The same story of community destruction and high-rise hells would play out in African-American neighborhoods across the country: East Harlem, Central Avenue in Cleveland, Desoto-Carr in St. Louis, Bronzeville in Chicago. In St. Louis, the high-rises of the Pruitt-Igoe projects won an architectural award when they opened in 1956—and were literally imploded in 1971.

 

Editor’s note: The following essay is adapted from a speech delivered by the author at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. on October 4.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/progressives-grand-plans-subsidized-housing-harmed-african-americans

THE COMING STORM TO CLASH WITH THE ALREADY HIGH NUMBER OF HOMELESS IN NEW YORK CITY!!

Let’s start by going back to the Franklin Roosevelt administration and the National Housing Act of 1937.  The progressives of the New Deal were convinced that the private housing market was doomed to fail the majority of the population—and that government should step in to build and manage replacement housing called public housing.

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt pushed especially hard for housing projects for African Americans, convinced that the segregated Black neighborhoods of that era needed to be replaced.  She even came to Detroit to cut the ribbon on the first public housing project, named for Frederick Douglas. 

In Detroit, the Douglas Houses and later its companion the Brewster Houses, replaced a neighborhood known as "Black Bottom" (for its soil not its race) that was home to no less than 300 Black-owned businesses, a significant percentage of one, two and three-family homeowners, a thriving branch of the Urban League and other self-help groups, and, of course, many churches—including the Bethel AME, led by the Rev. C.L. Franklin. 

"God does us like that sometimes" when we are in too "comfortable a nest of circumstances" and "we don’t bother to struggle, we get comfortable right where we are." 

All the effort that built Black Bottom aimed toward that goal of struggling toward self-improvement—and was, by 1950, left as nothing more than vacant lots, a highway and high-rises which deteriorated so quickly that would have to be demolished themselves. 

The same story of community destruction and high-rise hells would play out in African-American neighborhoods across the country:  East Harlem, Central Avenue in Cleveland, Desoto-Carr in St. Louis, Bronzeville in Chicago. In St. Louis, the high-rises of the Pruitt-Igoe projects won an architectural award when they opened in 1956—and were literally imploded in 1971. 

None of that happened until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, by which time Blacks would have long since been steered into the alleged reward of the projects. 

It goes by many names: affordable housing, public housing, housing choice vouchers, Section 8, low-income housing tax credit developments or simply "the projects."

all of these housing policies, dating from the 1930s until the present day, have been and remain harmful, indeed especially harmful to the interests of African Americans. They have lured Black households into dependency and long-term poverty, rewarded single-parenthood and led to the gnawing gap in home ownership and wealth between White and Black households.

Our housing policies have had all these deleterious effects in a series of ways: by destroying Black neighborhoods filled with Black-owned businesses and homeowners but labeled as slums; by replacing them with public housing projects where no ownership was possible and Blacks were and are over-represented; by setting housing rules such that both increasing income and marriage are punished; and by defining affordable housing as subsidized rentals rather than small, privately-owned homes whose ownership builds wealth.