It may be surprising to learn that, in a region of the country notorious for its rugged individualism and suspicion of meddling federal government, most large cities embraced public housing to the applause of civic leaders committed to federally sponsored slum clearance and urban redevelopment. This book explores the experiences of five of the largest cities in the U.S. Southwest—Albuquerque, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and San Antonio—to shed light on the little-known story of the region’s war on slums, a war that employed public housing and federally sponsored slum clearance. It examines how closely the southwestern story follows the...

The geographer D. W. Meinig has called the Southwest “a distinctive place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps.”¹ This study confirms his second assertion but contends that even the idea of the Southwest as a “distinctive place to the American mind” changed over the twentieth century. During the early part of the century, Texas and Oklahoma—along with Arkansas, Louisiana, and sometimes New Mexico—were often referred to as the “Old Southwest” (Figure 1.1). The Dallas Chamber of Commerce, for instance, embraced this definition in the 1930s, claiming Dallas was the geographic and economic...

Although many Americans had lived in horrific dwellings and slum conditions since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the problem took on new meaning that went beyond the notion that the slum was a vile place inhabited with vile people (see Appendix A). As a result of the Great Depression, many working-class Americans lost their jobs and faced the prospect of moving to slums that were now seen more as a force than as a physical condition. The heterogeneity of people, housing, and land uses found in slum areas was now believed to promote social and psychological disintegration and disorganization; slum...

On September 1, 1937, Congress set up the nation’s first permanent public housing program by passing the Wagner-Steagall Act (also known as the Housing Act of 1937), which established the United States Housing Authority (USHA) and gave it the power to provide loans and grants to local housing authorities for 90 percent of the cost of a given project. These funds underwrote two kinds of projects: slum clearance and the construction of public housing on the cleared site and the construction on a vacant site of public housing to give slum dwellers a way to move out of their old,...

America’s entry into World War II profoundly influenced the slum clearance and public housing program. Full employment generated by defense spending robbed the movement of one of its selling points: that razing slums and constructing public housing projects provided jobs to unemployed and underemployed workers, both skilled and unskilled. The production of armaments reduced the supply of materials to build housing for civilians. In addition, money that might have funded additional slum clearance and public housing projects for low-income residents now was going to war-related expenses. Furthermore, the preoccupation with ridding cities of dangerous slums gave way to the need...

Cities in the Southwest had anticipated a new federal slum clearance and public housing program ever since Senator Robert F. Wagner, Senator Robert A. Taft, and Senator Allen J. Ellender introduced a housing bill in Congress on November 14, 1945. That legislation finally happened nearly four years later, when, on July 15, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949, which reactivated the war on slums and significantly enlarged the scope of both slum clearance and public housing.¹ The law not only authorized additional public housing (810,000 units over next six years) but created the urban redevelopment program that...

At first glance, the promise of federal funds for slum clearance and urban redevelopment appeared to be a match made in heaven for rapidly expanding Sunbelt cities. But the shifting public discourse emphasizing individual rights over cities’ needs clearly inhibited some southwestern cities’ ability to take advantage of the federal slum clearance program. The Housing Act of 1949 also contained a downtown component in its urban redevelopment provisions. The act authorized loans and capital grants for local redevelopment authorities to buy and clear slum and blighted land, then sell it to private developers at a price below market value, a...

On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty” in his State of the Union Address.¹ This edict differed fundamentally from the declaration in the 1930s of a war on slums and the enactment by Congress, under prodding by housing reformers, of the Housing Act of 1937. Johnson’s new emphasis on the poor contrasted sharply with the earlier emphasis on slums and their threat to the larger city. The anti-slum warriors aimed at protecting cities from the evil influence of cancerous slums and making better citizens out of a select group of slum dwellers by eradicating...