Sociology Applied to Planning: Robert K. Merton and the Columbia–Lavanburg Housing Study

Sociology, Planning, and Housing Circa 1950

The Columbia–Lavanburg Housing Study was one of a number of community studies from which planners of the 1940s and 1950s could have benefited. W. E. B. Du Bois had published The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, perhaps the earliest scientific study of African Americans in an American city. Sociologist August Hollingshead, surveying research on communities from the 1890s to 1948, cited Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown (Muncie, IN), published in 1929, as the landmark initiating emphasis on “the interrelations between the daily life of people, their institutional organizations and function[s], and the social structure of the community.” Studies referenced in Hollingshead’s article included W. Lloyd Warner and associates’ volumes on “Yankee City” (Newburyport, MA), including The Status System of a Modern Community; St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s, Black Metropolis (Chicago); John Useem and associates’, “Stratification in a Prairie Town”; Harold F. Kaufman’s, Prestige Classes in a New York Rural Community; Hollingshead’s own “Selected Characteristics of Classes in a Middle Western Community”; John Dollard’s, Caste and Class in a Southern Town; James West’s (pseudonym of Carl Withers), Plainville, U.S.A. (Wheatland, MO); and William F. Whyte’s, Street Corner Society (Boston). ³ In his classes of the 1940s, Merton routinely assigned the Lynds on Middletown; Warner and associates on Newburyport; West’s Plainville; Dollard’s Caste and Class; Robert B. Hudson’s Radburn: A Plan for Living; William H. Form’s “Status Stratification in a Planned Community” (Greenbelt, MD) and unpublished studies of federally planned Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenhills, Ohio; and also, interestingly, sociologist and psychiatrist Alexander Leighton’s study of the “dislocated community” of Poston, AZ, one of the camps in which West Coast Japanese Americans were interned shortly after the United States, entered World War II. A study Form relied upon and Merton was probably aware of—Ralph H. Danhof’s “The Accommodation and Integration of Conflicting Cultures in a Newly Established Community”—concerned Boulder City, NV, set up by the US Bureau of Reclamation to house the workforce constructing Boulder Dam. ⁴

Looking back from 1950 on the evolution of city planning and the advances of urban sociological research, sociologist and former city planner Richard Dewey described the situation as “nearly complete divorce,” tempered by recent evidence “that the long-term estrangement of social scientist and city planner is coming to a close.” Early twentieth-century city planning had been predominantly the work of architects and engineers formulating master plans, zoning schemes, and highway networks, while the “Chicago School” leaders of urban sociology had described a city structured of “ecological” zones—working-class residential, transition zone—under the pressure of “invasion,” “succession,” and other forces. Taking planners’ enthusiasm for the “neighborhood-unit principle” as an example, Dewey blamed the sociologists for failing to adequately explain why it was inappropriate to the complex lives of residents of metropolitan regions. ⁵

In considerable part, sociology and planning were divorced from each other before 1950 because planning was sharply bifurcated. The “City Beautiful” of the 1890s, the creation realized most dramatically in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and the redesign and rebuilding of Washington, DC, shortly after 1900, inspired the founding of city plan “commissions” in many cities. The commissions adopted “master” plans and zoning ordinances devised by firms of architects and engineers engaged for the purpose. By 1927, 390 cities had planning commissions and 525 cities and towns had established zoning. Yet, cities did little to develop staffs capable of implementing plans. What became the city planning profession, the alternate fork of bifurcation, developed as a reform movement, led by the National Conference on City Planning and the American City Planning Institute. The movement spawned university planning programs to swell its ranks; Harvard initiated a program in 1929. As cities slowly hired professional planners, their capacity to make practical use of sociological research strengthened. Such is a condensation of planner and historian Mel Scott’s American City Planning Since 1890, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the successor to the American City Planning Institute: the American Institute of Planners. ⁶

The University of Chicago’s “Chicago School” of sociologists, led by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, and others, had produced the majority of urban theory and research findings prior to 1940, but in Scott’s opinion: “neither Wirth nor any other sociologist could say with certainty how cities should be organized [or] how the findings of scholarship should be applied in the development and redevelopment of urban areas.” Eugenie Birch, writing in the tradition of the city planning movement, has argued that the significance within the movement of the planned town of Radburn, NJ, suggests many planners believed it was well adapted to its middle-income residents’ preferred way of life. Its homogeneity was praised by the New Deal’s National Resources Board for providing a “fuller enjoyment of social life.” A planner for the Tennessee Valley Authority, quoted by Birch, wrote that Radburn was “the first tangible product of a new urban science…that seeks to make the places of man’s habitation and industry fit the healthy requirements of his daily life.” In the 1960s, however, professional opinion soured; Radburn was disparaged for embodying “middle-class values” and failing to involve residents in the planning process. The town had been designed by members of the Regional Planning Association of America, a prominent planning movement group, including architect Clarence S. Stein, who later served on the Lavanburg Foundation research committee overseeing the Housing Study. ⁷

The housing literature up to 1950 acknowledged little contribution from sociology. Robert Merton in one of his first Housing Study publications: “The Social Psychology of Housing” agreed, serious investigation was just beginning. Edith Wood, a prominent housing reformer and expert, lamented in her 1931 survey Recent Trends in American Housing: “It is regrettable…that housing and city planning should be divorced to the extent that they have always been in the United States.” Radburn, then under development, and other new towns, were an exception, as was Lavanburg Homes. Charles Abrams, another housing reformer, writing in 1946, emphasized the difficulties of planning in democracies; despite the hundreds of planning agencies, “little planning ha[d] been accomplished.” Abrams was optimistic about housing and planning in the period ahead, calling housing “the opening wedge to comprehensive city planning.” Catherine Bauer, cited above, a housing reformer with only brief architectural education, published Modern Housing in 1934, which proved influential in the struggles to devise New Deal housing policy. A year 2000 collection of essays on housing policy: From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, has discussed the complexities of federal policies and programs that planners faced in trying to design public housing projects. Joseph Heathcott’s “The strange career of public housing” has concisely reviewed its political history from reform movements of the late nineteenth century to 2012 and discussed the “competing narratives” with which that history is “fraught.” ⁸

The Columbia–Lavanburg Partnership

A Lavanburg Foundation committee initiated the Housing Study in October 1944. Its objectives were to examine how planned communities could best aid residents in living as they desired to live and how they could strengthen democracy at the community level. Merton, whom the Lavanburg committee specifically sought out to direct the study, proposed identifying and studying a recently founded planned community that was near New York City, old enough “to shake down into fairly well-established forms of community organization,” “successful” in its organization, with between 400 and 600 housing units, and with “a comparatively high degree of ethnic homogeneity.” ⁹ Winfield Park, NJ, built through the Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division of the Federal Works Agency, was selected and identified throughout as “Craftown” to assure its anonymity. Whether one additional community, or a number of communities, would also be studied was to be determined later.

The sociology of cities was a major interest of Merton’s in the 1940s, but he had no experience directing large-scale community field research. Nor had the BASR, which would be the Study’s home, previously been involved with housing or urban planning. Born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Philadelphia in 1910, Merton was among the first group of graduate students enrolled in Harvard’s recently created sociology department early in the 1930s. His dissertation on the development of science in seventeenth-century England was an early contribution to the sociology of science. Hired by Columbia in 1941, he experimented with theories of urban social structure, applications of the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim to the study of deviance, and other topics, until 1949, when he declared his commitment to theory and practice of “functional analysis” in a major publication. This was coordinated with the social systems and action theories of Talcott Parsons, the leading American social theorist at that time, and one of Merton’s mentors in his graduate student years at Harvard. Believing that American sociology was insufficiently mature to commit to a definitive society-wide theory, Merton introduced the notion of “middle-range” theories incorporating findings of empirical research. An example was his 1950 contribution to “reference group theory,” employing findings of the American Soldier project to improve command of the armed forces during World War II. ¹⁰

Merton dedicated a large proportion of his time to the Housing Study between 1944 and 1953. In the preparatory stage, he visited planned housing projects and communities all over the country to learn how they were developed and managed. ¹¹ Once Winfield Park was selected in mid-1945 for the initial phase of field research, Merton and his full-time staff from the Bureau obtained the cooperation of the town’s managers, rented one of the housing units for their field office, and prepared for intensive interviewing of one adult in each of some 700 families. ¹² Late in 1946, a single planned housing community was selected for the second phase of field research: Addison Terrace, an interracial public housing project within the city of Pittsburgh, PA, identified throughout as “Hilltown.” ¹³ The Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, which managed Addison Terrace, provided that its tenants be equally divided: 50 percent white and 50 percent African American; Winfield Park was exclusively white. Like Winfield Park, Addison Terrace was federally financed but under a different program.

The Research Design

Occupational and racial characteristics, age, education, and residents’ self-designation of their social class, were assembled through questionnaires and used as a base to which data would be added describing behavior and relationships in the communities. Chiefly, those consisted of memberships in organizations and friendships among residents. Analysis would show whether strong patterns emerged and whether the patterns could be described as a behavioral structure of community life. The materials preserved in Merton’s Papers and the BASR Records, both housed at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, include several draft versions of the questionnaires to be used for interviewing. ¹⁴ Interviewing in Craftown began before Hilltown was selected for the second phase. Craftown respondents were asked questions about their previous place of residence, and their responses were used to try to determine whether adjustment to living in the community varied depending upon the size and character of their prior places of residence. Hilltown residents were questioned about the racial composition of their previous Pittsburgh neighborhoods, and the information was then used to determine whether adjustment to life in Hilltown varied based upon prior experience in biracial surroundings. Questionnaires for both projects asked about length of residence, and efforts were made to determine whether differences between earliest settlers and later arrivals were the basis for differing adaptation to their new communities.

A great deal of descriptive information was collected and later discussed but not within a theoretical framework. Respondents were asked about their sense of “privacy” and how it related to the layout of buildings and design of individual units. Subjective information obtained in the lengthy interviews, sometimes as long as three or four hours, was used to attempt to define the unifying characteristics of life in each community, initially labeled their “ethos.” However “ethos” was not a concept in regular use in community studies. Questionnaire respondents were asked to name their three “closest and most intimate” friends, which eventually became the basis for the dominant analysis in the manuscript reporting the research enterprise as a whole, but there was no sociological theory of friendship in the 1940s to guide that analysis. ¹⁵

The Communities as Found

Merton and his staff opened their office in Craftown four years after the first residents had arrived. Establishment of the community had originated with the efforts of Local Sixteen of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America to house workers in and around the Kearny and Elizabeth, New Jersey federal shipyards. The Federal Works Agency, which was in charge of building the community, introduced a “mutual home ownership” plan under which tenants could eventually obtain ownership of their units. The union controlled recruiting of tenants, while Federal Works Agency personnel exercised final approval. Members of other unions in war production plants were also favored. ¹⁶

The land on which Craftown was built had formerly been a 120-acre dairy farm. Soon after federal purchase of the land, residents of Linden and Clark Townships, in which the site lay, became afraid demands would be made upon them to provide and fund services. They persuaded the New Jersey legislature to make Craftown an independent locality. The newly founded Borough of Winfield Park was left on its own for police and fire protection, schools, trash collection, and so on. See layout of Winfield in Figure 2. ¹⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Plan of Winfield Township. Source: RKM Papers, Box 207 folder 20.

Craftown’s first months were a nightmare for its earliest residents. When permission was granted to occupy, in November 1941, the streets were not paved, sidewalks had not been constructed, and there was only temporary water service and electricity. Worse, construction of the units had been shoddy. In fall 1942, the project gained national notoriety from an investigation by the US Senate’s Truman committee, Missouri Senator Harry Truman’s vehicle to uncover waste and corruption hindering the war effort. The November 30, 1942, issue of Life magazine featured a story and photos of what the committee found. The project’s initial reputation with surrounding towns was abysmal: “a mud hole” full of “chicken coops”; some compared it to Europe’s concentration camps. For a view of conditions early in 1942, see Figure 3. For a view of Winfield today see Figure 4. ¹⁸

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Mary Louise Weismantel (nee Burke), age 3, spring 1942, by kitchen stoop of her family’s Seafoam Avenue unit, Winfield Park. Source: Matthew Weismantel (son of Mary Louise) Winfield Park artifact collection, with his kind permission.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Central open area, looking south toward Gulfstream Avenue, Winfield Park, January 2017. Photographer: Zachary Fox.

Hilltown was one of a number of public housing projects managed by the Pittsburgh Housing Authority. Because it was a “slum clearance” project, residents of the former buildings on the site received preference for occupancy. To commemorate the one-hundred-thousandth federally constructed low-rent housing unit, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Hilltown’s October 9, 1940, dedication one of the stops of his reelection campaign. ¹⁹ The Housing Authority strictly applied a fifty–fifty white–African American racial proviso, despite the greater difficulty of recruiting white tenants. In contrast, Craftown was mandated exclusively white by Federal Works Agency authorities in Washington. ²⁰

Hilltown tenants had limited opportunities to select the unit they would occupy; Craftowners had more freedom of choice. Craftown consisted primarily of two-story structures of two, three, and four attached units. Hilltown’s three-story brick apartment houses stood on three hillside terraces; buildings had two or three separate stairways, each accessing twelve apartments. All buildings but one throughout Hilltown were racially segregated. The four buildings on the middle terrace were reserved exclusively for whites; the 50 percent African American residents occupied the upper and lower terraces jointly with the remaining white households. Buildings for whites, and African Americans, on the upper and lower terraces were separately grouped; buildings facing each other were of similar race. For the layout of Addison Terrace and a view c. 1946, see Figures 5 and 6. ²¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Layout of Addison Terrace, May 29, 1947. Four buildings exclusively for white residents on the middle terrace are shown clustered along Grove Street. Source: RKM Papers, Box 207 folder 20; the layout was presumably composed by an unidentified staff member.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Addison Terrace in or about 1946: uphill view from the lower terrace along Bentley Drive toward Grove Street middle terrace to the right, and downtown Pittsburgh in the distance center and left. Source: Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh photograph archive, with permission of the Authority.

The Study team arrived in Hilltown in 1946, six years after its dedication. Pittsburgh’s “Hill District,” where Hilltown was sited, saw a very rapid increase in African American population during the late 1930s and the 1940s. The project was in the Fifth Ward in the center of Hill District, which was 70 percent African American by 1940 and 7 percent foreign-born white. ²² While Craftown experienced early adversity as an independent township, Hilltown was within the city of Pittsburgh and therefore without any jurisdictional powers.

One Year In: Progress and Doubt

By the time a progress report to Lavanburg on the first year’s work was due, Merton was disheartened and seriously considered resigning. Lavanburg Foundation Director Carl Stern strongly urged him to continue. ²³ In the report, Merton explained that Craftown had been chosen for study because it appeared to have achieved “some measure of popular participation in community affairs.” It was hoped it would be possible, in studying Craftown, “to determine in a clinical fashion the factors and procedures which led to this result.” Consistent with the democratic concerns of planners, Merton emphasized the Study’s focus on determining “[the] conditions making for the adequate organization of communities on a democratic basis.” ²⁴

At the time the Interim Report was assembled, study of an “interracial” community was being proposed by Lavanburg for the second phase of the research. ²⁵ Merton’s distress may have been due in part to anticipated difficulties in comparing ethnic relations in all-white Craftown with white–African American relations in a second community. Once interracial Addison Terrace was selected, he justified their pairing by arguing that ethnic relations in Craftown would be analyzed first, followed by racial interaction in Hilltown, but ultimately comparison was not attempted. Final versions of the questionnaires were not designed to collect the data necessary for comparison. Nor were there published studies available to guide such comparative analysis. Despite his concerns, Merton continued on as director. ²⁶

Community Ethos: Capturing the Essence of Craftown and Hilltown Life

In 1948, drafting of a book-length monograph reporting on the Study began, with emphasis on the “ethos” of each community. Merton hoped to show that the social structures of Craftown and Hilltown were taking shape without strong influences of the residents’ experience of class and status stratification where they had previously lived. The Columbia–Lavanburg Study was unique among community studies of its era in attempting to use ethos as an analytic concept and to explore how planning and management of new housing communities could promote a beneficial ethos. The surviving materials among the Papers and the BASR Records include Merton’s notes and speculations about the potential significance of ethos for studying communities; there are intra-staff memos about ethos and early drafts of an “ethos chapter” for the book-length manuscript. ²⁷

The ethos chapter drafts emphasized, for Craftown, (1) the leadership of early residents in overcoming initial adversities and (2) the emergence of intense community politics, and for Hilltown, the “significance” of its planned housing for African Americans and whites. What internal politics there were in Hilltown did not impress Merton and Study staff as a prominent aspect of community life. In an intra-staff memo, Patricia Salter suggested the reason may have been “the almost complete integration of Hilltown into the parent community,” that is, the Fifth Ward and Hill District. Hilltowners, in her view, showed “uninterrupted persistence in outside community patterns of behavior.” ²⁸

Major issues of Craftown’s politics included the long-term survival of the project and the role its mutual ownership program would play in that survival. For the program to succeed, a sufficient proportion of residents had to commit to participating. This was immediately made unlikely by the near-catastrophic failings of project construction exposed by Senator Truman and his committee. Tremendous efforts were required to overcome these. Merton and his staff elected to describe this as a contentious process in which early residents, known as “pioneers,” were differentiated from later arrivals by a variety of characteristics surveyed through the questionnaire interviewing. Political groupings also played a part in affairs during this period, including organized groups of Republicans and Democrats and a nonpartisan “Independent” group that worked to assure success of the mutual ownership program. ²⁹

“The Significance of Hilltown’s Housing for Negroes and Whites” constituted the treatment of that project’s ethos. Pittsburgh’s Housing Authority took responsibility for the project’s needs, obviating the opportunity for project self-government. While buildings were racially segregated, the project’s managers required that all community organizations and organized activities be open to both races. These factors appear to have worked against the emergence of the sort of local politics found in Craftown. Unlike Craftown, which founded and managed its own elementary school, Hilltown children attended schools outside the project over which residents had little influence. ³⁰

The draft section on Hilltown’s ethos argued that Hilltown was significant for its African American residents in two ways: (1) it provided opportunities for them to rent housing similar in size and quality to housing available to whites at similar rents, and (2) it provided a source of pride in progress toward racial equality for Pittsburgh’s African Americans citywide. Unlike Craftown, many of whose residents were embarrassed to have friends and relatives living elsewhere come to visit, particularly in the early years, Hilltown’s African American families were envied by nonresident friends and relations for having obtained housing in the project. ³¹ Hilltown also provided its African American residents an opportunity to show that African Americans and whites could live together harmoniously. To the question: “Do you think colored and white people should live together in housing projects?” 90 percent of 357 African American Hilltown respondents affirmed, but only 32 percent of 355 whites. A significant proportion of white respondents told interviewers they had expected racial conflict and even violence but conceded their fears had proved unfounded. For a Housing Authority photo of Addison Terrace children, white and African American, playing together, presumably for publicity purposes, see Figure 7. ³²

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Addison Terrace children on a big slide, 1946; presumably a publicity photo. Source: Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh photograph archive, with permission of the Authority.

Abandoning and Replacing Ethos

As draft chapters were revised, “ethos” was abandoned as the main focus. Study staff had agreed that the chapter on ethos should be solely Merton’s to compose. A partial draft of a chapter defining “ethos” as an analytic concept broke off in midcourse. In a letter to Lavanburg research committee member Peggy Hitchcock, Merton explained that he was abandoning “ethos” because he was unable to produce a chapter that satisfied him. ³³ In this chapter, fragment Merton had written that each ethos “is expressed in virtually every phase of life in the two communities…” and that “systematic study” of Craftown’s ethos, and Hilltown’s, would produce “a systematic method for the study of community ethos in general.” Ethos involved a “system of expectations current [among the residents of each community] about the behavior of its…members”:

[E]thos refers to the values attached to various modes of behavior[;]…in the ordinary round of daily life these values are expressed in socially approved or condemned behavior…[A] reward-punishment system operates to sustain the ethos.

“Ethos” had been expected to explain the behavioral patterns of community life. Another approach involved treatment of friendships, utilizing data collected through the questionnaires and accompanying interviews. When Merton decided to abandon ethos as a major topic, patterns of friendships replaced it. By the completion of the first draft of the manuscript, which was announced as a forthcoming book in 1951, the treatment of friendships had become central to the description and analysis of behavioral patterns in the two projects. ³⁵

The collection of friendship data had begun in Craftown, prior to the addition of Hilltown to the Study. Merton’s frequently recited working hypothesis concerned friendships within ethnic groups: do Craftown “birds of a feather flock together[?]”, and if so, how does that affect values they probably shared. ³⁶ If friendships chiefly formed between residents of similar ethnic background—“birds of a feather”—then their similar values would strengthen, and the likelihood friendship might change residents’ values would be minimal. If other factors strongly influenced friendship formation, friends might be more likely to have differing values; as such friendships flourished, changes in values might occur, with potentially favorable consequences for the community. In notes compiled to guide revision of the final report manuscript, Merton summarized:

[I]n the matter of interpersonal relations, it is not the individual’s disposition toward in-group parochialism or indiscriminate out-group ass[ociatio]n with outgroupers, but the social context (setting) in which these individuals live that provides the strategic leverage for changing patterns. Obvious as this conclusion seems, it is one that often falls obscurely into the periphery of attention when we focus on the in-group dispositions of individuals, as though these were fixed and inexorable traits. ³⁷

The questionnaires sought the names of respondents’ three “closest” or “most intimate” friends, whether residing within or outside their community. For friendship pairs within Craftown and Hilltown, staff attached residence addresses to the names and analyzed whether the addresses were on the same side of the street, across the street, several streets apart…. Matching of names facilitated comparisons by ethnicity, age, education, gender, religion, occupational status, length of residence, and so on. Eighty-seven percent of Craftown respondents named three closest or most intimate friends and 90 percent of Hilltown respondents. Only 1 percent of Craftown respondents reported no friends and only 3 percent of Hilltowners. Half of Craftowners’ closest friendships were with other project residents and half with nonresidents; 45 percent of Hilltowners’ closest friendships were with residents and 55 percent with nonresidents. ³⁸

The outstanding finding from friendship data was that the strongest factor influencing friendship formation was “propinquity,” the closeness of friends’ residences: “Immediate proximity is…apparently of overwhelming impact on the choice of friends.” ³⁹ Closeness of residences heightened day-to-day contact, increasing the likelihood friendships would form. Craftown friendships tended to form between residents living next door to each other and between residents whose units faced each other across streets. Fifty-five percent of Craftown friendships were between close neighbors. ⁴⁰ Data for Hilltown, with its apartments in three-story buildings, showed that friendships were most likely to form between residents sharing the same stairwell of their building. Seventy-five percent of Hilltown friendships were between residents of the same terrace. ⁴¹

Diversity in the Formation of Friendships

A significant proportion of friendships were diverse: friendships between partners differing in familiar status characteristics: religion, occupational type, social class…. Friendships among residents similar in local characteristics, such as date of arrival and membership in local organizations, were likely also to be of diverse social status. Comparisons were made between the proportion of residents of various characteristics and the proportion for each characteristic selected as friends. See Table 1. ⁴² The similarities for all characteristics were interpreted as showing that residents of every sort were similarly popular as friends; residents of no characteristic were being shunned. For propinquity to be a strong force, and yet for these results to eventuate, many friendships would have had to involve differences between the partners.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Relative Popularity of Social Categories of Residents Craftown and Hilltown.

	Craftown		Hilltown
	Composition of Population	Composition of Friendship Choices	Composition of Population	Composition of Friendship Choices
Sex
Male	47%	48%	40%	41%
Female	53	52	60	59
Racea
Negro	–	–	50%	49%
White	–	–	50	51
Age
15–24	8%	5	10	5
25–34	52	54	33	34
35–44	29	29	26	32
45–54	7	8	15	16
55 and over	4	3	16	13
Birthplacea
Native-born	91%	91%	74%	75%
Foreign-born	9	9	26	25
Religiona
Protestant	42%	41%	26%	20%
Catholic	50	50	39	41
Jewish	4	5	34	38
None	4	4	1	1
Education
Grammar school graduate or less	28%	25%	44%	43%
Some high school	39	39	32	33
High school graduate or more	33	36	24	24
Occupational stratum
White-collar	20%	19%	24%	25%
Skilled	47	51	9	11
Semi- and unskilled	33	30	67	64
Self-ascribed statusb
White-collar	17%	18%	13%	12%
Working-class	83	82	87	88
Average number of casesc	617	670	714	550

Source: Patterns of Social Life, draft of chap. VII: “Patterns of Selection in Interpersonal Relations,” 6–7; RKM Papers, Box 211 folder 5.

Note: While the figures for “Composition of Population” include the entire Craftown population, the figures for “Composition of Friendship Choices” include only friends who were Craftown residents, as non-resident friends were not sought out and interviewed.

^a Since they exhibit the same patterns, the data for Negro and white residents in Hilltown are combined, except in the case of birthplace and religion which are reported only for white residents, since all Negroes are native-born and, with few exceptions, Protestant in religion.

^bSelf-ascribed status is based on respondent’s own designation.

^c“Average” number of cases, since there is some small variation in the base figures of friendship choices for different social categories. This results from the fact that we do not have full information about all of those chosen as friends.

Another comparison involved the expected number of friendships between residents of similar characteristics and the number of such friendships observed. The mostly positive differences were interpreted as “over-selection” of friends with a particular characteristic. Some results indicated a lack of diversity, such as over-selection of Jews in Hilltown as friends by 137 percent, but calculations for local characteristics clearly paired diverse residents, including over-selection of members of organizations in Craftown by 125 percent and of “pioneers” by 135 percent. Almost all characteristics of Hilltown residents showed minimal over-selection, indicating less diversity among friends, probably primarily a result of the strict segregation of friendships by race. No white Hilltown resident named an African American among their three closest friends, and only two African Americans named a closest white friend. These findings were limited to friends who were both project residents. The race of nonresidents whom respondents named as their closest friends was not queried or analyzed. ⁴³

Friendship Patterns as Structure

The two major findings of the friendship analysis—the tendency for friendships to form between residents living close to each other and encountering each other frequently (the propinquity finding) and the limited conformity to status categories in selecting close friends (the diversity finding)—were consistent with an argument that in both communities, in their early years, social relations were largely unstructured. But over time, did friendships provide structure for emerging patterns of community life?

In working with the friendship data, Merton and staff looked urgently for types of friendships associated with emerging structural features. For Craftown, they found that members of organizations were chosen as friends twice as often as their proportion of all residents surveyed: 37 percent of residents belonged to organizations, but they were 73 percent of those chosen as friends. ⁴⁴ For Hilltown, 23 percent of residents belonged to organizations, and they were 28 percent of those chosen as friends. Craftown’s “pioneers” were 24 percent of residents but constituted 37 percent of close friends. For Hilltown, where no group of early arrivers was uniquely labeled, 55 percent of residents who were early settlers were selected as 64 percent of closest and most intimate friends. ⁴⁵ Over-selection of Craftown “pioneers” as friends was interpreted as an indication that those friendships had been significant in overcoming the hardships of the early years. A sense of accomplishment may have solidified close friendships between pioneers regardless of differences among them in religion, education, or occupational status. Over-selection among members of organizations may have been a factor in the development and effectiveness of organizations. To a lesser degree, these same factors appeared relevant in Hilltown’s development. ⁴⁶ Insofar as propinquity produced diverse friendships, it may have reduced interethnic and interracial tension. ⁴⁷

Direction Problems: Friendships and Values

A major objective of the collection and analysis of friendship data was to determine whether friendships influenced residents’ values and, in turn, aided achievement of each community’s objectives. There was a risk involved, however: what if the direction of interaction were the reverse? What if shared values motivated the formation of friendships, leading to groupings of friends with similar values and little likelihood that anyone’s values might be changed?

Numerous examples of this second possibility emerged, and staff began to refer to them as “direction problems.” The term “direction problem” appears to have first been employed in preparing a chapter titled “The Growth of Community Participation.” Questionnaire responses showed that more friendships formed among residents already belonging to a given organization than formed prior to each of a pair of friends joining the organization. ⁴⁸ Additional instances of the problem took various forms. In a July, 1948, “Outline Memo for Friendship,” Patricia Salter wrote concerning personal association and “morale”:

Ignoring for the moment the question of the direction of effect, that is “which came first”, it is clear that tenants’ feelings toward the community on the score of the personal relationships it makes possible are correlated with their morale in general, their satisfaction with the community…. (emphasis added) ⁴⁹

Merton received indication that the friendship data were not adequate for dealing with certain “direction problems” from Peggy Hitchcock, who read and commented on most, if not all, study reports and draft chapters. Merton’s 1946 Interim Report to Lavanburg had offered tentative statements about friendship that “similarity of religious background was less significant” as the basis for friendships than shared participation in community activities and that propinquity was stronger than religion as a basis for friendship. ⁵¹ Hitchcock doubted the friendship data collected through the questionnaires could support meaningful comparison between the strength of propinquity in friendship formation and such other factors as shared religious affiliation:

I still can’t for the life of me see how we have a comparison on equal terms which allows of the implication that Mrs. Jones is more likely to choose as her friend her next door neighbor instead of Mrs. Smith, another Catholic, in the next block. I can’t see that it really matters either. Because obviously both factors are important, and the process is shown in each case. Am I being awfully dumb, or is there a misleading implication of a kind of comparison that does not exist?

Publicizing the Housing Study

Anticipated publication of the final report manuscript, tentatively entitled Patterns of Social Life: Explorations in the Sociology of Housing, by Merton, Patricia Salter West and Marie Jahoda, was first announced in 1951. In the spring of 1954, Merton wrote to Peggy Hitchcock that he was setting aside two-thirds of his time over the summer to complete rewriting. Soon after, he suffered an attack of appendicitis, which worsened to peritonitis; he spent weeks in hospital. In fall, he wrote her again saying he would set aside significant time during the coming semesters; that promise also went unfulfilled. ⁵³ Findings were publicized in other forms however. In 1948, Merton published an article on researching the “social psychology” of housing that discussed the strength of propinquity in friendship formation in Craftown: “[Q]uite apart from other factors, sheer propinquity played a major part in determining the patterns of personal association.” On race in Hilltown, the piece focused on differences between whites who had previously lived in biracial neighborhoods and those who had not. Fifty-six percent of those without experience had initially expressed “fearful and anxious expectations of racial conflict” compared with only 19 percent of those with experience in biracial neighborhoods. When Hilltown questionnaire surveying began in 1946, a considerable proportion of respondents had been in residence for five years. Eighty percent of the initially inexperienced and eighty-one of the experienced indicated “that the races get along pretty well.” About two-thirds of both groups of whites reported friendships or acquaintanceships with African Americans. The finding that no whites reported African Americans among their three closest or most intimate friends was omitted from the discussion. ⁵⁴

Merton used “The social psychology of housing” to emphasize the significance of the Housing Study as applied social science. The social psychologist studying a “biracial public housing community,” he wrote, “may find policy makers in the federal housing administration becoming fearful lest his research call public attention to the fact that biracial communities do exist….” In the face of such dangers, he advised researchers to be “stoic.” Merton had also provided encouragement and guidance to practitioners of applied sociology in 1947 with a report on Craftown in “Selected Problems of Field Work in the Planned Community.” ⁵⁵

The findings on race in Hilltown were provided to President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, which included some of them in its 1947 report: To Secure These Rights. In the section on the positive effects of interracial contact in various situations, the Committee noted concerning Hilltown:

Before they moved into the project only one of every 25 whites thought that race relations would turn out well, while five times as many felt that there would be nothing but conflict…. After a few years, one out of every five whites said that race relations were better than they had thought they would be, while only about one-fourth as many thought that they were worse than they had expected.

The most prominent opportunity to publicize the Housing Study came with the 1949 invitation to assemble the special issue of the Journal of Social Issues. The introduction, “Social Questions in Housing and Community Planning,” composed by Catherine Bauer at Merton’s request, emphasized that what should be avoided was “a priesthood of ‘advanced social research[ers]’” working by themselves to produce “answers.” “The questions that trouble us most” required judgments about “social values and human relations.” In her view, judgments affecting race and class were “of such significance…that they warrant the most able and earnest analysis….” While these were issues the Housing Study had examined in minute detail, only a rather brief piece on “Race Relations in Public Housing” by Merton’s coauthors Marie Jahoda and Patricia Salter West was included in the special issue. “Actual social relations” between the races in Hilltown were found “more gratifying than many tenants had foreseen,” and they reported similar findings from a study of biracial projects in New York City and Newark, NJ, by a New York University research group. Jahoda and West argued there were hopeful signs for planners in the Hilltown findings, most important: that both white and African American residents who had previously lived and worked closely with those of the opposite race adjusted more comfortably to life in Hilltown and developed more favorable attitudes toward biracial planned communities generally. Management’s strict enforcement of the fifty–fifty white–African American proportions of residents had been important to maintaining the racial balance; another biracial Pittsburgh project, where the fifty–fifty “quotas” were not strictly enforced, soon shifted to between 80 and 90 percent African American. ⁵⁷

Two contributors to the 1951 special issue, sociologist William Form and psychologist Leon Festinger, had received copies of a draft of the Patterns manuscript. Form’s piece: “Stratification in low and middle income housing areas,” offered tentative generalizations about the social structure of housing projects and planned communities. ⁵⁸ Form had previously published a summary of his own work on the federally founded community of Greenbelt, Maryland, which he studied for his doctoral dissertation. That earlier article reported that although Greenbelt’s founders had hoped to establish a “nonstratified society,” within four years from initial occupancy, “a definite status structure” was in evidence. Form expected “some town planners and social engineers” would find that eventuality “disturbing.” ⁵⁹ In his piece for the 1951 special issue, Form argued, based upon review of several neighborhood-level studies of planned communities, including Merton, Jahoda, and West’s Patterns manuscript, that “[i]rrespective of the architectural plan or social composition” of such neighborhoods, some types of stratification “appear[] to be inevitable”:

Planning on the physical and social level cannot really block the appearance or spread of the ranking phenomena. ⁶⁰

Festinger’s contribution to the special issue discussed the role of project layout and architecture in creating “involuntary” groups of residents:

The decisions of the architect in designing the house, in laying out the site plan for a group of houses, and in deciding who will live in the houses[,] determine to a large extent the nature of the group memberships which will be imposed upon [those] residents….

A logical place in the special issue for findings of the Housing Study would have been accompanying Form’s and Festinger’s articles. Although Merton’s Papers contain considerable correspondence with Catherine Bauer about the special issue, he did not explain why he declined to contribute. In the Patterns manuscript, Merton, West, and Jahoda argued that Form’s analysis of stratification was overly pessimistic. They disputed Form’s claim that Craftown friendships among organization participants constituted a status hierarchy similar to the one he observed in Greenbelt. And they believed the Craftown–Hilltown findings ran counter to Form’s sweeping conclusion that:

The hope to encourage interaction and cooperative experience among socially heterogeneous people is not likely to be realized anywhere…. The barriers to interaction among status groups operate everywhere: in the neighborhood, school, work plant, marketplace, social organization, and even in the cemetery.

Festinger and his two associates had published a book on their MIT studies: Social Pressures in Informal Groups, A Study of Human Factors in Housing, in 1950. It documented in great detail how the propinquity phenomenon could generate the formation of groups among residents of projects according to the design, placement, and alignment of housing unit structures. They invited Catherine Bauer to contribute a chapter discussing how their findings might be beneficially applied to city planning, and she obtained extensive assistance in writing it from Merton. Her chapter: “Social research as a tool for community planning” provided the Housing Study additional publicity. The Columbia–Lavanburg study was in substantial agreement, she explained, with the Festinger group’s assertions that site plans, street layouts, and house orientations significantly influence the patterns of residents’ social interactions. Both studies were addressing planners’ need to know “the factors in the site plan or building layout which…will facilitate the most desirable degree and satisfactory form of neighborliness.” She also noted the favorable findings from biracial Hilltown and its support for the “trend” among public housing agencies in Northern cities “against racial segregation.” ⁶⁴

Re-purposed Publicity: Friendships as Process

Sometime after the 1951 special issue appeared, Merton coordinated with BASR director Paul Lazarsfeld on a piece that discussed friendship findings from Hilltown. Titled “Friendship as a social process,” it described “certain social-psychological processes through which social relations interact with cultural values to produce diverse patterns of friendship.”

Unlike the competing formulations relating friendship and values in the Patterns manuscript, here Merton posed and analyzed only the option that values impacted friendship, asking:

What are the dynamic processes through which the similarity or opposition of values shape the formation, maintenance and disruption of close friendships?

Merton’s and Jahoda’s Ongoing Activism

The book announced in 1951, and again in 1954, as “forthcoming”, retitled—Patterns of Social Life, Explorations in the Sociology and Social Psychology of Housing, has never been published. Its text may yet have had considerable influence on urban sociologists and planners however, as some 100 mimeographed copies of the 900-page typed double-spaced manuscript were distributed to selected individuals in 1954. ⁶⁶ In response to Merton’s 1955 final report to Lavanburg, President Roger W. Straus indicated the Foundation was satisfied that the objectives of the project had been achieved, despite the failure to publish the Patterns manuscript. Merton had previously briefed Foundation director Carl Stern on achievements in stimulating and guiding research by others. ⁶⁷

Both Merton and Marie Jahoda continued to promote research on biracial housing, to which Lavanburg provided support. First came a study of four biracial housing developments: two in New York City that were integrated throughout and two in Newark, New Jersey, that were “segregated biracial,” each building being segregated and the projects being divided into white and African American sections. Morton Deutsch and Mary Evans Collins of the New York University Research Center for Human Relations directed the study. Merton and staff made an early draft of the Patterns manuscript, and associated materials, available to them; Merton participated in meetings at which Deutsch and Collins planned their research. ⁶⁸

The principal issue in the Deutsch and Collins study was the effect of the differing racial occupancy arrangements in the pairs of projects on the attitudes of white residents: would whites who lived in the integrated projects “have less prejudices toward Negroes” than the whites in the segregated biracial projects? As in Hilltown, few whites in any of the four projects would have favored residing together with African Americans if an intense housing shortage had not severely constrained their options. Deutsch and Collins did not test any hypotheses that friendships might play a role in any process by which differing occupancy patterns produced change in “attitudes.” Responses to their interview questions about preferred policies suggested that differing occupancy arrangements did have an effect on white residents’ attitudes. Fifty-three percent of the “white housewives” in both New York projects favored an integrated policy while only 4 percent and 6 percent favored it in the Newark projects. Thirty-eight percent and 40 percent in the New York projects favored a segregated policy however, which was considerably less than the 73 percent and 69 percent favoring a segregated policy in the Newark projects. African American residents interviewed in the New York projects overwhelmingly favored an integrated policy, as did 60 percent in Newark. ⁶⁹

Merton and Jahoda also assisted a second study by the New York University Center: Human Relations in Interracial Housing, A Study of the Contact Hypothesis, which set out to replicate the Deutsch and Collins research in cities away from the “cosmopolitan composition of New York City,” cities of more varied size with projects having smaller proportions of African American residents. ⁷⁰ Daniel Wilner, Rosabelle Price Walkley, and Stuart Cook directed the study. The “contact hypothesis”, an important factor in the Deutsch and Collins study, involved micro-ecological propinquity similar to that Festinger’s group and Caplow and Forman had studied, but with attention focused on change in attitudes rather than friendship formation. Interviewing attempted to measure “friendliness” between whites and African Americans but not numbers and intensity of friendships. Analysis of effects of “contact,” particularly as discussed by Deutsch and Collins, later played a major role in psychologist Gordon Allport’s influential 1954 treatise The Nature of Prejudice. ⁷¹

Wilner, Walkley, and Cook’s findings concerning “contact” showed that in all the projects, “white housewives living near [African-American] tenants [we]re more likely to have intimate inter-racial contacts than [we]re white housewives who live[d] farther away.” More of these white homemakers living near African American families had “favorable attitudes…about the characteristics of the [African-Americans] in the project….” More of these homemakers favored having whites, and African Americans live in the same community and more had favorable attitudes toward African Americans generally. ⁷²

In the mid-1950s, Merton served on the Research Advisory Committee to the Commission on Race and Housing, a private group founded in 1955 to study the “social problem” of the kinds of communities in which ethnic and racial minorities ought to reside. Their published studies included Privately Developed Interracial Housing, An Analysis of Experience, by the husband and wife team of Eunice and George Grier, which provided the private complement to the biracial public housing studies of Deutsch and Collins, Wilner et al., and Merton and his Housing Study coauthors and staff. ⁷³ Among the Griers’ findings was the similarity of the objectives of prospective white and African American residents: both were intent on obtaining suitable housing they could afford. Several developers reported that severe local housing shortages reduced “white resistance” to their biracial projects to “the vanishing point.” The Housing Authority director in one city told the Griers: “The big obstacle to inter-racial housing is that the average white worries about what his friends will say.” Sales people found this problem was minimized when prospects were less “emotionally…dependent” on family and friends or where they lived farther away. ⁷⁴

The Housing Study’s Relevance to Planning

What contributions did the Housing Study research make to the development of a sociology of planned housing projects and planned communities that would be useful to planners? I believe there is the basis for several claims. First, structures of interaction, “patterns” as the draft manuscript had it, developed at both sites through initiatives of the residents, rather than being imposed by overarching class and status hierarchies of American urban society. Making this argument through the mechanism of a unique ethos of each community was abandoned in midcourse. Emphasizing instead the role of friendships was a bold initiative. One staffer lamented that there was no sociology of friendship to build upon as there was of marriage. ⁷⁵

Second, friendships proved crucial to the patterns that did emerge. The influence of propinquity in formation of friendships was stronger than other factors in both communities. Equally important was the diversity of friendships across religious, ethnic, and occupational status lines. Propinquity contributed to formation of diverse friendships where closest neighbors differed in status. Racially diverse friendships formed in Hilltown but only very rarely at the level of respondents’ three closest friends. ⁷⁶

Third, the groundwork was laid for relating friendships to persistence, or change, in values. “Direction problems” arose, however, that questionnaire queries and responses were inadequate to resolve. There was also evidence that friendships were a major factor in participation in organizations, although again questionnaire data were inadequate to clarify the direction of influence.

And fourth, there was a reason to anticipate that the propinquity and diversity friendship findings would prove significant in the development of planned communities and housing projects generally, displacing the pessimism of earlier analysis. The urban sociology of the 1920s and 1930s had asserted that neighbors in very dense settlements, such as Hilltown’s apartment house dwellers in Pittsburgh, tended not to form close friendships as a consequence of frequent day-to-day contact. In their two books on Muncie, IN, the Lynds reported that working-class women often had no close friends and feared intimate relationships with neighbors; business class men and women formed friendships readily where business or social advantage might result. ⁷⁷ The Craftown–Hilltown findings suggested that residents formed intimate friendships with close neighbors wholly apart from prospects of economic or social gain: neighbors of dissimilar status and neighbors who might never have become friends if they had lived several blocks or further apart or on different Hilltown terraces. ⁷⁸

Counter-indications

One swallow does not make a summer, and the Housing Study alone was not sufficient to justify claims that the effects of planning on the social structure and relationships of Craftown and Hilltown were common to planned towns and housing projects generally. William Form presented contrary evidence in his article for the 1951 special issue. Western Reserve sociologist Irving Rosow provided stronger counter-indications in a 1961 Journal of the American Institute of Planners article: “The social effects of the physical environment.” While he may not have read the Patterns manuscript, Rosow was aware of the Housing Study and its findings. In this article, he argued that although it had been convincingly demonstrated that slum clearance and “rehousing” of the residents improved their health, safety, and quality of life, and saved their cities on the cost of services, the benefits of friendships in planned communities were questionable. In some of the communities studied, beneficial friendship patterns did not form, in some benefits were realized only in the earliest years, and in some friendship ties were soon overshadowed by stratification that was not beneficial (citing Form on Greenbelt and other studies). Most importantly, the studies might be biased for lack of a comparable “base point”: studies of friendship patterns among similar populations living in unplanned neighborhoods. Despite the lack of such baseline research, Rosow concluded that the studies he reviewed provided “little conclusive evidence of more than ephemeral changes in social patterns through the medium of planned communities.” ⁷⁹

Findings of a study of one of the “Levittowns”: Willingboro, NJ, researched by sociologist Herbert Gans, ran counter to the Housing Study. Willingboro is a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia. The Levitt company planned, constructed, and managed its development there beginning in the late 1950s. In 1960, when Gans began his participant observation research, there were 2,978 households totaling about 12,000 people, almost four times more than Craftown or Hilltown. While he studied, building continued; by 1964, there were about 25,000 people in 6,200 households. Gans argued that his findings disputed a theory he attributed to “city planners”: “that the community, especially its physical component, is a significant determinant of behavior.” Rather, Gans claimed to have found, changes by Willingboro residents derived from their personal “aspirations, which originated outside the community in national cultural patterns.” Planners, he asserted, “overestimate the role of builders and designers as agents of change.” While Gans did not study friendship patterns as systematically as the Housing Study had done, he argued that “propinquity” was not a strong force in friendship formation in Willingboro. ⁸⁰

More research was needed. In his 1954 inaugural contribution as the first research editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Martin Meyerson cited both Merton and Festinger for undertaking research applicable to planners’ needs. He also noted that neither Merton nor Festinger had gone on to specialize in research applicable to planning. Meyerson lamented the lack of committed research funding and in-kind academic and governmental support, which he hoped the American Institute of Planners could work to alleviate. Yet by 1964, ten years later, Rosow’s was one of only a handful of articles on such research to appear in the Journal. ⁸¹

Conclusion

Despite the failure to complete revision and publish the Patterns manuscript, the Lavanburg Foundation was satisfied that its objectives for the Housing Study had been achieved. They had hoped to initiate sociological and social-psychological research useful to housing planners and “practitioners.” More importantly for the future, they had hoped to encourage other foundations and research groups to undertake similar efforts. They had decided at the outset “that the role of the Foundation [would be] primarily that of stimulating and guiding research efforts of others who would draw upon the resources of diverse foundations and group[s]….” In a 1949 letter to Lavanburg Director Carl Stern, and in his 1955 final report, Merton described in detail the numerous achievements along those lines. The broadest dissemination of the Housing Study’s work came with the 1951 special issue of the Journal of Social Issues. The article by West and Jahoda reported results on race. The article by Form discussed the Craftown and Hilltown findings on friendship, in conjunction with Form’s own findings from Greenbelt and those of the Festinger group and others. And Catherine Bauer’s long introduction gave notice that significant efforts were underway on the questions: “How do people live and how does environment affect them?” and “How do people want to live, and how can they achieve it?” ⁸²

The major question the research on Craftown and Hilltown posed, and attempted to answer, was how the layout and buildings of the two communities, the character and quality of the housing units, and the social composition of the resident populations, generated and affected social structure, patterns of interaction and satisfaction with living day-to-day and long term. After some ineffectual starts, Merton and his staff focused on the role friendships played in shaping the social structures of the two communities. The structures facilitated cooperation and problem-solving in Craftown and avoidance of interracial conflict in Hilltown. They believed those accomplishments were well established by their findings. Merton’s attempt to show that each community developed an “ethos” of values guiding interaction and relationships was abandoned. Efforts to show that diverse friendships altered residents’ values for the better were inconclusive.

I emphasized at the outset that in terms of research, analysis, policy, and practice on urban communities, sociology, planning, and housing were on different pages up to the 1950s. Lavanburg Foundation hoped to initiate dialogue and coordination among the three. Robert Merton and Columbia’s BASR implemented Lavanburg’s project and undertook a major sociological study of two communities. The fact that this was attempted on a major scale made it a significant event in the history of all three fields. For planning, the Housing Study and Form’s Greenbelt study and the Festinger groups’ MIT studies were the earliest efforts to provide “applied” sociological and social-psychological research that would be useful to community planners and housing reformers. How influential those efforts were in improving planning practice and housing policy is a separate issue.

Merton believed strongly that the Lavanburg–Columbia cooperation, and the later studies he was involved with as an advisor, had shown planning and housing practices could significantly advance race relations. The initiation of school desegregation by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision was aided by their research.

The aspect of the Housing Study that Merton did most to promote was the racial findings from Hilltown. He continued to be involved with race issues through the 1950s. In a talk for a group of architects in 1947 or 1948 titled “Urban Redevelopment—Threat or Promise?” he argued that redevelopment planners “must confront [issues of racial composition] as one of the central problems of democratic life”:

Diversified residential areas are undoubtedly harder to achieve, but, the evidence shows, they result in attitudes and experiences that later make for greater mutual understanding among people of diverse origins, beliefs and race. ⁸³

How much were Merton and his staff, or Form or the Festinger and Caplow groups, able to determine about the effects of the physical environments of planned communities on residents’ relationships and patterns of day-to-day living? Their studies did show that defined communities of similar housing units fostered “micro-ecologies” that in turn facilitated cooperation in community governance and problem-solving, although only in the early years in Form’s Greenbelt. Hilltown findings suggested that while violence between races was avoided, whites and African Americans developed parallel micro-ecologies with minimal interaction between races. Study staff were uncertain whether integration of buildings would have resulted in more biracial friendships. They strongly believed that providing similar apartments at similar rents to whites and African Americans was beneficial to the status and self-respect of Hilltown’s African Americans and African Americans throughout Pittsburgh. But the next stage: showing how physical design, and patterns of assignment of residents to housing units, could produce beneficial outcomes was only broached.

While she was not a sociologist or a professional planner, the influence of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) owed a great deal to analysis of spatial interaction in dense neighborhoods similar to that of the Housing Study and the Festinger group’s MIT study. Reviewing Death and Life retrospectively in the American Journal of Sociology in 1978, Harvey Choldin faulted Jacobs for making “no use” of the work of urban sociologists, yet found her insights “sociologically compelling.” Reviewing Death and Life in this journal in 2017, along with some fifty years of commentary, Ralph Blessing credited Jacobs’ expression of widely shared discontent with “overly strict separation of uses,” and other planning practices of the 1950s and early 1960s, but did not report that her book led to better dialogue between sociologists and planners. In his 1968 article: “Urban sociology as an aid to urban physical development…,” sociologist William Michelson did not mention Jacobs’ Death and Life but described sociological “research strategies” that could benefit planning of future cities. ⁸⁵ Fitfully, the campaign for “interdisciplinary cooperation” between sociology and planning continues.