Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities

By Lawrence J. Vale

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.”
In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226012599

Book preview

Lawrence J. Vale is the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. His many books include three prizewinning volumes: Architecture, Power, and National Identity; From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors; and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01231-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01245-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01259-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vale, Lawrence J., 1959–   author.

Purging the poorest : public housing and the design politics of twice-cleared communities / Lawrence J. Vale.

pages cm.—(Historical studies of urban America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-01231-5 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-01245-2 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-01259-9 (e-book)

1. Public housing—Georgia—Atlanta—History.   2. Public housing—Illinois—Chicago—History.   3. Urban renewal—United States—History.   I. Title.   II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

HD7288.78.U5V35 2013

363.5′850977311—dc23

2012033770

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

PURGING THE POOREST

PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE DESIGN POLITICS OF TWICE-CLEARED COMMUNITIES

LAWRENCE J. VALE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

EDITED BY TIMOTHY J. GILFOYLE, JAMES R. GROSSMAN, AND BECKY M. NICOLAIDES

Also in the series:

Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago

by Lilia Fernandez

Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

by Richard Harris

Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities

by Carl H. Nightingale

Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago

by Tobias Brinkmann

In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930

by Peter C. Baldwin

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

by Mark Peel

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin

by Christopher Klemek

I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

by Cynthia M. Blair

Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City

by Lorrin Thomas

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

by Jordan Stanger-Ross

New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era

by Jennifer Fronc

African American Urban History since World War II

edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter

Additional series titles follow index

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Public Housing, Design Politics, and Twice-Cleared Communities

2. Public Housing and Private Initiative: Developing Atlanta’s Techwood and Clark Howell Homes

3. Redeveloping Techwood and Clark Howell: The Purges of Progress

4. Up from Little Hell: Developing Chicago’s Frances Cabrini Homes

5. Urban Renewal and the Rise of Cabrini-Green

6. Staving Off Collapse: Mediated Violence and the Beginning of Cabrini’s End

7. Bringing the Gold Coast to the Slum: Cabrini-Green’s Redevelopment and the Litigation of Inclusion

8. Conclusion: Public Housing and the Margins of Empathy

Notes

Credits

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1. Trends in federal subsidies for rental housing in the United States

2.1. The slums surrounding Atlanta’s downtown

2.2. Housing and urban renewal as steps toward a brighter tomorrow

2.3. Tanyard Creek flowing through Tech Flats

2.4. Charles Palmer’s commute, passing near Techwood Flats

2.5. Paul Revere Palmer

2.6. Racial composition of the cleared neighborhoods

2.7. Tech Flats slum

2.8. Looking North Toward Georgia Tech from Williams St.

2.9. Existing slum conditions prior to Techwood

2.10. Part of the Tech Flats community cleared to build Techwood Homes

2.11. Two black workmen carry a crib into Techwood

2.12. White couple entering their new Techwood home

2.13. The AHA promised homes, health and happiness

2.14. View from Georgia Tech toward Techwood Homes

2.15. Children frolic in Techwood’s wading pool

2.16. Techwood’s modern laundry facilities

2.17. Site map of Techwood and Clark Howell

2.18. Techwood Drive, before and after public housing

2.19. The AHA’s view of a typical growing family

3.1. Aerial view of Techwood and Clark Howell, before redevelopment, 1981

3.2. Techwood bat patrol, March 1981

3.3. Fleeing from Techwood drugs, 1989

3.4. Housing activist opposing PATH plan, 1991

3.5. Emptying Techwood in advance of an approved plan to rebuild

3.6. Techwood boarded up as Olympic Village construction proceeds, 1994

3.7. Centennial Place, with neighboring Coca-Cola headquarters, 2010

3.8. Aerial view of Centennial Place, 2007

3.9. View from the gated Centennial Park North toward Centennial Place, 2010

3.10. Empty Techwood cupola building with Centennial Place, 2010

3.11. Atlanta’s transition from public housing to vouchers

3.12. Centennial Place Elementary, a curbside school, 2010

3.13. Map of Centennial Place and environs

3.14. Aerial view of Centennial Place and environs, 2007

4.1. Zorbaugh’s Lower North Community: mapping poverty and philanthropy

4.2. Insanity Rates in Chicago, 1930–1931, per 100,000 Adult Population

4.3. Death Corner in Little Hell

4.4. ‘Death Corner,’ Scene of New Murders

4.5. Racial composition of the area later cleared for Cabrini-Green

4.6. Proposal to clear thirty-six square miles of slums

4.7. Aerial view of Frances Cabrini Homes, 1951

4.8. Costs of slums versus nonslum areas, 1940s

4.9. Father Luigi surveys the clearance, ca. 1941

4.10. Dedicating Frances Cabrini Homes, summer 1942

4.11. Aerial view of Frances Cabrini Homes, 1940s

4.12. Flowers Grow Where Slums Once Stood

5.1. Diagram of the Method Prescribed for slum clearance and redevelopment, ca. 1950

5.2. Chicago Can Build, housing on top of the old slums

5.3. Chicago’s dirty backyard

5.4. Modeling Cabrini Extension

5.5. Modern CHA public housing instead of streets of dreariness

5.6. Buildings to be cleared on Hudson Avenue to make way for Cabrini Extension, 1951

5.7. Aerial view of clearance on Cabrini Extension site, 1952

5.8. Families Break Up as Housing Conditions Become Worse

5.9. Cabrini-Green and CHA tenant incomes relative to Chicago area median income

5.10. Map of the completed Cabrini-Green project and its neighborhood

7.1. The Near North Redevelopment Initiative (NNRI)

7.2. Map showing the location of new developments, in and around Cabrini-Green

7.3. Old Town Village West in late 2009, with lingering presence of Green Homes tower

7.4. Mohawk North tenants

7.5. Site plan of North Town Village, as proposed in 1998

7.6. North Town Village mixed-income development

7.7. Overall trends in Chicago public housing

7.8. Parkside of Old Town, 2009

7.9. Reaction to Parkside of Old Town price reductions

7.10. View of Chicago skyline from Parkside of Old Town

7.11. Site of Parkside of Old Town and Death Corner

PREFACE

My interest in the subject of American public housing began more than thirty years ago at Amherst College when I made it the subject of my senior honors thesis in American Studies. I called that thesis Housing an Ideology: Public Housing and the Jeffersonian Tradition because I was already convinced that understanding public housing invited a larger immersion in American cultural and intellectual history. As a native Chicagoan, I was deeply troubled by watching the downward spiral of the city’s Cabrini-Green development. It was located just a few blocks away from my family’s own high-rise apartment, but in an entirely different world. As an undergraduate, I had hoped that the world of architecture contained the solutions for public housing redevelopment and that it would be possible, in effect, to design our way out of such dysfunctional environments.

The more I learned about the subject, however, the more obvious it became that architecture, while undoubtedly important, was also embedded in a larger realm of politics, policy, social relations, and management. During graduate school in architecture, I abandoned my earlier dream of becoming a practicing architect and gradually discovered the fields of planning and urban design. I ended up receiving graduate degrees in both architecture and international relations, the latter focused on the comparative history of planning. In the mid-1980s, while still a graduate student, I returned to the subject of public housing redevelopment, excited by the dramatic transformations then underway in both Boston and Cambridge. As a junior faculty member at MIT in the early 1990s, however, I soon realized that I could not tell the stories of public housing redevelopment without asking more deeply rooted questions about the origins of that housing. Instead of one book about public housing, I ended up with two.

The first one, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors, traced 350 years of efforts by institutions in Boston to house the least economically viable residents and included a history of the Boston Housing Authority. The second volume—Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods—looked at the subject from a more bottom-up perspective, tracing the saga of development, decline, and redevelopment in three Boston public housing communities. These stories had mixed outcomes, but one example stood out: Boston’s Commonwealth Development. This place, once among the city’s most physically and socially distressed projects, was transformed into an attractive and safe community, one that successfully mixed races and ethnicities but did not entail mixing incomes, even though the site could easily have attracted interest from market-rate renters or homebuyers. Today, more than twenty-five years after completion of its redevelopment, it still stands as a model of good practice and remains a high point in the careers of all those who participated in its revival.

Following the release of those books, I commenced work on two further books that bring the public housing story to a more national level. This book, which compares the slum-clearance and urban renewal era that created public housing with the HOPE VI era of public housing clearance, focuses on Atlanta and Chicago and extends arguments developed in From the Puritans to the Projects. The fourth and final volume, a follow-on to Reclaiming Public Housing, will center on the diverse variety of approaches to HOPE VI public housing redevelopment in several other American cities, revealing highly differentiated attitudes toward housing (or rehousing) the poorest Americans.

In entitling the present book Purging the Poorest, I am conscious that purge is a very strong term. Similarly, to focus on the poorest in a North American context is to invite a larger consideration of relative global poverty. This is not the place to engage the economic, social, political and cultural complexities of who counts as the poorest in an international or comparative sense since there are such deep disparities, but it is also important to note that every country faces its own struggle over low-income housing provision. To gain additional perspective, during the final writing of this volume, I traveled to India and Brazil. I went first to visit the Pyarabagan (Guava Orchard) slum in South Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Home to perhaps four thousand persons, it is located immediately adjacent to a luxury housing tower, an uneasy juxtaposition that has nonetheless been legalized by the municipal government. With evictions successfully thwarted and security of tenure long since granted, slum dwellers have benefited from two rounds of efforts to improve water and sanitation, and have been able to remain in what is now a coveted central location. Although their level of poverty is undeniably even deeper than Depression-era America, this is not a depressing place. Watching young children hone their cricket skills on a makeshift concrete pitch while mothers go about various daily chores, I could not help but think of stickball on a preclearance American urban street. Pyarabagan is not the Little Hell slum that preceded Chicago’s Cabrini-Green or the Tech Flats that preceded Atlanta’s Techwood Homes, but is a reminder that all decisions about urban development entail political acts rendered through the mechanism of design.

Similarly, Brazil’s favelas may accommodate greater overcrowding, more extreme deficits of water and sanitation infrastructure, and deeper poverty than any district remaining in the United States, but these places also engage familiar questions about where the state will permit its urban poor to reside, under what conditions, and for how long. São Paulo’s Paraisópolis (paradise city) houses at least eighty thousand people in an undulating favela with spectacularly disorienting views toward a cliff-scape of adjacent luxury condominiums in Morumbi. In the opposite direction, the view is almost equally jarring—an abrupt transition to brand-new six-story slabs of public housing under construction in the favela’s flood-prone periphery, into which the government is seeking to relocate three thousand Paraisópolis dwellers. Although rents are set to be affordable to those earning only half of Brazil’s minimum wage, even this may not suffice to make many of the displaced believe that the move to modernity is both possible and desirable.

Rio de Janeiro’s favelas—at least the centrally located ones—have faced more than a half century of contestation, with the latest rounds prompted by the coming of the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games. Vila Autódromo, a favela peacefully housing about four thousand people, sits uneasily within the bounds of the racetrack zone being redeveloped by AECOM to house everything from Olympic gymnastics, swimming, cycling, and tennis to the hotel for the world’s journalists and the international broadcast center. Precisely twenty years earlier in Atlanta, preparations for the 1996 Olympics triggered the redevelopment of the Techwood and Clark Howell public housing projects, also viewed as embarrassingly proximate to Olympic athletes and global media scrutiny. There are certainly profound differences between the struggles of Brazilian favela residents to stave off Olympic displacement and the struggles of their U.S. counterparts in public housing, but whenever a government threatens to purge its poorest citizens from suddenly desirable land, some things remain constant: agitated residents, well-meaning nongovernmental organizations, polarized journalists, and conflicted local politicians. Low-income people and high municipal aspirations remain in frequent conflict. Although the remainder of this book is focused on the United States, in charting the double redevelopment of communities in Atlanta and Chicago, I grapple with the larger, contested moral choices over what housing scholar/activist Chester Hartman has usefully called the right to stay put.

Methodologically, this book relies on interviews with key participants in public housing redevelopment efforts in Atlanta and Chicago, as well as on archival and secondary accounts about the larger history of each housing project, its neighborhood and its city’s politics, and the redevelopment plans themselves. I make use of a broad range of sources, including oral histories, silent films, census analyses and mapping, historical maps and photographs, newspapers (both mainstream and alternative press, including online sites), YouTube videos, and blogs. I have paid particular attention to historical data about the period when the original public housing was built, to compare the pattern of displacement and rationales for construction from that earlier era of public housing to the current pattern of displacement and rationales for reconstruction that are now happening under the federal government’s HOPE VI program. As such, the focus remains on the development and the redevelopment of public housing, rather than on the period of decline that occurred between these phases. Ultimately, my interest is in measuring success rather than critiquing failure. Defining success, however, is a far more difficult and contested challenge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to the many people I interviewed, I am most grateful for the assistance of a wide range of others who made my time in Atlanta and Chicago productive and enjoyable, and helped maximize my access to the people and places I wished to learn from. In Atlanta, I thank Danny Boston, Jeff Holzgrefe, Norman Johnson, Larry Keating, Elizabeth Kiss, Kathy Shoemaker and the staff of MARBL at Emory University, Dana White, and Rick White.

In Chicago, I gained immensely from the insights of Larry Bennett, Brad Hunt (who also provided extremely generous access to his files), Mark Joseph, Mary Pattillo, Len Rubinowitz, Janet Smith, and Spruiell White. The municipal reference staff at the Harold Washington Library and the Chicago History Museum also provided important aid. I am also grateful for the hospitality of my brother Peter Vale and mother Virginia Vale (who has also sent me hundreds of newspaper clippings about Chicago public housing over the course of the last thirty years).

My work on this book has also benefited significantly from conversations with, or materials supplied by, Nick Bloom, Danny Boston, Xav Briggs, Jim Buckley, Antarin Chakrabarty, Liz Cohen, Margaret Crawford, Susan Fainstein, Bob Fairbanks, Roberta Feldman, George Galster, Ezra Glenn, Ed Goetz, Tali Hatuka, Joseph Heathcott, Mary Joel Holin, Amy Howard, Derek Hyra, Aseem Inam, Alison Isenberg, Sandy Isenstadt, Mark Joseph, Michael Katz, Lang Keyes, Diane Levy, Keith Magee, Deirdre Oakley, Max Page, Sandra Parvu, Mary Pattillo, Sue Popkin, Wendell Pritchett, Bill Rohe, Len Rubinowitz, Brent Ryan, Adèle Santos, Katie Schank, Alex Schwartz, Wayne Sherwood, Anne Whiston Spirn, Julia Stasch, Mike Stegman, Jim Stockard, Phil Thompson, Fritz Umbach, Florian Urban, Alex von Hoffman, Sam Bass Warner Jr, Rhonda Williams, and Graham Willis.

Most of the support I have received for this book has come from close to home. I gained tremendously from the resources and assistance of the Rotch Library staff at MIT, particularly Margaret de Popolo and Peter Cohn. My work has also profited greatly from the Vertical Files collection at the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Loeb Library, with access facilitated by Jerold Kayden’s offer to host me as a visiting scholar during 2009. Most centrally, perhaps, since 2002 my work has also been ably supported by a wonderful succession of student-colleagues and research assistants: Yonah Freemark, Erin Graves, Stephanie Groll, Colleen McHugh, Steve Moga, Annis Whitlow Sengupta, Jeff Shumaker, Kristin Simonson, Andrew Trueblood, and Yan Zhang.

At the University of Chicago Press, Robert Devens has been a champion of this project since we first discussed it in 2007, soliciting two very helpful anonymous reviews of the manuscript and facilitating its connection to the Historical Studies of Urban America series. I am thankful for additional support with manuscript production and editing from Russ Damian, Mary Gehl, and Lisa Wehrle. Production of this book has also been assisted by a publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts—providing another dimension to subsidized housing for which I am most grateful.

At base, however, this project would not have reached completion without the support of my family—Julie, Mira, Aaron, Jeremy, and Jonathan—who are all happy that the piles of materials from this project will finally be purged from view.

1

PUBLIC HOUSING, DESIGN POLITICS, AND TWICE-CLEARED COMMUNITIES

The Cultural Roots of American Public Housing

The tempestuous subject of American public housing warrants more than a sober exercise in policy analysis. It is also far more than an occasion to muse on the power and limitations of architecture and planning, and more than the poster child for the shift from Keynesian welfare economics to neoliberal urbanism.¹ Instead, analysis of the American experience with public housing offers a window into the priorities of a society and the workings of a polity. To probe public housing is to think through the basic structures and strictures of inequality in the United States. At base, public housing forces contentious discussions about the role and limits of the state in providing shelter to its poorest citizens.

This book explores how the struggle to house the poorest citizens has played out in parts of two emblematic American cities during the last seventy-five years. Atlanta and Chicago were pioneers in the creation of public housing during the 1930s and, seven decades later, they have also led the way in transforming or eliminating it. The approaches deployed in Atlanta and Chicago have not proceeded unchallenged. Controversial in their own cities, they are part of a larger national dialogue about how best to house extremely low-income households in equitable ways.

Although this is a book about public housing, the most stigmatized form of rental housing in the United States, it is also about homeownership and, more fundamentally, about what it means to control land. It is about purely residential communities, but it is also about Starbucks and Coca-Cola. It is about the displacements of slum clearance and urban renewal, but it is also about other powerful acts of sudden community evisceration—the burning of Atlanta and the Great Chicago Fire. It is about local politicians, developers, designers, and low-income residents, but it is also about Franklin Roosevelt, Scarface Al Capone, and Martin Luther King Jr. It is about unremarkable local events and countless community meetings, but it is also about the Olympic Games and the community-wrenching birth of the postindustrial American city.

The challenge of public housing is deeply rooted in every society. It is the challenge of how—and where—to house the least economically advantaged persons of that society. Americans call this public housing whereas many Europeans prefer the more inclusive term social housing, but whatever it is called, the concept raises the question of who is responsible for this housing. When does it become the responsibility of the state? When should it be left up to the market? And when should it be the purview of civil society institutions? Moreover, since it is never just one of these groups acting alone, the lines of responsibility have never been clear.

In the United States, these struggles predate the founding of the country and go all the way back to the time of the seventeenth-century Puritans. These early Americans and their descendants viewed municipally supported housing as a kind of necessary coping mechanism, epitomized by places such as an alms-house or house of industry. Here, the poor people whom I have termed public neighbors could be institutionalized if they lacked the economic resources, charitable benefactors, and family support networks to survive on their own in the city. Yet this tradition of housing assistance also had a more auspicious counterpart. By the nineteenth century, urban Americans sometimes viewed housing as a reward from the state for the upwardly mobile poor, most famously typified by the Homestead Act of 1862 or various forms of land pensions awarded to veterans.²

Public housing inherited this dual impulse—drawing both from the housing-as-reward tradition and the housing-as-coping-mechanism one. At its core, city, state, and national officials have long treated housing assistance as a moral good, linking it to an overarching emphasis on the importance of hard work as evidence of strong personal character and responsibility. This housing-work nexus combines the power of the house of industry concept—the notion that the able-bodied indigent should be put to work to earn their keep—and the homesteading notion—the idea that land could be given on the condition of self-help toil to build a house on it in a timely manner. These earliest housing policies continue to resonate. It is not such a great leap from nineteenth-century homesteading to Habitat for Humanity (though the latter is not a government program). Similarly, there is ideological continuity between the nineteenth-century workhouse and the late twentieth-century introduction of a community service requirement for public housing recipients, often coupled with additional expectations for paid employment or participation in a self-sufficiency program as a condition of entry. The name of the nation’s public housing reform legislation—the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (QHWRA)—spells out the connection explicitly.

Three Social Experiments: Reconceptualizing Public Housing History

To date, much of the history of public housing in the United States has followed a cyclical practice of displacement and neighborhood renewal, frequently directed at purging the poorest from the communities being redeveloped. Such a statement flies in the face of conventional accounts of public housing history. Most Americans think of public housing as a single, failed program (rather than as a succession of many programs, introduced with different rationales, but sharing the same name).³ Similarly, the usual understanding of public housing is as a program to consolidate the poorest households into federally subsidized ghettoes. Public housing, seen this way, is a concentrating of the poorest, rather than a purging of them. My argument here is that the concentration of poverty view of public housing, when seen as part of a broader historical sweep, is actually both a narrowly time-bound reading of planning history and an ideological anomaly. The phase of poverty concentration—widely viewed as a major policy mistake even as it was being implemented—is an interregnum between eras characterized by efforts to avoid providing federal public housing assistance to those among the marginalized poor judged least deserving, especially those who do not engage in paid work.

Most of the abundant literature on public housing falls into the category of decline and fall narratives, and thereby focuses on the challenges of housing the poorest.⁴ This misses the cultural power of the initial public housing impulse—centered on selectivity and moral judgment—as well as the ways that this moralist animus has been reconstituted in much of US housing policy since 1990.

These battles over the cultural place of public housing assistance resonate with arguments about the meanings of welfare reform and the so-called underclass made by Michael Katz and Herbert Gans. Urban historian Katz observes in The Undeserving Poor that the redefinition of poverty as a moral condition accompanied the transition to capitalism and democracy in early nineteenth-century America. With poverty cast as evidence of personal failure in a land of opportunity, this justified a mean-spirited treatment of the poor. In The War Against the Poor, urban sociologist Gans adds that Americans imported the terms deserving poor and undeserving poor from nineteenth-century England, and that these labels have persisted as a way to calibrate the perceived need for welfare largesse:

The ideology of undeservingness holds that if people were without the moral and other deficiencies that make them poor, there might be no poverty; and if the jobless were not lazy there would be virtually no unemployment. In both instances, the public monies now used to support the poor and the jobless could remain in private purses. That may be the greatest moral failing attributed to the undeserving poor.⁵

In The Failed Welfare Revolution, sociologist Brian Steensland argues that these deeply rooted cultural practices—the three-part distinction between the deserving, undeserving, and working poor—served as the basis of American social policy through the New Deal and postwar eras.⁶

Many New Deal programs began as efforts to champion the deserving poor, including both Aid to Dependent Children (welfare), initially targeted to economically suffering widows, and Old Age Insurance (social security). Meanwhile, public housing grew from the parallel impulse to reward the working poor. It was not until the 1960s that policymakers gave greater attention to the possibility that poverty might often be the result of structural unemployment among those who faced persistent disadvantage due to age, racism, lack of education, geographical location, disability, or family circumstance. In that era, too, public housing policy followed the larger cultural practices of an expanding welfare state, and housing projects became increasingly available to poor people of all varieties.

Despite this, traditional American unease over eliding measures of neediness and evidence of worthiness continued apace. During the early 1970s, in a revealing anomaly, welfare policy reformers in the Nixon administration seriously considered a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) program that would have offered cash benefits to those earning below a certain minimum income per year. This program, significantly, made no distinction between inadequate income that resulted from low wages and income inadequacy that resulted from actual unemployment; it simply responded to need. Not surprisingly, even though many people of diverse political persuasions recognized the impossibility that good jobs at adequate wages could ever be available to all, the legislation failed. Steensland studied the debates over guaranteed minimum income closely and, tellingly, found that the main obstacle to GAI legislation was the cultural distinction that Americans draw between different categories of poor people. Put most simply, Americans have long considered some types of people, based on their perceived adherence to the work ethic, to be more worthy of government assistance than others.⁷

Instead of policies that conflated moral categories of poor people by providing benefits based on economic need alone, American legislators preferred to create new antipoverty programs that reinforced the old distinctions. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program (introduced in 1974) targeted a deserving poor cohort of the aged, blind and disabled and, Steensland argues, was undertaken explicitly to protect them from the social stigma connoted by ‘welfare.’ Similarly, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program (begun in 1975) provides tax relief strictly to those working poor in the labor force, thereby operating in accord with existing cultural categories of worth.⁸ Arguments for or against welfare programs, however, fundamentally affect individuals and families, whereas the conceptual premise of public housing has also embraced the need to displace—and replace—entire communities.

Purging the poorest is not always an intentional community strategy, nor is it necessarily meant to be cruel. Instead, the most well-meaning of those promoting the social and spatial displacement of the least advantaged frequently rationalize it as something that will actually help the poorest by offering them new opportunities elsewhere. At the same time, they tacitly or explicitly acknowledge, it also helps the nonpoor and the remaining deserving poor to have the undeserving poor safely out of the way.

Ultimately, the equitability of the purge depends on whether those who depart their communities have done so out of something resembling a genuine choice. There are also, of course, entirely legitimate reasons for excluding some people from government subsidized housing, such as criminal behavior or other serious lease infractions. Poverty itself, however, should not be considered a crime.

Given the ways that poverty as a concept is culturally constructed, it is clear that measures of income are not sufficient to explain it. Nor do income categories enable a fine-grained definition of the poorest that could be consistently applied to all eras, from the Great Depression to the present. In part this ambiguity emerges because long-standing measures of the American poverty threshold remain flawed. The much-discredited measure developed in the early 1960s (based on three times the presumed cost of a minimum diet and updated in accordance with the consumer price index) failed to take account of changing patterns of family size and structure, including workforce participation by women and associated child-care costs; missed out on significant disparities in health-care costs, especially for the uninsured; neglected to count the effects of important government policy initiatives (which could either enhance or reduce disposable income); ignored cultural shifts that increased expectations for an acceptable standard of living; and disregarded regional cost-of-living variations, especially with regard to housing. Even after a National Research Council panel issued its Measuring Poverty report in 1995 and proposed a new approach, and even after the Census Bureau provided another set of Supplemental Poverty Measures in 2011, the measurement of poverty has remained deeply contested.⁹

The ongoing disputation over its measurement demonstrates again that poverty connotes far more than a deficit in material or economic well-being. Seen as a sociopolitical issue, the notion of the poorest becomes more of a cultural category than an economic one that can be captured by scarcity of income. Some of this is because there are other kinds of deficits that demarcate an impoverished life, including hunger, substandard housing, and lack of affordable health care. On top of those deficits, moreover, there are the psychic costs that come from being blamed for one’s own poverty. In this context, income measures and poverty thresholds can only hint at the larger forces of moral judgment at work in the selection of potential beneficiaries in a system of housing assistance where assessments of neediness and assumptions about worthiness remain thoroughly conflated.

This book reconsiders the tortuous and tortured saga of public housing, viewing it as a kind of triple social experiment: (1) a twenty-five-year series of efforts to target public housing chiefly to the upwardly mobile working class between 1935 and 1960; (2) a thirty-year consolidation of the poorest into welfare housing between 1960 and 1990; and (3) a series of programs and policies since 1990 to return more of public housing to a less-poor constituency.

To be clear, I am using the term social experiment rather loosely here. The successive efforts to develop and alter low-income housing policy and community design have rarely been carried out in anything that resembles a structured, evaluative manner. There has been little formal testing of interventions on tenants or communities, and few policy shifts seem motivated by findings generated by researchers. Instead, public housing policymaking has proceeded and evolved in accordance with a much more informal sort of experimentation—expressed as the eagerness to try out something systematically. These public-sector experiments signal the revealed preferences of a society, and they remain subject to the shifting winds of national politics and broad trends in social cognition. As much as public housing proponents experimented with a variety of architectural forms and financial schemes, at the most basic level their experimentation concerned people: the history of public housing can be reframed as a series of highly combustible experiments to determine which of the poor it should serve.¹⁰

The First Experiment: Public Housing for the Top of the Bottom Third

In the first experiment, conducted between the early 1930s and the late 1950s, local and federal officials, embracing the high modernist hopes of the mid-twentieth-century state, replaced slums and slum dwellers with carefully chosen communities of the upwardly mobile working class. Although liberally bathed in a rhetoric of uplift, the new public housing authorities actually invited very few slum dwellers to make the transition into the modern housing that had displaced them from their homes. Instead of a focus on uplifting individuals, the new projects instead sought to uplift whole neighborhoods. Housing policymakers substituted one entire community with another one duly cleansed of its predecessor’s dilapidated buildings and problematic people.

The resistance to housing those with the lowest incomes began with the earliest New Deal public housing initiatives.¹¹ The Public Works Administration (PWA), introduced as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933, contained a quasi-independent Housing Division charged with developing multifamily housing projects. Initially, the PWA oversaw seven limited-dividend developments (i.e., built by state-regulated corporations that agreed to accept no more than small profits), each constructed to serve white households with modest incomes. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who also served as PWA director, complained that the rent levels at these first projects had been set too high to reach the poorest, and used this as justification to shift the PWA’s Housing Division into a direct development mode during 1934. Yet such a policy rationale seems no more than an expedient way to get what Ickes really wanted: public entities empowered to build, own, and operate low-rent housing projects.¹² Even with no dividends rather than just limited ones, early public housing would still fail to serve the poorest.

Ickes viewed public housing as an integral part of a new, enlarged civic plan based on sound, sensible social engineering. He derided the human and moral costs of slums and sought to rid cities of the unsightly and objectionable districts we have permitted men and women to call their homes. In a pointed dig against a famous Hoover administration slogan, he complained about a supine National Government . . . too busy installing chickens in every pot to inquire whether there was any kitchen in which they might be cooked. Ickes wanted bolder action. Assuming that dwellers in the slums cannot be lifted bodily out of their present economic status at one stroke, he argued in 1935, the first necessary step to improve their general condition is to end such housing conditions by replacing them with decent public housing.¹³ Engineering slum clearance itself served a social purpose. Notably, Ickes proposed to replace housing conditions with better housing; he did not necessarily say that the people lifted bodily out of their present homes would be the same bodies selected to return to the improved district.

Like most municipal analysts of the era, Ickes subscribed to the dictum that slums cost money. Because a slum district cost a city far more in municipal services than it returned in taxes, Ickes viewed slums as perhaps a city’s most expensive luxury. As historian John Bauman puts it, Housing Division literature bristled with burglars and murderers whose twisted psyches ‘were to a large degree formed in childhoods spent in slums.’ Not only would slum clearance check incipient crime, to use the division’s logic, but it would also inoculate the city against tuberculosis, influenza, and other slum predators. In practice, the economic engineering rationale about cost containment took precedence over the social engineering of building modern communities. Ickes paid lip service to the idea that public housing tenancy obviously must be restricted to those who most seriously need it—namely, the present occupants of slums who are able to pay modest, but steady rent. He also realized that if public housing is to be occupied by families who can well afford to pay higher rents, it will defeat its own purpose. Even so, Ickes—like his successors at the United States Housing Authority (USHA)—presided over a housing system ruled by an economic logic, and a moral calculus, that had little or no place in public housing for the sorts of slum dwellers displaced to build it. Despite continued PWA proclamations that it would build for those in the lowest income classes and despite the provision of significant subsidies, historian Gail Radford found that, like the limited dividend experiments, the housing the PWA itself built . . . was also too expensive for the very poor.¹⁴

The earliest PWA projects had no income ceilings whatsoever and thereby stood open to all interested parties, a situation remedied only after June 1936 with passage of the George-Healey Act. This legislation stipulated that no family could occupy PWA public housing if its income exceeded five times the fixed rent (including utilities) charged for its apartment. Further—and indicative of the ongoing concern about the inclusion of moderate-income tenants in the new housing—the Act required that it be targeted only to families who lack sufficient income . . . to enable them to live in decent, safe and sanitary dwellings and under other than overcrowded housing conditions. Such provisions, however, meant little since the Act also fixed rents so as to cover all of the project’s operating expenses and to repay, over the course of not more than sixty years, 55 percent of the project’s initial construction cost, plus interest. Taken together, this priced PWA housing beyond what most low-income households living in substandard conditions judged to be affordable for their families, however demonstrably better the quarters. At the same time, the relatively high income ceiling generated by multiplying these rents by five conferred eligibility for public housing on many households that did not need financial assistance to obtain standard housing.¹⁵

During its four-year existence, the PWA built 21,121 housing units in 51 housing projects, 27 of them on cleared slums. Most projects emerged as racially segregated, with racial choice based on a prevailing neighborhood composition formula. Ickes proposed that public housing occupancy mirror the characteristics of the surrounding area—a practice that, in many cities, continued informally through the 1940s and beyond, since local authorities held a great deal of autonomy over site selection. Beyond the racial concerns, critics such as Catherine Bauer complained about the costs of land assembly in slum districts and lamented the presence of previously established street patterns that would be costly to undo to achieve modern superblock site planning objectives. By contrast, vacant land frequently yielded cheaper sites for housing and avoided the heavily litigated challenges of eminent domain. On the other hand, private developers seeking to build on vacant land and landlords with existing rental properties often viewed public housing construction as direct and unfair competition. If public housing had to happen at all, they preferred to see any federal government action deployed in slum clearance projects that would yield no net increase in housing units. Moreover, since slum clearance entailed high-visibility actions carried out with high-minded moral exhortation, this practice remained popular with civic leaders and the general public.¹⁶ Those whose homes and businesses were to be bulldozed away, however, remained less enthused.

Proponents of public housing during the 1930s advanced several simultaneous rationales to support it, collectively revealing diverse and conflicting priorities. Those who viewed the program as primarily a slum clearance venture captured widespread public sentiment and appeased the real estate industry, but saddled public housing with the insoluble challenge of producing low-cost housing on high-cost land, given the lack of political will to introduce deeper subsidies. The policy activists of the National Public Housing Conference (NPHC), led by Mary Simkhovitch, Helen Alfred, Louis Pink, and Ira Robbins, emphasized the centrality of slum clearance while clinging to the unrealized hope that this could also yield better housing for the very poor. Others viewed public housing as chiefly a mechanism to generate employment in the Depression-wracked construction trades, or cared primarily about finding ways to make the new housing attractive to moderate-income members of various trade unions. Working with the Labor Housing Conference (LHC), Catherine Bauer championed a large program of well-designed communities aimed at reaching a broader range of incomes. She saw these as akin to the broader social housing aims of post–WWI western European initiatives and intended to be a direct challenge to conventional for-profit development practices. Bauer gained the confidence of Senator Robert Wagner and Representative Henry Ellenbogen who enlisted her assistance in drafting national housing legislation during 1936 and 1937.¹⁷

The Housing Act of 1937 as eventually passed, however, survived only as a battered product of compromise. Saddled with a variety of amendments that marginalized the LHC’s agenda, it yielded a program that claimed to target housing only to those with the lowest incomes. With imposition of stringent construction cost limitations and a requirement that slum dwellings be eliminated in equivalent number to any public housing units created, the law protected commercial landlords and attempted to maximize the distinction between those served by public housing and those seeking homes in the private market. Taken together, the provisions supported job creation and slum clearance, but the cost strictures and design guidelines generally yielded less attractive projects than those produced under the PWA.¹⁸ At the same time, while the letter of the law promised to assist those with the lowest incomes, the program rarely reached them. Seen one way, this was a financial miscalculation. Seen more holistically, the financial problem reflected a deeper cultural and political reality. American legislators, like the American public, did not want to use the limited resource of public housing to serve society’s least advantaged. Speeches and policy language evinced empathy, but the actual results on the slum-cleared ground argued otherwise.

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal agenda for housing policy had yielded what Radford usefully calls a two-tier framework of intervention. The top tier aimed at shoring up market-produced housing by organizing and subsidizing financial markets. Anchored by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the new federal agencies also included the Home Loan Bank Board, the temporary Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). Once the exigencies of Depression and World War II had passed, the FHA and Fannie Mae—together with many other supportive policies and infrastructure investments—led the expanding American middle class to rapidly increasing levels of subsidized homeownership. Meanwhile, the Housing Act of 1937, which established the USHA, launched the second and lower tier of policy intervention, separate from the upper one, aimed squarely at what Roosevelt had called one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.¹⁹ For at least the next twenty years, however, even this lower tier never reached very low, revealing a genuine ambivalence toward the nation’s least advantaged denizens.

Under the terms of the Housing Act of 1937, the USHA constructed about 170,000 dwelling units in 260 communities, with fully 89 percent of them built on slum sites and only 11 percent on vacant land.²⁰ Construction costs for some early USHA projects exceeded those of the PWA precursors, causing Chicago banker Morton Bodfish, the executive vice president of the US Building and Loan League, to conclude in 1938 that there is little foundation upon which to base the hope that rents will come within the means of the lowest third of the tenant groups in the cities to be served by the projects, unless the subsidy is greatly increased.²¹

Nathan Straus, who administered the USHA from 1937 until 1942 (when the agency was absorbed into the wartime Federal Public Housing Authority²²) set out to debunk what his 1944 book called The Seven Myths of Housing. Straus insisted that per-unit construction costs of USHA projects were significantly lower than the PWA ventures, and viewed the notion that Public Housing Does Not Rehouse Families from the Slums as myth number five. He began by parsing the language of the Housing Act, noting that it says public housing should target those who are in the lowest income group and who cannot afford to pay enough to cause private enterprise in their locality or metropolitan area to build an adequate supply of decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings for their use. He pointed out that the Act refers to those with the lowest income and not to those without income. Responsibility for the latter, he argued, should be the concern of relief agencies, not the USHA—though he noted that some local housing authorities chose to accept some such families.²³

As long as the USHA housing penetrated somewhere within FDR’s bottom one-third of a nation, Straus did not probe how deeply into this bottom third the USHA reached. He simply insisted that USHA rents for newly built public housing compared favorably to the rents prevailing for slum shacks, and blamed the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) for having systematically disseminated misinformation about USHA tenant incomes in their Confidential Weekly Letters. Straus did not take up the pertinent question of whether USHA public housing actually rehoused families from the slums displaced to create it. Instead, he emphasized that all slum dwellers are not alike and that the USHA sought to aid those having considerable means, yet with insufficient income to afford the rents charged for decent housing in the community. These households, he opined, especially if they are large, should be the object of chief solicitude of any government that seeks to have the children of the nation reared in healthful homes. By contrast, he ridiculed the notion (championed by NAREB) that federal policy ought to provide direct rent subsidies to families rather than construct subsidized housing. Straus noted that no such system has ever been used in any country that has carried out a public housing program and this was not in the American tradition.²⁴ Straus made clear that public housing is not relief and is not charity. When it came to assisting the poorest, American tradition embraced a wary scrutiny.

Early public housing, mostly deployed in large cities, admitted few of the city’s poorest. Lawrence Friedman has framed it best: public housing targeted the submerged and potential middle class which was lower class in income but middle class in values or aspirations.²⁵ Faced with thousands of poor people to choose from, the gatekeepers rebuffed those who came from the wrong race, the wrong size family (either too big or too small), lacked proper US citizenship, or seemed financially unstable enough to be reliable rent payers. USHA public housing served as a reward for good citizenship and focused admission on two-parent households with secure employment, usually arraying them into developments that were wholly segregated. Despite the segregation, these communities carried no stigma. Instead, multilayered selection processes often accepted as few as one in ten applicants, so entry to public housing served as an affirmation of worthiness, not as an admission of desperation.

Public housing, as a financial model and as a moralist reward mechanism, began with the explicit premise that tenants should be the working poor, rather than the neediest households. In Chicago, for example, the Chicago Housing Authority screened 28,000 families to find the 2,424 it selected for its first three projects. The Authority’s steps in investigating applicants included an office interview by a qualified social worker; verification of employment, clearance with Social Service Exchange, and police record; a home visit by an investigator experienced in home interviews; and a careful scoring of the applicant’s overall desirability as a tenant by a person well-qualified to weigh the accumulated facts. Above all, the Authority sought assurance that, while suitably low income, the family will be able to carry the rent in the project. Eschewing childless couples, except aged couples on pensions, the Authority gave preference to families with children who could provide evidence of thrift, good credit risk and [a] good employment record.²⁶

Chicago’s preferences for working-poor households seem typical of housing authorities nationwide during the 1930s and 1940s. Only in the 1950s, once demand for public housing from white working-class households dropped, did public housing authorities gradually relax their standards for admission and accept higher percentages of families on relief. Proponents of the early projects often claimed that they would reach—and reform—those of the lowest incomes, but the income requirements and screening processes required for admission meant that they never even came close to doing this. Given such policies and aspirations, it is hardly surprising that the new public housing accommodated very few of the slum dwellers purged to create it.

Across the country, the nascent housing authorities considered large numbers of low-income households to be too poor for public housing or otherwise undesirable as tenants. Armed with large staffs and the luxury to cull those among the poor and near-poor judged worthiest from among thousands of applicants, they assembled highly selective collectives. For example, with Boston’s first four prewar public housing projects, records show that between 50 and 80 percent of the site residents sought entry into the project that had