A City without Slums: Urban Renewal; Public Housing and Downtown Revitalization in Kansas City, Missouri

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2001 by Kevin Fox Gotham

As Table 1 shows, the LCRA launched eighteen urban renewal projects from 1953 to 1969. The first area designated for slum clearance was the Northside area, with the Attucks, South Humbolt, and Eastside urban renewal projects following consecutively during the 1950s (Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority 1954). The purpose of the 54.2 acre Attucks project was to clear predominantly black neighborhoods adjacent to the downtown. The 6.6 acre Northside area was cleared to provide parking lots near the downtown while the 85.9 acres cleared for the South Humbolt and Eastside renewal projects were to expedite construction of the downtown freeway loop (Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority 1969; Anderson 1957; "A Northside OK," 1953; "Old Northside Gone," 1954; "Attucks Ordinance In," 1954; "East Side Renewal Project Gets OK," 1956; "Old North Side Gone," 1954; "Start Near on Huge City Job," 1956; "Modern Look for Northside Horizon," 1957).

Besides the Attucks, Northside, South Humbolt, and Eastside urban renewal projects, the LCRA initiated fourteen more major redevelopment projects in the 1960s. These included the Woodland (46.3 acres), Garfield (206.6 acres), Hospital Hill (36.8 acres), West Main (3.3 acres), Trinity-St. Mary's (22.5 acres), Manual (86.5 acres), Town Fork Creek (654.8 acres), Independence Plaza (259.8 acres), Columbus Park (146.5 acres), Attucks East (103.8 acres), the CBD itself (284.7 acres), East 23rd Street (857.8 acres), Oak Park (2241.1 acres), and 12th and Vine (33.1 acres) (Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority 1969). As Table 1 shows, urban renewal displaced thousands of individuals and businesses, including 1783 blacks, 1960 whites, and 755 businesses. Of those urban renewal projects reporting data on numbers of displaced blacks and whites, 48 percent of those displaced were blacks while whites made up 52 percent of displacees.

To qualify for federal urban renewal subsidies through the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, municipalities had to insure that a sufficient supply of replacement housing would be available to families displaced by slum clearance (Gelfand 1975, chapter 6; Hirsch 1993, pp. 85--86; Pynoos, Schafer, and Hartman 1973). Throughout the 1950s and up to 1964, the Housing Authority of Kansas City, Missouri (HAKC) segregated its public housing residents by race. By 1954, the HAKC had three major public housing projects--Guinotte Manor (454 units) and Riverview (232 units) built in 1954 and 1952 "for whites" and T. B Watkins Homes (462 units) built in 1953 for "Negro families." Projects in planning or under construction during this time included Wayne Miner Court (738 units) for blacks and Chouteau Court (140 units), West Bluff (139 units), and Pennway Plaza (250 units) for whites and minorities other than blacks (Housing Authority of Kansas City, Missouri 1953, 1956, 1957; "Three Public Housing Sites on Fringe of Downtown Area," 1957).

The question of where to build public housing was a source of bitter controversy during the 1950s and 1960s. While middle class whites opposed predominantly black public housing in their neighborhoods, in many cases middle class blacks objected to the same public housing in their own neighborhoods, revealing that class as well as racial conflicts were central to the public housing controversy. In response, the HAKC built all of its housing developments within six miles of each other, thus concentrating public housing in the city. During this time, the Greater Kansas City Urban League and the local African American newspaper, the Kansas City Call, repeatedly voiced opposition to the HAKC's segregative public housing site selections and demanded that housing authority officials build public housing on vacant land outside the city ("Interracial Housing Project in Order," 1953; "Speaking the Public Mind," 1952; "Oppose a Housing Sit," 1950). In 1953, the Kansas City Call castigated the "rigid pattern of segregati on which the Housing Authority has adopted in the operation of Kansas City's low rent housing projects." It is "unfair and unrealistic," as the Call lamented, for the HAKC to expect the Watkins project "to take care of the housing needs all over the city." A year later, the Call expressed outrage at the HAKC's policy that black families displaced by urban renewal and public housing construction "will be housed in the Watkins project which means that some of the families in the central Negro area which would normally have secured housing there will not be accepted because there will not be enough units to take care of all" ("Segregation in Housing Must Go," 1954, p. 22).