Today's Read

A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949 (PDF)
Alexander Von Hoffman

I see a lot in here about an initial consensus across the political spectrum about the need for "slum clearance" as well as numerous mechanizations by the real estate industry to submarine the efficacy of the program. I do not see, however, anything about an intent for "temporary" housing nor do I see anything to indicate an intent to "warehouse the poor." (In fact the intent appears to have been quite the opposite)

Some highlights:

Conservative congressmen, concerned that public housing would compete with privately developed housing and foster dependency among the poor, limited the program to low-income people by placing a ceiling on the income of eligible tenants and the rents of public housing units. They also incorporated the goal of slum clearance into the law by requiring that one slum unit be demolished for every public housing unit built

Insofar as public housing became a "warehouse for the poor" the origins of this can be traced to conservative lawmakers seeking to protect real estate interests by limiting the scope of the program. Furthermore the rule of one demolition for one new public housing unit constructed has largely been abandoned by today's HUD as the current plans in New Orleans will result in a massive net loss of affordable housing units.

Much of what has come to be portrayed in current talking points as the "failed liberal experiment" of urban redevelopment was originally hatched as a government-funded land-grabbing scheme for the benefit of developers.

Nelson and NAREB leaders abhorred public housing on ideological grounds. They believed that housing projects competed with private businesses but did not pay taxes, were the opening wedge in an eventual takeover of the private housing industry by the government, and undermined the initiative and independence of American citizens. More immediately, real estate interests feared that public housing authorities would appropriate the best urban redevelopment sites for low-income housing. During the late 1930s, NAREB campaigned intensively against public housing and helped convince a conservative Congress to stop funding the program.

Problems of land assembly and costs, however, stood in the way of any slum clearance program based on private redevelopment. Inner-city industrial and lower-income residential areas, however unsightly, were generally profitable. Located near city centers and major transportation routes, these sites were in demand for factories, stores, and low-rent residences. Hence, slum landowners were reluctant to sell their properties at low prices or sometimes at all. After assembling tracts of land, private developers faced the expense of demolishing existing structures and building new ones. As a result, few private developers undertook the redevelopment of slum tracts.

To solve these problems, NAREB proposed in 1941 setting up metropolitan land commissions that would acquire blighted areas through the power of eminent domain and use federal and local government subsidies known as “write-downs” to sell them to private developers at below-market prices. Supporters of public housing were quick to label NAREB as hypocritical for proposing government subsidies for urban redevelopment while condemning subsidies for public housing.

Public housing and urban redevelopment interests were eventually married as a result of uncomfortable compromise between real estate and housing advocates.

When it was finally passed, the Housing Act of 1949 put into law, in only slightly revised form, most of the provisions of the 1945 W-E-T bill that had not already been enacted. It preserved the original goal of “a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family,” but the law took only a small step in the direction of that goal (Congressional Quarterly 1966; “Housing Act of 1949” 1949).

The act’s major new contribution to national urban policy was the program for urban redevelopment. Title I authorized $1 billion in loans to help cities acquire slums and blighted land for public or private redevelopment. It also allotted $100 million every year for five years for writedown grants to cover two-thirds of the difference between the cost of slum land and its reuse value. The act stated that local governments had to pay the remaining third, but lightened the burden by allowing them to do so either in cash or in kind, by building needed public facilities.

The other provisions of the Housing Act of 1949 revived, expanded, or extended existing housing programs. Title III restarted the public housing program established by the Wagner Housing Act of 1937. It authorized federal loans and grants to build 810,000 new low-rent public housing units over the next six years—10 percent of what experts estimated would be the nation’s total housing needs. It reinforced the bias of the original law toward slum clearance and subsidized housing restricted to the poor. It placed ceilings on construction costs and tenant incomes and stipulated that local public housing rents be at least 20 percent below the lowest rents for comparable private units available in the same community. Title III required that public housing authorities demolish or renovate one slum dwelling unit for every public housing apartment they built.

Notice again, the restrictions placed on the scope of these projects emanate largely from conservative real estate interests and not from liberal social engineering. Notice also the phrase “a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family,” does not include the word, "temporary".

Unsurprisingly, conservatives and developers immediately set about inhibiting and subverting the already watered down program.

An abbreviated version of the previous legislative struggle over public housing followed. President Truman, public housers, labor groups, social workers, and veterans organizations argued for the new bill, and the real estate lobby and the U.S. Savings and Loan League assailed the cooperatives as un-American. Public support for cooperative housing, however, failed to materialize as it did for the 1949 act. The working-class middle-income group did not inhabit the worst slums, and the postwar housing shortage had begun to subside. Both houses of Congress rejected the program, while liberalizing private industry–oriented FHA programs.

Having won this battle, the real estate industry surprised the public housers with an anti–public housing campaign at the local level. Across the country, members of local real estate agencies and S&Ls mobilized to close local housing authorities, veto housing projects, and reject housing appropriations or bonds. The anti–public housing drives were more successful in the South and West than in large eastern and midwestern cities where public housing and urban redevelopment enjoyed political support

Also worth noting:

Title III of the Housing Act of 1949, however, had a fatal flaw: a naive reliance on physical dwellings to carry out social goals. The planners and developers of postwar public housing, whatever its architecture, inherited from earlier generations a faith in the influence of physical environment on individual values. Some believed, without examining the belief, that decent dwellings would impart middle-class standards of behavior to lower-class people. Others assumed that poor people would be grateful to live in new homes that were a great improvement over their old ones and would improve themselves correspondingly. The political exhaustion of the public housers after the long battles with their opponents and a shift in sociological theory to the view that the individual, not the community, was the basis of modern society, also may have affected the program. Regardless of the causes, new public housing projects lacked the community facilities and activities and social services that characterized early public housing (Bauer 1957;
Bauman 1987; Fairbanks 1988; Radford 1996; von Hoffman 1996a).

This sounds astoundingly similar to the arguments made today by developers in favor of demolishing projects. Somehow we've given credence to the demonstrably flawed argument that the problems of urban poverty are either the fault of or can be alleviated by buildings alone. I've expounded upon this in a YRHT comment thread but what we're seeing today is largely a repeat of the mistakes of the past. Conservatives and real estate developers propose that instead of focusing on the causes of urban poverty (such as a failed post-industrial economy exacerbated by a stupid "war on drugs") we allow them to take advantage of the situation to disperse the already dispossessed and turn the harvested land over to private profiteers. It's the same scheme only this time ignoring the one for one demolish and rebuild guideline that at least lent a patina of fairness to the program.

The problems of the urban poor in New Orleans will not be bulldozed along with their residences. The HUD demolition scheme will not serve the housing needs of the working classes. It will only push them out of the way until the developers are ready to clear the next slum.