Designing the Modern City by Eric Mumford

Author:Eric Mumford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press

74. “Coincidence of Factors Indicative of Poor Housing, Richmond,” 1939 (Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities [Washington, D.C., 1939], 47).

The decisions that followed these 1930s federal assessments of mortgage risk for the most part simply codified earlier American private real estate lending practices, which had typically seen the “invasion” of any “Negroes” into a residential area as a grave threat to future property values. Widely used deed restrictions on who could buy homes were intended to “protect” more affluent areas from this risk, and were generally enforced until they were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948 in its Shelley v. Kramer decision. Standard real estate appraisal manuals produced in the 1930s suggested that the presence of “undesirable groups” in an area would lower land values. Hoyt’s research identified that under these conditions, the effect of African Americans moving into an urban area would at first raise house prices, but then precipitate a drastic decline as white residents departed. To avoid such outcomes, the New Deal policy of denying mortgage insurance in central urban areas was meant to speed up what had been identified as a natural process of “ethnic succession” that led to urban decentralization. In postwar America, it instead “froze” the once-changing central urban patterns of the 1930s in a negative way, ensuring that central urban and African American areas would be denied Federal mortgage insurance. Without such mortgage insurance, most central urban areas became very risky in real estate terms, and were put on a path of almost unavoidable social and economic decline for decades thereafter.

Because these HOLC maps were supposed to be secret, their existence and long-term urban social effects were not widely discussed in print until the 1980s, when they were publicized by the historian Kenneth T. Jackson in his book Crabgrass Frontier (1985). Following Chicago School of Sociology theory, which saw the “zones of transition” with their mixtures of older urban housing and commercial and industrial uses as doomed in real estate terms, these redlined areas were where new slum-clearance projects for lower-income housing began to be built. An early example of this was Neighborhood Gardens in St. Louis (1934), a privately sponsored philanthropic, low-rise garden apartment complex of 252 units, designed by Hoener, Baum, and Froese. The architects’ models were similar to perimeter-block projects in Amsterdam and Vienna, and this “for whites only” project was built to clear a very dense slum area, one of two that had been indicated as “blighted” by St. Louis planner Harland Bartholomew in 1917. Harlem River Houses, designed around the same time, followed a similar design pattern, but it was succeeded by many later public housing projects that avoided perimeter-block courtyard organizations in favor of variations of more row building–type site plans, with lawns and parking areas set between the low-rise buildings.

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