Abstract
This forum arose from a discussion among several historians about their reactions to the special section in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of Urban History called Thinking through Urban Renewal and especially to Samuel Zipp’s essay, “The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal.” When JUH editor David Goldfield learned of the discussion, he offered to publish responses in a forum and invited me to serve as coordinator. Six urban historians—Christopher Klemek, Jennifer Light, Jon Teaford, Suleiman Osman, Gail Radford, and Kristin Szylvian—volunteered to present their thoughts in the following JUH forum.
All of the historians involved in the discussion are grateful to Sandy Zipp for taking up the challenge of tracing the history of urban renewal and, with his co-editor, Michael Carriere, for bringing together the issue’s illuminating studies of urban renewal.
Leaving the distinguished forum contributors to make their own arguments, I will try to make the case that that the history of urban renewal is more complex than Zipp suggests.
Zipp begins his essay, “The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal,” by connecting the policy of slum clearance to social reformers. This raises an intriguing question: Why would social reformers support demolishing the homes of people they were trying to help? Zipp agrees with the scholars of social reform who stress the importance of the belief in environmental influence.
I heartily concur and would also point to reformers’ ambivalent attitudes toward the inhabitants of the hated tenements. Some pessimistic Progressive-era tenement reformers considered eugenics as a solution to the problem of the urban lower classes. Both in the original public housing development in the 1930s and the recent redevelopment of public housing started in the 1990s, as Lawrence Vale has recently shown, animosity towards the poor was a prime factor in slum clearance. Racial biases influenced slum clearance plans so frequently that African American leaders derided the urban renewal program as “Negro removal.” 1
The other intellectual source of urban renewal, Zipp argues, is what he calls “modern housing.” Much as I admire Zipp’s wide-ranging explorations of the ideas of European modernist architects, his argument does not always appreciate the important differences between housing advocates. It seems odd, for example, to lump together Lawrence Veiller, the champion of housing codes and a die-hard opponent of public housing, with Edith Elmer Wood and Mary Simkhovitch, leaders of the social-work wing of the public housing movement who opposed and eventually surpassed Veiller in political influence.
Even more jarring are Zipp’s references to the writer Lewis Mumford as a leader of the movement for public housing in the United States. Although he avidly supported public housing as a component of regional planning, the intellectual Mumford played the role of bystander in the making of housing policy during the New Deal. In contrast, Mumford’s former protégé Catherine Bauer literally wrote the book on Modern Housing (1934) and almost single-handedly organized labor support for the public housing bill (Wagner-Steagall Act of 1937), which she helped draft. Numerous other proponents—Wood, Simkhovitch, Monsignor John O’Grady, Ernest Bohn, John Edelman, Boris Shishkin, Leon Keyserling, and Charles Abrams, to name only some—were more important than Mumford in establishing the public housing program. 2
Urban historians should also recognize differing points of view within the planning and housing fields. From the first national conference of city planning in 1909, for example, social reformers such as Simkhovitch fought—unsuccessfully—against comprehensive physical planners, led by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., to impose a social agenda on the young planning profession. By the 1930s, many housing and planning reformers believed in planning small communities as opposed to simply producing large numbers of dwelling units. Although these ideals seeped into plans for New York's public housing, it seems a stretch to say that the New York City Housing Authority designers refined Clarence Perry’s proposed neighborhood unit—with its schools, stores, churches, and parks—by building monolithic high-density residential towers on superblocks. 3
I also doubt that Leon Keyserling’s Keynesian proposal of 1946 played a great role in thinking about postwar urban redevelopment. As many historians have shown, representatives of the real estate industry provided the impulse and political push for a federal urban redevelopment program, which they delayed until 1949 by insisting that public housing be excluded from legislation. Significantly, the redefinition of the program in 1954 as “urban renewal” reduced the requirements for any housing component in redevelopment plans, which often called for commercial complexes, office buildings, and civic centers. Thus, although some housing reformers embraced slum clearance and urban renewal, the intellectual and political evolution of urban renewal extends beyond the history of housing, modern or otherwise. 4