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The past: Public Works Administration builds housing |
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Aerial view of Dallas' Cedar Springs Place, a 'slum clearance
project.' (photo: Dallas Public Library) |
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Cedar Springs Place, the first public housing project in Texas,
was built in 1937 in Dallas. (photo: National Archives) |
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Dr. Stephen Fox
professor
Rice University, Houston
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During the New Deal era of the 1930's, during the Great Depression,
there were a number of Americans, sociologists, architects, who
were very concrened with issues of low income housing in the United
States.
During the 1920's in Europe, in the aftermath of World War I,
a number of European governments had embarked on large scale social
housing programs, building large housing estates for low income
families in the large metropolitan centers of Germany particularly,
the Netherlands, France, so that the housing reformers, as they
were called in the United States, with the advent of the depression
and particularly after Franklin Roosevelt's election as president,
had a body of experience and a body of knowledge to refer to.
During the course of Roosevelt's administration there was a sequence
of different programs. In the mid-1930's the Public Works Administration
undertook a series of approximately fifty demonstration projects
in different American states building a different kind of housing
called slum clearance housing. These were usually built in the
centers of large cities often in existing lower income neighborhoods.
They adopted the planning and architectural ideals of European
social housing and were carried out -- the goal was to demolish
slums and replace them with these new sorts of model communities.
Usually in place of single family houses they grouped new dwelling
units into apartment blocks. Most of them were one and two stories,
in some larger US cities they were three and four stories, but
it was rare for them to be so high as to require an elevator.
Usually they were laid out on large acreage sites. There was a
very strict separation of vehicular traffic from pedestrian traffic.
The sites were often landscaped so that these apartment blocks
stood in park like settings. Often the apartment blocks were aligned
fairly rigorously if it was a flat site so that they would have
optimum access to ventilation and also to sunlight and this configuration
- the German term is Zilenbau - "Z" building - accounted for the
organization of these sites with parallel rows of two story, flat
roofed apartment blocks. In Texas the 1st public housing complex
in the state, Cedar Springs Place in Dallas, was one of these
Public Works Administration demonstration projects and it was
completed in 1937. |
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Acting under the authority of emergency powers the Public Works
Administration began to build housing in 1933 for low income families.
The purpose was not so much to build the housing but to create
work. Roosevelt recognized the employment potential of home building.
One third of the unemployed were from the building trades. The
Public Works Administration had millions of citizens on its payroll
at subsistence wages and it needed work for them.
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Housing reformers inspecting poor housing in San Antonio in 1930's. (photo: Institute of Texan Cultures) |
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Poor neighborhood in Galveston which was demolished to build public
housing. (photo: National Archives) |
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Clayton Homes public housing development in Houston illustrates
apartment row building style of early public housing developments. (photo: National Archives) |
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Public housing developments were built to last, with concrete
roof and floor and tile block interior and exterior walls. (photo: Houston Public Library) |
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