American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

Christian Century, July 4, 2001 by Robert Westbrook

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto.

By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Harvard University Press, 332 pp., $29.95.

SOCIAL POLICY IS inscribed on the landscape. And perhaps the most telling such inscription in U.S. cities is the public housing project, an inscription that is currently being erased. In the history of the building and unbuilding of these structures--particularly the most massive projects such as Columbia Point in Boston or the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago--one can read the story of the anemic American welfare state and the profound unease with which we have met the plight of the poor.

Two fine new books tell elements of this story. From the Puritans to the Projects is a compelling history of the treatment in Boston of "public neighbors"--needy people unable to provide fully for themselves--from the early 17th century to the present, focused on the construction and management of public housing in that city since the mid-1930s. American Project is a bold ethnographic account of "project living" in the Taylor Homes, which opened in 1962 and are currently under steady demolition. Although decidedly different in approach, both books are animated by the conviction that, as Sudhir Venkatesh puts it, the "public housing complex has become a contemporary mirror for American self-examination."

One of the several virtues of Lawrence Vale's history is its broad canvas. He argues persuasively that the fate of public neighbors who have found their way into Boston's public housing projects in the last 70 years must be imbedded in the longer, wider story of the treatment of such neighbors since the city's initial settlement by the Puritans. These neighbors, as he demonstrates in an adroit survey of the "prehistory" of Boston public housing, were always regarded with profound ambivalence.

The Puritans felt a keen sense of obligation to those members of their community unable to care for themselves, but this obligation did not extend beyond the boundaries of the town and was often grudging. Outsiders in riced of help were "warned out" of town, and support for needy fellow townspeople was often offered with a good deal of complaint about its costs. Nineteenth-century Bostonians sought to reform as well as aid the poor (an increasingly immigrant poor), and built substantial institutions such as the House of Industry and the House of Correction designed to isolate and uplift them. At the end of the century, tenement reformers and settlement workers led by Robert Woods attempted to remake impoverished, working-class, immigrant neighborhoods according to "the American standard" of propriety necessary to upward mobility.

All these efforts to assist and regulate the poor were governed by a crucial distinction between the "worthy" and "unworthy" poor, between those who could not be blamed for their dire straits and those who could, between those who were redeemable and those who were not, between public neighbors entitled to support and those subject to scorn. The most troubling of public neighbors were the able-bodied unemployed, and reformers endeavored to separate out those worthy poor who were the temporary victims of economic circumstances beyond their control and those unworthy poor immune to the appeal of the Protestant work ethic. The former were disciplined and rewarded, the latter disciplined and punished.

Whether the poor were transferred to almshouses and asylums or targeted in the tenements in which they lived, their housing stood in stark contrast to the American ideal: the detached, single-family home, preferably situated on a sizable plot of land. Vale nicely points out that insofar as the American state has sponsored an uncontested, well-funded program for housing the American public, it has resided in its extraordinary support of this ideal. From the Land Ordinance of 1785 to the Homestead Act of 1862 to the FHA mortgage insurance program begun in the 1930s, the national government has expended vast sums in support of this Jeffersonian norm.

Few of those who happily take the home mortgage deduction on their income taxes think of themselves as participating in a program of publicly subsidized housing, but they are. Many of the notable planners and architects who designed communities for low- and moderate-income residents in the early years of this century were wedded to this "retrograde ruralism," and their influence would be visible in later public housing projects that featured streetless "superblocks" marked by substantial expanses of empty (and often hazardous) space.

The onset of the Great Depression, in which the ranks of the worthy poor expanded dramatically, occasioned widespread experiments in the construction of housing projects sponsored by the federal and state government. Nearly all of Boston's public housing projects were built between 1938 and 1954 under New Deal and Fair Deal auspices. As Vale demonstrates, these projects were designed and administered by the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) as "selective collectives" that aimed to serve the needs of the deserving poor, providing them with a way station on the path to eventual home ownership. Rents were set at a level beyond the reach of the city's poorest residents, including many of those displaced from their oft-times decent homes in the oft-times decent neighborhoods cleared to build the projects. This intra-class discrimination was only enhanced by the preferential housing of war workers in the projects during World War II and of veterans in its aftermath. The projects were also marked by rigid racial discrimination, with Boston's relatively small African-American population housed in separate and unequal projects in minority neighborhoods.