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The Politics of Urban Renewal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
The Housing Act of 1949 established in Title I the goal of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’. To achieve this goal the Federal Government was to support, by grants and by its legal powers to acquire land, a massive programme of public housing: ‘…it was the first and, until the Act of 1968, the only public housing measure that authorized action that bore some reasonable relation to need’. Nevertheless, the targets set by the 1949 Act for 1954 have still not been reached. Subsequent legislation shifted the emphasis of the programme from public housing to broader schemes of urban renewal, including non-residential development and middle- and high-income housing. The most serious aspect of this neglect of the needs of the poor has been the inadequate management of relocation for those displaced by renewal. For many slum-dwellers in the 1950s ‘urban renewal’ came to mean ‘Negro removal’.
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References
1 National Commission on Urban Problems (1968), p. III. The Chairman of the Commission was former Senator Paul Douglas, who had been floor manager for the 1949 Bill. The Commission Report is henceforth referred to as Douglas Commission.
2 The problems of relocation are dealt with in Douglas Commission, pp. 87–93. See also Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968), ch. 2, IV. This Report is henceforth referred to, after its Chairman, as Kerner Report.
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