Landmark Withdrawal: U.S. v. Certain Lands in Louisville and the Evolution of American Public Housing Policy

Introduction

The history of American cities is replete with landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which have helped shape urban development.¹ Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) affirmed federal jurisdiction over interstate commerce, ended the trade monopoly on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers held by Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston, and stimulated shipping and shipbuilding in many river cities.² Buchanan v. Warley (1917) outlawed a Louisville city ordinance that prohibited a person from moving into a block where most residents were of another race.³ Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty (1926) upheld the constitutionality of zoning.⁴ Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) barred judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in residential deeds.⁵ Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City (1978) held that historic landmark ordinances that potentially limit the use of a property do not constitute an unconstitutional taking.⁶ In addition, several landmark cases during the 1970s addressed issues related to racial segregation in suburban municipalities.⁷

Occasionally, however, a lower court ruling becomes a precedential landmark because the losing party does not appeal the case to the Supreme Court or because the high court allows the lower court decision to stand. The former was the case with U.S. v. Certain Lands in City of Louisville, a mid-1930s case that prohibited the federal government from using eminent domain to acquire property for public housing and slum clearance.⁸ The decision profoundly shaped the development of public housing in the city and, as numerous historians have noted, American public housing policy as well.⁹ Had the case been decided another way, public housing might have been developed differently, with stronger federal control and diminished local power over its shape and scope. Despite the significance of the case, historians have not examined its origin and dynamics. This essay addresses that gap by explaining the origins and course of the case and how it affected the development of public housing in Louisville and national housing and slum clearance policy.

The Progressive Roots of Housing Reform and Urban Planning in Louisville

The events that culminated in the Louisville decision originated in the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, when white urban elites and the rising middle class in large American cities sought to improve urban services, infrastructure, and living conditions, especially in burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods. In Louisville, the movement included parallel campaigns for housing reform and urban planning and the outcome was significantly shaped by and reinforced the city's racial demography. The housing reform movement began feebly in 1903 when the Board of Public Safety appointed an inspector to work with the health department in identifying and cleaning up tenements in older neighborhoods that bordered the central business district. The movement gained momentum during the fall and winter of 1908–1909 when an inspection by Emily Dinwiddie, secretary of the Tenement House Commission of the New York Charity Organization Society, inspired the city's General Council to create a Tenement House Commission. Upon its implementation, the commission hired Janet E. Kemp, a Boston social worker and housing investigator, to make a "house examination in the tenement district and to prepare data for a report."¹⁰

The deplorable conditions identified in Kemp's report, issued in July 1909, prompted the Tenement House Commission to propose a state law to remedy the conditions described in the document. During the winter of 1910, commission chair William Watkins, the law partner of former Louisville mayor Robert Worth Bingham, and vice chair Mary Gray Belknap, a prominent club woman, drafted a tenement-house law and secured its passage by the Kentucky General Assembly. Although a significant advance for Louisville and the state, the new law was less stringent than such measures in most other states. Standards for light and ventilation were particularly weak and the law covered only multifamily tenements, thus failing to cover many tiny, one-family cottages that were common in older parts of the city.

An effort to solve the latter problem began in 1919 when the...