Abstract
When it comes to the federal urban renewal program, Texas has often been dismissed as a conservative state since large cities like Dallas and Houston refused to participate. But a closer look at Texas shows that smaller cities such as Lubbock, Waco, and Grand Prairie did indeed embrace the program. Unlike northern cities which employed urban renewal to retard decline, these Texas cities embraced it to promote growth and to improve race relations. Because of segregation, blacks had few standard neighborhoods to reside in and civic leaders saw new opportunities to better black living conditions offered by urban renewal.
Despite a continued interest in urban renewal by scholars, most studies have focused on large cities while they have generally ignored smaller municipalities. 1 Although many Texans rejected urban renewal, the possibility of receiving federal funds to improve their communities attracted lesser cities and suburbs since they provided town builders opportunity to promote growth through infrastructure development, clearance of slums, and better housing. Despite onerous paperwork and limited personnel to implement the program, a surprising number of small Texas communities made commitments to urban renewal and successfully secured federal grants, allowing them to participate in one of the most controversial programs in the nation’s history. Intent on improving their communities’ physical and social needs, they embraced slum clearance, rehabilitation, and a codified way of promoting better housing to improve neighborhoods and provide new opportunities for upward mobility.
Although Texas has long been known as a conservative state with a strong suspicion of federal social programs (three of its largest cities failed to participate), other smaller places embraced it when given the chance. Despite the fact that it took state legislators nearly eight years from the passage of the Housing Act of 1949 to approve enabling legislation for slum clearing urban redevelopment, and even then it forbid public housing on cleared areas and required a public referendum before urban renewal could take place, some cities and towns opted to participate in the program. 2 Unlike Dallas, Houston, and Fort Worth that failed to fully engage in the program despite federal approval of each city’s Workable Program (albeit Houston’s was provisional), smaller communities embraced the program and the available federal funds. 3 Neither Houston nor Dallas even held a referendum on urban renewal and Fort Worth citizens defeated urban renewal not once but twice, the latter in 1966 by a 5-1 margin. 4 Concern over the indiscriminate use of eminent domain as well as about federal meddling in local affairs along with a continued paranoia about socialism seem to reenforce the idea that the state’s conservative political culture was to blame for big Texas cities’ lack of participation in the urban renewal program. But curiously, such fears did not appear to play much of a role in some of the state’s smaller cities and towns that embraced the program. Indeed, by 1959, 155 Texas towns and cities had contacted the Regional Administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) in Fort Worth for information concerning urban renewal, and 76 of them even adopted Workable Programs, a requirement before any urban renewal could be undertaken. 5
Not all carried through, however, since as of 1958, only twenty-eight Texas municipalities had held the state mandated referendum on federal urban renewal and in only nineteen of those, residents had voted for it. 6 By 1967, sixteen Texas communities had urban renewal projects underway. Most of these had a population of under 100,000 and many places fewer than 10,000 residents. For instance, the state’s smaller cities and towns in South Texas played a major role in creating what became known as the Texas Urban Renewal Association (TURA) in 1964. That organization was an outgrowth of the Valley Urban Renewal Association established in Mission by urban renewal agencies of the Rio Grande Valley in Deep South Texas on February 20, 1960. The newly created TURA promoted the exchange of information and ideas as well as held workshops and shared interactions with the federal housing officials to clarify ambiguous requirements. TURA members elected E. K. O’Shea, executive director of the urban renewal agency in tiny Mercedes, as their initial president. Other small-town urban renewal agency heads also took on important leadership roles as TURA evolved into a state organization with a membership of 342 by 1971. 7 It held biennial meetings while the executive committee met four times a year in part to set the agenda for the membership meetings. By the 1970s, TURA had also become a significant lobby force in Washington trying to secure additional money for Texas projects. 8
Municipalities such as Savoy, Clute, Aransas Pass, and Stanton all with populations under 3,000 held membership in TURA and joined with others such as Crystal City, Marshall, Mission, Port Arthur, Waco, Lubbock, Austin, and Grand Prairie to participate in the federal program. With urban renewal, cash-strapped communities like Stanton and Aransas Pass saw opportunity to improve their community without spending too much money and jumped at the opportunity since small towns only had to provide one-fourth of the funds for urban renewal projects as opposed to the one-third contribution required from larger cities. 9 But rapidly growing places like Dallas and Houston had numerous residents who believed the solution to slums and blight was even more threatening to their rights as citizens and feared that an intrusive federal government might well threaten not only their community’s loss of autonomy but their ownership of land too thanks to eminent domain. Some even feared federal programs like urban renewal might slowdown their cities’ population and economic growth. Others were confident federal money was not needed and espoused locally funded urban renewal programs. 10
The Texas experience with urban renewal suggests that housing issues related to minorities in smaller cities gained as much attention as the focus on improving the central business district. Civic leaders feared the economic and social consequences of slums and worried that inadequate housing might create racial turmoil as blacks looked to white neighborhoods for better housing. It also may help explain why some Texas cities turned more to rehabilitation of existing black neighborhoods rather than total slum clearance as the best solution under urban renewal. All the three medium-size Texas cities in this study experienced a sense of urgency to improve the lot of minorities in the 1950s. In addition, supporters of urban renewal believed the program would make their city healthier, cost efficient, and more physically attractive either by subtraction (clearing slums) or addition (by improving the neighborhoods of the poor). Professional planners reinforced these notions.
Waco’s War on Slums
One of the state’s most ambitious urban renewal programs took place in Waco, Texas. It was not only the first city to complete an urban renewal project in the state, but by 1975 it had finished nine urban renewal projects, the most in Texas. 11 Waco residents, in a town viewed by many as conservative, approved their city’s participation in the federal government’s urban renewal program by a vote of 2,133 to 293 (a margin of more than of 7 to 1) despite efforts by the John Birch Society to defeat it. 12 A city of 84,706 by 1950, Waco had experienced significant growth during the 1940s thanks to the war but faced new obstacles in the 1950s including a destructive Tornado in 1953 that severely damaged downtown along with various neighborhoods. 13 In addition, the closing of three military establishments and the decline of agriculture in the area created challenges for the community. Although Waco experienced slow growth in the 1950s, the increase of suburbanization and a stagnant economy in the following decade resulted in population decline that accelerated a desire to improve the city’s physical appearance. 14
Not unlike many cities after World War II, the business establishment blamed some of the city’s woes on local political leadership and “the cumbersome commissioner form of government.” A very low tax rate meant inept officials were either unable or unwilling to provide the necessary services needed to attract people and industry to Waco, whose reputation as a poorly run municipality was well known. Many of the city’s roads were dirt, and basic infrastructure was missing. In response to a growing desire to enhance the city’s image as “a viable place to live and do business,” 15 advocates of change called for a revised city charter that created a council/manager form of government and voters approved it in 1955. Supporters of the new charter had promised that charter reform would attract better leadership that would promote city growth and development. About the same time, a citizens’ group had appeared under the name of Grass Roots of Waco and pushed for better housing for the city’s minorities. Meanwhile, dwindling tax receipts from the blighted city’s central business district and the appearance of slums and blight throughout the city worried civic leaders and newly elected local officials who feared for Waco’s future. 16
Such concerns explain why those officials turned to Harland Bartholomew and Associates, a well-respected city planning firm that had already furnished plans for places such as Dallas, Fort Worth, and Corpus Christi. 17 Hired in 1956 to produce a comprehensive plan for the city, Bartholomew’s completed document (1958) characterized the city’s slums and blight as “both social and economic liabilities” and recommended a “vigorous housing improvement program taking full advantage of federal and state housing legislation and federal funds currently available.” The plan also emphasized the need to remove the slums bordering Baylor University not only because planners viewed them as the city’s worst housing but because they inhibited the school’s ability to expand the physical campus. Bartholomew’s plan also stressed the importance of preserving the downtown as the core of the city and called for clearance and rehabilitation of aging buildings in and around the Central Business District, still struggling from the 1953 tornado, so it could be “brought up to date and improved in both appearance and utility.” 18 Toward that end, Bartholomew and Associates recommended a pedestrian mall and ample parking to make the downtown more attractive. The plan touched on other important elements of the city, including the development of thoroughfares and the need for healthier neighborhoods. To achieve these goals, planners recommended that Waco participate in the federal government’s urban renewal program. 19
When the state finally passed enabling legislation for urban renewal in 1957, civic leaders, both associated with downtown and nearby Baylor University pushed for slum clearing urban renewal as designated by the Bartholomew Plan. 20 The plan was typical of the master plans of the 1940s and 1950s, in which it focused on the need to protect the city from a deteriorating downtown and from housing conditions of the poor that threatened the stability of the larger city. Bartholomew viewed slums as incubators not only of bad health but of bad citizenship, both a threat to the larger city. 21
To prepare for the city’s involvement in urban renewal, City Manager Jack Jeffrey had appointed realtor Hank L. Corwin to survey housing conditions in Waco. 22 His 1956 land survey identified 3,847 dwellings in the city as substandard. The following year Jeffrey named him to head the Waco Urban Renewal Agency (WURA). 23 This proved a wise choice since Corwin’s stellar leadership and good relationship with the HHFA’s Regional Office in Fort Worth along with his ability to work with Baylor and city officials allowed him to secure the necessary money to undertake the city’s various urban renewal projects.
It should come as no surprise that Waco’s early urban renewal project targeted that land bordering the campus. The decision to clear land just northeast and southeast of Baylor would not only eliminate what planner Harland Bartholomew had labeled a menacing slum but also provided more space for the university to expand. Supporters of the university (the Baylor–Waco foundation) raised the necessary money and purchased the land and once the WURA cleared it for university use this meant the renewal agency would have an immediate buyer for its first projects and the assurance that the land would be developed quickly. 24 Thanks to the first two urban renewal projects, Baylor 1A and Riverside 1 Baylor secured 163 acres though slum clearance allowing the school to triple the size of what had been a compact campus. 25 By 1971, the university had added an additional fifty acres of land thanks to urban renewal allowing it to further expand the campus. 26
The initial slum areas targeted for clearance located in a flood prone area located between the campus and the Brazos River were occupied primarily by Mexican and African Americans. Part of the area had been a city dump and other parcels housed noxious industries such as slaughterhouses. Few dwellings had indoor plumbing, and many of the rickety buildings were nothing more than dilapidated frame and tarpaper shacks. Indeed, the Dallas Morning News claimed the slum so despicable that “a well-bred hog would have avoided [it].” 27 By eliminating these slums, city officials believed that they would improve the lives of residents by destroying an environment that seemed threatening and inhospitable. Examples of this belief appeared in the urban renewal agency’s follow-up study that claimed that 85 of those families displaced from the first targeted slum area had lived in sordid, substandard places. After relocation, the agency reported that only 5 percent of those uprooted ended up in substandard places. Even more important, according to the agency, some benefited tremendously from their new environment. Urban renewal officials claimed that when they forced a family of four from a deplorable “shotgun shack” with no indoor facilities, it relocated them to a much better neighborhood “where their family status…improved to an almost unbelievable extent.” Homeowners from this and other urban renewal sites were scattered throughout the city and in a few cases to predominantly white Anglo sections. 28 Another relocation story recounted that when a senile head of the family relocated from a badly blighted area, he experienced “a miraculous change in his physical condition which made the whole family very happy.” 29 Although urban renewal personnel claimed that 90 percent of those relocated were satisfied with their new living conditions later interviews found that others felt betrayed by the Urban Renewal Agency. Some of the uprooted had supported urban renewal believing it would renovate their neighborhood rather than displace them from it. 30 At the time of renewal displacements, Rev. M. L. Cooper, black pastor of the Second Street Baptist Church, and Dr. J. H. Adams, president of all-black Paul Quinn College, were the loudest critics. Cooper protested that urban renewal would not only uproot his congregants, but he was troubled that the cleared land was being sold to Baylor, a university that did not even admit blacks. Dr. Adams complained that “city fathers had neglected the Negroes in the planning stages of urban renewal in Waco and that Negroes had not been properly informed in advance of the beginning of that program in Waco.” 31
Despite such protests, in 1964, the city hired planning consultants Caudill, Rowlett, Scott, Bush, and Witt to prepare a General Neighborhood Renewal Plan for Waco that would become the overall framework for the renewal of downtown and its bordering areas. This included not only the central business district but also the major portion of the industrial and warehouse district close to the city center. It also incorporated several residential districts to the north and the south of downtown that housed approximately 6,100 residents. When Bartholomew and associates revised its plan for Waco in 1967, it once again emphasized the need to remake the deteriorating downtown into a strong central business area so the city could “regain its economic position and to induce growth at a rate comparable with other urban areas in the state.” 32
The most challenging and most ambitious of all the city’s urban renewal efforts targeted the site of the city’s original settlement covering over 140 acres. Initiated in 1968, it cleared the sixteen blocks nearest the Brazos River (including the demolition of 199 buildings) while only preserving old city hall. 33 In addition, after a successful bond package, the city erected a Convention Center, other government facilities and added additional parking. Urban renewal funds also helped improve an inadequate storm drainage system in downtown that had allowed heavy rains to flood the stores of merchants. In addition, urban renewal officials promoted rehabilitation and conservation for much of the downtown area. Again following Bartholomew’s recommendation, it converted Austin Avenue into a landscaped pedestrian mall in an attempt to bring shoppers back to downtown. Such action, according to one report, would not only revitalize a declining downtown but would project “a modern and progressive image” for the larger city. 34 By the early 1970s, the city had improved over 2,100 acres of land under its urban renewal program through slum clearance (1,200 homes and 300 commercial structures) and rehabilitation (400 dwellings). There is no doubt that the US$100,000,000 worth of improvements had a profound impact on the city’s landscape and had a significant role in shaping the modern city of today. 35
In many ways, the Waco experience with urban renewal mirrored what was happening across the nation. Slum clearance often uprooted minorities for institutional betterment and to salvage downtown. But unlike some renewal experiences, at least one report celebrated the success of the urban renewal undertakings. According to it, the urban renewal plan for Waco would provide “a framework of strong residential areas with adequate schools and parks on in the northern and southern extremities of the central area and reinvigorate the central business district.” 36
Although urban renewal was controversial in Texas, it appears that civic leaders and residents in Waco supported the programs in part because they feared that Waco would lag further behind in the urban sweepstakes and the urban renewal program seemed the best way to combat Waco’s decline. A deteriorating housing stock along with a blighted downtown resulted in dropping income for the city due to falling property values and less revenue from sales taxes. But unlike some cities, Waco citizens now confident in their city government voted for a US$12,300,000 bond issue in 1958 and approved the urban renewal referendum required by the state. 37 The appearance of outside professional planners with their emphasis on how urban renewal would help the whole city gave the urban renewal program more legitimacy. In Waco, urban renewal did not appear to fall prey to greedy businessmen but won approval of concerned civic leaders who cared about Waco’s future. Slum clearance near Baylor brought two different benefits to the city. It opened up land to allow the university to expand while ridding the city of menacing slums that not only appeared to threaten its residents but the safety of the entire city. The continued emphasis on eliminating slums, improving neighborhoods through rehabilitation, and promoting a dynamic downtown seemed a comprehensive program that would address several of Waco’s problems. Supporters of urban renewal viewed eminent domain as a necessary evil when it came to the rights of individuals, as was the Workable Program that required a housing code, improved zoning, and other regulations that infringed on property owners rights. 38 Such actions suggest that some viewed the welfare of Waco as even more important than some of their rights. The destruction of slums and blight along with the resurrection of downtown seemed worth such a price exacted by urban renewal.
Lubbock and the Limitations of Urban Renewal
If a conservative political culture was the sole determinate about decisions to participate in federal slum clearing urban renewal, then Lubbock might have been one of the least likely candidates. Citizens had defeated a needed public housing project for 600 blacks at a 1950 referendum, and later that decade McCarthyism had a chilling impact on the city’s state university, Texas Technological College (Texas Tech University after 1969), as several professors were dismissed for their political beliefs. 39 A significant proportion of population attended fundamentalist churches and the city remained dry until 1972. But despite the city’s conservative reputation, Lubbock became the first in the Lone Star state to initiate urban renewal. 40 Its civic leaders, a downtown group that included bankers, lawyers, and merchants known as the Empire Builders, saw the postwar years as a time to not only grow their city’s population but to expand Lubbock’s influence and prestige nationwide. As a result, they not only supported a more activist local government that embraced planning but one that also endorsed urban renewal. They feared that a blighted downtown discouraged business growth and the menacing slums populated by the city’s Mexican and African American populations threatened the city’s health and social stability. 41
Located on the Southern High Plains, the West Texas city developed as an important agricultural center depending on cotton and sorghum. By 1940, this county seat had grown to 31,853. World War II (especially the Reese Air Force Base) impacted Lubbock helping it become one of the fastest growing cities in the United States by 1950. During that decade, the population continued to surge from 71,747 to 128,068. 42
An influx of Mexican Americans moved into an already congested barrio north of the industrial district after the war creating unacceptable housing conditions while a growing African American population emerged beyond municipal limits southeast of downtown where they built cheap and primitive housing without access to utilities such as water and sewage. By the 1950s, city officials identified both areas as slums that threatened the health and the peace of the city. 43 Even before the state passed the necessary enabling legislation for federal urban renewal, officials annexed the outlying African American areas and strategized how to improve the areas as well as and the Mexican American barrio already in the city limits. Fearful that the city’s blacks had almost nowhere else to live but in the crowded and deplorable slums, civic officials initially tried to secure public housing but when that failed they worked with the local Real Estate Board and created Southeast Lubbock Development Corporation to subdivide and sell improved lots for the cost of water, sewer, and paving on city-owned land where African Americans could build better homes. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) approved the subdivision of 100 single family lots providing African Americans the opportunity to purchase land and build their housing in a neighborhood that would meet city regulations. Such an action provided new opportunities for house hungry blacks but also allowed the Real Estate Board to dictate where African Americans could live in a city that strongly embraced segregation. Although some celebrated this public–private partnership between city officials and the Real Estate Board, Manhattan Heights, as it was called, grew slowly because potential buyers had limited financial resources and often faced challenges in securing mortgages from local banks despite FHA mortgage insurance. 44
After Congress passed the Housing Act of 1954, city officials saw urban renewal as the answer of how to remove the city’s unsightly and dangerous slums while providing relocation housing for the displaced. Under Section 221, FHA mortgage insurance would provide liberal terms to finance new homes for those uprooted and encouraged nonprofit organizations to develop low-rent apartments for the displaced. The Housing Act of 1954 (Section 220) also provided a generous loan program for those who needed money to rehabilitate their dwellings in blighted but salvable neighborhoods throughout the city where spot clearance and the provision of necessary infrastructure could rescue them from further decline. 45
Despite the state’s delay in passing enabling legislation for urban renewal, city officials secured federal approval in 1956 for its Workable Program to prevent future decay and planned urban renewal for the Mexican American barrio known as Guadalupe. Shortly after the state finally approved enabling legislation in 1957, the city held a referendum on urban renewal that November. Despite the opposition from the Independent Conservative Voters of Lubbock, supporters of urban renewal won the day with a vote of 1,181 for and 160 against. African Americans voted 8 to 1 in favor of urban renewal. Advocates of urban renewal had emphasized how the city’s slums never paid their own way, drained city services and threatened Lubbock’s health and safety. Indeed, according to city officials, slums appeared to destroy peoples’ lives and threaten the very welfare of cities. The Lubbock Avalanche agreed claiming that the city’s slums served as “the breeding ground of disease, crime and delinquency.” Shortly after passage of the referendum, city commissioners created the Lubbock Urban Renewal Agency (LURA), which promptly secured an advance loan from the HHFA for planning purposes. 46
Even though urban renewal officials initially targeted a Mexican American barrio for its first urban renewal project that changed after LURA officials announced they would promote a total clearance project rather than undertake rehabilitation there. Not wanting to see their community destroyed, Latinos dropped their support of the project and protested the plans for slum clearance. 47 As a result, renewal officials changed their priorities and decided to undertake urban renewal for the city’s worst slum, Queen City, occupied by African Americans and located southeast of the Central Business District. 48 LURA selected a thirty-five-acre plot of recently annexed land that was dominated by makeshift accommodations and a toxic environment. Fearful that the disease and lawlessness associated with this area might spill over to other parts of Lubbock, civic leaders and city officials both made it a priority to target this area for slum clearing urban renewal. 49 As a result, on May 8, 1958, LURA received approval from the HHFA for its Coronado urban renewal application making it the first accepted in the state.
The Regional Office of the HHFA had also encouraged LURA to develop a second urban renewal project which it did. This was a much larger area (380 acres) adjacent to Coronado and also predominantly populated by poor African Americans. Unlike Coronado that was scheduled for slum clearance and makeover as an industrial district, LURA planned the nearby Yellowhouse project as a residential development with some light industry to provide nearby jobs. The area would be improved by partial clearance and rehabilitation of existing dwellings. 50
In 1961, the Federal Urban Renewal Agency urged LURA to merge these two projects into one under the name of Coronado. The new Coronado project now housed 1,800 African American families in an area where dwellings varied from irredeemable slum housing to solid dwellings that just needed access to public utilities and a fresh coat of paint. Despite an initial promise of significant rehabilitation, LURA demolished over 1,429 buildings including all the dwellings in the smaller Coronado parcel. In the larger Yellowhouse site, workers managed to rehabilitate only 129 buildings. City officials met their one-third cost requirement by upgrading the rest of the urban renewal area. This included infrastructure improvements such as storm and sanitary sewers, waterlines, and gas and electricity lines, along with telephone wires and street improvements. In addition, the planning commission replatted and rezoned the area. Bond money would also result in new schools, parks and even a swimming pool for the former slum. Officials hoped such action would create a better environment for blacks. 51
Unlike Waco that had removed black housing to benefit Baylor University and downtown, Lubbock’s first urban renewal effort done in stages, removed bad housing and improved the infrastructure to better an area for blacks to reside. But in doing that it uprooted many African Americans who never returned. 52 Of the 929 families displaced by the project, 164 relocated in Green Fair Manor, an apartment complex completed on the cleared land in 1965 thanks to Section 221 mortgage insurance. The nonprofit Southeast Lubbock Development Corporation, which had earlier offered housing opportunities for blacks in Manhattan Heights, erected this project. 53 An additional 288 families who lost their dwellings ended up in rental units including 59 families who relocated at Coronado Apartments, another Section 221 complex built by the Masons also on the replatted land. Finally, 246 displaced homeowners purchased homes, some in the renewal area and others in nearby Manhattan Heights, thanks to the federal government’s available mortgage insurance. At least fifty-nine displaced families left the city, and the LURA could not locate an additional 185 families that had previous lived on the renewal site. 54 If the goal of the Coronado urban renewal project was to make a new, attractive African American neighborhood results were mixed at best. Much of the land remained undeveloped and the lack of commercial services for the neighborhood such as grocery stores and neighborhood businesses limited the area’s appeal more than had been anticipated. Nevertheless, a Dallas Morning News article observed that a “striking transformation” had taken place in Coronado from what it had been when urban renewal started there five years earlier. Low-cost housing did not draw many investors nor did the mortgage insurance program for the renewal area always work since many blacks failed to secure housing loans. 55 Lubbock’s effort to create a better neighborhood for blacks may have fallen short of expectations, but it created a much more stable and safer neighborhood than the earlier slum area had been.
The experiences of Waco and Lubbock, as well as the efforts of other Texas municipalities such as Austin, Marshall, and Grand Prairie, suggest that Texans’ suspicion of the federal government was not enough to sidetrack urban renewal throughout the state. Rather, ambitious city builders in the Lone Star State’s midsize communities viewed the controversial program as critical for their cities’ growth and development by the 1960s. Although Waco and Lubbock had different experiences, both initially focused on eradicating slums, an environment that appeared to threaten not only city’s financial well-being but is health and social welfare as well. To these city builders, the federal government program appeared to be the most cost-efficient way to address the slum problem that supposedly threatened their city’s future. Faced with limited financial resources, the offer seemed too good to turn down. Despite tedious paperwork and red tape, Lubbock officials embraced the federal program that provided them a chance to destroy slums and salvage some decaying neighborhoods. Local officials thought the hassle of securing federal money and the potential risk of increased federal involvement in local affairs was worth it since the real threat of slums seemed greater than the imagined threat of an expanding federal government that might lead to socialism. Simply put, the federal government’s urban renewal program seemed necessary and too generous to pass up. As Waco had done, Lubbock eventually used federal government’s urban renewal program to improve its downtown, but this happened only after a devastating Tornedo ravished both downtown and the Guadalupe barrio on May 11, 1970, killing twenty-six and doing US$135,250,000 worth of damage. 56
Grand Prairie’s Crusade for Better Black Housing
In many ways, the decision of Grand Prairie to employ urban renewal may have been the most surprising case in the state, but it underscores one of the original goals of urban renewal, improving housing for the city’s ill-housed while preventing future slums. Before World War II, Grand Prairie had been a small rural community located about ten miles west of Dallas. Life changed drastically for it in 1940 when North American Aviation located a massive airplane factory nearby the community and the US Navy established an aviation base adjacent to the town. As a result, during that decade, Grand Prairie grew from 1,595 to 13, 241, more than an eight-fold increase. Job hunters poured into the area, found land beyond the town’s boundaries, and built housing with whatever they could find. Rapid growth continued the following decade not only because of the defense industry and military training posts but because of expanding highway development and the location of Grand Prairie between the booming cities of Dallas and Fort Worth. 57
Much of the housing built during the war was characterized as “boom type construction,” often small framed housing with minimal utilities or even worse. So-called lean-to shacks and bus bodies also accommodated those with little money in desperate need of housing. This was especially true of the city’s black section, South Dalworth, which contained poorly built structures and often experienced overcrowding. The lack of paving, inadequate water, and sewage services as well as other neighborhood defects made it a candidate for rehabilitation efforts. Indeed, after securing a home rule charter in 1947, officials established city planning and zoning bodies for the first time to address the ill effects of that rapid growth. Civic leaders feared that Grand Prairie’s reputation as “a working man’s community with only war-time-quality housing” 58 would impede its growth as city officials sought to change that image and take advantage of its location to become an independent suburban city that would be particularly appealing to the growing middle class in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
Toward that end, the city engaged William Llewellyn Powell of Powell and Powell Engineers from Dallas to develop the town’s first comprehensive plan. As early as 1954, the city plan had underscored the need to improve the recently annexed African American neighborhood, South Dalworth. The plan not only called for the expansion of the neighborhood, but it also recommended a more “diversified development” including “better types of homes, for those who desire and can afford them, as well as minimum cost housing.” South Dalworth provided housing for most all of Grand Prairie’s blacks, from the unemployed to those with steady jobs and regular incomes. The plan also proposed “schools, parks, shopping districts and other neighborhood features” for the city’s black residents. Not content with planning for the future, the document challenged Grand Prairie leaders to “improve or correct substandard conditions that exist in the present development” now and pass legislation to ensure that the established black neighborhood would “conform to minimum requirements for health, safety and convenience.” 59 As early as 1955, a year after Congress passed the Housing Act of 1954, city officials had contacted the HHFA about the possibility of securing an urban renewal grant. 60
It should be no surprise then that shortly after W. L. Powell completed the plan, Grand Prairie officials secured approval of their Workable Program in 1957, a prerequisite for urban renewal money. 61 City officials also appointed a fifteen-member citizens advisory committee on urban renewal who surveyed the city’s blighted areas and targeted South Dalworth neighborhood in west Grand Prairie for the city’s first urban renewal project. The committee, which included two black members, opted for rehabilitation rather than total clearance because of the extreme housing crisis in North Texas. 62 To ease the fears of South Dalworth residents, Grand Prairie Urban Renewal Agency officials met with the neighborhood and explained how the project would proceed.
They emphasized that some rehabilitation efforts might result in temporary displacement of residents, but they would be encouraged to return to South Dalworth after the rehabilitation phase ended. Others were warned that some houses were too decrepit to save but could be replaced by new homes for those eligible for low-cost federal loans through Section 221mortgage insurance that required no down payment and provided for forty-year loans at low interest. Housing officials also explained to the others that Section 220 loans were available for rehabilitation work on houses that were not up to code. To secure federal help, city officials also pledged to provide new streets, utilities, playgrounds, and parks, along with other recreational facilities for the neighborhood. 63 When asked why Grand Prairie selected nearly all black South Dalworth for its first urban renewal project, city manager Larry Crow replied that “it needed urban renewal worse than any other areas and because its residents needed the benefits of FHA loans more than any other people in our city.” 64 Segregation in Grand Prairie as in other Texas cities gave blacks too few housing choices. Indeed, one reason for an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than clearance was that there simply was nowhere for blacks to go if South Dalworth had been totally cleared.
Local officials viewed the crowded black neighborhood as a problem for several reasons. First, it paid less property taxes and had a disproportionate number of service calls to the city, so it drained Grand Prairie’s budget. 65 Even more important, the conditions in South Dalworth were blamed for the areas above average health and crime problems. City officials feared that if unchecked, these slums would have ugly consequences for the children raised in such a setting. Moreover, problems from the slum conditions would affect the rest of the city too. By May 1957, the FHA already set aside mortgage insurance for up to 638 loans for South Dalworth residents who were slated to be displaced or in need of money to rehabilitate their homes. 66 As we have noted, urban renewal not only included efforts to improve South Dalworth housing but also to promote a more ordered and attractive neighborhood. Toward that end, Grand Prairie would furnish one-third of the cost of the urban renewal project by improving the infrastructure of South Dalworth, which contained few paved roads and limited water and sewage systems. City officials planned to expand the elementary school in South Dalworth and build a new recreational center for the area using bond money voters had approved on September 24, 1957. 67
Despite the support of the mayor, the city manager, and the city commission, along with the chamber of commerce, realtors, and others, a vocal few strongly opposed the urban renewal program. The most adamant opponent was Congressman Bruce Alger, Dallas County’s first Republican Congressman and a self-described “ultraconservative.” Alger not only detested the use of eminent domain for private development in urban renewal but he hated the red tape linked to all urban renewal projects. 68 He managed to rally so much opposition in Dallas that it had forced Mayor Robert L Thornton to cancel the city’s upcoming referendum on whether it should participate in the federal government’s urban renewal program. 69 Despite the anti-urban renewal campaign in nearby Dallas, voters in Grand Prairie approved it by a narrow thirty-vote margin. 70 Although two precincts voted against it, urban renewal probably passed because of its support in South Dalworth where blacks voted 117 to 88 in favor of it. 71
Unlike other urban renewal sites where occupants were uprooted en masse, the South Dalworth project tried to preserve and improve the black neighborhood without great disruption. Blacks were pleased with the city’s commitment to emphasize rehabilitation over mass clearance and applauded Grand Prairie’s desire to improve the infrastructure, expand the school, and erect a recreation center. 72
Similar to Coronado in Lubbock, South Dalworth had developed on the outskirts of Grand Prairie during the war. Workers who streamed to the area bought or secured lots and built housing with whatever materials they found. Many had jobs but the color line limited housing options and most of the city’s black population found South Dalworth as their only option. City officials believed that urban renewal offered the least expensive way of responding to the blight and slum conditions in this 285-acre black neighborhood that included 514 homes and about 2,000 residents. 73
Although the emphasis in South Dalworth was on rehabilitation, by 1962, the urban renewal agency did remove 151 of what it characterized as “shaky shacks, crates and boxes that used to be called homes.” Despite this subtraction of these dwellings, some already vacant, the city created the necessary infrastructure for a viable community including sewer and waterlines, paved streets and sidewalks, and a new recreation center and gymnasium. 74 Rehousing those displaced proved problematic since Texas forbid public housing on land cleared by urban renewal and public housing on vacant land often met with opposition by white residents. Despite the challenges due to the makeover of South Dalworth, by 1963, Grand Prairie blacks had spent more than US$200,000 on the rehabilitation of 148 properties. 75 Other black homeowners who were displaced were eligible for Section 221 mortgage insurance program that allowed them to secure a US$9,000 house in the urban renewal area for no money down and for monthly payments of under US$50 per month. As a result, blacks spent more than US$1,600,000 for new homes in the urban renewal site. 76 The South Dalworth urban renewal project was probably one of the most successful ones developed for blacks in the state. 77
City officials secured approval for other urban renewal projects too, including the 350-acre Lakeview project, populated by white World War II defense workers who built primitive housing in this unincorporated land at the time so they could work in a nearby plane factory. 78 Although the reclamation of that massive site was a significant accomplishment by the Grand Prairie Urban Renewal Agency, it paled in comparison to the Agency’s success in South Dalworth. Faced with the challenge of how to deal with the slums-like conditions in South Dalworth, Grand Prairie used urban renewal to build a better black community by spot clearance and rehabilitation rather than total clearance. Although tagged as a rehabilitation project as had the Lakeview project, dwellings were demolished and people displaced. 79 Still, the end product was a significantly improved residential area for Grand Prairie’s African American population. 80
Conclusion
Despite Texas’s reputation for its conservative approach to the problem of slum housing and its tendency to avoid public housing by the late 1950s, some of the state’s midsize cities and smaller communities proceeded to employ urban renewal. City builders in these places embraced urban renewal as a way to improve substandard conditions that threatened growth. Although the main national narrative of urban renewal stresses the focus on large cities and downtown renewal while emphasizing the terrible toll relocation had on minorities, 81 urban renewal for smaller towns often meant improved infrastructure whether it was sewers, paved roads, parks or bridges, overpasses, and even schools for neglected minority neighborhoods. The underappreciated Workable Program also mandated increased housing and building codes and other regulations that smaller towns and cities had previously never employed allowing slumlords to thrive. Just as important, the Texas towns discussed in this study used urban renewal to attack their slums and sometimes replace them with better neighborhoods. Of course, that goal was difficult to achieve because of the state’s commitment to segregation and limitations placed on public housing in Texas. Nevertheless, because civic leaders saw slums not only as a threat to the health and well-being of individuals but a menace to the larger community, government officials employed the only tools available, urban renewal, with its slum clearance and rehabilitation provisions, preventative measures, and low-cost housing policies associated with Sections 220 and 221 of the Housing Act of 1954. The experiences of these Texas communities suggest that slums were targeted not simply because they occupied land that was needed for downtown improvement or university expansion, but because of the perception that slums undermined the city’s future because they promoted health and social problems for the city as a whole. Although these communities were pretty successful with slum removal, they never achieved the stated goal of the Housing Act of 1954 to provide citizens in each community the opportunity to live in standard housing at a price they could afford. 82 Urban renewal legislation was written at a time when planners emphasized the neighborhood as a basic unit of the city and slums were seen as particularly problematic because they shaped individual behavior that could be a disruptive force in the larger city. Ambitious city builders understood the importance of removing such threats from the city. 83
Urban renewal not only cleared black neighborhoods but, in some situations, it revived them. For instance, Grand Prairie blacks, thanks to federal and local funds, benefited from not only improved dwellings but by the addition of parks, paved streets, storm sewers, and adequate waste disposal projects in their neighborhood. Waco’s mostly black Dewey neighborhood, and Edgewood, a predominantly white neighborhood, also benefited from rehabilitation rather than total clearance. As we have seen, the LURA targeted parts of the Coronado project for rehabilitation and neighborhood building too. But unfortunately, blacks too often found it impossible to secure loans from banks for improving their homes because of their credit rating or because of the color of their skin. 84 So for many, the hope of better housing was never fulfilled.
Although slum clearance in these three cities did disrupt living arrangements of minorities, it also destroyed housing conditions that had made these settings problematic and viewed as a threat to the larger city. Real slums existed in these Texas cities and posed real problems to the health and safety of the larger community. The federal government’s urban renewal program gave civic leaders even in smaller cites an opportunity to remove those slums, but the color line and other manifestations of racism impeded the government’s goal of providing decent housing for all. While some slum dwellers who lost their old homes benefited from government housing assistance and could move back to the old neighborhood or locate elsewhere, other slum dwellers with fewer resources were sacrificed and discarded for the so-called benefit of the city as a whole.
Thanks to changing notions about the relationship between poverty and the slums as well as what the public good really meant, new federal programs emerged that replaced urban renewal and would focus more on the needs of the poor rather than the dangers of the slums. 85
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.
