Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America

4: Urban Renewal and the Challenge of Homelessness

C H A P T E R 4 URBAN RENEWAL AND THE CHALLENGE OF HOMELESSNESS BY the late 1950s, America’s skid rows were sparsely populated slum districts . Surveying the Bowery, the New York City Planning Commission observed “a mixture of old tenements, commercial and industrial structures and cheap hotels . . . in poor, run-down condition, with narrow, dark halls.” Amid these dilapidated buildings were small clusters of homeless men. In the late 1940s, approximately 1,800 men had stayed in commercial lodging houses; a decade later barely 500 remained. Eying skid rows as valuable, underutilized real estate, enterprising urban planners launched ambitious redevelopment projects fueled by federal spending.1 Razing skid rows seemed at first a straightforward proposal. Who would argue against the prospect of encouraging investment in urban centers, eradicating blight, and ushering in a modern city marked by gleaming, sanitary, mixed-income developments? But destroying skid rows sparked debate, as did other postwar urban renewal projects. Increasingly, observers questioned whether or not the poor and homeless had a right to live in the city. By the 1960s, changes in the law and its enforcement meant that homelessness itself was not a crime in New York and other cities. Liberal legal decisions affirmed the rights of the homeless to exist in the nation’s cities, even as their environs were being destroyed. Acknowledging that the poorest of the poor had to live somewhere, urban officials had accepted skid rows and their residents as necessary elements of Urban Renewal and the Challenge of Homelessness 117 city life since the late nineteenth century. By attempting to disperse the homeless across the urban landscape, urban renewal posed the first real challenge to skid rows. The debate around such projects set the tone for the coming decades in urban policy, as many began to wonder whose interests were really served by urban planning decisions. Clearing the Slums By the mid-twentieth century, the Bowery’s lodging houses lingered in a shabby state of disrepair. For decades, their small rooms and dense occupancies had posed fire hazards, triggering periodic calls for renewed industry regulation and more rigorous enforcement of building and fire codes. More careful maintenance of facilities and establishment of reasonable minimum hygienic standards for commercial hotels might have ensured that temporary accommodations remained available to the homeless. But instead of working to improve conditions of Bowery flophouses, 1950s urban planners and politicians hoped to see them simply disappear.2 The postwar federal urban renewal program funded redevelopment projects that attempted to revitalize downtown districts, which often dislocated low-income residents. Relying on public-private partnerships, it encouraged business interests to invest in and reap profits from urban projects . Ironically, the program, which would ultimately displace many poor and working-class Americans, had originated in New Deal efforts to develop low-income public housing. Diverse voices representing a variety of political perspectives had called for an expanded role of the federal government in the nation’s housing market as early as the 1920s. The first major piece of legislation that shaped the contours of postwar housing development emerged from the New Deal, when members of the Labor Housing Conference worked with Senator Robert Wagner to revise the public housing bill he had introduced in Congress in 1935. The addition of increased federal sponsorship of cooperative housing developments targeting middle-income citizens enticed the support of the American Federation of Labor, which saw an opportunity to ensure the development of decent housing for families earning union wages. The unions wanted a feasible alternative to the Federal Housing Authority’s emerging agenda of providing funds to guarantee mortgages, a practice they saw benefiting lending institutions. The forces of commercial real estate —including the National Association of Real Estate Boards, U.S. League 118 Chapter 4 of Buildings and Loans, and National Retail Lumber Dealers Association— lobbied against the legislation. The struggle over the bill was between New Deal liberal “public housers” and their conservative foes. After being debated in three Congresses, the Wagner bill was passed in 1937 as the United States Housing Act. But compromises struck along the way erased many of the bill’s most progressive features, including support of nonprofit and cooperative housing. The legislation linked construction of public housing with clearance of existing slums.3 New Deal-era patterns of legislative support were repeated in the debates around the Housing Act of 1949, which was endorsed by the AFL...