Amid conservative backlash, a turn away from bold public housing experiments of the ‘30s

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

Public housing was a hot topic in the late 1930s and early 1940s, amid a severe housing crunch exacerbated by the Great Depression and later, World War II. Greenbelt, Maryland, and Langston Terrace, in Washington, DC, were supposed to serve as models for other federally funded developments.

Progressives hoped that the Housing Act of 1937 would help them establish housing as a right, yet the policy that ultimately passed contained serious compromises.

The federal government would offer favorable 60-year mortgages to local governments interested in building, but the bill included hard caps on costs per unit. In addition, future tenants were expected to pay 50% of upkeep as well as the mortgage through their rent and yet residents’ incomes also could not be more than five times the rent, which in practice meant that all residents had to be working and poor. Much of this was intentional on the part of Congress, which was on the receiving end of aggressive lobbying from real estate interests. They wanted a program that would not compete with private interests, but would help the working people who were temporarily down on their luck.

The bill also included language to assure the private market that housing developed under the Act would not compete: For each unit built, an unsafe or unsanitary unit somewhere else would need to be cleared. This would encourage slum clearance in the coming years, generating private development opportunities.

Langston and Greenbelt were both funded before 1937. After political opponents dragged Greenbelt’s head planner Rexford Tugwell’s name through the mud, administrators struggled to renew funding and Greenbelt was not replicated. When progressives looked to build new public housing, however, they hoped to duplicate the successful aspects of Langston — its healthy mothers and babies, and wholesome community overall.

Conservatives attacked Greenbelt as wasteful, Communist

Tugwell started out working against trends in American housing — the ideal of cooperative garden towns had few natural political allies and many opponents. Important members of the building industry, real estate, and finance all had serious stakes in private enterprise, which could be harmed if Green Town Projects — in the style of Greenbelt — were replicated across the United States. These opponents were ready to use any excuse to characterize the greenbelt projects as a failure, including the very real issue of funding.

New Deal construction was often understood primarily as a back-to-work program with other goals secondary, so administrators intentionally hired inexperienced workers to do most of the labor. In the case of Greenbelt, they began by hiring 900 white men living in five transient lodges in DC and a few hundred Black men, similarly temporarily housed in a warehouse. All were unpracticed in construction, and thus not as efficient as skilled laborers who were less in need of government assistance.

Though building costs had been intentionally excessive to create jobs, that didn’t stop opponents of the most progressive elements of the New Deal from using the project as political fodder. Conservative senators and newspapers called the expenses wasteful and regularly declared Tugwell a Communist, partly because Greenbelt was planned as a cooperative. Newspapers as far flung as The Chicago American blared, “First Communist Town in U.S. Nears Completion” as its opening date grew closer.

Before construction costs piled up, Greenbelt administrators had originally planned on selling the housing either to a private company or a local entity that would allow moderate-income residents affordable rent, in order to keep up the units. However, given the high costs, balancing the books would have made rents unaffordable for the moderate-income residents. Raising the prices and finding higher-income residents would have been an illegal use of relief funds, so administrators requested special permission from Congress to extend the program.

As a result of the cost and scandal, policymakers were uninterested in creating more Greenbelt towns. By the end of the 1930s, it was increasingly clear that the most politically successful housing policies of the New Deal government would be to back the mostly-private market through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), but to offer little direct housing assistance to moderate income (but not desperately poor) white Americans like those living in Greenbelt.

This shift, combined with similar policies under the GI bill, led to a suburban housing boom directly following WWII. The GI Bill included a loan guarantee from the federal government, making veterans a safer investment for banks and, in turn, making mortgages more accessible to returning veterans. Some Greenbelt residents even took advantage of newly created 30-year mortgages as they moved into larger homes in the region. The benefits, however, were largely limited to white veterans: the FHA, the GI Bill, and private interests worked in concert to create a market that effectively locked potential Black homeowners out. Overall, these policies were incredibly successful in building housing, but also contributed to the car-dependent and exclusive suburbs that we recognize today.

Langston Terrace had a controversial founding figure

Despite early Langston Terrace’s lack of specific income requirements and its higher cost per unit, it was public housing and had always been planned as such. Planner and architect Hilyard Robison was the face of Langston Terrace, but the development’s funding had been largely orchestrated by a more polarizing man: John Ihlder.

Ihlder pushed for more public housing, but also led campaigns against alley dwellings in DC and supported creation of the Alley Dwelling Authority (ADA). The ADA had the authority to redevelop areas considered slums, and also managed Langston. Although Ihlder put in real work to create new public housing, the number of alley dwellings that he helped remove far outnumbered the units he helped create, and he knew it. In 1932 he said, “Old slum areas may not contain suitable sites for housing, and may better be devoted to other uses.”

Ihlder was determined to build residential units, both public and private. When faced with locals who tolerated white public housing in their neighborhoods but put up resistance to Black or mixed public housing, he caved far more quickly than local Black civil rights leaders wanted because he was desperate to build. This capitulation further hardened DC’s colorline.

“Some Negroes have only one desire, full racial equality,” Ihlder wrote. “They see public housing as an opportunity to advance a step further by demanding that there shall be no distinction of race in any public housing property… In the District of Columbia and in Congress the preponderant opinion is so strongly against this that such a policy adapted by the ADA would kill it.” Ihlder details the concerningly crowded conditions that Black alley dwellers faced, but despite his and other’s efforts, such housing persisted.

Ultimately, neither Ihlder’s endeavors, nor those of private industry, did much to help the majority of Black DC with housing. Still, for all his flaws, he was instrumental to the funding and management of Langston Terrace, where residents were grateful for their homes.

Overall, Ihlder had mixed intentions. He fully recognized the displacement he was creating as he worked to reduce alley housing within DC. At the same time, he asked for greater funding for public housing and pushed for specific projects, but could not create a powerful and cohesive enough coalition to bring most projects to completion — especially as his own actions working to clear slums made him a less palatable ally.

WWII tightened housing crunch

Throughout the 1940s, demand for housing in DC remained excruciatingly high. Shortages caused by the Great Depression were exacerbated as the New Deal drew people to DC, and worsened further as WWII brought even more workers. War funds were dedicated to temporary dormitories for defense housing, but these did not come close to equaling the number of new arrivals in the city. At the beginning of the war these temporary dormitories were exclusively for white federal employees, but after DC’s Black civil rights activists protested, dormitories were built for Black federal employees. All were segregated.

Meanwhile, the private market catered to white DC residents, while ignoring Black residents, even those who could pay. This did little for longtime Black residents who faced displacement as the federal government physically expanded its buildings into what had been Black residential neighborhoods over the two decades.

Very little public housing was built in DC as opposition and internal strife mounted against the ADA. As the agency’s powers expanded, the National Association of Real Estate Boards came out against its attempts to build public housing in the District. Even National Association of Real Estate Board members who Ihlder had once worked with and had considered allies now opposed his work. Meanwhile, the issue of desegregation came to the forefront, with officials holding stances on either side of the issue and local citizen’s associations opposing.

Ihlder’s allies in creating public housing in DC, segregated or not — the Congress of Industrial Organizations (which saw public housing as an opportunity for union labor), the NAACP, and the National Public Housing Conference — argued that Ihlder should be given funds and permission to build. After a long negotiation, public organizations like the ADA were left as the builder of last resort, with most redevelopment privatized.

As the United States exited WWII, housing needs were great, both in DC and the rest of the nation. Tugwell’s dream of many small cooperative planned communities never came close to fulfillment. Meanwhile proponents of widespread public housing found growing opposition from private interests that feared competition and early NIMBYs who especially opposed any housing that would allow Black residents, and unstable alliances with Civil Rights groups. They also had to deal with less flexibility around the use of federal dollars.

Given these many obstacles, it is almost surprising that Greenbelt or Langston were ever built. More public housing was eventually built in DC, but similar obstacles and new problems like white flight and suburbanization continued to impede administrators and activists. Even today, although income-restricted affordable housing is more varied in type, almost none are located in wealthier, more suburban, Northwest DC.