Abstract
The four contributors to “Thinking through Urban Renewal” are to be commended for encouraging students and scholars of U.S. cities to examine the theories, attitudes, and assumptions of those who influenced the policy making and implementation process. Historian Samuel Zipp identified “reformers, social workers, urban businessmen, politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and urban professionals of various kinds—usually architects and city planners” as the primary contributors to the “ethic of city rebuilding” that prevailed during the early twentieth century. Urban historians would be well to remember and acknowledge that workers too contributed to the intellectual and political underpinnings of urban renewal. 1
Labor shaped both of the “sources of the ethic of city rebuilding,” which Zipp discusses: the “social reform movement called ‘modern housing’ and the pursuit of slum clearance.” In 1914, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) recommended the creation of a federal program to make low-interest loans available for the construction of affordable, “sanitary” housing for wage-earners, but did little to make it a reality. During the Great War, the Committee on Labor of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense convinced Congress of the need to appropriate funds for housing for workers in shipbuilding, munitions, and other defense industries. The communities financed by the U.S. Shipping Board’s Emergency Fleet Corporation and built by the U.S. Department of Labor’s U.S. Housing Corporation were widely admired for their Colonial Revival architecture, Garden City–inspired site planning, and the quality of construction. The AFL warned that the war workers’ towns would “fall into the hands of speculators” unless Congress and President Warren G. Harding endorsed a plan put forth by architects and reformers to sell them to the residents on a cooperative basis. 2
During the housing boom of the mid-1920s when home ownership for wage-earners was promoted by the Better Homes campaign with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the AFL warned workers to use caution before agreeing to undertake a home mortgage. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America took advantage of a 1926 bill passed by the State of New York offering a period of tax exemption to not-for-profit corporations that built low-cost housing. The union’s privately funded cooperative projects in New York City—including a Bronx apartment complex and a slum-clearance project on the Lower East Side—became models and inspirations for other labor groups around the United States, but none proved capable of duplicating their success.
Labor’s efforts to foster the growth of the noncommercial market by funding its own initiatives or collaborating with philanthropic organizations during the 1920s and 1930s produced few units of housing nationwide. In 1932 with housing construction brought to a near standstill by the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover backed the passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, allowing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to make loans to limited-dividend corporations for the construction of housing. The RFC program proved to be no boon to unions unable to obtain the funds needed to build nonprofit housing for workers.
The AFL backed the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 because slum clearance and the construction of low-cost housing was conceived of as part of a larger program of public works that would create jobs and help improve living conditions for low- and middle-income workers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal advisers regarded unions and their members as participants in the process of planning, building, and administering publicly funded community developments. When the Division of Housing of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works provided a long-term, low-interest loan to a limited-dividend housing development corporation created by the Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers for the construction of Philadelphia’s Carl Mackley Houses, reformer Catherine Bauer described the program as “for, of, and by Workers.” 3
Bauer, who co-founded the Labor Housing Conference in 1934, traveled to union halls to help workers convince elected officials of the need to make permanent the low-income public housing program created on a temporary basis under the Public Works Administration. The AFL and its rival offshoot, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), joined with secular and nonsecular civic and social advancement organizations to secure passage of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. The CIO’s Housing Committee fought vigorously for the creation of United States Housing Authority (USHA) and its low-income public housing program, but opposed the slum clearance provisions in the Wagner-Steagall Act because its members were convinced that tearing down dwellings “only aggravates the shortage.” 4
When the President signed the Lanham Act into law in October 1940, labor’s united forces could claim credit for forcing Congress to provide funding for housing for the civilian employees of defense contractors. During the defense phase of the Lanham program when the CIO’s political and economic influence was at its peak, union members worked with officials from the Federal Works Agency (FWA) and the world’s foremost architects, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Clarence Stein, to build a series of “modern housing” communities that were intended to serve as models or starting points for postwar urban renewal and revitalization. One group of these pilot project communities located in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas was earmarked for sale to the residents on terms of a mutual home ownership plan. In September 1941, Walter Reuther, the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW) leader, was so inspired by the mutual home concept that he requested President Roosevelt to authorize the use of Lanham Act funds to build a model city to be cooperatively owned by ten thousand Willow Run Bomber plant workers. Reuther envisioned his proposed “Defense City” as the starting point and model for the postwar revitalization of Detroit and other aging industrial cities. 5
Labor encouraged National Housing Administrator John B. Blandford to use the lessons learned under the New Deal and Lanham programs to inform and guide him in the development of plans to rebuild and economically and socially revitalize U.S. cities when the war ended. Blandford, who sought the approval of real estate investors and home builders, did not regard the communities developed during the Roosevelt years that promoted noncommercial housing for low- and middle-income wage-earners and utilized a participatory approach to community planning as models or starting points for postwar urban renewal. Although its influence to promote modernist cooperative housing waned with the creation of the National Housing Agency in 1942 and the departure of many of the old-line New Dealers, labor continued to shape housing and urban renewal policy in the postwar and Cold War eras.