In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The War on Slums in the Southwest: Public Housing and Slum Clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, 1935–1965 by Robert B. Fairbanks
  • Jessica M. Webb
The War on Slums in the Southwest: Public Housing and Slum Clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, 1935–1965. By Robert B. Fairbanks. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Pp. 252. Tables, notes, index.)

In The War on Slums in the Southwest, Robert B. Fairbanks presents an excellent study of the public housing and slum clearance movements in the Southwest. Focusing on five different cities—Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix, and Albuquerque—over thirty years, Fairbanks explores how municipal leaders attempted to employ the new policies in their own cities and explains why they were not always effective. He argues throughout the volume that “changes in the perception of the problems associated with slums” (7), as opposed to the oft-cited regional ideology, had a major influence on civic leaders’ solutions to slums and the bid for public housing.

Fairbanks’s book is essentially a collection of five case studies organized chronologically. He begins in chapter 1 with a brief but adequate introduction to each of the five cities, placing each of them in the historical context. Chapter 2 discusses how the five cities dealt with public housing before the passing of the Wagner-Steagall Act, or Housing Act of 1937. Fairbanks spends his third chapter examining how the five cities responded to this act. Chapter 4 looks at the effect of World War II on slum clearance and public housing programs, explaining how new projects were typically put on hold or war workers were housed in the new buildings. The Housing Act of 1949 and the eventual decline of the movement for public housing, which Fairbanks attributes to the claim that the public housing programs were part of a leftist agenda, are the focus of chapter 5. The final chapter in The War on Slums in the Southwest discusses the Housing Act of 1954 and the shift from urban redevelopment to urban rehabilitation and renewal. [End Page 438] Fairbanks ends his study with an epilogue, claiming that the war on slums eventually, in the 1960s and 1970s, shifted into the War on Poverty.

While Fairbanks’s major focus is on governments—federal, state, and local—and the implementation of many different programs, he also spends a good amount of time on the racial implications of the slum clearance and public housing programs. He weaves in discussions of race throughout every chapter to show the role that race and ethnicity played in this story. Fairbanks also spends a good amount of time on Texas. While his study is on five different cities and his discussion of all of them is adequate, Fairbanks shines the brightest when he is discussing one of the three Texas cities.

Fairbanks has done his homework with this volume. His sources are extensive, with the majority stemming from government documents and local newspapers. The book contains several images and maps, which help in understanding the many different projects. He also has four different appendices, with statistics about public housing and slum clearance and analyses of the changing movements. The War on Slums in the Southwest is a well-written book that should be a great addition to the literature on the public housing movement.

Jessica M. Webb
Texas Christian University
...

pdf

Share