Chapter 1

Defining a Housing Crisis

Tear down the old. Build up the new. Down with rotten, antiquated rat
holes. Down with hovels. Down with disease. Down with crime. Down with
firecraft. Let in the sun. Let in the sky. A new day is dawning. A new life.
A new America!
—Fiorello La Guardia, 1944 1

New York City had tolerated its tenement districts for decades, and even
modest forms of tenement regulation amassed a dismal record. The
Great Depression, however, weakened New York’s inviolate traditions of
private property. Housing reformers, in this moment of crisis, reinvigo-
rated the Progressive-era notion that tenement districts (Figure 1)
threatened the health and long-term welfare of the city as a whole.
These zealous activists used the mass media, exhibitions, and public fo-
rums to sell public housing as the most enlightened means of compre-
hensive urban reconstruction. For the first time in New York’s history,
the notion of replacing tenements with housing built and managed by
the government began to seem reasonable.
What eased the selling of public housing in New York, and the found-
ing of NYCHA in 1934, was not only the promise of thousands of jobs
but also the seductive model of European public housing developments.
Idealized visions of European housing projects became a key ingredient
in New York’s sales pitch. New social housing, on a European scale,
would be paired with an expanded array of New Deal–funded municipal
public works that would usher in a more enlightened urban age. New
York would thus end the private sector monopoly on low-rent housing
by establishing public housing as a new municipal service that both
cleared slums and built model housing in its place.
In the years before the Housing Act of 1937 and the state housing pro-
grams approved in 1938, NYCHA built little, but its leaders laid the
groundwork for what became America’s largest housing program. The
housing authority secured its legal right to condemnation for public
14 A Municipal Service

Figure 1. Tenements, typical of those that once covered much of the city, on the
site of what became Amsterdam Houses (1948). La Guardia Wagner
Archive/NYCHA Photograph Collection.

housing projects and began instructive experiments under the Public

Works Administration. The new authority also heightened the sense of
crisis by feverishly demolishing tenements and artificially enhancing a
local housing shortage. These years of planning and talking initially
seem less important than subsequent decades because of the limited
amount of construction actually achieved, but it was during this time
that New York laid the groundwork for all of its future endeavors.
New York City, normally a whirlwind of activity, had slowed to a crawl by
the early 1930s. The Depression was an authentic crisis that threatened the
social fabric of the city and the nation. Unemployment reached record lev-
els as business activity slumped. The city appeared to be spiraling out of
control as shacks sprouted in Central Park, foreclosures soared, and social-
ists called for an end to capitalism itself. Housing reformers now seemed
mild in their prescriptions for a renewed, more humane city.2
 Defining a Housing Crisis 15

The context of high unemployment provided the most immediate

and persuasive justification for the public housing program. Langdon
Post, the authority’s first chairman and a dedicated housing reformer,
made clear in a 1934 radio address that “housing reaches deeper down
into the pool of the unemployed than does any other branch of this
[construction] industry.” He estimated that in many branches of the
construction trades, unemployment had reached 90 percent, of which
about 50 percent were on relief. Government-funded housing projects
he promised, would absorb 75 percent of those workers on relief and
might in short order employ nearly ten thousand workers. Post had
started to make noise; these were dramatic, if unrealistic, estimates.3 It
was not, Post admitted, a “humanitarian change of heart on the part of
our legislators, but the fact that the administration in Washington,
under economic stress, is compelled to spend money to relieve dis-
tress.”4
The immediate problems of unemployment catalyzed housing pro-
grams in New York, but activists used the crisis to redefine New York’s
slums as an equally vexing and imminent threat to urban welfare. One
of the first major projects of the authority in 1934 was a citywide prop-
erty inventory that both answered the need for employment in a suffer-
ing city and gave NYCHA precious ammunition. The eight-month survey
by six thousand employees of the Civil Works Administration found that
most of the city’s older multi-family buildings were “firetraps, breeders
of crime and disease,” and covered seventeen square miles of the city.
The authority figured that approximately half a million families with
one million children lived in housing of this type.5 Reformers claimed
that these slums “bred tuberculosis, crime, juvenile delinquency, im-
morality,” and “a general breakdown of social morale.” Tuberculosis
rates seemed particularly alarming in slums, with a rate approximately
twice as high as the citywide average.6
A different formulation of the crisis perspective came from those with
a less humanitarian bent. These urban advocates, including figures such
as Robert Moses, were less concerned about the million left in the tene-
ments than they were about the image and liabilities of a city full of ten-
ements. Suburban hinterlands, both those within the city’s boundaries
and outside, had swelled in the 1920s as a broad segment of families
rode trains and cars to new homes. Albert Mayer, a prominent architect
who completed housing studies for NYCHA, found that the tenement
districts, rather than being upgraded, seemed to take a turn for the
worse as a result of decentralization: “residential urban areas lost popu-
lation; owners could not afford to keep up their properties, which con-
sequently deteriorated; poorer classes of people took possession;
properties deteriorated still further, and hence new slums were created.”
16 A Municipal Service

The city’s leaders, thought Mayer, had to create “a way of life that can
compete with suburbs.”7
These convergent visions of crisis—substandard housing as both a hu-
manitarian and civic threat—focused on the old-law tenements. That
the old-law tenement, a mix of subdivided single-family homes and
purpose-built congested walk-ups, remained a staple of the New York
housing scene frustrated housing reformers. Frontal assaults on the ten-
ement evil in the form of Tenement House Laws from 1867 and 1879
had little improved the state of New York’s tenements. Housing created
under these laws (so-called old-law, or dumb-bell tenements) often
lacked indoor plumbing and central heating, and, because they were
very nearly built out to the lot line, sufficient air or light. Windowless
rooms were all too common. Reformers in 1900 counted eighty thou-
sand tenement buildings that housed over two million unlucky
denizens. The 1901 reforms, adopted in an era of Progressive reform,
set higher standards of air, sanitation, and light, including much en-
larged central courts. The “new-law” tenements that resulted from the
legislation sprouted uptown in Manhattan or in the outer boroughs
rather than in the crowded tenement neighborhoods. The Multiple
Dwelling Law of 1929 finally mandated what could be considered mod-
ern standards of light, construction, and hygiene, but the Depression
muted the law’s impact by halting almost all new construction.8
Direct regulation of existing old-law tenements had proved equally
unsatisfying. The Tenement House Department, a result of the 1901 leg-
islation, had been designed to supervise new construction and improve
existing housing by requiring updates such as indoor toilets, new win-
dows, and fireproofing. Many indoor toilets and windows had been in-
stalled, but the department’s inspectors had limited success confronting
the city’s squalid tenement districts. The 1901 law, after all, grandfa-
thered existing old-law tenements; enforcement of violations proved
time consuming; machine politicians interfered; funding was inade-
quate; and business interests whittled away at the department and its un-
derlying legislation. Government action threatened what was likely the
city’s most lucrative industry. One of the key figures in the department,
Lawrence Veiller, became frustrated by the painfully slow progress in up-
grading slums, but he, like many others in his generation, viewed public
housing as inimical to American values.9
Tenement districts thus remained in the 1930s an easy target for reform-
ers with a grand vision. Old-law tenements might have suffered from a 20
percent vacancy rate by 1933, but large segments of New York’s poor obvi-
ously still lived in the 80 percent still occupied. They endured irremedia-
ble infestations, substandard or nonexistent sanitary facilities, drafty
windows, and tiny courtyards that barely permitted air circulation. Tenants
 Defining a Housing Crisis 17

generally used coal as a heating source, and most tenement apartments

were firetraps that annually harvested their share of victims. It was, in fact,
“a rash of fatal fires” in the early months of the La Guardia administration
that further “dramatized the dangers of substandard housing.” 10
The idea of replacing tenements with model housing had a long his-
tory in New York, but from the perspective of housing advocates previ-
ous experiments had been as grand a failure as the tenement laws. Forty
years of philanthropic building, for instance, had yielded units for only
3,588 families by 1910. Examples of philanthropic housing in New York
are the Tower Buildings (1879) and Dunbar Houses (1928). Philan-
thropists not only tended to favor the cream of the ill-housed poor, but
“the volume of even pure philanthropic housing had to be limited by
the limitations of the philanthropy itself. They could be demonstrations
and experiments” at best.11
Limited-dividend experiments, combining profit and philanthropy,
had blazed the trail toward public housing. The City and Suburban
Homes Corporation, for instance, built a number of attractive com-
plexes across the city and returned dividends of almost 5 percent annu-
ally between 1899 and 1936. The corporation provided good-quality
housing for those of moderate income but, like others in the business,
grew slowly because a sufficient number of investors could not be found
to create a mass movement.12
Government subsidy of limited-dividend projects seemed to solve the
problem of limited capitalization—and was based on Europe’s tremen-
dous success using the very same means. The indefatigable reformer
Mary Simkhovitch, the founder of the pioneering settlement house
known as Greenwich House, convinced Governor Al Smith in 1926 to
create a state program that granted tax exemption for low-cost housing
for twenty years. The legislation limited investors to a 6 percent return
and a monthly rental maximum of $12.50 per room. Labor unions con-
structed some of the best of this housing for their members, particularly
the Amalgamated Tenements in the Bronx (1927). Private developers,
unfortunately, showed little interest, and most other labor unions lacked
Amalgamated’s vision of worker housing. By 1936 only eleven state-
funded limited-dividend projects had been completed.13
President Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) limited-
dividend projects, announced in 1932, attempted once again to drive
forward new projects while at the same time relieving the malaise in the
building trades. The loans, funneled through the State Housing Board
and overseen by Robert Moses, were distributed to private industry in a
pattern similar to that of the state-funded projects that preceded them.
The RFC-funded (later PWA-supervised) projects were all estimated to
rent monthly at between eleven and twelve dollars per room. New York,
18 A Municipal Service

with its tradition of model low-cost housing, actually gained approval for
two projects. Under this program, the Fred French company built
Knickerbocker Village (1933), a high-rise slum clearance project on the
Lower East Side; the future federal administrator and wealthy philan-
thropist Nathan Straus Jr. built Hillside Homes (1935) in the Bronx.
Both of these developments proved to be important, if different, prece-
dents for NYCHA (see Chapter 3).14
Few New Yorkers believed that limited-dividend or philanthropic
housing like these would make much of a dent in New York’s housing
deficiencies. Limited-dividend programs would have seemed much
more impressive had they been on a scale to rival programs in Europe.
By 1905, London’s limited-dividend corporations had built housing for
123,000 people. London’s municipal corporation, the London County
Council, had even built 15,000 public housing units before World War I.
In the interwar years publicly subsidized housing in Europe became a
mammoth operation. Why not New York?15

European Envy

Housing is the one field where private enterprise and individual initiative
have notoriously failed. . . . For reasons inherent in our political thinking,
the State has not interfered in private housing in this country and the State
housing reforms which have played so large a part in the mitigation of Eu-
ropean slums are here unknown.
—Editors of Fortune, 193216

Many New Yorkers had lost patience with demonstration projects; they
now envisioned a government housing program as a powerful tool of
humanitarian and civic transformation. Mary Simkhovitch took the
housing lawyer Ira Robbins aside one day in 1933 and informed him
that “this business of trying to improve conditions in old-law tenements
is all right . . . But we ought to do what they did in Vienna.” What they,
the socialists, did in Vienna was to create some of the most attractive
public housing developments the world had ever seen—and on a
tremendous scale. Langdon Post, the first chairman of NYCHA, also be-
lieved that because “practically every country in Europe has accepted” a
role in low-cost government housing, “for the first time the slums of Eu-
rope are really being cleared.” New York housing advocates had obvi-
ously tuned their program to the European one.17
America and New York had dithered in housing because before the
1930s no sense of crisis existed on the American urban scene. Few Amer-
icans before the Great Depression honestly believed that America would
 Defining a Housing Crisis 19

not redevelop its old housing in due course. As a nation engaged in con-
stant acts of creative destruction—and blessed by abundant land around
its cities—excessive concern about housing quality reflected a lack of
faith in American social and geographic mobility. The Depression weak-
ened this confidence and many worried that the country, and its older
cities, had shunted into a permanent decline. It looked as though Amer-
icans might finally have to plan and upgrade older urban areas. In the
context of diminished expectations the European model of urban re-
construction took on new meaning. A country such as Great Britain, in
obvious economic decline, had somehow still managed to clear slum dis-
tricts and rehouse large segments of its populace.18
Americans had made frequent pilgrimages to leading examples of
good planning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
whether Birmingham, Frankfurt, London, or Paris. There they found
not only new boulevards and grand public buildings but also more prac-
tical innovations such as zoning, abundant recreational facilities, public
markets, public baths, and improving sanitation. Even more astounding,
and somewhat unsettling, was the discovery of low-cost housing, in both
city centers and the suburbs, partly subsidized by city governments.
America’s municipal reformers made significant progress in areas such
as public water, public markets, schools, sanitation, parks, zoning, and
occasionally public transit, but otherwise American reformers could do
no more than gaze longingly at European municipal reforms in areas
such as town planning and housing.19
During the 1920s the distance between Europe and the United States
grew, particularly in terms of municipal housing. Even before World
War I, a few European municipalities directly built a few thousand hous-
ing units of low-cost housing; quite a few cities also subsidized an im-
pressive volume of low-cost housing undertaken by a mix of
philanthropists, building societies, cooperatives, and limited-dividend
corporations. The left-leaning interwar years, however, were notable for
vast programs of low-cost housing, according to the historian Daniel
Rodgers: “In all, between 1919 and 1933 some six million new dwellings
were built in Europe, three million of them outside the framework of
the private housing market.”20 Vienna’s famous public housing projects
may have been designed as the vanguard of a new social order that
would destroy capitalism, but municipal housing in this period did not
require Vienna’s extreme version of municipal socialism. Council hous-
ing authorities in Britain alone, for instance, had built one million
homes by 1938.21
Many New Yorkers who later played leading roles in public housing,
such as the housing lawyer Louis Pink, Nathan Straus Jr., and the social-
ist leader B. Charney Vladeck, had toured European social housing
20 A Municipal Service

developments and collected their impressions on paper for the Ameri-

can public. Beautifully illustrated texts such as Louis Pink’s A New Day for
Housing (1928) and Catherine Bauer’s much lauded Modern Housing
(1934) raised expectations about the power of public housing by cele-
brating European housing success.
Pink’s A New Day for Housing highlighted the many versions of social
housing in Europe by the 1920s. In London Pink discovered minimal
but still attractive model tenements that had transformed slum neigh-
borhoods: “the typical Council tenement is five stories high, but two
rooms deep, has no central heat, but does provide a bath . . . There is
plenty of light and air.” Pink was also impressed, as would be many oth-
ers, with the garden-city low-cost housing estates in London’s suburbs:
“They have winding streets and courts, attractive stucco and brick cot-
tages with red tiled roofs, gardens, hedges, trees, flowers, playgrounds,
and schools.”22
Catherine Bauer most admired the modernist continental develop-
ments that she featured in her forcefully written, well-illustrated book.
Like many reformers of the time she preferred subsidized housing on
the city’s edge because decentralized housing would be less expensive
while still providing maximum air, sunlight, open space, and opportuni-
ties for community planning. This new way of living was perhaps best ex-
emplified in Frankfurt’s modernist housing developments (Figure 2),
but Bauer also endorsed traditional-style dwellings. Bauer was most im-
pressed that European reformers had committed to “finding a new way
to house everybody” and celebrated that housing had become “a Public
Utility” in Europe much like sanitation, fire fighting, and education.23
New Yorkers had the opportunity throughout the 1930s to learn, with-
out travel or reading, of the many advantages that public housing had
brought to European cities. Bauer’s popular housing exhibit at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art in 1934 contrasted tenement conditions with
streamlined European housing projects. European housing experts also
frequently spoke in New York City to prominent civic organizations. To
say that these various sources of information painted a flattering portrait
of European social housing is no exaggeration.24
American housing advocates liked to argue, misleadingly, that mass
support for public housing in Western Europe revealed its essentially
apolitical nature. The tireless housing pioneer Edith Elmer Wood, for
instance, viewed European public housing as an investment in social
health rather than socialism: “European experience justifies belief that
in a few years the death rates, sickness rates and delinquency rates of a
transplanted slum population would approach the city average.” That
the Ministry of Health in Britain oversaw the public housing program
lent credence to such an interpretation.25 In a “Letter to a Banker,”
Figure 2. European public housing in Frankfurt am Main of the type that inspired housing advocates in the United
States. La Guardia Wagner Archive/NYCHA Photograph Collection.
22 A Municipal Service

Langdon Post assured Americans that subsidized units built in England

had not only provided a stimulus to private building but had resulted
from “the policies of a frankly conservative government.”26
These American advocates consciously overlooked the degree to
which public housing either originated in leftist proposals or was agreed
to by conservative figures fearful of growing socialist power. Only a few
connected the dots in public. Helen Alfred, a housing reformer with so-
cialist tendencies, remembered that for some time “municipal housing
smacked of Socialist Vienna, Red Moscow; hence was dangerous, de-
fendu.”27 The actual leftist connections could create qualms for the lib-
eral minded. Ira Robbins remembered that he faced an uphill battle
convincing New York’s democratic Governor Herbert Lehman to go
along with public housing because the “Vienna example, as convincing
as it was, was ‘tinted red’ by its sponsors.”28
In spite of these liabilities, and in the leftist New York context, local
government officials ultimately found European examples a handy
precedent to justify their unorthodox use of public power. At the dedi-
cation of First Houses in 1935, Governor Lehman even felt comfortable
alluding to the fact that “students of housing have been well acquainted
with the great programs” in Europe. He reminded his listeners, “Over
twenty years ago in cities abroad, local communities undertook to serve
the housing needs of those families who found it impossible to provide
for themselves homes of modern standards.”29 Mayor La Guardia in
1934 “declared that Vienna, Berlin, Liverpool and other European cities
have done more to improve housing than any American city.”30 When
launching what he envisioned as a massive, city-funded housing plan in
1938, La Guardia again cited Europe: “The Mayor said he claimed no
originality for his plan, since it had already succeeded in Great Britain
and Holland. The London County Council, he added, had erected thir-
teen square miles of new buildings in 200 different units, providing ac-
commodations for 350,000 persons.” This casual statement likely sent
shivers through the spine of many a New York property holder.31
This enthusiasm for European public housing had practical conse-
quences. New York was not sailing into terra incognita but into its own
version of a proven vision. European housing projects were an attractive
reality that contrasted sharply with American tenements. They were vital
evidence that could be conveniently cited for what was, in reality, a con-
troversial program in the American context.

Diffusing the Opposition

There is a tendency to overstate unanimity on the issue of public hous-
ing in New York, but even in the depths of the Depression there existed
 Defining a Housing Crisis 23

significant opposition to government meddling in the housing market.

A fair number of real estate interests supported public housing for its
potential role in slum clearance (either adding value to their properties
or taking real estate albatrosses from around their necks), but a munic-
ipal housing program represented the most comprehensive assault on
private property the city had ever seen. Many property owners simply re-
fused to accept the vision of humanitarian or civic crisis dramatically il-
lustrated by public housing advocates. Nor did they see anything in
European housing except socialism and unfair competition with private
enterprise.32
Developers and owners of property understood how large the New
York public operations could become because they alone knew how
many people put up with substandard housing; it might be impossible to
put the genie back in the bottle. E. A MacDougall, the developer of the
upscale, segregated cooperative community of Jackson Heights, con-
demned the many efforts to bring government into the housing busi-
ness. He believed that European housing conditions truly threatened
public health whereas New York’s old tenements had “emptied out” and
would be redeveloped in due course. He called even limited-dividend
projects “a semi-socialistic enterprise” that, through use of tax exemp-
tion, represented unfair competition with existing private accommoda-
tions.33
Others believed that the condition of New York’s tenements had been
grossly misrepresented in both scale and quality. One gentleman even
went so far as to argue that “during the five years preceding 1901 many
of the very best tenements in this city were built.” He boasted that “many
of them have two toilets on each floor and many of them have individ-
ual toilets.”34 Opinion like this generally revealed the callousness of the
city’s landlords. Some business interests carefully shifted their focus to
calls for state-sponsored rehabilitation of private housing, and renova-
tion remained the preferred solution for many progressive business
leaders. A few ridiculed the oft-repeated assertion by housing advocates
that the housing they intended to build, at prices of $5 per room per
month, would not compete with either new or old housing in the city as
a whole.35
Some housing supporters believed that real estate interests’ opposi-
tion was slowing the formation of government agencies to create hous-
ing, but opponents did not bring housing to a halt. Opponents lacked
unity, and monied interests during the Depression had lost much of
their prestige and social power. Many small-scale tenement owners, for
instance, had already lost or sold their properties to richer investors.36
Ira Robbins, who later became a NYCHA administrator, delivered a
broadcast in 1934 infused with class criticism. “If you read through the
24 A Municipal Service

list of wealthy owners of tenements,” he began, “you will think you are
reading the social register.”37 By 1937 Langdon Post would even alarm-
ingly admit that public housing would “to some extent . . . compete with
existing old-law tenements in the city and with obsolete buildings.”38
Opponents of public housing in this era now found themselves in the
position that had long stymied reformers: they lacked an alternative vi-
sion. With few new houses under construction in the Depression years,
and many more being lost to decay, real estate interests could scarcely
compete with a dazzling vision of new hygienic housing featured in
books, articles, editorials, talks, and exhibits. Refusing to accept that a
genuine crisis in housing existed left them effectively on the sidelines.
Opponents would reemerge during the postwar boom when suburban
private housing again came within reach of the region’s working-class
population, but by then the public housing programs had become well
established.

Institutionalizing Housing
European precedents proved essential in selling housing, but a genuine
talent for lobbying shown by housing reformers closed the sale. A new
generation of reformers and political figures demanded a level of gov-
ernment action that in another age had been taboo. They were so good
at their business that they managed to convince a reluctant Roosevelt ad-
ministration to go along with a comparatively daring national public
housing program.
Public housing received a boost locally from New York’s leftist tint.
Labor leaders such as Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers of America encouraged the city to build housing for the jobs it
would yield. B. Charney Vladeck, one of New York’s socialist leaders and
a founding member of NYCHA’s board, boldly claimed, “There could be
no adequate rehousing in the country until the time when the ‘hold’ of
the real estate interests on urban America ‘is completely broken.’ ” The
municipal socialist Paul Blanshard of the powerful City Affairs Commit-
tee effectively lobbied the city government for new housing.39 A massive
labor rally in 1934 even called on the city “to recognize housing con-
struction and maintenance as a ‘public enterprise’ in the same category
as transportation and education.”40
The socialist tradition made a difference at the local level and often
smoothed the way for government action. Many tenement neighbor-
hoods, with strong leftist traditions, devoted significant political capital
to the early competition for housing projects. Brownsville community
activists, according to the historian Wendell Pritchett, desired public
housing in the 1930s because “unlike other working-class groups that
 Defining a Housing Crisis 25

opposed any type of ‘socialistic programs,’ Brownsville Jews believed that

government should intervene when the market failed.” Leftist support
like this, operating on a local and citywide basis, bolstered New York’s
program and is different from lukewarm or hostile reaction to public
housing in other cities.41 Mainstream liberal organizations such as the
Welfare Council of New York, the League of Mothers Clubs, the New
York League of Women Voters, and the Women’s City Club lent their
considerable weight to the cause as well.42
The founding of the Public Housing Conference at Greenwich
House in 1932 drew together a wide range of the city’s leftist and lib-
eral housing reformers. The conference’s seemingly prosaic goal, from
the outset, was to achieve a monthly “rental of approximately $7.50 a
month a room” for “wage earners” rather than relief recipients. The
organization, while supportive of limited-dividend projects, sought to
create a “Housing Authority similar in scope to the Port Authority, with
powers to supervise slum clearance in the city” and build housing. No-
table members of the conference included Paul Blanshard, Mary
Simkhovitch, Helen Alfred (an “obstreperous and flamboyant” hous-
ing advocate43), Edith Elmer Wood, the architect Clarence Stein,
Rabbi Steven Wise, the socialist Norman Thomas, Louis Pink, Lilian
Wald, Representative Fiorello La Guardia, and the social critic Lewis
Mumford.44
The conference’s members each had his or her own ideas about the
ultimate role of housing in modern life, but the organization carefully
framed its support of municipal housing on a number of progressive
principals: public health; a shortage of decent, affordable housing; the
failure of limited-dividend projects to reach the lowest-income renters;
and employment possibilities. Public housing would be a tool for build-
ing a better city; socializing a segment of the housing market was a mere
side effect of finally realizing progressive goals. The Public Housing
Conference began to lobby the city to set up a housing department and
sought $25 million in funding from President Herbert Hoover’s Recon-
struction Finance Corporation to build housing that could rent monthly
at $8 per room. From their efforts came Knickerbocker Village, Hillside
Homes, and a few other limited-dividend efforts.45
The besieged mayor, Jimmy Walker, a product of the Tammany polit-
ical machine, was no fan of public housing, but he mildly endorsed
housing in 1932 as a public works project should the federal govern-
ment buy the city’s bonds. The interim mayor, John O’Brien, the Tam-
many stalwart who followed Walker, however, gave a lukewarm response
to the many calls for a municipal housing agency, even when faced with
intense lobbying.46 Because of Tammany’s resistance to housing pro-
grams, the mayoral candidate Fiorello La Guardia in 1933 could
26 A Municipal Service

provocatively link together “model multiple dwellings” with the more

practical goal of making “Boss rule . . . a thing of the past.”47 Tenement
crowding and misery seemed to serve Tammany well by keeping the
poor dependent on local politicians. Eliminating the slum would not
only improve the city’s health and welfare but might also weaken patron-
age. As a congressman, La Guardia had associated himself with the fight
for housing and during his mayoral campaign would remind liberal
forces that “he had long been an advocate of municipal housing proj-
ects.” La Guardia’s commitment to action contributed to his victory over
the machine in 1933.48
As mayor-elect that November, La Guardia announced that he imme-
diately sought to create a city housing commission. He couched his
haste in concern that New York would be beaten out by other cities and
thus lose “jobs for the unemployed.” Answering charges that the high va-
cancy rate in city apartments obviated the need for public housing, he
retorted that the housing he had in mind “will be in competition not
with real estate, but with disease and poverty.”49 His belief that low-cost
“housing would become exclusively a function of government . . . be-
cause of its important relation to governmental control of public health”
led ultimately to a European-scaled program.50 Nor did La Guardia’s
choice for tenement house commissioner, Langdon Post, shy from ac-
tivist government. The way Post saw it, “State operation of bridges, tun-
nels, parks, canals, health institutions and schools” was “implicit in our
State constitutions” and for this reason “the construction and operation
housing . . . is merely a perfectly logical extension of this recognized
principle.”51
La Guardia and Post, and those who supported them, had an advan-
tage shared by very few other housing advocates. The historian John
Buenker has documented that New York State during the 1920s had
been “an island of progress and reform” by pursuing “new frontiers in
labor and welfare legislation, education, housing and public power.”
Governors Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt had not pioneered public
housing, but they had used the governorship to pursue progressive plat-
forms, including limited-dividend housing. The Depression-era sense
of crisis accentuated the state’s potential role in ameliorating social
problems.52
In 1933 a bill had been prepared under La Guardia’s direction (by the
lawyers Ira Robbins, Charles Abrams, and others) for the creation of
state housing authorities and, after much revision, it passed in January
1934 with Governor Lehman’s strong support. Its passage reflects both
the political skills of proponents and the sense of urgency related to un-
employment woes. Lehman’s support, it should be added, developed
only after intensive lobbying. Seeing the potential employment benefits
 Defining a Housing Crisis 27

of the program, he came around with the Public Housing Conference’s

nudging.53
The creation of an authority was an unorthodox solution to housing
reform but featured Progressive-era advantages that helped mute op-
position. Because good-government reformers had legitimate con-
cerns about giving so much power to machine politicians, the bill
insulated housing programs from local patronage politics. Authorities,
after all, had tax exemption, could issue debt, collect data, hold hear-
ings, build housing, and even condemn land through eminent do-
main. New York State’s housing authorities, including NYCHA, were to
have an unsalaried board of five members appointed, on a rotating
basis, by the mayor. Mayors were supposed to pick only the initial
chairmen; the authority boards would assume responsibility for select-
ing subsequent leaders. With power in the hands of a technical and
professional elite, an authority such as NYCHA operated more like Eu-
ropean cities where the business classes and an elite bureaucracy dom-
inated municipal government.54
In 1934 La Guardia named Langdon Post as chairman and Mary
Simkhovitch, the Reverend Robert Moore, B. Charney Vladeck, and
Louis Pink as board members. As La Guardia lightheartedly admitted in
1935, “Where can you find a housing board to equal it; an idealist on
housing [Pink], a social worker [Simkhovitch], a Catholic Priest
[Moore] and a Socialist [Vladeck].”55 A board of such devoted housing
experts and advocates could be counted upon to develop a broad and
positive approach to public housing. New York’s administrative ethos, it
turns out, already had diverged from that in other cities. The urban his-
torian John Bauman found that none of the first appointments to
Philadelphia’s authority, for instance, “won the unqualified endorse-
ment of Philadelphia housing reformers.” Real estate interests often
dominated boards in Philadelphia and other American cities.56

First Lessons
At first glance it looks as though the New York City Housing Authority
in these early years had limited success. On closer examination, how-
ever, it becomes clear that Langdon Post and those around him began
shaking up the economic and legal framework of New York City. The
federal government may have approved only two projects before the
Housing Act of 1937, and the state and city programs were not approved
until 1938, but NYCHA undertook vitally important research and ini-
tiatives.
The notion of crisis received a powerful boost from Post’s determina-
tion to clear tenement houses from congested neighborhoods. Such a
28 A Municipal Service

dramatic program required little money but would both eliminate sub-
standard housing and create pressure among the working class for pub-
licly subsidized housing. Post, it appears, single-handedly “revived the
long disused power to vacate buildings found to be unfit for human
habitation.”57 In his dual role as head of the Tenement House Commis-
sion, Post began work on slum clearance projects that replaced con-
gested tenement blocks with new park space.58
Post aimed to pressure owners to comply with forceful amendments
to the multiple dwelling law made in 1935. He “estimated that nearly
half of the 65,000 old-law tenements would be unable to comply” with
the new laws that would go into effect beginning 1 January 1936. Tene-
ment owners, now redefined to include mortgage holders (and the
banks held many more mortgages than normal as a result of the Depres-
sion), appeared unwilling to pay the high costs of renovating tenements
long past their proper expiration date. Post openly paired this enforce-
ment to building pressure for public housing because he frankly ac-
knowledged that those displaced from this housing would not “be
provided by private initiative” because of their low income levels. He ar-
gued, instead, that “government subsidies are the only way.”59
Between 1934 and 1936 the authority demolished 1,100 old-law tene-
ments, which represented ten thousand dwelling units.60 Another forty
thousand apartments were lost to abandonment by property owners in-
dignant over the new city regulations.61 In 1936, Post predicted that
“demolition of old houses and the condemnation of others as unfit for
human habitation would contribute to the housing shortage.” As he
himself said, “The only way to get action [on public housing] is to cre-
ate the need.”62 When many banks and other property owners initiated
mass evictions from substandard buildings, Post offered a temporary stay
on criminal liability for building owners. During this crisis he called
again for a “long term public housing program.”63 Even a housing advo-
cate such as Harold Riegelman had to acknowledge that “from excellent
and humane motives we have thus accelerated the housing shortage . . .
if we keep on this course we shall have the highest housing standards in
the world, while a third of the population sleeps on park benches.”64
Post had, in fact, achieved his goals of turning the housing authority
into a powerful organization with the ability to shift the city’s political
economy. NYCHA would remain an authority dedicated to slum clear-
ance until the 1960s. Clearing slums for parks and other public uses,
however, remained distinct from clearing slums for public housing. It
was the experimental First Houses (1934) project that created this pow-
erful combination.
First Houses, NYCHA’s first project, might be forgotten today were it
not for its being first and a test case for the power of housing authorities
Figure 3. This modern image of First Houses (1936) illustrates both its modest scale and its integration with the surround-
ing neighborhood. Photograph by Seth Knudsen.
30 A Municipal Service

(Figure 3). NYCHA had launched First Houses to demonstrate the po-
tential for tenement renovation, favored by real estate interests, without
replacing potential federal support for new housing projects. First
Houses was built with labor donated by the Federal Emergency Relief
Organization using WPA labor. The authority partly acquired the prop-
erty, on the Lower East Side, by exchanging authority bonds for slum
properties Vincent Astor wished to relinquish. The philanthropist
Bernard Baruch bought authority bonds to help finance the project.
NYCHA also sold salvage materials, gleaned from its clearance projects,
to raise funds for its operations.65
First Houses remains one of NYCHA’s most attractive complexes, but
it turned out to be very expensive per room because of high labor costs,
poor planning, low densities, and high quality materials (see Chapter 3
for details). These high costs turned out to be more of a public relations
problem than a practical setback because the federal government’s do-
nation of labor and material permitted rents of only $6 per month per
room. By achieving low rents the authority could claim success. First
Houses also, according to Post, firmly established “the marketability of
Housing Authority bonds” and the “Authority’s right of condemnation.”
These were, indeed, two very important principles. NYCHA would, over
the decades, raise billions through bond sales for both short-term and
long-term needs.66
The legal basis of the authority’s operations, established in New York
City Housing Authority v. Muller, proved central to public housing not only
in New York but also in the nation as a whole. NYCHA records from the
1930s indicate that Andrew Muller, one of the property owners of what
would become the First Houses site, “contended that the Municipal
Housing Authorities Laws, as well as the State Housing Law, violated the
constitutions” of both the federal and state governments. He believed
“that the taking of his property was for a private use” and the municipal
housing laws “for the benefit of a class.” Like many others at the time,
he thought that the police power constituted the extent of government
power over private housing.67
NYCHA’s counsel, Charles Abrams, composed the 1936 brief that
placed America’s public housing program on a solid legal basis. Abrams
employed a historical argument by dividing the history of New York
State housing law into three periods: “Purely restrictive legislation [ten-
ement house laws] . . . Constructive legislation [limited dividend] . . .
[and] Constructive legislation through public low-rental housing.”68 The
historian Scott Henderson believes Abrams’s legal strategy effectively
demonstrated that “these stages suggested a progressive increase in pub-
lic activity,” thus housing authorities could be seen as a legitimate ex-
pression of this trend.69
 Defining a Housing Crisis 31

In 1936 the New York Court of Appeals accepted his logic and upheld
a lower court decision in NYCHA’s favor by arguing in a similar fashion
that the police power of the state had proved inadequate to the task of
remedying slum conditions. The court, in a fit of sociological jurispru-
dence, argued that to end the “evil” of slums and offer low-cost housing
it was necessary to create “large scale operations . . . under direct control
of the public itself.” Such operations were not designed to benefit a cer-
tain class but to “safeguard the entire public from the menace of the
slums.” The state’s interest in slums was buttressed by the loss of taxes
and the high cost of services. Government housing was no different
from the city’s assumption of “many activities formerly and in some in-
stances still carried on by private enterprise.”70
The decision established the legality of NYCHA’s operations and
opened the way to an expansion of its activities in future years. Its lan-
guage also lent credence to Post’s and La Guardia’s definition of public
housing as a legitimate municipal service. Because the Public Works Ad-
ministration (PWA) had failed in the courts to build public housing di-
rectly (in United States v. Louisville, 1935), it was logical that local housing
authorities, based on the Muller decision, would not only be able to con-
demn land but ultimately be entrusted with the design and construction
of public housing.71

What NYCHA Learned from the PWA

Not only had the PWA housing programs failed to pass judicial muster,
but problems quickly mounted as local and federal officials struggled for
power. NYCHA learned from its experience with the PWA that construc-
tion had to be both decentralized and much more economical. Many in-
structive lessons, after all, are negative ones.
In the spring of 1934 the PWA initiated a small federal public housing
program. New York’s liberal senator, Robert F. Wagner, had tweaked leg-
islation at Mary Simkhovitch’s urging in 1933 to include low rent hous-
ing in the National Industrial Recovery Act. The Depression-era political
“mobilization of urban working class constituencies” that brought an in-
creasingly liberal Congress allowed Wagner’s plan to move ahead. The
PWA, under the direction of Harold Ickes, the secretary of the Interior,
became the vehicle for federal housing action through both direct ac-
tion and partnership with local authorities.72
As late as March 1934, however, Post found that in contrast to the Roo-
sevelt administration’s speed in other areas, at the federal level “no def-
inite plan had been worked out” for public housing.73 In May 1934, the
PWA’s Housing Division finally announced the Williamsburg (1937)
project, with projected monthly rents of between $6.00 and $7.50 per
32 A Municipal Service

room. NYCHA moved ahead with land assembly in Williamsburg even

though Post admitted it did not have final approval.74
At first it seemed that the PWA would primarily supervise and fi-
nance the project; in time, the PWA nudged its way into a more direct
role.75 Evans Clark, NYCHA’s financial advisor, condemned Ickes’s
leadership of the PWA because “even the smallest detail of housing
business in the PWA office became enmeshed in a tangle of checks and
counter-checks” and “contractors jacked up their estimates 10 to 20
percent.”76 Lines of authority had become so blurred that “Post . . . dis-
covered NYCHA and PWA were both collecting option agreements
from the 700 property owners on the Williamsburg site.” Apparently
Ickes, like many reformers of his era, lacked any faith in local officials.
In the context of what happened to housing in other cities, his skepti-
cism seems more reasonable today. Williamsburg, an attractive low-rise
development, turned out to be too expensive to serve as a true model
for housing in New York.77
Harlem River Houses (1936) raised further doubts about the PWA’s
management. The overcrowding of Harlem, a result of the Great Migra-
tion and housing segregation, had by the 1930s become a serious and
distinct social issue that NYCHA might address. Harlem’s population
had exploded from 83,000 in 1920 to 204,000 in 1934. In the 1930s
Harlem replaced the Lower East Side as New York’s most overcrowded
tenement district. Harlemites faced higher-than-average rates of unem-
ployment, disease, and rents—and became outspoken that the govern-
ment relieve their misery. Langdon Post had assured black leaders that
“Harlem [was] not being neglected” in plans for public housing,78 but a
riot on 19–20 March 1935 in Harlem led to NYCHA assurances of immi-
nent action. The authority’s planners had previously considered land
costs too high in crowded Harlem for anything but small projects, but
the second PWA project, announced in 1934, became Harlem River
Houses. Harlem River Houses remains a darling of architecture critics,
but like Williamsburg Houses and First Houses it was constructed at a
very high cost per unit.79
High development costs meant that the low rents paid by tenants of
these early projects resulted from elevated levels of government subsidy
rather than economical construction. Even staunch housing advocates
such as Loula Lasker believed the PWA had lost “sight of the main prob-
lem . . . to provide adequate though not necessarily ideal accommoda-
tions for low-income families.” NYCHA and the PWA negotiated hard
over interest rates for the final loans, which allowed them to charge an
average monthly rent of $7 per room, and more fundamentally over the
future course of public housing management.80
Secretary Ickes took the position that “he preferred to keep adminis-
 Defining a Housing Crisis 33

tration of low-cost housing construction, so far as possible, in the hands

of the federal government.” Post, La Guardia, and many housing re-
formers sought the empowerment of local housing authorities, as in
Great Britain’s successful program, because “the Federal Government
will be hamstrung in its efforts to push forward a really large-scale pro-
gram.”81 Post and others won the battle for local control (with the Hous-
ing Act of 1937; see Chapter 2), but the PWA story, and perhaps Ickes’s
philosophy, looks better from a long-term perspective. It may be true
that the PWA created housing that seemed too nice for its intended pop-
ulation, but this was intentional.82
The PWA had its faults, but the developments it painstakingly spon-
sored are today considered some of the finest American public housing
because PWA housing, in the words of the historian Gail Radford, rep-
resented “the most thoroughgoing challenge to a market-based housing
system ever attempted in the United States.” Most of the public housing
that followed under the federal acts of 1937 and later would be designed
with the very poor in mind. Local authorities, outside New York, also un-
derperformed.83
New York housing advocates, in spite of the PWA setbacks, always
aimed for a program that far exceeded anything else dreamed of in the
United States. NYCHA’s Chairman’s Committee on Long Range Pro-
grams, led by the planner Albert Mayer, in 1935 had recommended a
$150 million annual budget as part of a long-range $1.5 billion program
that would one day house hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. The
scale of the recommended projects was shocking: one was projected to
cost $73 million alone and yield 55,000 rooms on 350 acres. New York’s
political classes and NYCHA’s board liked the scale of the plans, but
Washington never gave its assent. These plans nevertheless remained at
the heart of NYCHA’s mission during the 1930s. New York would even-
tually build a large system, but only by drawing on non-federal sources
of aid.84
Mayor La Guardia even had the temerity to ask in 1935 for $150 mil-
lion in loans from the federal government as part of his long-term plan.
This request was made in spite of the fact that New York had already re-
ceived a disproportionate amount of the small funds for housing then
available. Post and La Guardia, promising housing for thirty thousand
families and approximately forty to fifty thousand jobs, acted as though
the money would be forthcoming from the president. Approximately
$100 million seems to have been approved by the president in 1935, but
before the Housing Act of 1937 New York received funding only for First
Houses, Williamsburg Houses, and Harlem River Houses.85 Roosevelt
awaited further Senate action in 1936 and rejected further housing proj-
ects for the moment because housing projects did not appear to “give
34 A Municipal Service

employment to large numbers of needy persons. . . . They require much

preliminary work and after construction of the buildings has started re-
quire a large number of skilled workers, few of whom are now to be
found on relief rolls.”86
In spite of the fact that New York had built very few apartments by
1937, the authority and those who supported it had made substantive
progress shaping both public opinion and administrative powers. Advo-
cates had effectively enhanced a sense of crisis in the city, redirecting a
concerned public from short-term economic concerns to more elabo-
rate humanitarian and civic goals. The public and politicians had been
goaded, in particular, by appeals to European housing accomplish-
ments. Chairman Post had spotlighted slums and his enforcement of
strict laws had increased demand for public housing projects. NYCHA
also had in hand judicial approval of the replacement of slum clearance
with model tenements. What looked like a flailing authority, embar-
rassed by criticism of its methods and expensive housing projects, was in
fact well on its way to becoming a powerful city-wide organization.