New Directions in Urban Public Housing

David Varady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351503228
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public housing is at a crossroads, buffeted by demographic, economic, and political winds. Privatization, rehabilitation, demolition, rent certificates and vouchers, tenant management, tenant ownership, resident empowerment: these are just some of the current and proposed policy initiatives that could change the face of urban public housing.In this book the nation's foremost housing policy experts explore the problems and identify solutions that will define the future of this essential housing sector. The contributors review the origins of public housing policy, probe the current policy climate, and anticipate new directions. Chapters are illustrated with case studies from Boston, Chicago, Decatur, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as the United Kingdom.The book contains sections addressing: historical perspectives, social issues, design issues, comprehensive approaches to public housing revitalization, and future directions. The contributors include: Alexander von Hoffman, Peter Marcuse, William Petersen, Leonard F. Heumann, Karen A. Franck, David M. Schnee, Gayle Epp, Lawrence J. Vale, Richard Best, Mary K. Nenno, Irving Welfeld, and James G. Stockard, Jr. This book should be read by all city planners, housing officials, and government personnel.

PART I

Historical Perspectives

ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN

1 High Ambitions: The Past and Future of American Low-Income Housing Policy

Introduction

This chapter explores the often unexamined assumptions that shape and delimit discussions about housing policy. Usually policy debate focuses on the efficacy of specific programs, but such debate, which often takes place in the midst of political struggles, leaves little time to examine the logic and philosophy that drive policy. To understand the underlying thinking behind American housing policy, the chapter examines the public housing program during the 1930s, the midlife of public housing in the 1950s, and the present situation.

The argument presented here is that the failures of public housing have been less in the area of housing (despite the well-publicized disasters of a minority of projects) than in the area of expectations. The disillusion, which has dogged the program, arose in large part from the high and idealistic ambitions of its proponents. The idealism of public housing advocates has often taken the form of environmental determinism, a belief that an ideal or improved residential environment will better the behavior as well as the condition of its inhabitants.

In the 1930s, advocates of the new federal public housing program hoped to cure the social ills of the city and aspired to rehouse up to two-thirds of the American people in European-style public housing projects that would eliminate slums forever. Although they established a public housing program, they were unable to escape political controversies over location of the projects, and their design innovations would later come back to haunt the program. After the passage of the Housing Act of 1949 created a much larger public housing program, visionaries attempted to help by placing the poor in high-rise buildings, an experiment that was soon deemed a disaster.

In the face of frustration and failure, housers reluctantly accepted that a single public housing program for the majority of Americans was unfeasible and abandoned the notion of introducing new architectural styles through low-income housing projects. Yet visionary idealism, in particular environmental determinism, persists in the housing movement. Today heterogeneous communities are latter-day versions of the public housing and high-rise environments that housers once believed would eradicate the evils of the slum. Thus, some contend that programs of mixed-income housing development, scattered-site public housing, and geographical dispersal of low-income families will achieve social betterment for the urban poor.

But the shattered dreams of the past are a warning that today’s popular housing policies are not panaceas. The future of public housing and related programs depends on setting goals that the movement can reasonably and readily address.

Early Public Housing Programs

The idea that living environments influence people’s lives has been a part of the housing movement from its earliest days. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, idealistic philanthropists and moral reformers attempted to solve problems related to the housing of the urban poor. They firmly believed that the slums of the city were a malevolent environment that threatened the safety, health, and morals of the poor who inhabited them. By clearing slums and convincing or coercing property owners to improve the housing in the slum, reformers hoped to create a better environment that would uplift the poor. By the time of the New Deal, housing reformers had accomplished the passage of stringent building regulations, the construction of dozens of model tenements and industrial villages, and, most important, the dissemination of the belief that housing reform was necessary to solve the social problems related to urban poverty (Birch and Gardner 1981; Cousineau 1989; Lubove 1962; Wright 1981).

The economic crisis of the Great Depression created a favorable climate for federal government intervention in the housing industry. The housing industry had been in recession since the late 1920s, unemployment rates reached painfully high levels, and many American homeowners could not make their mortgage payments. Overwhelmed by soaring demand for relief and by plummeting tax revenues, local governments could only look on helplessly. During the 1930s, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by propping up the financial system of credit that supported homeownership.¹

At the same time, Roosevelt’s New Deal programs intervened directly in the production and maintenance of housing for middle- and lower-class Americans. Besides the planning experiments of the Resettlement Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the government’s initial housing production program came as part of an employment program. When New Dealers and their congressional supporters drafted a jobs bill during the spring of 1933 to cope with the unemployment crisis, veteran housing reformers such as Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch and Edith Elmer Wood persuaded them to include provisions for slum clearance and low-income housing. The result was the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration (PWA). During a tenure that lasted until 1937, the PWA Housing Division built 51 public housing projects containing 21,800 dwelling units (Cole 1975; Keith 1973; McDonnell 1957; Straus and Wegg 1938).

Housing reformers were not satisfied with the PWA because they felt that it was a temporary agency committed to creating employment, not low-income housing. With the support of such groups as the American Federation of Labor and the National Conference of Catholic Charities, reformers lobbied successfully for the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937, which established the United States Housing Authority (USHA) and put public housing on a permanent footing in this country. The USHA had built 100,000 units in more than 140 cities by 1942 (when it was folded into the National Housing Authority) (Biles 1990; Keith 1973; McDonnell 1957).

Visionary goals inspired the advocates of New Deal public housing. As heirs to the environmentalism of the 19th century, the housers of the 1930s condemned the slum districts for breeding disease, delinquency, and crime and believed that the elimination of the slums would cure urban social ills. They argued that the government should fight the problems of the slums by providing good homes furnished with abundant light and air, sufficient space for privacy for family members, adequate plumbing, and adequate heating, at a cost that unskilled workers could afford (Bauer 1933, 1934b; Ford 1936; Walker 1938; Wood 1931).

Housing experiments in Europe and Britain inspired breathtaking ambitions in the leaders of the movement for public housing. Elizabeth Wood and the brilliant young writer Catherine Bauer, among others, envisioned a massive housing program that would house not just the working poor, but two-thirds of the American population. They believed that private enterprise constructed good homes only for families whose income placed them in the top third of the population. This view relegated those in the lowest income group to the dangerous slums and those in the middle income third to shoddy subdivisions that were frequently potential or incipient blighted slums. The audacious goal to house all but those in the luxury market exceeded both the popular understanding of the need for a housing program and the liberal agenda of political leaders such as PWA director Harold Ickes and President Roosevelt (Bauer 1934a; von Hoffman 1995; Wood 1931).

To create an environment antithetical to the urban slum, housers mixed American architectural traditions with European modernist styles that, for better or worse, gave public housing its distinctive image.² For decades, reformer architects had experimented with single-family houses planned in Garden City-style groupings (after the innovations of Unwin and Parker), perimeter apartment blocks, and garden apartment buildings. In the 1930s, Bauer and designers such as Henry Wright heralded recent European innovations in housing, applauding the streamlined functional-looking image championed by the modernist or international school. The modernist-oriented designers particularly celebrated the German Zeilenbau style, in which parallel rows of two- to four-story apartment buildings were aligned along an east-west orientation and situated in superblocks (large blocks that exceed standard city block sizes) (Bauer 1934a; Plunz 1990).

During the 1930s, public housing architects and officials fashioned the Zeilenbau style to American cities and created a mold for much subsequent public housing. Oscar Stonorov created an early prototype of the American Zeilenbau style at the Carl Mackley Houses, built from 1933 to 1934 in Philadelphia for the Hosiery Workers Union.³ His design softened the severe Zeilenbau lines of the apartment buildings with indentations and added American amenities such as courtyards, laundries, and parking garages (see figures 1.1 and 1.2) (Bauer 1934a; Bauman 1987; Plunz 1990; Pommer 1978; Sandeen 1985).

The aesthetic designs and amenities in some early public housing projected an image of superior housing, especially when compared with the old, dilapidated housing of the slum districts. Particularly good designs characterized, for example, Techwood Homes in Atlanta, a handsomely landscaped project that included parking garages and modern kitchens; Harlem River Houses, an attractive restatement of the garden apartment typology; and Lakeview Terrace in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Zeilenbau style was adapted to a sloping site above Lake Erie. These projects compared favorably with commercially produced apartment building complexes of the day (Architectural Forum 1938; Pommer 1978).

Many, perhaps most, of the first generation of public housing projects, however, fell short of these high architectural standards. The apartment blocks in developments such as Old Harbor Village in Boston, the Jane Addams Houses in Chicago (see figure 1.3), and Willert Park in Buffalo lacked the graceful doorways and roof lines and the varied landscaping found in the better-looking projects. Their interpretations of functional-looking modern design appeared austere rather than elegant. If mediocre in architectural terms, these projects were quite serviceable nonetheless and well appreciated by their communities and residents. A few projects such as Parklawn in Milwaukee, La Salle Place in Louisville, and Cheatham Place in Nashville resembled traditional domestic architecture. Adorned with familiar pitched roofs, doorways, and backyards, these intimately scaled one- and two-story row houses were more homey than many of the modernist projects (Architectural Forum 1938).

Whatever the quality and type of design, the idealistic planning principles used in all early public housing developments also helped endow them with the “project” identity that public housing would wear for decades afterward. To distinguish public housing complexes from the tawdry environment of the slums and to incorporate the community planning principles espoused by Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, and others, the government developments invariably were designed as discrete residential entities. By placing the housing complexes in superblocks, the designs separated them from surrounding streets and neighborhoods (Plunz 1990; Pommer 1978). The fact that the new housing developments were composed of apartments also contributed to the distinctive image of public housing. At the time, over three-quarters of all American families lived in single-family houses; public housing projects presented a contrast with the types of residences occupied by most Americans.

FIGURE 1.1
View of children’s wading pool, Carl Mackley Houses, Philadelphia, PA, W. Pope Barney, Architect

Source: Architectural Record 78(5), November 1935. Photograph by F. S. Lincoln. Copyright 1998 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Despite the deviations of public housing in type and appearance from other American homes, early academic research into the effects of public housing seemingly confirmed the principles of environmental determinism. Chapin (1940), for example, claimed that public housing actually improved the social behavior of the poor. However, his use of sophisticated mathematical analysis of survey data disguised methodological assumptions that were heavily biased toward the optimistic findings.

FIGURE 1.2
Plan, Carl Mackley Houses, Philadelphia, PA, W. Pope Barney, Architect

Source: Architectural Record 78(5), November 1935. Copyright 1998 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

The establishment of a public housing program in the United States was a remarkable achievement, but the vaulting ambitions of public housing’s supporters created pitfalls for the program. Location of the projects, for example, proved v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Historical Perspectives
• Part II. Social Issues
• Part III. Design Issues
• Part IV. Comprehensive Approaches to Public Housing Revitalization
• Part V. Future Directions
• Part VI. Epilogue
• Contributors
• Index