It is clear now that postwar America’s greatest single social scandal has been its failure to provide adequate housing for its low-income groups. Less than half of the federal public housing units authorized by Congress in 1949 under Public Law 171 had been built by 1959—this was the estimate given by a spokesman for the AFL-CIO testifying last year before a Congressional Committee. Supporters of Public Law 171, before it was enacted, had prophetically argued that the 810,000 public housing units which the law envisioned would barely keep pace with the expected growth of slums in the next decade. Even this minimal program was cut in the 50’s by the administration. The result—as expert witnesses have emphasized to Congress—is that no less than 13 million American families are now slum dwellers. That is to say, more Americans now live in slums than on farms—a fact pointed out by the president of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, Charles L. Farris.
The figures describe only the familiar traditional slums—the broken-down tenements without heat and often without running water. (The census in 1950 defined a dwelling unit as “dilapidated” when it “is run down or neglected, or is of inadequate original construction so that it does not provide adequate shelter or protection against the elements or it endangers the safety of the occupants.”) Contrary to popular belief, the number of such slums has actually increased since 1949; the destruction of old slum neighborhoods for the various public housing programs, resulting in mass evictions, has intensified the pressure on existing slums and created many new ones.
The problem of slums in the postwar years, however, has become even more complicated with the development of the new public housing projects. For many of these have in their turn become what can only be described as “income ghettos”—centers for juvenile gangs, modern “poor farms” institutionalizing social disintegration. Physically sound, the buildings are, as the tenements they replaced often were, the setting for massive social problems and for a culture of poverty in which the opportunities for the young to escape have not appreciably improved.
By contrast both with the familiar dilapidated slums and the new concrete-and-steel, automatic-elevator slums, there still stand a few examples of a happier kind, whose residents do not at all exhibit the hopelessness we associate with the usual slum dweller. This is the traditional ethnic slum with a vital community life based on a national culture or religion. Such a community is to be found in New York City’s Chinatown, within whose bounds delinquency and crime are virtually nonexistent; it is one of the last remaining examples—the Kerry Patch and Little Italy, also in New York, are others—of the type of slum which was once a dynamic, creative part of American society.
The close of massive immigration after World War I brought with it the end, for the most part, of this first type of enclave, where a strong national culture managed to flourish amidst dilapidation in physical housing. (Puerto Ricans will probably be the last group to form such communities—at least until the present immigration laws are changed.) Today’s changed slum, on the other hand, where the new poor of the affluent society live, resembles the old ethnic slum only in dilapidation and overcrowding; for the new slum is conspicuously lacking in any central culture, and most often is based solely upon the integration of poverty with poverty, failure with failure. The government’s response to these problems of housing has been the public project; there, gross dilapidation no longer exists, but the slum psychology continues in an atmosphere of alienation by bureaucracy.
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Consider, first, the character of the old ethnic slum, particularly in contrast to the newer tenement neighborhoods. The tenements of the first decades of the century had been built especially for the newcomers; they had not “trickled down” from the middle class. If the neighborhoods were dense and the housing utterly inadequate, there was nevertheless a community of language, religion, and the spirit of self-help. Above all, it was a time of expansion and hope—the great ideal of American opportunity that prevailed in the land informed the lives of these tenement dwellers, too.
Even now, there is a unique feeling to life in the the remnants of these old slums: one notices a concreteness, a kind of richness of existence, together with some of the old sense of identity and hope. In the best of these remaining neighborhoods, children swarm the streets throughout the day and early evening but rarely form themselves into violent gangs. If such neighborhoods are strident, they are also alive; if dotted with signs of the Old Country, they are at the same time way stations to the new.
When I moved into a Jewish slum on New York’s Lower East Side several years ago, I was astonished that, the first day, a storekeeper nearby was quick to ask: “You live in 740, don’t you?” The community was self-enclosed—it could figure out the street number of any stranger. On Saturday its streets were deserted for the Sabbath; on Sunday there was an air of parade and excitement.
The old slums, closed communities, were indeed centers of poverty, but out of them their inhabitants drew the strength to encounter the new society. George Orwell once said that a flourishing society would take care to preserve one of these neighborhoods, not so much to show how bad life had been in the past, but to let people know how good it had been—despite everything. Oscar Handlin, writing in the more formal language of sociology (in The Newcomers), noted that “the ethnic community supplied its members with norms and values and with the direction of an elite leadership.”
But the great adventure of the ethnic slum is now drawing to an end. The residents in them who remain behind—in New York, the Irish and Germans of the South Bronx, the Jews of Williamsburg, the Italians of the South Village—are often old people who refuse to wrench themselves away from their past; others are among those who failed to make the climb over the economic and social walls of their group. To be sure, a social worker in a Brooklyn slum explains that some of those evicted from its tenements will move out to Long Island and buy a house; on the other hand, a priest in the Melrose section of the Bronx describes the Irish and German poor who must come to the parish house for help in dressing their children properly for their first communion.
The ones who stay behind face a far more difficult task than did the previous generations of slum dwellers. The children, separated from the aspirations of those now merging with the larger society, can inherit only the disadvantages of their “ghetto,” surrounded as they are by elders who never made the transition to the new land.
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The new slum which has arisen houses the country’s internal migrants—as opposed to the immigrants of the old slum. These internal migrants are largely Negroes from the South seeking jobs, whites from the farms also seeking work in the city, and Puerto Ricans. When they come into the areas of dilapidated housing to join those who have remained from the old ethnic cultures, an entirely different kind of neighborhood is formed. They arrive at a time of relative housing scarcity (when public housing was first proposed in the 30’s about a quarter of the slum units were vacant)—which inhibits mobility even when income rises1—and, for many, the crucial problem is color, making the walls of their enclave almost impossible to surmount.
Leaving the subway at the Marcy Street stop in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the first thing one notices is a Spanish record playing, Spanish titles on the movie marquee, Spanish shops along the street. Close by are shop windows displaying Hebrew lettering. Further down the street, Holy Trinity Church is the center for the remnants of an old German community. “Integration” here—some of the tenements house Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and whites together—is the integration of poverty, of rootless transients, of those forced to live together.
According to a young priest at Holy Trinity, his parish is made up of people on relief and workers with low-paying jobs—many of the latter are in the garment trades; and each family has three or four children. Except for a few clubs, the church is the center of whatever community life there is. The parishioners are “worried silly,” to use the young priest’s phrase, because a Title I Project is moving into the area and will uproot them. At another community center, a social worker reported that while 6,000 people over the last few years have moved out of the neighborhood—the poor to other slums, the better-off to the suburbs—since 1955 Negroes and Puerto Ricans have been moving in steadily.
Poverty is the basis of the country’s new slums. In New York City, for instance, there are some 300,000 “hard core” Public Assistance cases—the mentally ill, the aged, the chronically sick. In a recession (such as that of 1957—58), their number is immediately swelled by another hundred thousand or so and according to the New York State Interdepartmental Committee on Low Incomes, these “hard core” cases actually represent less than a fourth of those qualified for Public Assistance. In effect, over one million New Yorkers lack enough of the “basic necessities”—food, shelter, minimal medical care—to qualify for Public Assistance.
In New York City, minorities form a large part of this slum population. Public Assistance recipients in the 50’s included 31.3 per cent whites, 40 per cent Negroes, and 28.7 per cent Puerto Ricans. (The federal census classes most Puerto Ricans as white. On a national scale, these statistics would probably appear as 43 per cent Negro and 57 per cent white.) Thus, the decline of aspiration among slum dwellers partly reflects a sophisticated analysis of society: for the colored minorities there is less opportunity today than there existed for the white population of the older ethnic slums, and the new slum people know this. The poverty of their myths reflects the poverty of their reality.
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The quality of the new slum life is suggested by the kind of family it houses. Where the ethnic slum was usually centered around a stable family life, the pattern of the new slum is that of “serial monogamy”; a woman will live with one man for a considerable period of time, bear his children, and then move on to another man. In a National Education Association study, Walter B. Miller estimated that between a quarter and a half of the urban families in the United States are “female based”—a finding that applies most clearly to slum dwellers.
The inhabitants of the new slums are also regular victims of a bureaucratically produced rootlessness. Government housing programs, and particularly the urban renewal activities of the middle and late 50’s, generally initiated a migration within the cities involved. In 1959, for instance, the Mill Creek area of St. Louis was cleared—a middle-class housing development is to replace what had been a Negro slum—as part of an urban renewal effort. The great problem created by this particular clearance was that the majority of those evicted were forced to find housing within the existing Negro slums. Only 14 per cent found their way into low-cost projects; the majority disappeared altogether from the public records. The constant shifting caused by the renewal projects makes the development of community life impossible in many of the new slums. In 1958, a study in New York quoted the poignant cry of an old resident in one of these transitional areas: “Nobody, not even an angel, can avoid trouble here. Too many people with no investment and no pride in the neighborhood. Too many just passing through. I feel sorriest for the kids—they’ve never known what a decent neighborhood is like.”
When the home itself is rootless and transient, the problem of the slum child can easily be imagined.2 Juvenile delinquency is non-conformist and clearly antisocial from the middle-class point of view; as seen from within the slum, however, it is often a process of carrying everyday home values to their logical extremes. The older ethnic slums, too, produced their share of violence and gangsterism, but their family patterns, their value systems, and their very access to the outside world, provided strong counter forces. In the new slum, these checks are not nearly so strong.
The phrase that most aptly summarizes the major difference between the new slums and the older ones of the great immigration is: the absence of aspiration. At the end of 1959, the Gallup Poll surveyed the attitudes of Americans on the eve of the new decade. Its findings were broken down according to income—it divided the United States into five classes—and the consistency of response on the part of the lowest group (under $3,000 a year) is startling. In answer to both general and specific questions, the individuals in this group were the least optimistic. More of them expected World War III and a new depression than did those of any other group. In instance after instance, these respondents voiced less hope of any kind of deliverance than did any other income group. These pessimistic respondents are the inhabitants of the slums.
Further undermining any possible sense of aspiration is the vicious circle set up by the slum dweller’s view of society. Seeing his chances for improvement as slim produces in him a psychology of listlessness, of passivity, and of acceptance, which, in turn, reduces his chances still further. So it is that the Negro child in a St. Louis school could hardly grasp the idea of a reprieve for Caryl Chessman: “You mean I can shoot people and no one would shoot me?” Ideals and aspiration arise with the greatest difficulty from an environment of violence and ugliness; but the lack of aspiration and ideals only perpetuates the violence and ugliness.
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The current answer to the slum is the low-cost housing project. But the number of dwelling units which have thus far been built do not even equal the number that have been destroyed in the clearing of the project sites. In New York in 1954, one public housing unit existed for every 7.1 newly eligible families; in 1956, one for every 10.4 newly eligible families. (These figures are roughly typical of the nation as a whole.) More importantly, the experience of the hundreds of thousands of people who have entered the projects signify that these projects have become a source of new housing problems, or are inadequate solutions of the old ones.
Probably the best publicized of the new problems is the project’s continuing tendency to produce violence, in particular juvenile crime. Harrison Salisbury’s Shook-Up Generation centered on gangs in New York’s housing projects. “Theirs,” he wrote, “is a world of young people harshly buffeted by grim realities—poverty, hunger, physical hardship, danger, displacement, disease, and deprivation. Beset by force and violence they escape into paranoid visions of grandeur, daydreams of demonic power, ecstacies of sadism, endless fantasies with a gun.”
In December 1959, a grand jury investigation in St. Louis found a similar pattern in that city’s projects. “Generally speaking,” the jury wrote, “the rate of crimes against the person—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—is approximately two and a half times higher than the city-wide average.” It continues: “Based on testimony we have received, outside teen-age hoodlums have used the project buildings for gambling, drinking and all kinds of minor crimes. . . .”
There are, of course, projects free of violent juvenile gangs, but in them, social disintegration continues in less obvious forms. For one thing, the projects tend to be huge and impersonal, a bureaucratic environment often disorienting to the old slum dwellers. Writing of a Lower East Side development in New York City, a young sociologist, Michael Miller, described the ways in which the tenants respond to their new experience with administrative routine. To them management was distant; it represented a powerful disciplinary authority involving rules, constant checks on violations, and all the other formalities of the bureaucratic world. For a Puerto Rican family, Miller points out, the first encounter with the eviction notice (which is delivered for failure to pay the rent on time) is a perplexing, even a frightening matter. (Salisbury has noted that the “rent girl,” a sort of combination social worker and bill collector, once a major positive link between the people and the project management, is no longer used.) In St. Louis, a social worker tells of families who become constipated because of their perplexity in the presence of modern plumbing.
How does the project dweller attempt to cope with this distant, powerful authority? Describing three “styles of life” among the people in the project he studied, Miller found one group adopting a strategy of complete withdrawal from whatever sense of community the project offered. These residents isolated themselves in their own apartment, or else maintained ties with some ethnic group or old neighborhood on the outside. As a result, they were most alienated precisely when at home.
Another group sought some identification by developing an ethnic grouping within the project. Miller describes the “bench culture” in front of the houses: on the south side, the Jewish benches; across from them, the Puerto Ricans; and across the play area, the Negroes. The hostilities produced by this situation obviously made the development of any kind of community life extremely difficult.
A third group, a rather small one, worked with the Tenant Council. But, by a predictable irony, they were regularly targets for eviction, for their incomes tended to rise, and they were in constant danger of exceeding the maximum established by law. These activists often ended up talking only to one another, forming a sort of elite community within the otherwise indifferent project.
The Fuller Houses in the Chelsea section of New York have often been cited as the model of a “good project.” Perhaps this project’s most obvious advantage is the presence of the Hudson Guild, an old, established community center which has had some success in bridging the gap between the newcomers and the older neighborhood. The Guild is opposed to the concept of a “project community,” and conceives of its work as covering the entire neighborhood.
The neighborhood of the Fuller Houses is more mixed than most slum areas which ring housing projects. A few blocks away is a large middle-class apartment house. A considerable number of Irish and Italian workers have remained in the “old-law” tenements which, under rent control, cost no more than $45 or $50 a month. In some cases, old property has been rehabilitated, thus bringing a new stratum of middle-class people into the neighborhood. In the near future, there will be an International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union cooperative development, which will broaden the community base even more.
The Fuller Houses themselves are radically integrated—45 per cent of the residents are Puerto Rican, 25 per cent Negro, and 30 per cent white. Tenants with whom I talked could not recall seeing anything like the ethnic “bench culture” which Miller found on the Lower East Side, nor are there any violent gangs in the project or in the surrounding neighborhood. The Hudson Guild has even employed closed-circuit television in an attempt to provide the project with an exciting means of communication. (The experiment was not successful: according to the Guild, because of inadequate programming; according to some of the project residents, because the system interfered with the reception of the regular, commercial channels.)
All the virtues of the Fuller Houses, however, have not been sufficient to destroy the crushing inheritance of the slum past of their residents. A nursery in the Guild has difficulty in attracting children from the project, although middle-class parents from blocks away send their children to take advantage of the Guild facilities. It would seem that a certain level of aspiration and culture is necessary before one can take advantage of modern opportunities.
When one project family took its children and some of their playmates to the beach (hardly a difficult, or expensive, outing for a New Yorker), other residents of the project were excited and surprised at their adventure. People who had lived within an hour’s subway ride of the ocean for most of their lives had never seen it; neither had their children. The trip to the beach required a transition in values which they had simply never made. In short, public housing by itself fails to solve the problem of slum psychology.
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It is simple enough—only a matter of money—to destroy tenements and dilapidated buildings. In 1955, Joseph P. McMurray, then State Housing Commissioner of New York, estimated that abolishing slums within twenty-five years would require a public and private investment of $125 billion, a sum five times larger than the current government commitment. But while new buildings can be put up for the old, that hardly solves the real problem. The basic issue is not new buildings, but the eradication of the whole cultural and spiritual inheritance of the slum past. Public housing must be seen as one element in a comprehensive and integrated program, or else it will fail. Simultaneous with the attack upon dilapidation, there must be an attempt to create communities which will transform the slum psychology. And this cannot be done by segregating the poor on the basis of class or caste. What is required is a basic change in the way we have been thinking about public housing.
The original federal housing program in 1935 was part of a depression attempt to “prime” the economy; it placed a heavy emphasis on inducing private investment and stimulating employment. The conditions which gave rise to this approach no longer existed after the war, but the approach remained the same. In June 1960, FHA and VA guarantees exceeded $76 billion—half the funds needed for a serious drive to eliminate slums from American life. Yet this money did not go to the aid of the slum dweller, but to provide housing for the middle class, and so often increased the number of slums.
In 1959, Charles Abrams, testifying before a Senate committee, said that the public housing program had become “little more than an adjunct of the publicly subsidized private urban renewal program. This urban renewal program too, while it does help cities to get rid of slums, has developed into a device for displacing the poor from their footholds to make way for higher rental dwelling which those displaced cannot afford. Thus, the lowest-income family remains the forgotten family, though it is still the most home-needy in the American family circle.” Abrams also estimated that it took an annual income of over $6,000 before an American family could seriously think of buying its own home.
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To deal with the problem of slum psychology, as administrators like Charles’ L. Ferris of St. Louis have proposed, low-cost and middle-income units should be interspersed, and there should be far more serious attempts than have as yet been made to integrate public housing with existing, and vital, neighborhoods. There must also be a limit on building size (Ferris suggests eight families) to avoid the creation of an impersonal, bureaucratic environment. Existing private, individual housing should become, whenever possible, the focus of a campaign for rehabilitation, and where there are projects, there should be an adequate budget for social work and the maintenance of community centers.
There must, in short, be new neighborhoods composed of a variety of housing; individual homes, some of them new, some of them refurbished; low-rise housing built in relatively small units, and so forth. The residents should be of every income level, race, and national group. Community institutions—schools, social centers, parks, and so on—should be planned beforehand as part of the program for helping to create a neighborhood. Finally, the administration and decision-making apparatus for the neighborhood should be instituted along the most personal possible lines.
This may all seem Utopian. It certainly is, if measured against the standard of present policy which is inadequate even for the problem of dilapidation. And yet, unless an image of this type defines our housing programs, we will continue to perpetuate that costly social phenomenon, poverty, and to institutionalize, moreover, the psychology of hopelessness. Present life conditions of the poor breed a situation which already requires a good portion of every city budget in the United States. If slums could be eliminated, there would be, as has often been pointed out, a substantial saving in terms of welfare, police, and fire appropriations. Then, too, perhaps our urban life as a whole could be substantially enriched.
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1 New York, from which most of these examples that follow will come, is hardly a typical American city. Yet the New York experience is being repeated in various ways throughout the nation. In Chicago, an important element is the white sharecropper, in St. Louis the Southern Negro on his way North, in Los Angeles the Mexican-American. In each case, the internal migrant joins with those who have stayed behind in the older slums.
2 In his study of the New York gangs, The Shook-Up Generation, Harrison E. Salisbury quoted a police estimate that there were 8,000 young people in the city actively engaged in violent, anti-social conduct and perhaps another 100,000 who lived on the edge of this underworld.
