New Deal’s Legacy of Segregated Public Housing

See A New Look at the New Deal’s Legacy of Public Housing by RICHARD ROTHSTEIN. He reviews HIGH-RISERS: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing by Ben Austen. Excerpts:

"The Public Works Administration then built separate projects for white and black tenants. In communities as varied as Cambridge, Cleveland and Atlanta, its developments established segregation in neighborhoods that European immigrants and African-Americans had previously shared, mostly amicably. Later, when the federal government constructed housing for workers at World War II defense plants, these new quarters also required segregation.

After the war, veterans desperately needed lodging, so President Truman proposed new projects. Congressional conservatives, deeming public housing socialistic, resolved to defeat Truman’s 1949 legislation with a poison pill amendment banning racial discrimination in public housing. They expected that Northern liberal support would ensure its passage, and planned to subsequently ally with Southern Democrats to defeat the amended legislation.

Liberals mobilized against the integration amendment. Paul Douglas, a leading liberal senator from Illinois, urged: “I should like to point out to my Negro friends what a large amount of housing they will get under this act. … I am ready to appeal to history and to time that it is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing program as planned, rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it.” Douglas succeeded in persuading his Northern Democratic colleagues, the amendment was defeated, and the Housing Act passed, including permission to discriminate."

"Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes. Located where African-American poverty was already concentrated, the Chicago high rises replaced barely habitable slum dwellings — wood-frame firetraps frequently without plumbing, heat or adequate sanitation. Yet the projects’ racial isolation came at a price, solidifying ghettos where our most serious social problems — unemployment, violence, confrontations with the police, inadequate student achievement, multigenerational poverty — fester to this day."

"With public housing racially isolated, other policies — some misguided but well intentioned, others indefensible — exacerbated the dysfunction. Austen notes that long waiting lists for relatively few units left poor applicants without other options for safe lodging. Compassionate officials addressed the predicament by lowering the income cutoff to qualify for public housing. The Chicago Housing Authority then made space for the poor by evicting working-class families for whom the projects were initially designed. The authority’s executive director told them, “Be proud to move out, so that a lower-income family can have the advantage that you have had.”"

"the policy created a disincentive to marry, because a husband’s wages might render a family ineligible to remain in its home. The result was the segregation of projects by race and by income, concentrating fatherless young men who not only had little access to legitimate employment but lacked working-class role models who knew how to search for it. In the early 1950s, the median income of Chicago’s public housing residents was nearly two-thirds of the citywide average. By 1970, it was barely one-third.Initially, Cabrini-Green hired residents as maintenance workers. But perversely, when income cutoffs were lowered, holding such jobs made tenants ineligible to remain. With residents themselves no longer responsible for maintenance, projects deteriorated. And with projects now filled with the politically powerless, and with revenue from rent payments falling, government slashed maintenance budgets and turned high rises into slums."

"The alternatives Paul Douglas faced — either segregated housing or none at all — were not the only possibilities. We as a society could have dispersed low-income families across less dense public projects throughout metropolitan areas. We could have preserved diversity of income and race; many working-class white families, especially returning war veterans, needed apartments in the 1950s and would have preferred heterogenous housing developments to living with their in-laws. Many employed white veterans did initially live in public housing, only to abandon it for single-family homes in racially restricted suburbs, thanks to attractive federal mortgage terms."