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

The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 represented the culmination of real estate industry lobbying efforts to curtail the production of public housing, create local redevelopment authorities with broad powers of eminent domain, and provide generous public subsidies for private redevelopment. Title I of the 1949 Act financed slum clearance. Title II raised by $500 million the amount the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was allowed to offer as mortgage insurance, Title III authorized the federal government to build 810,000 new public housing units over the next ten years and required local public housing authorities to demolish or renovate one slum dwelling for every public housing unit they built. Title IV provided for funds to conduct research into the economics of housing construction, markets, and financing. Title V reorganized and expanded the loan program initiated under the Farm Tenant Act of 1937 which allowed farmers to purchase and improve loans. The Housing Act of 1954 broadened the urban renewal pr ogram, increased funding for federal home financing activities, and established the first specific housing for elderly citizens through the public housing program. Due to opposition from the real estate industry, public housing never came close to the construction levels provided in the 1949 Act (810,000 units). By 1960, only 250,000 units had been made available (Mitchell, 1985, pp. 9-11). While the stated goal of Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 was "[t]o provide a decent home and suitable environment for every American family," urban leaders and real estate elites considered the Acts less as a "housing" program and more of urban "redevelopment" program.

IV

Implementation and Dislocating Effects

IN 1953, THE STATE OF MISSOURI CREATED THE Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority (LCRA) for planning and administering local urban renewal activities including slum clearance of blighted neighborhoods according to the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954. While the preamble to the Housing Act of 1949 called for a "decent home" as the official goal of federal policy, local real estate officials and downtown business elites looked to the Act as a policy mechanism for eliminating blighted land-uses surrounding the CBD and using federal subsidies to engineer downtown growth ("Slum Law Legal," 1954). The city government established the LCRA as a separate legal entity not directly responsible to City Hall or the city manager but to its own board, composed of leaders from the private sector (Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority 1969). While the federal government provided the bulk of the funding, important decisions about site selection and size and project cost and duration were left to LCRA officials working w ith closely with downtown business interests, including the Downtown Committee (renamed the Downtown Redevelopment Corporation [DRC] in 1952), the Building Owners and Managers Association, the Citizens Regional Planning Council, the Hotel Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Merchants Association (Bohanon 1971, pp. 66-67, 88-94, 100-109). The federal government supplied two-thirds of the $80 million to finance Kansas City's urban renewal activities from 1953 through the end of the 1960s. However, federal officials played a decidedly subordinate role, leaving key decision making to the LCRA while supplying vast financial resources for urban redevelopment.