Life in Greenbelt and Langston Terrace’s early days

This is part two of a multi-part series on the histories of Langston Terrace and Greenbelt. Read part one and part three.

Amid a severe housing shortage in Washington in the 1930s, people were grateful for the opportunity to live in Langston Terrace in DC and Greenbelt, Maryland, two unique planned communities created from the New Deal. Most early residents moved directly from substandard housing, and despite their imperfections, the developments offered high quality, healthy homes as well as a sense of community.

Both Greenbelt and Langston Terrace were federally funded public housing and were supposed to serve as models for other developments. They may not have been replicated, but there are still lessons to be learned from these ambitious housing experiments, which also attempted to create jobs, foster community, and uplift residents’ morality. It mostly worked during this time.

Early life was community-oriented

Greenbelt opened in 1937 and its new residents were extremely active — they had a town newspaper, an education committee, a health association, religious groups, athletic clubs, a citizen’s association and many other opportunities for involvement. However, planners’ ideas of a social utopia, aiming to uphold middle class ideals of the day, sometimes went too far for residents, particularly with regards to women’s roles in the home.

In Greenbelt’s early days, women were not allowed to work and wearing shorts to do shopping was forbidden. Laundry was to be brought in by 4:00 pm on weekdays. Pets were not allowed. Radios had to be off by midnight, and one woman recalled a time when she had fallen asleep while pregnant and been visited by a police officer because she had left the radio on. Still, residents generally remember the early days of Greenbelt fondly.

As residents settled into Greenbelt, families worked to live their version of a middle class lifestyle: some brought issues like pet ownership to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which managed Greenbelt at the time. The FSA refused to change its ban, which led to a city-wide vote. Unfortunately for the hopeful pet owners, other Greenbelt residents outvoted them.

As incomes rose rapidly in the early ‘40s residents protested income requirements. A committee of Greenbelt residents wrote, “You will not discover one family in Greenbelt which has a feeling of security of tenure which is the essence of home life and of community life because of the fear… that some day the family will get a raise and have to move.” Federal managers relented, first easing restrictions, and then eliminating them altogether. By the time Greenbelt was sold to its residents in the ‘50s, residents were able to change most rules that the majority disapproved of.

Residents of Langston Terrace, the first federal housing development for Black people, were similarly community-oriented in the 1940s. Children’s author Eloise Greenfield, whose family moved into Langston in 1938, wrote that neighbors knew each other and it was “a good growing up place.”

Langston’s architect, Hilyard Robinson, created a wide courtyard with steps that created a stage on one side, and the community made full use of it. They held kite competitions, kickball and baseball (a basketball court was added later) as well as a three-day festival to celebrate the first anniversary of Langston’s opening.

The neighborhood was built with two recreation centers and, at some point, included a co-op store. In 1939, a Washington Star article noted a Mothers’ Club, a Works Project Administration-led pre-school nursery class, an aquarium, and a film development room were all active within the recreation centers.

Another former resident, Samuel Washington, recalled during a reunion in 1986 that, “Langston was a close-knit community. There were hundreds of youngsters and we all knew each other. There were two recreation centers. There was a co-op store. They had speaker forums on Sunday. If you asked any one of the people at the reunion, you would hear them say it was a utopia.”

Still, life was not easy for Black DC residents, including those lucky enough to get housing at Langston. Greenfield wrote of pervasive segregation that, among other things, led to yearly drownings at Kingman Lake when Black children couldn’t get into the few pools they were allowed to use. Segregated pools in DC meant that Black residents had limited access to only two pools, while white DC residents had access to four. Meanwhile, white youths in Greenbelt enjoyed a pool constructed alongside the townhouses, apartments, and community center.

The communities evolved

It became clear to policymakers by the late 1930s that Greenbelt with its many amenities was not scalable. However, there was still hope that the successes of Langston Terrace could be replicated and that it could serve as a model for public housing.

In 1938, various housing authorities joined residents to celebrate Langston Terrace’s first Christmas. The Washington Post noted the presence of officials and the importance of celebrating the “first of Washington’s Government financed housing projects,” and implicitly made the argument that public housing was good for children and prevented delinquency.

Langston families were closer to the city and, as Black urban residents, saw far more of the struggles of the 1940s. Residents were more isolated in Greenbelt, located in a protected suburb outside the city, but they could not escape changes brought on by WWII.

Greenbelt’s numbers nearly doubled in 1941 when 1,000 defense houses were built to help relieve the housing shortage as the war brought even more people to the city. These houses were for government workers and their families, not carefully selected as the first Greenbelt residents were. These townhouses and apartments are physically further from downtown Greenbelt, and were built more quickly because they were intended to be temporary.

At first, the new families were not readily absorbed into the rest of the community, and accusations of discrimination against frame or defense homeowners continued into at least the 1950s. Newspapers published various reminders to be welcoming to newcomers, and there was a shift towards calling the new dwellings “defense houses” rather than frame houses, which refers to their hasty construction. By the ‘60s, the topic fell away from discussion in the town newspaper.

Unique experiments

In the late 1930s, DC’s housing administrators still hoped to replicate the successes of Langston in other public housing projects, but they largely realized it was not to be by 1945. DC administrators faced a wide coalition of anti-public housing advocates, slowing their ability to build, while the federal government narrowed their funds, creating programs that only aided the very poor. Greenbelt’s creators had resigned themselves to having created a unique social experiment.

However, the populations of Langston and Greenbelt thrived. Although their different locations had important implications, both sets of residents felt that their families benefited from living in these low-cost planned communities.

This suggests that imperfect experimentation in public housing can be good. Lessons have been learned since the 1940s, but this early example of residents who were happy with their experience should encourage proponents of public housing.