In the State’s Shadow of Fair Housing: D.C. (White) Business Leaders and their Revanchist Desires

Abstract

This article traces D.C. White business leaders’ advocacy of (low-income) Black suburban relocation and White upper-class resettlement in D.C.’s central neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s. By examining the organizational papers and memos of meetings and policy documents from the Federal City Council, a D.C. nonprofit advocacy organization for the city’s leading business and real estate leaders, I document how predominantly White business leaders appropriated fair housing and regional fair share political stances to articulate revanchist desires. These leaders’ revanchist rhetoric depicted the Black poor—especially the single Black mother with children—as the primary figure of neighborhood blight and domestic deviance. In the wake of these revanchist politics, low-income Black mothers remained principal victims of pro-mobility policies and gentrification agendas that forced them to continually move to support demolition or redevelopment. This article affirms low-income Black mother activists’ political support for placemaking and low-cost, family-friendly, and well-maintained communities.

Keywords

affordable housing politics revanchist politics Federal City Council fair housing fair share housing White business leaders and low-income Black mothers

Before urbanists engaged in a debate in the 1990s about whether mobility programs can achieve fair housing goals, community organizers in the 1970s first questioned and examined the reasons for bipartisan support for mobility programs. During the late 1970s, in Washington, D.C., Black tenant activist Yulanda Ward was one of the first urbanists to study why conservatives and liberals embraced pro-mobility tools like housing vouchers over place-based investments in public housing. After conducting a stealth operation to retrieve files from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) office (Kelly 1981), Ward claimed that the federal government supported a program called “Spatial Deconcentration.” According to Ward (1981), this program encouraged housing officials to facilitate low-income Black residents’ dispersal into suburbs with the use of “fair share” programs, which regionally distributed housing assistance. Ward questioned the impact of this HUD initative, averring these programs isolated many low-income families from supportive social networks and disrupted community organizing.

Ward claimed that this HUD’s initative indirectly condoned D.C.’s first wave of gentrification in the 1970s because HUD "fair share" housing assistance encouraged low-wage Black families’ relocation from the District of Columbia. Moreover, Ward challenged HUD’s claim that these mobility programs realized the fair housing goal of integration. Instead, she countered that these pro-integration and pro-mobility programs helped materialize White business leaders’ desires for land reclamation.

By extending Ward’s incisive critique about political leaders’ promotion of pro-mobility housing assistance, this article examines the motivations for local White business leaders’ support for pro-mobility housing initatives. This article argues D.C. White business leaders supported pro-mobility housing initatives because it allowed them to pursue their revanchist goals of White resettlement in D.C. However, these leaders concealed their revanchist desires by appealing to paternal concerns about D.C.’s rising number of impoverished Black families. They argued that the city’s rising number of welfare-assisted Black families was an interconnected threat to future property values, (White) upper-class resettlement, and Black poverty reduction. These leaders advocated that fair housing and fair share policies be used to relocate poor Black families from D.C.’s central neighborhoods to D.C.’s neighboring suburbs.

To uncover this political history, I conducted archival research of the Federal City Council (FCC), a D.C. nonprofit advocacy organization historically comprised of the city’s leading White business and real estate leaders. This research revealed FCC’s leaders used the debates on the citywide Comprehensive Plan in the mid-1960s as an opportunity to identify welfare-assisted Black mothers as metonymic symbols of neighborhood blight. Additionally, they advocated Black poverty dispersal to DC suburbs as the desirable urban planning solution. Black women, as welfare rights and tenant activists, did not explicitly organize against the Comprehensive Plan. However, many Black women attended neighborhood meetings about the plan and contributed to the political pressure needed to exact concessions. And while Black women did not explicitly rebuke White business leaders’ political demands, they used their welfare rights campaigns to indirectly condemn political elites like FCC leaders’ negative depictions of their domestic lives.

Despite Black women activists’ rejection of political elites’ caricature of their domestic lives, FCC leaders eventually made alliances with Black bureaucrats and conservatives and promoted mobility programs as urban planning solution for Black urban poverty. Consequently, low-income Black women and their children were disproportionally encouraged to move out of D.C.’s central neighborhoods. Low-income Black women’s forced mobility did not mean they transcended the negative imagery that initially justified their relocation. Instead, political elites’ negative depictions of low-income Black mothers and their children condoned a discriminatory rental housing market that cast these families as undesirable migrants and problematic tenants.

By revisiting and historicizing White business leaders’ selective advocacy of fair housing and fair share housing programs, I make four contributions to the urbanist debate on mobility versus place-based development. First, this article historicizes fair housing politics by recognizing business leaders’ vested interest in housing mobility initiatives. Second, this article demonstrates how cultural narratives are critical mediums used to legitimize the uneven development processes that gave rise to these pro-mobility interventions in the first place. Third, this article illustrates negative cultural narratives’ instrumental and gendering effect on low-income Black women, especially as they seek to live in pro-growth metropolitan areas that prioritize the valorization and concentration of capital, property owners, and higher-income individuals. Finally, this historical analysis generates essential questions about how contemporary officials and developers take up seemingly liberal rhetorical frames to keep obfuscating their profit motive and anti-(poor) Black family bias.

Exploring (Un)Intended Consequences of Fair Housing’s Implicit Pro-Mobility Goals

Over the last several decades, urbanists have debated whether the government should promote mobility programs to facilitate (Black) families’ access to historically segregated but “high-opportunity” suburbs or improve welfare and housing conditions within urban centers. In this debate, urban scholars were crudely bifurcated into two groups. One group of scholars supported local and federal government’s efforts to support low-income (Black) families’ relocation from high-crime, poverty-concentrated urban centers to highly resourced suburbs. In contrast, another group of scholars stressed place-based and state-allocated investments in living conditions for low-income families in urban centers. In reality, the scholars who participated in this policy debate likely recognized the benefits of both place-based and mobility-focused strategies (Imbroscio 2004; Goetz and Chapple 2010; Squires 2012). Nevertheless, this debate engendered critical discussions about whether low-income Black families’ housing conditions, life opportunities, and economic status improved to the extent politicians and housing policy experts presumed it would.

These mobility programs increased after the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968. While integrationist politics predated the Fair Housing Act of 1968, this national legislation galvanized strategy-based discussions about how to redress Black residential segregation. During the congressional debates leading to the passage of the Fair Housing Act, many liberal Democrats envisioned fair housing as a medium to facilitate Black integration into historically segregated and majority-White suburbs (Sidney 2001). This integrationist strategy failed to be codified in the Fair Housing Act. However, judges, housing policy experts, federal housing officials, and civil rights activists later demanded the federal government and localities play a facilitating role in encouraging Black mobility to generate suburban integration.¹

In the early 1970s, federal housing officials began to apply mobility strategies to low-income housing assistance programs. For example, in the 1970s, Housing and Urban Development officials backed housing vouchers to support low-income Black families’ efforts to find housing in the private market and facilitate Black (suburban) integration as well. By creating “fair share” housing assistance programs that distributed low-income housing assistance throughout a metropolitan area, HUD officials hoped to incentivize suburbs to house more low-income (Black) families. While urban scholars typically emphasize the federal government’s post-1980s history of mobility initiatives like Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, this article accentuates the federal government’s post-1960s promotion of integrationist and mobility agendas like “fair share” housing. With initiatives like fair share and housing vouchers, HUD Secretaries claimed they were affirmatively working to realize integration and mobility for low-income (Black) families. However, as urban scholars have already illustrated, low-income families with housing vouchers continue to face multiple obstacles, including localities’ differing forms of (lax) fair housing enforcement, limited welfare support in suburban areas, and persistent (White) suburban resistance/backlash. Moreover, critical urbanists argued that low-income Black residents ended up moving to increasingly Black suburbs, while many majority-Black urban centers experienced gentrification (Crump 2002; Imbroscio 2006).

While critical urbanists like David Imbroscio, Lawrence Vale, and Jeff Crump astutely address the mixed legacy of federally pushed policy agendas like housing vouchers, much of the urbanist scholarship focuses on state actors, scholars, and civil rights activists’ defense or critique of integrationist and mobility policy agendas like Moving to Opportunity programs. While useful and insightful, existing research on the state’s fair housing enforcement (or lack thereof) does not consistently explore how different private actors and public officials have used fair housing’s implicit goal(s) for suburban integration and (Black) mobility for alternative political ends like land reclamation. This article examines how White business leaders and housing officials attempted to use fair housing rhetoric to legitimize their revanchist and urban growth desires.

Washington, D.C.: A Case Study of Liberal Capitalism and Black Poverty Deconcentration

Most majority-Black cities arguably had White business leaders who pursued land reclamation. However, Washington, D.C. is a critical case study because it illustrates how White business leaders used liberal rhetorical frames like fair housing to advance their revanchist politics and growth priorities. To explore D.C.’s gendered and racialized politics of land reclamation, I borrow critical geographers’ framework of revanchism. A term initially popularized by critical geographer Neil Smith, revanchism refers to a type of back-to-the-city urbanism that is driven by a “revengeful and reactionary campaign” to reclaim postwar disinvested cities for White and upper-class resettlement (Smith 1996, p. 207). To understand business leaders and Black politicians’ shared political interests, I build upon critical urbanists’ important work on urban growth politics.²

I conducted a historical review and close reading of FCC’s archival material, by analyzing FCC’s organizational memos, newsletters, members’ correspondence, and meeting minutes for its Housing Committee. These materials remain housed in Washington, D.C.’s Office of Public Records. As one of the largest and most prominent advocacy organization for business leaders in Washington, D.C., the FCC served as the leading interest group for business interests during the urban renewal era from the 1950s to the late 1970s. To contextualize this history, I also reviewed articles in the Washington Evening Star and the Washington Post, as well as in other D.C.-specific publications.

My close reading focused on the FCC’s urban planning discussions about low-income Black families. I review FCC’s internal correspondence about Washington, D.C.’s 1965 Comprehensive Plan. To uncover how low-income Black women were implicated in FCC’s debates on the Comprehensive Plan, I highlight when FCC leaders make direct or indirect mentions of low-income Black women and their families, including racially and gendered coded terms like welfare families, public housing, and problem families. I apply a Black feminist intersectional analysis by examining how FCC leaders and public officials used these terms to associate Black women and their families to neighborhood blight. I also note how these political actors use racial and gender ideologies to champion pro-mobility housing programs. Finally, I analyze the political forces that may have affected Black political actors’, including Black women tenant activists’, response to these White business leaders’ advocacy for fair housing and fair share–inspired housing programs.

FCC: Postwar White Flight and Revanchist Imaginations

Competition over a larger share of D.C. metropolitan’s economic growth precipitated White D.C. business leaders’ eventual and instrumental focus on low-income Black families’—particularly low-income Black mothers’—place in D.C. After World War II, D.C. White business leaders—like many urban business leaders nationally—were engaged in a competitive battle with suburban business leaders over White and upper-income consumers and residents (Asch and Musgrove 2017; Gillette 2006; Self 2003).

D.C.’s postwar suburban expansion and its attendant White and capital flight triggered White D.C. business leaders to brainstorm how to encourage primarily White middle-class households to return to D.C. At the start of the Cold War, the federal government moved several federal government agencies out of the District to undermine a potential nuclear attack, decongest D.C. traffic, and bolster suburban expansion.³ Scores of federal employees and particularly White families followed several federal agencies into D.C.’s suburbs—the latter aided by federal investment in highways, discriminatory low-interest-rate mortgages, and single-family housing in racially segregated suburbs. State-subsidized White flight corresponded with state-subsidized Black resettlement through the construction of public housing often placed in segregated D.C. neighborhoods in Far Northeast and Southeast (Gillette 2006). Despite state-backed racially segregated housing, in the mid-1950s, White D.C. business leaders were fretting about D.C.’s declining impact over the region’s economic growth and sought to develop civic associations and advocacy groups to influence D.C.’s revitalization.

In 1952, the Washington Post owner Phil Graham feared White and capital flight to the suburbs would escalate D.C.’s economic decline, so he commissioned the Washington Post reporter Chalmers M. Roberts to produce a series of articles to arouse public support for increased federal support for local community development through urban renewal funds in downtown redevelopment, slum clearance, and transportation upgrades. Focusing on revitalizing downtown to ensure D.C.’s local business economy resumes significance post-federal decentralization and suburbanization, Roberts called on local business leaders to act as “civic leaders” and “do the job of redeveloping downtown Washington to make it an example for the Nation and the world” (Roberts 1952).

In 1954, White business leaders observed Roberts’ call for business leaders to lead D.C.’s economic resurgence as the Washington Post publisher Philip Graham and other White businessmen founded the FCC. FCC’s first chairman, Francis G. Addison, former president of Security Bank and former president of the Board of Trade, submitted,

formation of the Council gives us the opportunity to do all we can for the betterment of Washington—whether it be coordination of the public works program, elimination of slums, studying parking or public transportation problems or supplying information to various government departments. (The Washington Post 1956)

Choosing to stay away from the public spotlight, FCC prided itself on working behind the scenes with federal and local officials to advance urban renewal projects (Albrook 1956). FCC’s invitation-only members, during the 1950s and 1960s, were the who’s who of D.C.’s White business class. FCC’s inaugural trustees included R. Roy Dunn, president, Potomac Electric Power Co; Robert V. Fleming, Riggs National Bank; Thornton W. Owen, Chair of D.C.’s Board of Trade and later Chairman of Perpetual Bank, D.C.’s largest Savings and Loan lender; and Morris Cafritz, head of Cafritz Construction Co.

These leaders’ racial and gendered revanchist politics eventually became evident during the National Capital Planning Commission’s (NCPC) development of its ambitious 20-year comprehensive plan called the “1985 Comprehensive Plan.” In 1965, the National Capital Planning and Park Commission, the federal agency that oversaw D.C.’s urban renewal and urban planning, released the first version of the plan meant to capture a 20-year vision of D.C.’s development goals. Majority-White advocacy groups like FCC, mainstream press, and political officials’ comprehensive plan widely condemned NCPC’s comprehensive plan. These groups eventually wielded enough political capital to stonewall and revise the plan (Eisen 1969). In 1966, FCC’s Housing Committee began holding meetings to synthesize FCC’s housing position, with the hopes that FCC can present an organizational position on a variety of D.C. housing issues, including D.C.’s comprehensive plan.

In these meetings, FCC’s housing committee members circulated research that identified low-income and large Black families as the primary tenants in central city neighborhoods like Shaw, Adams-Morgan, and Logan Circle.⁴ In the ensuing months, the FCC’s housing committee invited speakers, who were overwhelmingly White men with histories as urban planners and developers, to help FCC leaders envision and advance a regional approach to (re)housing low-income Black families.

One of FCC’s first invited speakers was James Gilman in March 1966.⁵ As the Staff Director of D.C.’s Community Renewal Program, James Gilman was responsible for conducting a four-year study that identified blighted neighborhoods and recommended citywide solutions. Urban renewal officials expected Gilman’s anti-blight recommendations to complement NCPC’s Comprehensive Plan since his study included social service proposals on how to reform residents who lived in or recently relocated from blighted neighborhoods. Building on a point in NCPC’s first version of its Comprehensive Plan, Gilman told FCC leaders that any plan to eradicate D.C.’s blighted neighborhood must include mobility proposals to move low-income Black residents to D.C.’s suburbs. Even with this insight, Gilman doubted D.C.’s suburbs would be immediately helpful, reminding FCC leaders that “the probability of the suburbs furnishing space for Negro housing will be remote for some time; if anything, suburban attitudes in this regard seem to be tightening.” Nevertheless, Gilman situated the problem of D.C.’s blighted neighborhoods within the context of White flight and Black urban migration. Gilman lamented that “during the period 1960-1963, a net population gain of 15,000 non-Whites per year was recorded and a net annual loss of 3,000 [W]hites.”⁶ He worried White flight would worsen D.C.’s “ghettoization” because D.C. Black migrants were likely to be low-income and Southern instead of employed, White, and presumably upwardly mobile (Lewis 1966).

To reserve this demographic trend, Gilman proposed three “alternative courses of action” to change the “ghettoization” allegedly found in half of all D.C. neighborhoods.⁶ In the first alternative course of action, Gilman advised the creation of six “urban progress centers” placed in the “socially and culturally deprived sections of the city” (Kaiser 1967; Lewis 1966; The Washington Post 1966). These urban progress centers were akin to modern-day settlement houses meant to provide “counseling and intensive social assistance to residents of areas inhabited largely by low-income Negro migrants from the rural South.” The second alternative course of action included an increase in the number of creation of urban progress centers as well as the creation of an Office of Policy Planning agency. The third and most ambitious alternative course proposed 50 urban progress centers, a guaranteed work program, and a “more reasonable distribution” of low-income Black residents between D.C. and the suburbs (Lewis 1966). The third proposal emphasized the “establishment of housing authorities in the suburbs, liberalization of residency requirements in welfare regulations to encourage ‘more mobility of the low-income population and construction [of] ‘heterogeneous new towns or other residential accommodations’ for low-income families outside of the District’ (Lewis 1966).

By linking blight to low-income Black southern migrants, Gilman stated that these residents were prominent faces of D.C.’s neighborhood blight. However, he indirectly cited low-income Black mothers and their children as the primary targets of local anti-blight plans. Gilman’s suggestion for welfare reform as a medium to realize his goal of Black poverty mobility revealed the gendering of anti-blight efforts. Another example of this gendering was in Gilman’s plan to study “multi-problem families.” By researching these families, Gilman hoped to “discover the attitudes, values, aspirations, and difficulties of the most destitute of Washington’s underprivileged, the families plagued at once by a number of grave problems” (Kaiser 1967). “Multi-problem family” was a long-standing and widely understood gendered reference to primarily low-income, single, and welfare-assisted Black mothers. Earlier articles identified the “multi-problem families” by their use of multiple social welfare services like housing and cash assistance and also by their alleged “mental and physical deficiencies, excessive procreation, alcohol, insufficient education, [and] lack of any skills” (Edstrom 1959).

Problem families broadly included a variety of marginalized individuals. However, the press typically cited welfare-assisted Black mothers as the prototypical (multi)-problem family member, due to their statistical majority and welfare officials’ programmatic and interventionist focus on these mothers. For example, a year before Gilman advised FCC leaders to check Black settlement in D.C., the Washington Post ran an article citing the social service challenges public housing managers faced after they had to house a higher number of Black families displaced by urban renewal. The journalist shadowed a social worker who made an “unannounced” visit to a “problem family”—but the problem family figure was the mother (Aarons 1965). The social worker described “Mrs. Smith” as someone who was “brought up in the old Southwest slum, with her mother, a “stepfather,” and a brother” (Aarons 1965). Pregnant at 14, Mrs. Smith, according to this social worker, only had an eighth-grade education and married her baby’s father and had three more children. The journalist identified Mrs. Smith’s problem as an untidy home, writing, “on a visit I made to the Smith’s apartment, dirty dishes cluttered the sink. The bathroom tub as finger-painting of black smears, the beds of a jumble of discarded clothes, soiled sheets, stained mattresses” (Aarons 1965). Without intensive social service and social work intervention, Gilman and his staff most likely presumed families like Mrs. Smith would hinder D.C.’s transformation into the “ideal city” (Kaiser 1967).

Gilman’s reliance on gendered and racially loaded code words like problem families and migrants and his fear about Black migration rested on patriarchal assumptions that not only accused low-income Black mothers of parental failure but also upheld urban planning notions that suggested these mothers were to blame for urban disinvestment and White flight. Informed by sociological and behavioral research that cited these mothers as the primary representative of “urban anomie” (Orleck 2005, p. 85), Gilman tied urban decline post–War World II to anti-Black urban sociological stereotypes like intergenerational poverty, poor hygiene, poor housekeeping, and domestic dysfunction to Black southern migrants (O’Conner 2001).⁷ Nevertheless, Gilman’s intensive focus on “problem families” illustrated a gendering of anti-Black racism—in the case of urban blight, Gilman assumed low-income Black mothers were the figurative enablers of family and neighborhood destabilization since these officials readily blamed these mothers’ nontraditional family formations and poverty status as definitive reasons for poor child-rearing and intergenerational poverty.

Other FCC-invited speakers shared Gilman’s fear of D.C.’s rising number of low-income Black residents. Another FCC guest, Walter A. Scheiber, claimed that D.C.’s “housing problem” increased because middle-class Black people were leaving the city for nearby suburbs due to locally passed fair housing laws. Director of Council of Governments, a D.C.-based nonprofit that sought metropolitan solutions to housing, transportation, and land use, Scheiber told FCC leaders that fair housing laws facilitated “the movement of the non-White with financial means to the suburbs but that the process will siphon off much of the responsible Negro leadership from the District of Columbia.”⁸ A couple of months later, White architects and construction owners also shared the same insight with FCC leaders, submitting the “current movement of Negroes to the suburbs involves essentially the better educated, higher-income families and does not affect the hardcore welfare families who are the crux of the housing problem.”⁹ These speakers repeatedly asserted “hardcore welfare families” represented D.C.’s housing problem, and any solution should stress metropolitan, not city-specific solutions.¹⁰

Even as these earlier White leaders decried Black poverty concentration, they were implicit about their support for Black poverty dispersal. However, another FCC-invited speaker, William Slayton, explicitly argued involuntary Black displacement was needed to inspire White resettlement. A former Assistant Secretary in HUD turned Director of Urban America’s Urban Policy Center, Slayton recommended FCC change D.C.’s racial composition.¹¹ He submitted,

any attempt to improve the housing situation in the Washington area must begin with the certain knowledge that Washington’s center city is heavily Negro and heavily poor with most of the [W]hite middle- and upper-income population located on the periphery of the District.¹²

Slayton continued, “a vicious cycle is in effect whereby the abundance of poor families places heavy demands on the District government for services, creating a greater need for additional revenues from a population with limited ability to pay taxes.”¹³ To lessen racial and financial tension, Slayton called for a housing policy that would “attract Negro families to the peripheral areas and to encourage the return of middle-to-upper-income Whites to the central city.” Slayton warned, “what the District of Columbia does in the immediate future with respect to housing will serve either to intensify or to lessen the concentration of the Negro population in the center of the city.”

To be sure, Slayton was not the first to articulate an anti-Black and racist anxiety about a majority-Black and working-class city. Since the 1950s, White urban renewal officials feared the “over-concentration” of Black working-class families in Washington, D.C. In spring 1961, William E. Finley, the second director of the NCPC, was among the first public officials to openly propose using housing certificates (akin to housing vouchers) to support Black resettlement in suburban housing (Derthick 1962, p. 210). Many D.C. urban renewal officials desperately hoped that the city’s neighboring suburbs would desegregate schools and ban housing discrimination so that Black residents can move there. Without fair housing, they predicted the city would be dominated by Black residents, predicting more than 800,000 Black individuals living in the District. Without a “moderate shift of non-Whites to the suburbs,” primarily White urban renewals feared that there would be an undesirable racial concentration of Black residents in the city, which they suspected would hinder city officials’ plans to recruit White individuals—both young and old—back to the city (Jackson 1962).

White Business Leaders’ Advocacy for White Resettlement Through Fair Housing Appeals

FCC leaders arguably answered Slayton and White urban renewal officials’ call for decisive action by advancing their vision of White resettlement in their campaign to change the 1985 Comprehensive Plan. NCPC’s first version of its 20-year comprehensive plan predicted modest population growth and significant investment in highways, rapid transit, schools, and recreation areas (Evening Star 1965). NCPC’s first plan estimated that at least 25% of low-cost housing for low-income Washingtonians would be destroyed through aggressive code enforcement and select urban renewal sites to make way for public or private redevelopment. The first plan estimated that it would only be able to furnish “one new unit for every 21 low-rental units” and did not locate sites for the 21,000-plus low-cost units needed to redress the low-income housing shortage (Lardner 1965). The NCPC readily admitted that the low-income housing crisis was acute but suggested that open occupancy laws could facilitate the rehousing of D.C.’s low-income (Black) residents in D.C.’s suburbs.

Unconvinced, civil rights activists quickly mobilized to condemn the plan’s failure to take a bullish approach in addressing the acute housing crisis low-income African Americans faced in D.C. Walter Fauntroy, a Black civil rights activist and later a D.C. congressional delegate, condemned NCPC’s preliminary proposal, claiming the plan “should make absolutely clear that until the suburbs open up—not merely to the Negro but to the low-income Negro—low-income housing should receive first priority in the District” (Evening Star 1965). To make low-income housing a priority, Fauntroy demanded massive state investment in the creation and preservation of low- and moderate-income housing. The NCPC seemed to take heed, later revising their plan to keep modest population growth, maintain low-density with limited high-rises, and emphasize public and assisted housing on vacant but federally owned sites.

D.C.’s White business class was in an uproar over NCPC’s revised plan. Working behind the scenes, FCC mobilized the primarily White business leaders and lobbied congressional leaders to contest NCPC’s revised 20-year comprehensive plan. FCC swiftly rejected NCPC’s proposal because they believed it would keep D.C.’s population with at least a third of low-income Black residents. For FCC and its supporters, this level of Black poverty spelled catastrophe for their plans for White and upper-income resettlement. FCC leaders suggested that NCPC’s plan to keep most of D.C.’s Black poor meant that NCPC’s plan focused on “the weaknesses of our society” instead of the “positive view toward the social and economic characteristics of the future population of the Nation’s Capital.”¹⁴ Instead of turning D.C. into a “hardcore poverty center,”¹⁵ FCC recommended an aggressive growth-oriented urban plan, submitting “the proportion of low-income households would be reduced since the increase in population to a great degree would be middle and upper-income households in high-rise apartments.”¹⁶

FCC and its supporters championed low-income Black suburban integration as a way to disguise White business leaders’ class interests as benevolent and gendered support of low-income Black mothers’ civil and social rights to daycare, employment, and fair housing. FCC leaders claimed growth-oriented urban planning would yield better economic outcomes for low-income Black residents since they would increase their purchasing power and decrease their reliance on federal assistance. Gendered logic undergirded FCC leaders’ claim about better economic outcomes for low-income Black residents. FCC leaders backed select aspects of Gilman’s anti-blight proposals. Disregarding Gilman’s call for more assisted housing, FCC leaders supported daycare vouchers so that low-income mothers can go to work and “reduce their dependence on assistance” and “increase their self-respect.”¹⁷

With daycare assistance, FCC leaders claimed that these mothers would be able to secure employment, increase their purchasing power, and reduce their need for housing and other welfare supports. Even with this welfare provision, FCC leaders recommended that these low-income households still needed to be “dispersed through the metropolitan area” so that D.C.’s low-income population would decline. To facilitate this dispersal, FCC leaders built upon urban planner James Gilman’s recommendation, calling for the creation of “new suburban towns focused on federal employment centers” with required public housing in these areas.¹⁸ While FCC did not state its political position for suburban public housing in gendered terms, FCC’s selective support of Gilman’s welfare-targeted workfare program evinced how these White leaders implicitly targeted low-income Black mothers since they were most likely to receive welfare assistance.

Supporting these liberal social provisions like daycare, FCC tried to make its growth-oriented urban plan compatible with rights claims. By implying that low-income Black mothers’ access to daycare and employment were paramount to their need for housing assistance, FCC leaders considered a right to residential mobility and wage work more than important than a right to housing assistance. Like sociologist and Congressman Patrick Moynihan (1965), FCC leaders paternally presumed to know what caused and perpetuated low-income Black women’s poverty. But, unlike Moynihan, FCC leaders cared little about the gender disparities or racial inequities Black women and Black men faced in the labor market. For example, Donald Bittinger, Washington Gas Executive and later FCC Chairman, feared any federally backed investments in welfare posed an existential threat to capitalism. For Bittinger, capitalists, not “starry-eyed sociological planners,” should drive D.C. urban development because the latter group would motivate other cities to follow NCPC’s plan and “do this sort of thing, depending on government for a great proportion of the expenses,” which Bittinger feared would “bring down the whole structure.”¹⁹

To ensure capitalist prowess in urban centers, FCC leaders employed a psychological and pathological lens to view Black urban poverty. By borrowing the postwar conception of racial liberalism that defined Black urban poverty by its degree of cultural nonnormativity, FCC leaders could instrumentally identify “problem families” to serve their political use of land reclamation.²⁰ Moreover, by claiming that low-income Black mothers desired employment and suburban access more than improved living conditions in D.C., White FCC leaders could paternally define low-income Black mothers’ emotional desires. For example, when FCC leaders insisted that wage work would give low-income Black mothers “self-respect,” these White business leaders assumed that these mothers lacked positive self-conception since they presumed low-income Black mothers wanted or needed to mimic upper-income and White suburban household formation.²¹

These leaders’ implicit pronouncement about low-income Black mothers’ psychological desires directly ignored the low-wage service work like domestic work that many of these FCC leaders undoubtedly relied on to furnish their market involvement as capitalists. Nevertheless, these leaders averred low-income Black mothers’ entry into the labor market would enable the “creation of pride and self-respect that would emanate from people participating fully in the mainstream of life in the Nation’s Capital.”²² By framing low-income Black mothers’ poverty as a psychological problem, FCC members could posture themselves as benevolent paternalists who advocate for the economic and psychological needs low-income mothers presumably left unvoiced.

FCC was not the only business advocacy group that linked racialized and gendered narratives to fair housing appeals. Washington Building Congress, D.C.’s trade association representing real estate, construction, and design organizations, also demanded NCPC encourage low-income Black dispersal to make way for the upper-income White families who wanted to return to D.C. The Washington Building Congress contended, “Many Negro families will desire to live and work in the suburbs once it is made possible and easy for them to do so. Many [W]hite families will want to return to live and work in the central city.”²³

Washington Building Congress did not want D.C.’s future demographics to be low-income Black residents. The organization predicted that “the steady immigration of poor and ill-adjusted families from the rural South will not continue at the present level” by directly suggesting “birth control measures” may reduce these families’ “population pressures.”²⁴ Unlike these “ill-adjusted” families whom the Washington Building Congress tied to “dull mediocrity, continued blight,” Washington Building Congress recommended an aggressive growth-oriented development plan to encourage upper-income White families’ return to D.C.²⁵ However, this growth-oriented plan did not include all low-income residents since the Washington Building Congress proclaimed, “There will never be enough housing for low-income families in the central city.”²⁶

For the Washington Building Congress, NCPC’s plan protected the wrong urban residents. For this group, low-income dispersal was the primary and most sensible way to attract (presumably White) investors and upper-income White households so that they could build and frequent the “shops and entertainment centers which are needed to make a great central city.”²⁷ To realize this vision, Washington Building Congress, like FCC, advocated relaxed zoning provisions to increase density provisions so that real estate leaders could target “affluent families with few children of school age” by building high-rises to house these smaller households.²⁸ Like FCC, Washington Building Congress made appeals to fair housing’s implicit goals of suburban integration and (Black) mobility to justify its urban planning vision. However, unlike FCC, Washington Building Congress readily implied that low-income Black residential presence thwarted capital reinvestment, rhetorically inquiring “who will dare start new construction in the vast blighted areas? And without good new construction, how are these great areas to be redeemed.”²⁹

To facilitate the physical redemption and reclamation of majority-Black and disinvested residential areas, Washington Building Congress recommended state-sanctioned Black dispersal to ensure White resettlement, insisting,

every effort should continue to be made to induce the suburbs and the new towns to accept and welcome Negro families, the poor as well as the affluent. Even more important, every effort should be made to encourage Negro families to want to live in the suburbs.³⁰

FCC and its supporters used fair housing appeals not only to mask its revanchist desires but also to define the ecological boundaries of which populations belonged in D.C.’s "ideal city." These leaders’ ideal conception of D.C. as land for primarily White and upper-income settlement meant that they had to redraw the acceptable residential boundaries for low-income Black residents, particularly for the “hardcore welfare” and “problem” families who resided in the central city. For D.C. to become ideal, these undesirable families had to be relocated to D.C.’s peripheries. These leaders’ ecological and classist redrawing of the urban space suggested that these leaders saw limited value in “mixed-income” residential communities. Instead, they preferred clear ecological boundaries between different income groups, which inevitably preserved racial and class segregation.

FCC and its supporters’ challenges against the 1985 Comprehensive Plan also revealed how they saw the state’s proper role in urban development. By insisting that low-income Black residents had a right to the suburbs, these White business leaders suggested that the state’s primary purpose should be facilitating the movement of populations who stood in the way of capital’s valorization. Consequentially, FCC and its supporters believed that the state should work with private interests to actively market the attractiveness of suburbs to low-income Black residents instead of pushing local government to improve the living conditions of low-income residents within D.C. And if Black D.C. residents did not articulate a desire for the “lily-white suburbs,” Washington Building Congress assumed it was important for the state and private interests to shape Black residents’ consumption desires for suburban living.³¹ While Washington Building Congress did not shy away from stating its White revanchist vision, its leaders still felt the need to deploy the ideological cover of fair housing appeals. Indeed, Washington Building Congress’ appropriation of open occupancy rhetoric was a thinly veiled attempt to hide its revanchist and profit-driven interests.

D.C. Black Women’s Demands for Universal Welfare Ignored

While White business leaders presumed universal knowledge over low-income Black mothers’ consumption, welfare, and employment desires, low-income Black mothers—particularly low-income Black welfare activists—had no problem articulating their political perspective. Most importantly, these activists advocated structural redress—not psychological and behavioral interventions—into Black urban poverty. As the NCPC was deploying its revised development plans from 1967 to 1968, low-income D.C. Black mothers were waging a national anti-poverty welfare campaign by joining with other low-income women of color to challenge discriminatory and punitive welfare policies. Locally, D.C. Black welfare mothers articulated their frustration with the nation’s ineffective approach to dealing with Black urban poverty. For example, in a cross-class Black women-only discussion about Black women’s poverty during Resurrection City (a national Poor People Movement’s direct action held in D.C. in summer 1968), Black women agreed that the central problems that reproduced Black women’s poverty were “welfare laws, poverty, lack of consumer protection, unemployment, daycare centers, and discrimination” (Lewis 1968). “We’re branded as illiterate, immoral, poor housekeepers,” D.C. welfare rights activist and mother of seven Etta Horn decried; instead of these sociological labels of welfare dependency and domestic pathology, these welfare activists wanted universal and guaranteed welfare protections.³²

While these women were not directly engaged in NCPC’s battle over its comprehensive plan, movement leaders like Etta Horn articulated a right to the city vision that positioned the state as a nonintrusive facilitator who assisted in the development of a welfare state that included public housing, public schools, public health, and universal income (Lewis 1968; The Washington Post 1969). They envisioned a D.C. where they would be free from coercion, discrimination, and devaluation. Instead of poverty interventions that presumed Black women’s lack of self-respect, these Black women activists wanted their care work to be considered vital citizenship work and valued domestic labor (Nadasen 2012; Williams 2004). Well-built and maintained public housing, for these activist mothers, would be evidence that society valued their families and their care work.

While their challenges against the Comprehensive Plan were not publicized as widely as FCC leaders, many low-income Black women participated in more than 20 community sessions the NCPC held on the Comprehensive Plan. Their participation surely motivated NCPC’s Chairwoman, Elizabeth Rowe Jr., to include an unprecedented number of low-rent housing units in the Comprehensive Plan. Black women’s civic engagement in these community sessions notwithstanding, FCC leaders used their political and financial muscle to pressure public officials to change NCPC’s urban planning priorities. Because D.C. was still under direct rule until 1973, local politics was subjected to numerous factors (Asch and Musgrove 2017). In this political context, only a few political groups were able to amass extensive decision-making influence. FCC leaders’ economic might translated into amendable political connections in Congress and the presidential administration. Without extensive knowledge of D.C.’s diffused decision-making apparatus, low-income Black women’s ability to pressure enforcement of their vision of public housing would have been limited.

Post-1970s White Capital–Black Bureaucrat Alliance Around Fair Share Rhetoric

After FCC leaders petitioned for federal support, federal officials forced NCPC to reassess its plan.³³ In response to FCC-coordinated backlash, an NCPC staffer called FCC’s and other business groups’ insistence on “social and economic programs” like welfare reform and Black poverty relocation to DC suburbs as “chimerical at best” and “irresponsible at worse” since these efforts were unlikely to change the need for assisted housing in DC.³⁴ Moreover, the NCPC staffer even suggested FCC’s calls for higher density zoning were thinly veiled attacks against low-income residents. Criticism notwithstanding, FCC and other similar advocacy groups successfully pushed NCPC to scale back its low-income housing plans, yielding a heightened focus on public urban transit, downtown development, and private housing redevelopment.

However, FCC leaders’ advocacy of low-income Black dispersal did not end after the 1985 Comprehensive Plan. Instead, FCC leaders used “fair share” rhetoric to justify low-income Black dispersal. Under the conservative Richard Nixon presidential administration, the Department of HUD escalated regional and private-led solutions to low-income housing. With bipartisan support, HUD sought to distribute housing vouchers and assisted housing production funds regionally. Council of Governments, directed by Walter A. Scheiber (who once advised FCC to consider regional solutions for welfare-assisted families), was selected by HUD Secretary George Romney to administer the Fair Share Housing program in D.C.’s metropolitan area. Scheiber and housing officials in the D.C. metropolitan area worked to devise a D.C.’s fair share housing formula built most of the new assisted housing in the suburbs. However, in actuality, D.C.’s fair share housing plan required voluntary participation; localities could decide which type of assisted housing to build (e.g., multi-family or elderly housing); and the number of assisted units/vouchers were kept low as to not upset suburbanites (Scharfenberg and Bowman 1972). Moreover, D.C.’s suburbs, like Montgomery and Fairfax, that wanted a higher number of assisted housing subsidies wanted the funding to house its respective localities’ police, teachers, firefighters, and low-income families, not D.C.’s poor (Lippman 1974). For business leaders and D.C. housing officials, fair share served as a political medium to say suburbs had a moral responsibility to desegregate and house a higher number of D.C.’s poor, who were increasingly represented by single Black mothers and their children.

Against the backdrop of Romney’s recommendation for low-wage Black families’ integration into suburbs, D.C. Black public officials were also advocating similar measures. Take, for example, Mayor Walter Washington and James Banks. Lifelong bureaucrats, Washington and Banks, gained governance experience through their work in urban renewal agencies. From 1964 to 1966, Mayor Washington served as the city’s Black first public housing director. Until the early 1960s, Banks also served as the city’s chief relocation officer for families displaced by D.C. urban renewal projects. From 1965 to 1967, Banks was the Executive Director for the United Planning Organization, which oversaw the local distribution and administration of Great Society funds. As FCC leaders deliberated about their position on the 1985 Comprehensive Plan, FCC leaders invited Washington and Banks to share their recommendations about how to house D.C.’s Black poor.

As FCC’s only invited Black guests, Washington and Banks agreed that the comprehensive plan should plan Black poverty dispersal to neighboring suburbs, but they wanted White business leaders also to make changes to its private employment practices. And they asked for FCC to extend their urban revitalization initiatives beyond downtown.³⁵ For Washington and Banks, racially redistributive policies like racial integration in private companies or affordable homeownership loans for Black middle-class families were actions White business leaders needed to take for them to support pro-urban growth and Black poverty dispersal efforts.

Washington and Banks helped implement this vision once they were, respectively, appointed as D.C.’s Mayor-Commissioner and Director of City’s Housing Programs in the late 1960s. As public officials, they embraced their role as bureaucrats who balanced different stakeholders’ competing interests. Ultimately, Washington and Banks often prioritized the political interests of D.C.’s wealthy business class and (Black) homeowners to maintain political dominance and generate higher tax revenues. As managers of D.C.’s economic growth, these Black leaders typically saw the urban poor—particularly low-income Black mothers and their children—as a municipal burden and potential hindrance to urban reinvestment.³⁶ For example, Banks cosigned conservatives’ promotion of fair share programs (Scharfenberg and Bowman 1972). Without a relocation of some D.C.’s Black poor to the neighboring suburbs, Banks claimed that “low-income areas predict, it seems, poor commercial and other services” and only Black poverty dispersal will ensure low-wage Black families get access to better services and housing options (Scharfenberg and Bowman 1972). To counter D.C.’s stagnant economic growth and rising poverty rates, Banks saw fair share housing as an attempt to reconcile his racially redistributive goals with the urban growth mandate of capital recruitment. Yet, even as Banks believed welfare-assisted Black mothers could get access to better services if they were numerically dispersed throughout D.C.’s metro region, he neglected to mention how or if fair share programs would counter the institutional discrimination these families could face not only housing options but also schools, employment, and recreational spaces.

Nevertheless, Black officials’ support for urban growth and Black poverty dispersal indirectly provided a political opening for White business leaders to articulate their revanchist desires once again. To counter the city’s stagnant economic growth, D.C. officials established a taskforce on how to stimulate urban and economic growth. Thornton W. Owen, the chairman of Perpetual Federal Savings and Loan Association—D.C.’s largest Savings and Loan bank—and also FCC’s Housing Committee chair, represented FCC on this task force. In this capacity, Owen suggested,

middle and upper-income groups should be encouraged to move into the District, while steps should be taken to find housing for some of the low and moderate-income groups in the adjacent suburban areas where moderate priced housing is more available. (Bowman 1977)

FCC’s senior leadership shared Owen’s perspective. A year prior, FCC’s President Sol M. Linowitz called for FCC to help realize the “number one priority” of bringing back the affluent while also devising a plan to assist the poor.³⁷ In addition, Owen’s comments came on the heels of a report that claimed the number of White households was increasing while the number of Black households remained flat. Recognizing the housing assistance needs of D.C.’s Black poor, Owen acknowledged that low-income residents experienced the worse housing conditions and affordability woes. However, he still encouraged D.C. to redirect its resources to upper-income residents, lest D.C. remains economically unbalanced and uncompetitive regionally. To ensure D.C.’s economic resurgence, Owen suggested suburbs house their fair share of D.C.’s low-income Black families.

Owen’s remarks did not sit well with some of D.C.’s Black leadership or Black working-class tenants. Owen’s comments gave D.C. City Council member Nadine Winter an occasion to legitimize and give voice to the rising anger from poor Black residents who were routinely evicted from their homes to make way for redeveloped homes resettled by upper-income majority-White residents. Winter expressed shock and dismay at Owen’s comments. She countered, “Whites left the city. We ([B]lack people) should not have to leave because they want to come back” (Bowman 1977). By the mid-1970s, Black residents, particularly low-income Black women, organized into tenant unions to fight rent hikes, eviction, and gentrification. Advocating housing cooperatives and tenant management, many working-class Black women denounced FCC’s outsized influence on D.C.’s urban planning. Black tenant activist Lorne Cress once noted, “we should be attacking the Board of Trade and the Federal City Council. Those are the big boys” (Camp 1978). She added, “We feel there is a design to push us out of the city . . . to put [B]lacks in counties where they have relatively little political power and where it is difficult for [us] to organize” (Camp 1978). Black public housing activist Mattie E. Andrews added, “they’re saying to poor [B]lack Southerners, go home. Everybody else is welcome in this city except poor [B]lack Southerners” (Camp 1978). While it was not clear whether Black tenant activists waged a campaign against FCC or the Board of Trade in the 1970s, it was clear many Black working-class residents felt that many elected officials were beholden to clandestine and primarily White-moneyed interest groups like FCC. For example, Black tenant activists held protests against Mayor Walter Washington, claiming his administration turned a blind eye to White business leaders’ gentrification practices (Camp 1978).

Owen’s comments countered FCC’s long-standing avoidance of public spotlight. Post-1970s, FCC was able to maintain its low-profile partially due to its informal alliance with pro-growth Black officials. As Mayor Washington and other Black public officials endured protests and managed public dissent, FCC leaders worked quietly with Black developers and Black housing officials to realize Owen’s goal of upper-class White resettlement through the aggressive creation of pricey homeownership options. Indeed, as early as Washington’s first mayoral administration, FCC’s Housing Committee was working behind the scenes with Black developers to attract (White) capital back to the city through redevelopment projects like Fort Lincoln, Capitol View Plaza, and Logan Circle.³⁸

As FCC leaders indirectly benefited from Black officials’ engagement with activists, public officials also did the important work of translating FCC priorities as a public good. For example, public officials attempted to temper and translate Owen’s racially and economically motivated comments. Housing official Ben Gilbert said he shared Owen’s sentiment but rejected his delivery. Gilbert claimed Owen simply wanted voluntary suburban integration. He added D.C. wanted to “keep the welcome mat out for all groups who want to live here” but insisted that the suburbs must do their part to make sure that low-income housing was available for those who wanted to leave the District (Bowman 1977).

Black D.C. housing officials routinely engaged in this type of double-talk. On the one hand, they presented themselves as allies of the poor and defenders of anti-discrimination and civil rights initiatives like fair housing and fair share housing. Yet, on the other hand, they were fierce advocates of capital accumulation and wealth centralization, which they concealed in economic inclusion or diversity rhetoric (Reed 1999). By engaging in this double-talk, Black D.C. housing officials avoided direct discussion of forced migration as well as racial and gender housing discrimination, which remained a recurring reality for many low-income Black mothers who sought housing in D.C.’s suburbs.³⁹

Economic Revitalization and Low-Income Black Mothers as Undesirable Migrants

As low-income Black mothers exercised their choice to move into D.C.’s suburbs, they frequently confronted the gendered and racialized stereotype of the “problem family” that informed select D.C. business and housing officials’ support of fair share and fair housing programs. Low-income Black mothers often knew that their confinement to and mistreatment within D.C.’s subprime rental market were justified because they were assumed to be responsible for domestic dysfunction.

As such, single Black mothers had to endure the mobile stigma of being associated with neighborhood decline. This stigma often followed them as many low-income Black mothers sought more affordable housing units in D.C.’s suburbs. This stigma was present even in suburbs that were historically receptive to low-income Black integration. For example, in the 1980s, 36 miles away from the District of Columbia in a racially mixed suburb called Columbia, Maryland, single Black mother Alfreda Woodson said she learned the meaning of shame when trying to exercise HUD and D.C. local housing officials’ fair housing choice to move. A White male realtor Richard Martin grilled Woodson when she applied for an apartment with her Section 8 voucher in 1982. Woodson recalled Martin incredulously asked her, “You mean to tell me you have children and you’re not married; your daughter has a baby, and she’s not married?” (Leff 1986). He asked her how often she was looking for work. Unsatisfied with Woodson’s answers, he denied her housing. He later explained his rejection of Woodson’s tenancy when Woodson sued him under the fair housing law for gender, marital, source of income, and racial discrimination. Martin expounded,

[Woodson’s] attitude displayed was of great unconcern for taking care of the property. She seemed very content to stay at home without looking for gainful employment. Apparently, her children are being schooled in the same philosophy: Let the government take care of me and let someone else pay my bills for me. (Leff 1986)

Martin’s discriminatory treatment represented a clear example of how the “problem family” stereotype, which presumed domestic deviance, was not merely tied to urban spaces but projected onto welfare-assisted Black women, even as they moved into different areas.

In Woodson’s case, the problem Black mother stereotype emerged as Martin’s justification for denial of entry into suburban residential space. Because he had read Woodson as “welfare-dependent” and thus an imperfect parent, Martin assumed Woodson would instigate property decline, not pay rent and condone adolescent waywardness. With Martin’s projection of this stereotype, Martin callously denied Woodson respect and complex personhood.

As low-income Black mothers like Woodson dealt with anti-welfare and anti-Black mother stereotypes in the suburbs, D.C. also reproduced similar logics within its tightening rental market. With D.C. pursuing urban revitalization projects in D.C. during the 1980s, low-income Black mothers with limited funds or housing vouchers found their residential movements increasingly confined to neighborhoods with an overpresence of affordable housing—and for D.C. that usually meant D.C.’s peripheries, in Far Northeast, Southeast, or Prince George’s County. With limited affordable housing options, low-income Black mothers and their children had to endure poor housing conditions, justified in part because of anti-welfare and anti-Black mother stereotypes. For example, in the early 1990s, Dorothy Briscoe, a young Black mother with two children, was frustrated with her landlord’s cavalier approach to fixing her Southeast apartment. One Washington Post reporter detailed how Briscoe had huge holes in her apartment that were left unrepaired for weeks. Briscoe blamed her mistreatment on the landlord’s disrespect of publicly assisted renters. “They see me as a young [B]lack woman with two children on welfare, and they don’t care,” Briscoe lamented (Harris 1994). For Briscoe, she felt that her landlord was incentivized to avoid property upkeep because she was a welfare-assisted mother who did not deserve the amenities landlords were taught to reserve for higher-income tenants. Because of this consistent mistreatment, Briscoe was treated like an undesirable tenant expected to endure the residential stigma of an undesirable migrant—forced not only to accept abuse in the housing market but also remain subjected to frequent (financially or politically driven) mobility and surveillance.

Demonized as undesirable migrants and problematic tenants, low-income Black mothers like Briscoe and Woodson often endured character attacks from landlords, while Black officials implemented aggressive gentrification agendas in D.C. Moreover, while D.C. landlords—no matter racial background—were incentivized to encourage low-income families’ relocation to realize higher rents, D.C. housing officials saw higher-income residents as a critical way to secure the city’s economic stability. D.C. politicians and business leaders’ shared commitment to higher-income population growth meant that D.C. politicians and landlords often turned a deaf ear to D.C.’s suburbs like Prince George’s County’s increased population of low-income Black families.

In the early 2000s, D.C. housing officials were indifferent to Prince George’s County officials’ complaints about D.C. not doing its “fair share” to keep some of its D.C.’s Black poor. For example, Prince George’s County, a D.C.-adjacent majority-Black suburb that houses some of the nation’s wealthiest Black residents, balked after they realized poorer Black residents moved after that D.C. demolished hundreds of its public housing units in the 1990s and 2000s. In the early 2000s, Prince George’s County officials rebuked D.C. housing officials for putatively foisting their Black poor unto D.C.’s nearby majority-Black suburb. Wayne K. Curry, an African-American executive for Prince George’s County, demanded D.C. pay Prince George’s County for the number of displaced D.C. families resettling in their cities and bringing along with them a higher demand for social services and allegedly threatening their prospects for upper-class resettlement. Curry wanted more upper-income moderate residents to settle there and feared low-income Black mothers and their families’ continued migration would frustrate that endeavor. “I want the other communities around Washington to do their fair share,” Curry added (Leoninic and Schwartzman 2000). D.C. housing officials dismissed Curry’s demand, claiming that D.C. has nothing to do with low-income (Black) residents seeking residency in Prince George’s country; D.C. housing officials countered, “poor families that qualify for federal housing vouchers simply are exercising their choice to live in the suburb” (Leoninic and Schwartzman 2000). Both D.C. and P.G. housing officials veiled their disinterest in housing the Black poor behind fair housing rhetoric, suggesting that Black people deserve the right to move wherever they want. However, behind public officials’ fair housing and fair share rhetoric, questions remained about the low-income Black mothers’ right to placemaking and true freedom from discrimination.

Low-income Black women’s right to placemaking becomes particularly salient when one considers the present-day attacks on low-income Black tenants’ right to remain in the District. Today, D.C. is one of the county’s most gentrified cities. After decades of disinvestment and political attacks, the District is currently considering a plan to privatize or demolish 14 public housing communities (Muntean 2019). With few affordability options left, more than 40,000 Black residents have moved out of the city over the last two decades (Prince 2016; Shinault and Seltzer 2019). D.C.’s dramatic demographic shift would suggest that FCC finally realized its revanchist vision after several decades of behind-the-scenes lobbying.

Indeed, most of the FCC leaders who initially advocated this vision died, and their political alliance strategy endured. By the 1990s, FCC leaders spearheaded and facilitated the city-capital negotiations that led to neighborhood-specific but massive revitalization projects like the Convention Center, Verizon Center, and Baseball Stadium (Pyatt 1997), all of which activated and escalated the gentrification wave that currently engulfs the city. While FCC, as a collective, did not execute the instrumental attack on public housing and private forms of low-rent housing, the group helped create the structural incentives for developers, real estate agents, and landlords to pursue the widely used displacement tactics like tenant buyouts or constructive evictions.⁴⁰ All of these actors valued and pursued profit maximization and higher tax revenues. This materially based shared interest often required discursive reliance on Black (female) deviance narratives to help depict political elites’ urban revitalization plans as a public good that would have considerable benefits for low-income Black families. As a result, many low-income Black mothers and their families seemingly must remain on the move in search of affordability, acceptance, safety, respect, and the right to remain.

Rethinking Fair Housing Legacy to Recognize Mixed Motives for Urban Dispersal

The beginning of this article began with theorist and activist Yulanda Ward’s theory of spatial deconcentration as a tactic of Black urban repression for two reasons. First, Ward was among the first to identify alternative sociopolitical goals for fair housing and fair share housing programs. Second, she noted the fragmented social networks and weak organizing networks that resulted when low-income Black families used these programs to move into suburban areas.

While Ward focused on federal officials who promoted these programs, this article highlights the role of D.C.’s local business class in deploying fair housing and fair share appeals to advance revanchist goals. For White business leaders in the 1960s, White upper-income resettlement was critical to their economic strategy of D.C.’s revitalization and success. While this vision was later modified to include upper-income Black families, these leaders were consistent in their belief that low-income Black families must move outside of D.C. to revitalize D.C. Moreover, FCC business leaders’ revitalization plans hinged on programmatic interventions that targeted low-income Black mothers who were presumed to be the “hardcore welfare mothers.” As such, this article reveals that business leaders used fair housing and fair share rhetoric to act as ecological planners, accessing populations for their putative economic usefulness in urban revitalization.

Despite these business leaders’ consistent effort to use fair housing and fair share to advocate D.C.’s racial and economic reconfiguration, HUD’s use of fair housing and fair share housing programs should not be uncritically lumped in with the revanchist interests of business and real estate interests. Nevertheless, HUD, D.C. housing officials, and D.C. real estate interests did share a commitment to urban growth politics, which implicitly required Black poverty dispersal. In many ways, low-income Black women and their families often bore the brunt of the adverse effects of urban revitalization, with their homes as frequent and susceptible targets for demolition or redevelopment (Vale 2013; Williams 2004).

Finally, while this article does not condemn fair housing or fair share housing programs as inherently wrong, this article does offer a cautionary reminder. It lifts low-income Black welfare activists’ original demand for state-developed rental units that are low-cost and family-friendly. In addition, this article underscores the importance of not forsaking the other important civil and welfare rights visions that contributed to the political climate that helped make fair housing a significant legislative victory. Tenant activists like Yulanda Ward and D.C.’s low-income Black welfare activists articulated a political vision of placemaking; freedom from moral and paternal surveillance; low-cost, family-friendly, and well-maintained communities; and the end to forced displacement. These activists’ welfare rights vision must be championed just as much as fair housing advocates’ vision of freedom from residential segregation.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rosemary Ndubuizu

Notes

Author Biography

Rosemary Ndubuizu is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University. She holds a PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies and specializes in social welfare policy, urban politics, Black feminisms, social movements, political economy, and cultural politics. She is currently writing her first book, which explores how controlling images and negative cultural narratives about low-income Black women and their families shaped and informed affordable housing politics in Washington, D.C.

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