“Dominant Decision-Making Authority”: Resident Leadership in St. Louis,Missouri,Model Cities Planning 1

The War on Poverty and the Creation of Model Cities

Model Cities was one of the most important (though certainly not the best-remembered) of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. To improve life for 40 million Americans living in poverty, in 1964, President Johnson created the OEO to develop programs for poor communities in urban centers, Appalachia, Indian reservations, and migrant labor communities. ⁹ The OEO’s CAP funded neighborhood organizations to run their own antipoverty programs, giving residents in some places a high degree of control over individual antipoverty initiatives. But many mayors disliked that CAPs bypassed established municipal institutions, and federal officials worried they could not adequately control these resident-run projects. In addition, CAPs’ separation from city government meant that these stand-alone programs did not have the potential to substantially influence local government priorities. ¹⁰ The creators of Model Cities consequently tried to maintain the citizen participation of CAPs while also requiring that resident groups function within a local government structure.

In addition to improving the antipoverty delivery mechanisms of CAPs, Model Cities was designed explicitly to alter New Deal–era policies that disadvantaged cities in relation to suburban development and correct two decades of federal urban renewal projects that often bulldozed working-class neighborhoods. ¹¹ As the first large initiative run by the newly created HUD, “the Model Cities proposal provided the substance for a dramatic announcement with which to launch the new Department, proof that the establishment of HUD was to signal the creation of a generation of new impulses to deal with the challenge of urbanization and housing.” ¹² The Model Cities legislation was therefore the cornerstone of HUD’s contribution to the War on Poverty, and the program called for “demonstration projects [to] show that massive programs of social services and physical reconstruction or rehabilitation, planned and carried out with the continuing participation of residents of the affected areas, can revitalize the cores of our cities.” ¹³ In St. Louis, the Model Cities target area covered 1,664 acres North and West of downtown, encompassing 4 percent of the city’s land. In the mid-1960s, it was home to a population of 73,533, about three-quarters of whom were nonwhite. ¹⁴ Five subneighborhoods served as the basis for resident organizing: Yeatman, Montgomery-Hyde Park, Murphy-Blair, Carr-Central, and Pruitt-Igoe. ¹⁵ Compared with the city as a whole, the area had twice the population density, twice the unemployment rate, and twice as many substandard housing units. ¹⁶

The Model Cities legislation called for large grants given to a small number of cities (the number of cities was expanded to 150 during congressional debates). ¹⁷ The problems with earlier antipoverty and urban planning efforts, the program’s creators argued, were inadequate funding and a lack of coordination. Previously, “every program of Federal aid to the cities has approached a single problem with a single weapon. They operated side by side—usually indifferent to each other, sometimes even in conflict with each other.” ¹⁸ The goal of Model Cities was for municipalities to experiment with new methods of comprehensive planning to craft coordinated programs that attacked urban poverty from interrelated angles, including physical redevelopment, education, employment, the arts, and health care. By funding a city agency to coordinate these efforts, the hope was that Model Cities would show that a total attack on the causes and effects of poverty could substantially upgrade the physical and social landscape in a struggling urban neighborhood. As methods for improving neighborhoods gained efficacy, the program could be expanded to more neighborhoods and cities.

Citizen participation, though it did not feature prominently in the congressional debates, was foundational to Model Cities. The federal task force that designed the program explained, “the civil rights movement and the administration of [CAPs] have contributed a new element to city politics: the mobilization of the poor to petition their government. As the poor have asserted themselves in the political marketplace,” they concluded, “more and more attention has been paid to their needs.” ¹⁹ Conscious of the political backlash CAPs were facing with citizen participation, the task force believed, “the experience of CAP should be analyzed and the effectiveness of the various citizen participation schemes judged.” ²⁰ Therefore, from its earliest stages, Model Cities was to be a program that took resident involvement in urban planning seriously, and it was designed specifically to improve the War on Poverty’s citizen participation started through CAPs. Sargent Shriver, head of the OEO, testified that “we have stimulated the application of the democratic process to the problems of the poor [and the Model] Cities Program now before Congress can make a major contribution in this direction.” ²¹ Like Shriver, the creators of Model Cities saw citizen participation as a necessary adjustment to the democratic process, explaining, “city-wide citizen participation should be the ultimate expression of a community organized according to democratic principles.” Furthermore, the task force asserted, “citizen participation is the key to transforming the fears and resentment of the past into positive community action.” ²² Residents’ opposition to urban renewal eventually resonated with federal officials, convincing them to mandate representation of the poor in urban planning. Through Model Cities, HUD employed strong citizen participation rhetoric in an effort to ensure that urban War on Poverty programs were responses to the needs of the poor and not opportunities for business leaders and middle-class homeowners.

Even in the earliest stages of Model Cities, poor residents saw the potential difference between Model Cities and urban renewal. One black resident in Oakland, California, explained, “no longer can some cat who lives on top of the hill come down here just eight hours a day and make plans for the people who live here with the rats and roaches and the mosquitoes and the mice.” He concluded, “It’s a new turnabout. We are planning for ourselves in West Oakland. We are letting them know what we want and expecting them to help us get it.” ²³ This man envisioned citizen participation in the War on Poverty as a transfer of power. Residents would decide their neighborhood’s priorities, and the municipal government and federal Model Cities officials were responsible for helping residents attain their goals. HUD’s inclusion of this resident’s statement in its official administrative history showed not just the department’s acceptance of citizen participation, but also the concept of citizen control. Throughout the Johnson administration, HUD officials vocally championed citizen participation as an important component that would determine the success of Model Cities.

About two weeks before the Model Cities grant winners were announced, HUD published a series of booklets to clarify what they were looking for in the Model Cities comprehensive plans. Community Development Agency Letter No. 3 dealt with citizen participation and put resident control of Model Cities into motion. ²⁴ HUD explained,

the concern with citizen participation is that in too many cities the customary institutions . . . of representative government seem sometimes unable to identify the serious problems of many citizens—as citizens define them—and accordingly fail to enlist them in problem-solving. ²⁵

HUD officials admitted that existing representative governmental structures were not allowing poor residents a voice in governance, so new democratic tactics of citizen planning were being put into place. HUD argued that citizen voices were needed to make urban planning more responsive to the needs of the poor. When the recipients of Model Cities were announced in fall 1967, their charge was to ramp up citizen participation to extend democratic representation to poor urban residents. In St. Louis, Model Cities residents saw these guidelines as a chance to infiltrate the government institutions that in the past had not worked for the poor and to make a bid for permanent power in city planning.

The Citizen Participation Structure in St. Louis’s Model Cities

Federally funded neighborhood organizing through the OEO was underway before Model Cities arrived, giving civil rights-minded residents access to federal money and resources. ²⁶ While each neighborhood organization chose somewhat different bylaws, they all used the concept of participatory democracy and shared the goal of maximizing citizen participation. These values were made explicit in the organizations’ articles of incorporation. ²⁷ For example, membership in the Yeatman District Community Corporation was open to all area residents over eighteen, and community members worked together to write the Model Cities plans. Each member had one vote in the general assembly. The Yeatman Corporation estimated that 14 percent of the neighborhood’s residents were members of their organization. ²⁸ The Montgomery-Hyde Park Neighborhood Corporation, which began in 1965 and was incorporated two years later, boasted a membership of five hundred residents. ²⁹ Over half of the Yeatman organization’s elected board of directors had to meet the OEO’s definition of indigence, showing the Corporation aimed to represent the true character of the neighborhood. ³⁰ With OEO funds, neighborhood groups gained experience running antipoverty programs. For example, the OEO gave Montgomery-Hyde Park residents $101,000 to rehabilitate houses on a section of Mullanphy Street that would become part of the Model Cities target area. In St. Louis and elsewhere, residents transferred their experience working within OEO programs to their bids for control in Model Cities. ³¹

The St. Louis government eagerly anticipated Model Cities. Mayor Alfonso Cervantes lobbied for the bill’s passage in Congress, and his early association with the program helped him understand the emphasis on resident leadership in Model Cities. Mayor Cervantes’s relationship with model neighborhood residents was complicated. A legal aid attorney recalled that “residents basically disliked him intensely” because they did not believe improving residents’ living conditions was a priority for him. Yet, they forged a tense working relationship with City Hall to control Model Cities planning. Facing pressure from federal guidelines and civil rights-minded residents, Cervantes consented to a resident-dominated planning process. ³² Citizen dominance in St. Louis Model Cities came through two entities: the Model Cities executive board and five neighborhood organizations corresponding to each of the subneighborhoods in the target area. ³³

Sitting on the executive board were residents, the director of St. Louis’s newly created Model City Agency (MCA), and several other city officials including aldermen and MCA staff. The purpose of the executive board was “to review all major decisions made by the planners of the Agency and by the neighborhood planning groups.” ³⁴ The executive board voted to approve contracts and proposals the MCA and neighborhood organizations wrote before they could be submitted for aldermanic and federal review.

At first, only three residents were to be executive board members, but neighborhood leaders’ objections yielded an increase in resident seats. In a Model Cities committee on resident involvement, “a general discussion revealed that the citizens were not satisfied by . . . the manner in which the Executive Board . . . was appointed.” ³⁵ A recently organized black rights coalition that included black power, civil rights, and resident groups called for “a new board [to] be selected by residents of the Model City target area.” Called the Black United Front, member organizations included the local Congress of Racial Equality, Urban League, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapters; the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood organization; the Ministerial Alliance; and a Pruitt-Igoe-based youth organization. The coalition was created after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The group submitted fifteen demands of the mayor, two of which pertained directly to Model Cities (creating a new executive board whose membership was dominated by target-area residents and waiving the civil service examination for MCA employees so that more residents could work directly for the MCA). Their inclusion of demands for resident control of Model Cities indicated black activists’ belief that Model Cities could be an avenue to increased power in the municipal government. ³⁶

By May 1968, these problems were being resolved. A resident-written newsletter explained, “with increased citizen representation on the executive board, the residents of the Model City neighborhoods will have greater power over the decision making within the Model City agency.” ³⁷ Each model neighborhood organization submitted candidates to the mayor, who then chose two executive board members from each neighborhood. ³⁸ Having ten resident board members ensured that over half of the board lived in the target area, giving residents de facto veto power. The board was a vehicle for residents to express satisfaction or disapproval with municipal and federal decisions regarding Model Cities. During board meetings, they continually questioned how many jobs were going to model neighborhood residents and blocked proposals that contradicted the citizen-authored comprehensive plans. ³⁹ Although resident power eventually decreased in other aspects of St. Louis’s Model Cities structure, neighbors dominated the executive board for its entire existence. The board lobbied loudly to make resident plans and leadership the highest priority.

Resident board members were legitimate representatives of their community, not allies of the mayor. Eugene Porter was a machine mechanic who was active in St. Louis’s NAACP branch, as well as a number of other local organizations. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1930, Porter used the GI Bill to attend college for two years. He lived in the Pruitt-Igoe neighborhood. John Fedrick, another board member, was a post office employee who had lived in the Yeatman neighborhood for fifteen years. He attended school through eleventh grade and for a short period studied accounting. He first got involved with his resident organization by volunteering for a neighborhood beautification committee. ⁴⁰ A third executive board member, a white man named William Faulkner, was a self-employed repairman in his late fifties with strong church ties. He attended school through sixth grade and lived in the neighborhood for forty years. ⁴¹ A social worker who worked closely with Faulkner in the Murphy-Blair area recalled that he was a “charismatic neighbor” who could often be found sitting on his porch talking casually with passersby. Each executive board member was also active in his or her neighborhood’s Model Cities organization. ⁴² Based on education level and job security, these men were probably somewhat better off financially than many of their neighbors. But their commitment to community empowerment and resident control in Model Cities was unwavering. ⁴³

A Model Cities–funded neighborhood publication called The Model City Voice served as a mouthpiece for residents’ visions for their neighborhood. Initiated in May 1968, just as resident planning was ramping up, the first issue of The Model City Voice explained that the purpose of the publication was to promote dialogue between the MCA staff and residents. MCA employees vocally supported funding The Model City Voice, indicating that the MCA was eager to cultivate citizen leadership. Each issue featured articles written by staff and residents to facilitate a two-way flow of information. Regular columns included news for each subneighborhood and a back-page article on black history, all written by residents. The MCA printed 18,000 copies of each issue, and the publication had a $958 monthly budget. Residents in the five subneighborhoods were hired to distribute the newsletters. The editor encouraged resident reporters to interview neighborhood corporation chairmen to get the most up-to-date news. ⁴⁴

The newsletter revealed residents’ skepticism toward the new federal program. In its inaugural issue, The Model City Voice dedicated a lengthy article to answering residents’ frequent questions regarding Model Cities. To the question, “other people have always made the decisions about how money should be spent in my neighborhood. How can I be sure they won’t do the same in the Model City program, in spite of what you say about neighborhood planning?” the resident-written article responded, “there is no way to guarantee residents the right to make all the decisions.” The article also clarified, “the Model City Agency in St. Louis plans to help residents have a greater voice in these decisions than they have had in the past. The agency will do this by granting money to neighborhood resident organizations.” The publication made sure to highlight the very different intent of the Model Cities process: “the Model City planning professionals will advise residents, instead of the other way around, as has been the case in the past.” ⁴⁵ Likely, these explanations were not just for the benefit of skeptical residents, but also a clear message to the city and federal government: St. Louis residents understood Model Cities as a citizen-run program, so their involvement hinged on real neighborhood control.

Emphasis on resident control also reflected the aims of the larger civil rights movement, and neighborhood corporations took pride in their direct links to the black freedom struggle. Their tactics varied, but each organization remained committed to resident autonomy. ⁴⁶ Some resident organizations tended toward the nonviolent direct action of Martin Luther King. The Jeff-Vander-Lou resident organization, which carried out housing programs in the Yeatman neighborhood, highlighted the connections between civil rights activism and their organization. Macler Shepard, who founded the group, had two years earlier led a march from his neighborhood to police headquarters “following the police shooting of a black youth in a schoolyard.” ⁴⁷ Judy Miller, a white Mennonite who lived and worked in Jeff-Vander-Lou during Model Cities, remembered, “he picked it up himself, but he believed the way that Martin Luther [King] tried to get things different.” ⁴⁸

However, some neighborhood organizations embraced tactics associated with Black Power. Montgomery-Hyde Park’s newsletter profiled one of their corporation’s members, Clara Davy, praising her direct, outspoken communication style and touting her experience in civil rights and black radical groups. The article characterized Davy as having “been plunged into the center of the black revolution” and mentioned her membership in the Congress of Racial Equality. The story explained, “this activity only makes her leadership in the Neighborhood Corporation even more impressive, for here clearly is a person who is not a middle-of-the-roader, a compromiser, but a fierce and unyielding fighter.” The publication proudly concluded, “the fact that she has found the corporation a promising place to carry on the struggle gives us all a richer hope for the future.” ⁴⁹ Montgomery-Hyde Park characterized Davy’s civil rights work as an effort to further a black revolution, showing that the corporation’s main agenda was to represent and improve their neighborhood, not make an alliance with City Hall. Montgomery-Hyde Park also allied their neighborhood organization with the Black Liberators, a local Black Power group similar to the Black Panthers. Although the Black Liberators were not officially associated with Model Cities, they were willing to collaborate with neighborhood organizations. ⁵⁰ They were interested in Montgomery-Hyde Park’s anticrime efforts, offering their members to serve as neighborhood patrolmen. ⁵¹ In turn, Montgomery-Hyde Park’s neighborhood corporation reported, “residents found themselves quite active in the Coalition formed after . . . incidents of brutality against the Black Liberators.” ⁵² Even in mid-1969, a year into Model Cities funding and long after resident leaders expressed vocal skepticism regarding municipal and federal officials, resident organizations remained steadfast in their commitment that their organizations would both be legitimate representations of their communities and adhere to civil rights principles. Furthermore, despite political and tactical differences between Jeff-Vander-Lou and Montgomery-Hyde Park, they remained in conversation and worked together in Model Cities. Judy Miller recalled, “it was unusual at that time when there were so many firebrands. But for some reason people respected [Macler Shepard] enough to listen to him.” ⁵³ Neighborhood organizations cultivated a loyal following, enabling them to force the city government to contend with their organizations’ interests.

By operating as autonomous organizations and developing power bases of their own, neighborhood corporations were in a position to partner with municipal institutions to change local government from within. The Jeff-Vander-Lou organization expressed this desire to remain autonomous from, yet connected to, city government. A press release stated, “Jeff-Vander-Lou, while seeking self-determination, recognizes that it is not separate, but an integral part of the city.” ⁵⁴ Jeff-Vander-Lou exemplified how neighborhood corporations viewed their relationship to the city government. They wanted to retain autonomy while becoming a crucial actor in official city planning. They embraced the concept of being both outside and connected to the government power structure. Doing so, they hoped, would change government institutions from the inside while maintaining residents’ independence. They wanted to shift urban planning away from relying on professional experts whose urban renewal initiatives favored economic opportunities for the middle class and toward a model of racial equality in which resident groups had real power in city planning. They hoped to do so through their neighborhood corporations that had official leadership roles and power in Model Cities planning.

Neighborhood leaders offered a clear argument for why residents should control urban redevelopment money. In June 1968, Montgomery-Hyde Park’s chairman, Dr. Bobby Westbrooks, gave an interview in which he articulated the logic of resident authority. When asked “what happened to the experts,” Westbrooks responded,

They’re around, anytime you want to talk about professionals and experts, you can look at Pruitt-Igoe. That 36-million dollar mistake they made. It took a woman with six children one hour to figure out that Pruitt-Igoe was built all wrong. I don’t think the city has learned yet, because they are still building high-rises with no facilities, no play areas and I don’t think the experts and professionals are going to learn. So it is time for the non-professionals, the citizens, the residents to teach these people the things that need to be done for us and I hope that the federal government is committed to this philosophy. ⁵⁵

Here, as happened many times throughout Model Cities, a resident pointed out how easy it was for poor people to recognize ill-conceived urban design. In exposing the follies of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, Westbrooks challenged the authority of professional planners, asserting the need for a different kind of expert: one whose experience was rooted in the lived reality of decades of urban planning that ignored the needs of cities’ most vulnerable populations.

Through neighborhood organizations, the resident-dominated executive board, and The Model City Voice, by spring 1968, residents had gained enough leverage to convince the city that neighborhood corporations should take the lead in planning for the first year of Model Cities. Citizen participation expert and HUD official Sherry Arnstein found that St. Louis attained the highest degree of citizen participation possible in Model Cities: dominant decision-making authority. Along with a small number of cities such as Dayton, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Arnstein explained that St. Louis “citizens hold the significant cards to assure accountability of the program to them.” ⁵⁶ Municipal and federal officials may not have been able to foresee the ways in which resident plans would deviate from conventional urban renewal, but by the time these differences became apparent, residents had already completed their comprehensive plans and submitted them to HUD as St. Louis’s Model Cities application. Their plans embodied their vision for achieving the goals of the War on Poverty: through a partnership between autonomous resident groups and conventional municipal institutions, Model Cities could simultaneously improve residents’ physical surroundings and economic opportunities.

Resident Planning in St. Louis’s Model Neighborhoods

After months of negotiations, on April 4, 1968, HUD released $21,000 for neighborhood planning, and St. Louis divided this money between the five model neighborhood corporations. ⁵⁷ At last, with these limited funds, the residents set out on a summer of passionate, idealistic, and creative planning for their neighborhoods. Neighborhood corporations used the money to pay for residents’ transportation to planning meetings, purchase office supplies, hire planners and consultants, and host social events. ⁵⁸ Each neighborhood attempted at every turn to make sure their comprehensive plans represented the will of the community. The documents the neighborhood organizations created served for years as the primary expression of residents’ visions for themselves and their community.

Resident activists had a heavy burden in writing their comprehensive neighborhood plans. They had to simultaneously establish themselves as legitimate representatives of their community and convince municipal and federal officials that their plans were up to the caliber of professional experts. The plans needed to show signs of experimentation along with evidence that programs would be successful. Furthermore, they had to maintain resident autonomy while also proving that their vision aligned with municipal planning goals that had in the past destroyed poor and black communities. ⁵⁹ By August 1968, all five neighborhood corporations submitted proposals and budget estimates for their programs.

To establish that the neighborhood corporations’ comprehensive plans reflected the will of the community, residents detailed how the neighborhood corporations operated. They emphasized that the organizations aimed to be accurate representations of the residents they served. The Montgomery-Hyde Park proposal explained that “even . . . as the final plans were being shaped, effort was extended to seek out more resident participation. The newsletter spewed out, contact workers pounded the streets and ideas buzzed back and forth like mosquitoes.” ⁶⁰ The organization continued publishing its newsletter and soliciting new members and opinions. The Yeatman District Community Corporation explained, “the planning process culminated in an intensive series of committee meetings and Corporation mass meetings at which the final decisions were made—BY THE PEOPLE MOST AFFECTED” (emphasis in original). ⁶¹ The introduction to the Murphy-Blair proposal boasted that 550 residents participated in planning the proposal. ⁶²

The neighborhood corporations operated through a system of subcommittees that crafted specific proposals for housing, job creation and training, education, welfare, health, and recreation. Each neighborhood organization then discussed the committee proposals and voted on their final versions. In some cases, a subcommittee would submit multiple proposals for organization members to debate and vote on. ⁶³ The neighborhood corporations maintained their democratic planning until their comprehensive proposals were ready for submission. In mid-July 1968, the Carr-Central Neighborhood Corporation met so that each committee chairman could present their component’s plan, and formatting for the final document could be discussed. The next week, committees gave final presentations, the corporation confirmed each program’s budget, residents discussed alternatives, and they voted on the entire package. ⁶⁴ In about three months, each neighborhood corporation submitted its comprehensive plan to the MCA executive board and the Board of Aldermen.

To bolster their legitimacy in the eyes of municipal and federal officials, resident authors explained that while the proposals were compiled in a hurry, they were the culmination of years of organizing efforts. ⁶⁵ Montgomery-Hyde Park explained, “the committees were awaiting the promised money and staff assistance from Model Cities before they really got into it.” However,

by spring . . . the committee members, increasingly aware of the fast-approaching deadline, realized that they had better not wait for help from Model Cities; what planning was going to get done, they were going to do on their own. ⁶⁶

Residents understood that they could not rely on the federal and local government to get things done on time. Furthermore, their statement indicated that the corporation was anticipating the possible criticism that residents’ proposals were made too hastily to be taken seriously by city and federal officials. Even though it was the federal government that had delayed funding and made the quick planning necessary, the resident plans highlighted that their speedy work came after years of analyzing problems in their neighborhoods. Taken together, the neighborhood organizations’ proposals showed that residents had keen understandings of problems in their communities, their causes, and methods for addressing them.

Residents developed relationships with private entities to get assistance on their plans. Each of the neighborhood groups partnered with private or nonprofit firms who sent “advocate planners” to support the residents. The proposals did not indicate serious tensions between the neighborhood organizations and the firms providing professional assistance. The Montgomery-Hyde Park proposal explained, “a rough draft of the entire plan was reviewed by professional consultants from St. Louis University’s Center for Urban Programs, and detailed, point-by-point suggestions were reviewed by the committees and in some cases incorporated directly into the plan.” ⁶⁷ Yeatman’s proposal similarly referenced an advocate-planner consulting firm while also insisting that “this proposal represents the needs and desires of the residents . . . surveys, committee hearings, and mass meetings were some of the devices used to achieve resident participation.” ⁶⁸ Residents who wrote the proposals made it clear that they believed their plans were an accurate representation of neighborhood desires and needs. Therefore, residents insisted on their expertise while recognizing they needed help writing a proposal the city and federal governments would find acceptable.

If the proposals revealed little tension between residents and advocate planners, the same cannot be said of the relationship between neighborhood organizations and the Model Cities bureaucracy. Residents highlighted the strain between their neighborhood corporations and the city. Yeatman residents, for example, began with an optimistic declaration that “the members of our corporation . . . feel that a strong step forward has been taken in fulfilling the hopes the Model City program has nurtured,” but quickly shifted to a statement revealing skepticism regarding the MCA’s ability to follow through: “the need now is for some concrete, visible signs of implementation . . . we are anxious and ready to take the next step in the program and wait only for further direction from the Model City Agency.” ⁶⁹ Carr-Central’s proposal pushed further, saying the proposal should “be recognized for what it is: a summary of needs long denied the people of this area, and a strategy for meeting these needs effectively and efficiently.” Furthermore, the proposal warned, “the hopes of the people have never been raised so high as they are now because of our recent efforts. However, faith in orderly, systematic planning can be maintained only if the plan is studied and funded without undue delay.” ⁷⁰ The residents suggested that if the municipal and federal governments refused to follow the residents’ plan, the city should expect protests or uprisings similar to what was being seen in urban areas around the country.

Asserting Autonomy: Residents’ Comprehensive Plans

The proposals varied in terms of length, aesthetics, and level of detail. Montgomery-Hyde Park and Yeatman’s proposals were almost one hundred pages and included detailed budgets and descriptions of programs. Four of the five proposals were submitted as large stapled packets. Murphy-Blair’s, in contrast, was professionally printed on blue and white paper and included illustrations on every page. Each neighborhood corporation submitted a proposal that outlined residents’ views of problems facing their neighborhood and programs to alleviate these issues in the realms of physical redevelopment, recreation, employment, welfare, education, health, safety, and municipal services. These proposals revealed residents’ analysis of the causes of poverty in their neighborhoods, as well as methods for easing suffering and reducing indigence over the long term. They were poor residents’ plans for fighting the War on Poverty.

Residents’ offered two arguments for how their plans differed from conventional city-planned redevelopment projects. First, the neighbor-written plans were a rebuke of urban renewal and an alternate vision for upgrading the physical stock of the neighborhood alongside increased services for residents. Instead of displacing residents or giving them the resources to move out of the city, the neighborhood plans were an attempt to simultaneously upgrade and stabilize the area for current residents. Montgomery-Hyde Park leader Bobby Westbrooks explained these goals, saying “contrary to what a whole lot of people think, all of us don’t want to move out in the county, we’d prefer to stay here if this neighborhood is made liveable with better houses, better schools, better everything.” ⁷¹ Second, residents insisted that a key component of their plans lay in an inherent value of resident-controlled institutions, arguing that unlike city government and private companies, residents’ focus would be completely on poor residents themselves. Residents’ strongest vision for remaking their communities came in their physical redevelopment plans. ⁷²

Residents’ physical redevelopment plans were a direct response to experience with urban renewal that demolished low-income and minority neighborhoods. Residents’ main criticism of the physical state of their neighborhood was a lack of affordable and decent housing. Montgomery-Hyde Park’s plan explained, “housing in the Montgomery area basically consists of leftovers—leftovers from the nineteenth century, leftovers from diverse ethnic groups since moved west, and leftovers from society as a whole.” ⁷³ Eighty-four percent of the available apartments were three-room shotgun style arrangements, inappropriate for families of any size. Fewer than 20 percent of residents described their housing situation as “good,” and only one-fifth of residents owned their homes. Yeatman’s proposal echoed Montgomery-Hyde Park’s concern over the size of housing units, explaining, “overcrowding has become a way of life . . . with instances of 5-6 people living in two (2) rooms.” ⁷⁴ Montgomery-Hyde Park estimated that most renters in the area paid $50 to $60 per month in rent, and while residents did not have more money to spend on rent, this amount was too low to lease large enough quarters either within or outside the model neighborhood.

Other problems with the physical state of the neighborhoods exacerbated housing shortages. Residents cited vacant and abandoned buildings as a large problem. The Yeatman neighborhood counted 134 vacant land parcels. The neighborhoods blamed the poor building conditions on obsolete zoning laws, lack of code enforcement, and economic disinvestment. ⁷⁵ In Carr-Central, a lack of private-housing options left almost all residents living in low-rise public-housing projects. Public-housing residents cited poor management, nonfunctioning elevators, and inadequate cleaning services. The residents also explained that existing land-use patterns contributed to physical deterioration of the neighborhoods as well as population loss. Carr-Central’s plan, for example, expressed intense frustration that industrial sites and warehouses disrupted residential sections of their neighborhood: in “between the two [residential] ends [of the neighborhood] lies trucking, warehouses and empty lots which present a highly effective barrier between the residents and isolates them from each other.” They called the warehouses and truck-loading sites an “‘invisible’ barrier separating the residents of the area.” ⁷⁶ Yeatman said their neighborhood “can be best described as a conglomeration of dilapidated structures, and conflicting, often incompatible uses” and claimed that companies operating in the area rarely hired residents.

Instead of seeing these statistics and land-use problems as a condemnation of their neighborhood, as was typical with urban renewal, residents used the information they gathered to argue that upgrading housing should be their first priority. Residents’ plans were therefore a direct response to previous failed urban renewal and antipoverty projects. Neighbors rarely used the term “urban renewal,” likely because many residents had lived through the destruction of previous urban renewal programs. In fact, they explained that “the best way to understand the new Model Cities program is to understand what it is not. It is NOT urban renewal.” ⁷⁷ Their proposals opposed conventional urban renewal projects that demolished entire blocks and neighborhoods without replacing housing stock.

The neighborhoods shared general goals, which grew directly out of the problems they identified and their criticism of urban renewal. As outlined by Carr-Central, residents wanted “to provide adequate home ownership housing. To provide public housing with emphasis on tenant management. To provide special housing for single people, elderly, and handicapped people. To provide full commercial service and facilities.” ⁷⁸ They believed these objectives would stabilize the neighborhood’s population and improve the housing stock for current residents. Residents recognized that pursuing these goals would mean some existing structures should be torn down, but the proposals explicitly stipulated that physical development plans must create more housing than they demolished. ⁷⁹ Crucially, all of the neighborhood applications pegged housing problems on lack of investment into the area, not residents’ neglect. Their proposals aimed to funnel money into a variety of resident-run housing programs that would help different segments of the population obtain better and cheaper housing.

Montgomery-Hyde Park offered the most comprehensive housing vision to address the problems they described. Rather than contract with the city’s land clearance and housing authorities, the neighborhood called for the creation of a housing corporation to be run by Montgomery-Hyde Park. This housing corporation would apply for government and private funding, in addition to Model Cities money. They claimed (perhaps naively) that this new corporation could avoid bureaucratic red tape and operate more efficiently. Implicit in their call for a resident-run housing corporation was an important critique of the officials who had directed housing policies for decades. Many residents had firsthand experience with the way government agencies tore down neighborhoods and failed to adequately relocate residents. Neighborhood leaders believed residents would do a better job. ⁸⁰

Montgomery-Hyde Park residents focused on the neediest section of their neighborhood, an area of about six hundred buildings. They estimated that approximately one hundred of the structures in this subarea would have to be torn down, and in their place, small parks and new housing structures would be built. The rest of the structures, about five hundred, would be rehabilitated, showing residents’ distaste for massive demolition projects and their desire for outdoor recreation space. The neighborhood set an ambitious timeline of rehabbing sixty houses the first year and one hundred each subsequent year of the Model Cities program. Each rehab project would cost approximately $1,500, based on assessments made by advocate planners. A typical rehab would involve converting a duplex into one six-bedroom house by constructing an indoor staircase to accommodate large families. As buildings were being renovated, the neighborhood corporation would also be in charge of temporarily relocating families. The plan requested $30,000 to rehabilitate the first twenty houses, with the understanding that when residents purchased homes, that money would be used to fix up other houses. ⁸¹ The Montgomery-Hyde Park plan included proposals for four resident groups: potential homeowners, renters, those in need of emergency housing, and the elderly.

Montgomery-Hyde Park’s home ownership plans demonstrated their goal of improving housing for current residents. Residents could purchase homes rehabilitated by the corporation, which would in turn provide more money for rehabilitations to continue. The neighborhood corporation would help residents utilize federal home ownership incentive programs to make purchasing a home feasible for low-income residents. In a clear critique of public housing and other government-sponsored housing programs, Montgomery-Hyde Park’s home ownership plan called for a resident committee to review applications, interview potential homeowners, and select the residents who would purchase Model Cities houses. Whereas most programs for government-sponsored housing “emphasize[d] occupancy by two-parent families with no felony convictions, the [Montgomery] organization attempted to allow all persons who wanted to buy homes to do so, provided they were financially able.” ⁸² Here, residents showed that neighborhood-controlled housing plans operated on new visions of how to improve a community. By rejecting government programs’ lifestyle and morality guidelines, Montgomery-Hyde Park indicated that all residents, regardless of their personal history, deserved a chance to purchase a home. ⁸³ The residents’ purpose was to increase opportunities for themselves, not judge each other’s lifestyles. ⁸⁴

Although never implemented on the scale residents hoped, their home ownership philosophy allowed some residents to purchase homes who otherwise would not have been able to do so. For example, Rosie Willis bought a house in the Yeatman neighborhood rehabilitated with Model Cities money. Reflecting on her decision to purchase a home in the model neighborhood, she explained, “I wanted to show people that you can be very poor, as I am, but still have some pride about yourself. And have some pride about where you live, and have pride in wanting to improve where you live. The whole community, not just your house. But the whole surroundings.” She concluded, “So that was my reason for moving here . . . And I’ve been here now for forty-eight years.” She and other homeowners in the neighborhood recalled that buying homes rehabbed by federally funded resident organizations was their only path to home ownership. ⁸⁵

Montgomery-Hyde Park also made provisions for renters, indicating that neighborhood organizations wanted to improve life for all Model Cities residents, not just those who could afford down payment on a house. The neighborhood corporation would seek federal subsidies to construct apartment buildings and rent out units. Some of the rehabbed structures would also be rented to residents, and federal rent supplements would be available. The corporation estimated the construction of seventy-five rental units. Montgomery-Hyde Park also made provisions for residents “who are at the very bottom of the economic ladder.” The resident corporation picked a location for the construction of a seventy-five unit apartment complex that would function as an emergency housing program. ⁸⁶ Finally, Montgomery-Hyde Park’s plans for retirement communities included architectural sketches with corresponding explanations of floor plan choices. ⁸⁷ Each apartment would have a small garden area and direct access to a walkway. The complexes would be built on land that was already vacant to avoid demolishing viable buildings. They were also designed to be well-integrated with the surrounding neighborhood to fight against social isolation of the elderly. In contrast to most urban renewal plans, residents’ proposals did not need to allocate large sums of money to relocate families, since they would be tearing down very few structures that were inhabited. ⁸⁸

Other neighborhoods’ public-housing proposals demonstrated their critique of the design and maintenance of public-housing complexes. Model neighborhood residents condemned the flawed design of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rises to bolster the legitimacy and expertise of resident planners. They complained that vacancy rates for smaller units were high, while there was a waitlist for larger units. A frequent target of criticism was Pruitt-Igoe’s skip stop elevators that made getting to units inconvenient. ⁸⁹ Residents knew there would not be enough Model Cities money for major renovations, so they instead, focused their plans on better maintenance, security, and tenant management. Since hiring a receptionist and installing buzz-in doors would be too expensive, Pruitt-Igoe requested $33,000 to install peepholes in each door. They also requested $40,000 to promote resident management in two of the complex’s buildings. They envisioned ceding control to tenants in phases and argued that tenant management would foster a sense of community responsibility. Anticipating the 1969 St. Louis public-housing rent strike, the proposal also requested funds for a rent supplement program to offset monthly payments. ⁹⁰

Residents’ plans were substantially different from typical physical redevelopment. While conventional urban renewal’s goals were many-faceted—bringing in money for private companies, making cities more attractive to the middle class, and upgrading inadequate housing stock—residents argued that their goals were completely community-focused. Neighborhood corporations insisted that they were beholden only to resident needs. Their plans aimed to upgrade housing with minimal disruption to residents’ lives while encouraging neighborhood stability through home ownership programs and their aversion to large demolition projects.

The Fate of Resident-Controlled City Planning

On August 23, 1968, the St. Louis MCA and Mayor Alfonso Cervantes compiled and sent the five neighborhood corporations’ comprehensive plans to HUD. The entire application weighed twenty-six pounds. ⁹¹ Budgets included estimates for money the city hoped to receive directly from Model Cities, as well as funding they requested from other sources, primarily federal, state, and local agencies. By far, the largest component was housing, with $7,243,290 of proposed programs, $6,148,000 coming directly from Model Cities funds. ⁹²

It was perhaps the first and only time in St. Louis history that resident plans had been submitted to the federal government without being tampered with and with full approval from City Hall. Due to the prompting of War on Poverty citizen participation guidelines, residents collaborated effectively with a municipal agency to make their visions for their neighborhoods the official plans for their community. Mayor Cervantes hailed the application, claiming the

neighborhood organizations which have presented their plans to me today have had more initiative and more decision making power with respect to the Model City Program . . . than have citizens in any of the other 75 Model Cities across the country. ⁹³

This resident leadership presented a model of how local and federal government could attune itself to the needs of poor and minority residents and correct for decades of urban renewal that failed to alleviate, and in many cases exacerbated, poverty. Residents insisted that neighborhood power was foundational to ensuring War on Poverty programs reached their intended beneficiaries.

Model neighborhood residents around the country aimed to convince government officials that their leadership could help cities avoid the usual pitfalls of urban renewal. Model Cities in St. Louis created the space for residents to assert their vision within a government structure. For a short time, the St. Louis government supported the goals of resident self-sufficiency through the creation of autonomous resident-run institutions to plan and implement federally funded programs. Residents were working within the power structure with real authority and autonomy. They saw the War on Poverty as an opportunity to alter the democratic process to include direct influence of the poor in antipoverty initiatives. St. Louis’s neighborhood proposals proved that residents were capable of crafting a creative, comprehensive program to break the patterns keeping their communities in poverty and assert their ability to plan for themselves.

The federal government’s reaction to St. Louis’s resident-written comprehensive plans foreshadowed the decline of citizen participation in urban antipoverty programs for the next forty years. Neighbors’ insistence on creating new, community-led institutions—such as housing corporations—became the primary sticking point between residents and the federal government. Once HUD officials saw that citizen participation would lead to calls for neighborhood autonomy, they retreated from their rhetoric of resident participation. HUD officials criticized St. Louis’s Model Cities plans for lacking municipal support, despite several rounds of revisions and continued assurance from the mayor, the MCA, and other city agencies that a strong partnership between the city and the resident organizations had been developed. ⁹⁴ HUD eventually declared that resident groups were not allowed to implement the programs they designed and clarified that Model Cities was to be a program that bolstered the mayor’s power, not a vehicle for resident leadership in urban planning. ⁹⁵ Although resident organizations succeeded in maintaining their autonomy throughout Model Cities, their influence over the program waned. Overwhelmed by delays, inadequate funding, and residents’ objections to their decreased power, St. Louis Model Cities programs never reached the scale necessary to have a noticeable impact on poverty in the model neighborhood. One survey estimated that of the thousand new housing units planned for the model neighborhood, fewer than two hundred were completed. ⁹⁶

Paradoxically, as citizen control of Model Cities decreased, the belief that resident participation was necessary to give antipoverty programs legitimacy became a permanent feature in HUD’s antipoverty initiatives. The current Community Development Block Grant program, the direct descendant of Model Cities, institutionalized the concept of citizen participation in urban planning but gutted it in substance. ⁹⁷ The neighborhood involvement mandated for block grants confines citizen participation to an advisory role, a mere shadow of the control residents in St. Louis were able to achieve during Model Cities planning. ⁹⁸ St. Louis’s resident advisory board for block grants fulfilled the citizen participation mandate despite the fact that resident board members accused the city of soliciting and then promptly ignoring residents’ advice. ⁹⁹ As of 2015, St. Louis merely “provid[es] citizens . . . with opportunities to participate in an advisory role in the planning, implementation and evaluation” of federally funded urban redevelopment initiatives. ¹⁰⁰ In other words, Model Cities residents convinced federal policymakers that urban plans need citizen approval for legitimacy, but this did not translate to permanent power. Ironically, Model Cities and the War on Poverty institutionalized resident participation while relegating it to a token level.