Culture of Property: Race, Class, and Housing Landscapes in Atlanta, 1880-1950

Six. Park-Neighborhoods, Federal Policy, and Housing Geographies, 1933 to 1950

158 CHAPTER SIX Park-Neighborhoods, Federal Policy, and Housing Geographies, 1933 to 1950 What had been the most productive period of home building in Atlanta’s (and the nation’s) history slowed and stalled by the late s and then dropped precipitously as the Great Depression set in. Mirroring the decline occurring in other cities, property values had dropped  percent between  and . Just over  percent of Atlanta families had incomes of less than $, in , and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) estimated that three thousand Atlanta families defaulted on their mortgages in . As a result of foreclosures and high rent-to-income ratios, nearly ten thousand families in the metropolitan area were “doubled up” with other families in . Atlanta’s blacks and poor—families who did not benefit from the park-neighborhood building wave of the s—coped with particularly high rents, substandard housing, and aging and overcrowded neighborhoods in the s. According to one study, tenants with annual incomes of less than $ paid over  percent of their income toward rent in , and those with annual incomes of between $ and $ devoted  percent to rent. Properties aged and decayed ; the HOLC Real Property Inventory reported that  percent of Atlanta’s homes needed major repairs or were simply unfit for use in . Not surprisingly then, and like residents of cities across the South, Atlantans adopted New Deal housing programs that promised to provide more, affordable, and healthy housing and that, in practice, helped impose racial residential segregation. Beginning in , public and private building practices and policies combined to sharpen boundaries between black and white neighborhoods. Policies , studies, and guidelines issued by the HOLC, the Federal Housing Administration , and other New Deal Housing offices in the s and s indicate that federal agencies adopted elite park-neighborhood sensibilities and used them as the housing standard. Appraisal manuals, reports and surveys, workshops , and pamphlets instructed public and private housing professionals in these housing and neighborhood expectations and kept this new framework in circulation within bureaucratic circles. As a result, professionals and their Federal Policy and Housing Geographies  agencies or businesses inculcated park-neighborhood fashions that celebrated owner- and white-occupied single-family homes, planned and designed neighborhoods , housing clustered by value or purchasing prices, and whiteness. New Deal mortgage insurance programs gave whites incentives to embrace and perpetuate the park-neighborhood landscape and facilitated white movement to Atlanta’s suburbs, while public-housing programs relegated black families to the urban core. The Public Works Administration, the U.S. Housing Administration , and the Public Housing Administration offered subsidies for low-cost housing production that, in the hands of Atlanta officials, improved urban housing conditions while concentrating black families in Atlanta’s core and near west side in the s and s. Supported by federal mortgage insurance programs, white park-neighborhood building continued the s pattern of consuming acre upon acre of suburban land around Atlanta, particularly to the city’s north. Often “protected” by restrictive covenants or zoning ordinances, such communities became off-limits to nonwhites and the less well off. After World War II, Atlanta’s local black leadership confronted local and federal , public and private housing discrimination by drawing on its community resources to launch a sustained home-building movement. Building on successful private home-building efforts in the s and s, the Atlanta Urban League (AUL) and its partners outlined a plan for black housing expansion in Atlanta’s central city and near west side that relied on the production of new homes targeted to black families and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that resulted in the turnover of white housing to blacks. As a result of these spatial and policy machinations, black Atlantans gained more housing, while lines between blacks and whites, homeowners and tenants sharpened, and racial and class distinctions across the metro area hardened. New Deal Housing Programs With  percent of the country’s population out of work, worldwide market failure, and escalating foreclosures, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s staff proposed aggressive programs for short-term relief and long-term market stabilization . The resulting agencies—Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Public Works Administration, U.S. Housing Administration, and Public Housing Administration—were designed to heal a range of housing market ills. For the private market, the HOLC, established in , offered refinancing mechanisms to homeowners facing foreclosure, and the program’s long-term amortized mortgage significantly influenced mortgage  Chapter Six design thereafter. In this new form...