Greenbelt and Langston Terrace planners promised quality housing — and to improve residents’ morality

This is part three of a multi-part series on the histories of Langston Terrace and Greenbelt. You can read part two and part three here.

Architects of the New Deal created Langston Terrace and Greenbelt amid a severe housing crunch in the 1930s to provide DC residents with quality homes and generate jobs. The two planned communities were mostly segregated, but both reflect similar lofty intentions to create safe, healthy developments that would not only house “respectable” middle class Washingtonians, but also uplift their morality. While residents were grateful to live in them, both projects failed to live up to their full ideals.

Greenbelt, Maryland was a wholly new town, consisting of townhomes and apartments, built in the middle of farmland in Prince George’s County. The exclusively white development was announced in 1935 and opened in 1937 with a school, grocery store, pool, community building and even a new lake. Many Greenbelt families owned one car, used by the husband to commute to DC. Residents also had access to a bus that connected to the local trolley, where the Rhode Island Ave Trolley Trail now is.

Meanwhile, the majority-Black Langston Terrace was built on the outskirts of developed DC near the city’s first public high school for Black children. The project started in 1935 and wrapped in 1938. Construction was less extensive and expensive than Greenbelt’s, but it too had townhomes and apartments, and its large campus included sculptures and playgrounds where children could play and grow. Langston residents could walk to the Black-owned shops along Benning Road NE and to the newly dredged Kingman and Heritage islands, or north to the new Arboretum.

To better understand what prompted the federal government to embark on such housing experiments, it is important to explore how the Great Depression impacted DC residents and housing at the time.

DC’s housing crumbled during the Great Depression

The two planned communities were born out of the Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal. The nation’s economy crashed in 1929 and struggled to recover, and the unemployment rate rarely dipped below 10% and nearly climbed as high as 25% throughout the ‘30s. Homeowners couldn’t make monthly payments and banks continued to collapse, meaning that individuals had no access to credit.

Unsurprisingly, the rental market was also in crisis. Month after month, formerly stable families found themselves unable to pay rent. At the same time, DC’s population grew from nearly 490,000 to 660,000 between 1930-40 as people moved to the city for federal jobs. In 1937, one Washington Post reporter wrote, “Great Growth of D.C. Sends Costs Soaring: Population Climb Causes Larger Demands for Service.”

This growth coincided with crumbling housing, and exacerbated the shortage. Many DC residents were homeless or lived in substandard housing, though it is nearly impossible to say exactly how many.

DC’s most crowded and unsafe areas were in Black neighborhoods near the city center and in the south and east. White residents prevented Black communities from expanding into less crowded northwestern areas, including parts of Georgetown up to Chevy Chase and Takoma. Transient camps consisting of hundreds of Black people grew where they could, while slightly luckier newcomers settled in alley dwellings. One survey along North Capitol Street, which divides much of Northwest and Northeast DC, found many occupied buildings were “almost unfit for human habitation.”

Even moderate-income DC residents faced unpleasant conditions. One Greenbelt resident, Dorothy East, recalled that she and her husband were barely able to afford a two-bedroom in the District. East said their DC apartment — located where the Rayburn Congressional office building is now — “was on the first floor at the back, where the coal was dumped all year round because they heated the water with coal. And our floors were like walking on sugar” due to the coal.

Another Greenbelt resident recalled that her DC apartment had lacked an in-unit bathroom, and remarked that their kitchen was really a converted closet with hotplates and an icebox. Despite these conditions, rent was still higher than for their Greenbelt housing.

Developing not just housing, but more moral residents

Both developments aimed to create safe, healthy housing for DC residents and to use the construction process to create jobs — but that was not the extent of their ambition. Early twentieth century Progressives believed “the prevention of drunkenness” and other vices was possible, simply “by providing for every man a clean and comfortable home.” This was the framework that Langston’s and Greenbelt’s planners both worked within and built on.

Greenbelt’s head planner, Rexford Tugwell, saw such suburban developments as the solution to urban slums. He wanted to “go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back to the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them.”

The planners first envisioned four developments outside New Brunswick, New Jersey; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Dayton, Ohio; and Washington, DC. However, in New Brunswick they were unable to purchase the required land from powerful conservative John Mettler. He stoked fears about the low-income development lowering property values and successfully killed it. Tugwell and other proponents still hoped they would be able to build on the success of the other three projects.

Meanwhile, Langston’s architect Hilyard Robinson, a Black DC native, focused on his one development. Like many planners and architects of the early 1900s, he too believed that the built environment could reform and elevate working-class life, and hoped to do so with Langston.

Although thematically similar to Greenbelt and also federally funded, Langston was entirely separate. It was the fourth federal housing project in the nation, and the first intended for Black residents. The Greenbelt homes were originally supposed to be built and sold at affordable prices, but federal money was needed to maintain affordability so this plan was not realized until decades later.

Promise vs. reality of the projects

In the short term, both Langston and Greenbelt achieved similar purposes but also made compromises. Planners, at their most optimistic, spoke of improving impoverished people living in slums through better housing, but neither wanted to endanger their project with risky participants. Both projects saw thousands of applicants, which allowed planners to be choosy about residents.

Greenbelt residents were selected carefully and paid higher fees than originally planned in an attempt to make up for cost overruns. Residents were required to make between $1,200 and $2,000 annually; in 1935-6, the median family earned $1,160 a year. Residents spent 20% of their income for rent, or about $20-33 a month — still less than many paid on the private market. The project nonetheless did not recoup its costs as planners had promised funders.

In addition, prospective Greenbelt residents had to be white married couples or families with children. They had to maintain 1930s ideals of middle-class respectability, meaning that women were not allowed to work. Those who made it through the application process also had uncommonly high education levels; 75% of all adults possessed a Bachelor’s degree. Planners selected a religiously diverse group, purposefully including Catholics, Jews, and Protestants — a progressive choice for pre-WWII America.

Greenbelt also had to grapple with conservative residents in Prince George’s County. Early versions of the plan included the nearby Rossville Rural Development intended for Black residents, but both a powerful state senator and area residents vocally objected. That resistance, plus a tricky political alliance in Congress between conservative Democrats who opposed integration and New Deal Progressive Democrats who sometimes pushed for racial progress, led Greenbelt’s planners to prioritize creating the town over all other goals, including integration.

Langston residents were carefully selected as well, but they paid only $6 a month — significantly less than a Greenbelt resident — and had no income requirements to fulfill. They were instead chosen if they were model citizens living in unsafe housing. Potential Langston residents might have their current housing inspected to see if their need was great. Inspectors would look for conditions outside of tenant’s control as well as issues with the location, like proximity to bars or gambling, or distance from parks.

Nonetheless, 1930s ideals of respectability were still in play at Langston. Officials made a point of noting that single mothers were allowed if they were widows — implying that single mothers who had never been married were excluded. Langston had no official race requirement and a few white residents moved in, although it was advertised in Black newspapers and early residents were majority Black. Hopeful Langston applicants included many members of DC’s middle class, who worked as civil servants and often brushed shoulders with the city’s elites.

The federal projects’ legacies

Both projects came to fruition by 1938 and housed thriving communities, but ultimately left mixed legacies. Despite planners’ good intentions, the developments loosely followed the trend of white urban residents moving to the suburbs, while Black urban residents — middle class and respectable or not — stayed in the city.

Neither planner created another development like Langston and Greenbelt, nor did the projects help those most in need — meaning they did not truly attempt to improve anyone’s morality through housing. Their combined less-than-3,000 units was woefully insufficient to solve DC’s enormous housing problem.

Still, early Greenbelt and Langston residents were eager to live in these safer, more modern homes. Despite their limited impact, the projects represented an improvement over pre-New Deal federal policy of not building housing at all.

A second article will examine the projects’ complicated legacy in more detail.