1960,

Horwitt 1992, Santow 2006).

The industry’s attempt to stamp out the public housing component of urban

redevelopment did not fully succeed either, despite the weak state of the program.

Politically, public housing was caught in what one of its creators called ‘‘a dreary

deadlock’’ in which it struggled on ‘‘not dead but never more than half alive’’ (Bauer 1957). During the 1950s, the Congress continued to fund the public housing program but

at levels far below what it would take to re-house those dislocated by government

clearance programs. Furthermore, a combination of federal administrative policies, local

bureaucratic inertia, and neighborhood resistance to situating public housing projects in

white neighborhoods slowed down the development of even those units that had been

authorized. Still, the program survived in urban redevelopment plans – in part because

politicians in cities such as Chicago considered it an essential component of racial

containment and in part because planners sometimes felt that inner-city ghettos could not attract private investment (Kaplan 1963, Hirsch 1983, Bauman 1987). Hence, some cities

continued to demolish old residences and build public housing, most noticeably in the

form of tall modernist-style elevator buildings. Funding for public housing actually

increased under Democratic administrations during the 1960s, by which time the housing

industry no longer considered public housing a threat and stopped trying to kill the

program.

A great confusion

Fundamentally, the code enforcement and rehabilitation approach to the slums

supplemented but never replaced the earlier notion of urban redevelopment. In fact, the

urban renewal concept never really broke from the idea of slum clearance. Private industry

anti-slum strategists had always recommended demolishing and replacing those properties

that were beyond saving. In 1955, James Rouse himself, along with federal housing official Nathaniel Keith, proposed an urban renewal plan for Washington, D.C., that called for

not only ‘‘vigorous enforcement of strong housing and building codes and thorough large-

scale rehabilitation,’’ but also ‘‘spot surgery,’’ and ‘‘complete clearance of existing

structures’’ (Bloom 2004, p. 79).

More importantly, pro-development city officials and civic leaders continued to

support slum clearance – with or without public housing – during the late 1950s and 1960s.

From the beginning, the cities best known for their use of enforcement and rehabilitation –

Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago – combined both rehabilitation and clearance for

new development often in the same areas (Architectural Forum 1952, 1956). Twelve years after the passage of the 1954 housing law, a government survey found that on average

Journal of Urbanism 295

predominantly residential urban renewal projects cleared about a fifth of the projects’ land

areas (Keyes 1969, p. 5). The watering down of the predominantly residential requirement

gave the urban powers-that-be more opportunities for redevelopment schemes. As a result,

locales that employed code enforcement and rehabilitation also demolished properties in

industrial areas and inner-city ghettos to build highways, civic centers, and commercial

developments as well as housing. Despite the hope that the urban renewal approach would preserve existing housing, in the following years the wrecking ball would destroy hundreds

of thousands of homes and force their occupants to look for new places to live.

In this context, the public generally never understood ‘‘urban renewal’’ as Colean and

real-estate industry leaders had originally envisioned it: a comprehensive approach that

stressed code enforcement and rehab first and foremost. Since many of the best-known

projects involved demolition of buildings and displacement of their residents, urban renewal became synonymous with a clearance project of any sort. Although in origin and

law, urban redevelopment and urban renewal were quite distinct, they became ‘‘hopelessly

blurred in usage’’ (Keyes 1969, p. 4). In common parlance, ‘‘urban renewal’’ simply

replaced ‘‘urban redevelopment.’’

By whatever name or definition, the policy grew in disfavor. Noting the dispropor- tionate numbers of minority groups who were displaced by redevelopment projects, critics

cried out that urban renewal really meant Negro removal. In the early 1960s, frustration

with the disruption of city dwellers, destruction of private property, and the seemingly

interminable length of time it took to complete renewal projects provoked a political revolt

against ‘‘urban renewal.’’ Intellectuals of all political stripes soon joined the attack (Jacobs

1961, Worthy 1976, Teaford 1990). By 1974 the urban renewal program had become so

unpopular that Congress terminated it and instead instituted wide-ranging block grants

that left decisions of whether and how to pursue urban improvements to the discretion of local governments.

Onwards with enforcement and rehabilitation

Even as urban renewal lost popularity, code enforcement and building rehabilitation lived

on as ways to deal with physical problems in urban housing. Early on the code enforcement and rehabilitation won the support of a key liberal housing group, the

National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO). In cities across

the country, state and city governments established housing courts to deal with landlord-

tenant disputes, rent control procedures, and, of course, housing and sanitary code

violations. No longer an important weapon in the war against blight, code enforcement

devolved to disgruntled tenants who used it as means of redress (Friedman 1968).

In the 1960s, policy makers sought to rescue the increasingly unpopular urban renewal

program by increasing the federal funds available for rehabilitating substandard dwellings.

In 1964, the federal government bolstered the approach by recognizing a new kind of

urban renewal carried out mainly or entirely by code enforcement and extended urban

renewal funds to code enforcement activities. The major housing acts of the Lyndon

Johnson administration – passed in 1964, 1965, and 1968 – provided financing in various

forms for rehabilitation of substandard buildings to assist them in complying with housing

codes. Having entered the urban policy arena with the 1954 Act, NAHB enthusiastically supported Johnson’s subsidized low-income housing programs and all but dropped its

public opposition to public housing.

Building rehabilitation, with or without code enforcement, eventually found a

foothold in urban areas. Long after the housing industry first championed rehabilitation

as the solution to slums, nonprofit and low-profit organizations took up the cause of fixing up homes for low-income residents. Soon a rehab element became common in

296 A. von Hoffman

residential renewal proposals (Keyes 1969). In 1978 the Congress established the

Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (now called NeighborWorks America) to

administer a revolving high-risk loan fund to local affiliates to distribute loans to home

owners in deteriorated areas to improve their houses. In the 1980s local community

development organizations in numerous cities worked to restore inner-city neighborhoods

by renovation and remodeling low-income housing. Among the financiers of such projects

were two national nonprofit organizations: the Enterprise Foundation, started by James

Rouse who at the end of a long career in real estate development returned to urban revitalization; and the Local Initiative Support Corporation, started by the Ford

Foundation. Ironically, the rehab approach to urban renewal, which conservative

industry groups originally promoted, now became a centerpiece of a new liberal populist

policy for reviving the cities (Whittlesey 1969, von Hoffman 2003).

But during the 1950s and 1960s, federal housing laws, fix-it and code enforcement

campaigns, and inducements to home builders were the key weapons in the fight to halt the

spread of blight and slums. Such physical improvements, however, could do little to

counteract such profound economic and social trends as declining industrial employment,

racial discrimination, the shortage of mortgage and business credit in low-income neighborhoods, the ongoing departure of middle-class residents to the suburbs, and the

consequent rise in urban poverty (Wilson 1987). Regardless, by the late 1960s it was clear that

code enforcement combined with private rehabilitation and development of housing had

failed to stop the decline of urban neighborhoods (Gribetz and Grad 1966, Friedman 1968,

National Commission on Urban Problems 1968, President’s Committee on Urban Housing

1969). By then the public mind thought of the private industry’s great hope for saving the

cities simply as slum clearance, which it labeled and denounced as urban renewal.

Notes

1. Flanagan (1997) understands that the 1954 Law subordinated public housing to urban renewal

and the debate over the law changed the previous political alignments of the housing lobbies, but

overstates the negative impact of the law on public housing and understates the influence of the

trade associations. Historian Hirsch (2006) mentions in passing an industry round table, but as a

venue for discussions about the organization and staffing of the federal housing agency, not

urban policy.

2. Life magazine co-sponsored the Rye, New York, conference in December 1952.

3. Two years later, the Housing Act of 1956 further weakened the residential requirement provision

by allowing it to apply to an urban renewal area as a whole rather than the specific redevelopment

site.

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