If You Build It, They Will Leave

In 1930, the Annual Report of the Public Buildings Commission quoted President Calvin Coolidge’s aspirations for Washington, D.C.: “If our country wishes to compete with others, let it not be in the support of armaments but in making of a beautiful Capital City. Let it express the soul of America.”

While Coolidge spoke of a “beautiful Capital City,” many of D.C.’s poorest residents were living in alley dwellings, the majority of whom were African American. After the Civil War, freed slaves had migrated to D.C. in waves, looking for better opportunities, but a housing shortage would eventually force a majority of the burgeoning African-American population into alley dwellings—cheaply built housing structures on the properties of wealthy white individuals, which faced in toward the alley instead of the street. Blight caused from overcrowding and a lack of sanitation, as well as dominant racist attitudes, created an image of alley life as a “breeding ground for vice and disease,” as President Theodore Roosevelt described these D.C. neighborhoods in a message to Congress in 1904. The federal government oversaw D.C.’s affairs until the early 1970s when it received Home Rule, so its urban blight was an order of national interest. For decades, housing reformers, health advocates, and lawmakers argued that the city should abolish alley dwellings all together.

During the 1930s, documentary photographers from the Farm Security Administration—including Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Esther Bubley, and Edwin Rosskam—documented these often-squalid communities. Some of these photographs appear to be formal portraits of black men and women standing outside their homes; often they stand in their doorways with their whole families, posing for the camera. Other residents seem to have been taken by surprise by the photographer; some hide their faces. Still others are undisturbed by the intruders with their cameras, and go about their daily lives.

To clear out D.C.’s alleys, Congress established the Alley Dwelling Authority (ADA) on June 12, 1934, funded by the Works Progress Administration. The ADA was given the power to convert any inhabited alley into private, public, or commercial use, making it in effect the first local housing authority in the nation. But the ADA was faced with opposition when trying to create low-income public housing for displaced alley dwellers: white residents already living in those communities rejected the idea of living alongside black families.

White residents worked with real estate developers to push back against government development, asserting “that private builders could do a better job providing housing for low-income residents than any public authority,” writes historian Howard Gillette Jr. in his 2006 book Between Justice and Beauty. This along with a growing movement across the country to eliminate so-called urban blight influenced Congress to set up the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA) in 1945, which was charged with assembling land parcels for resale to private developers to address the “blighting factors or causes of blight” in the city, taking authority away from the ADA

The RLA started by addressing the quadrant of Southwest D.C. It was close to downtown office jobs and included many alley dwellings, so it was seen as having the most potential for being made over as a “model city” for federal workers. After surveying the area, the RLA’s initial plan was to revitalize most of the blighted homes, but the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency refused to finance the RLA’s rehabilitation plan, preferring to totally rebuild. The RLA went on to create a renewal plan in Southwest which would displace the tight-knit communities of African Americans and Jewish immigrants then living in the area.

During the 1940s and 50s, the renewal plan made use of eminent domain: the right of the government to take private property and provide just compensation to the owner under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. When businesses sued to keep their properties, claiming the blight did not affect them, a unanimous Supreme Court sided with the federal government in the landmark 1954 Berman v Parker case, which justified the total rebuilding of Southwest and expanded “public use” to integrate social, aesthetic and monetary benefits. Justice William Douglas wrote, “It is within the power of the legislature ... to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.” The case expanded the public use limitation on what the government could claim, setting national precedent.

From the early 1950s through the early ‘70s, 99 percent of buildings on 560 acres of land in Southwest DC were razed, displacing 23,000 residents and 1,500 businesses—the largest development effort ever undertaken by the US government at the time of its initiation. Many Southwest residents relocated across the river to the D.C. neighborhood of Anacostia, while others were scattered throughout the city, sometimes ending up in conditions as poor as the ones they had been evicted from.

Southwest D.C. became a prototype for the national urban renewal movement through the 1960s, until strong community opposition and public criticism stopped what writer James Baldwin would later come to call “Negro removal” in an interview with Kenneth Clark in 1963, following a meeting with US Attorney Robert Kennedy and other cultural leaders in an attempt to improve race relations in the country.

Years of civil unrest around the country and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, forced President Lyndon Johnson to write a letter on April 5 to the House of Representatives urging them to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act. It was enacted on April 11, which federally enforced equal housing opportunities for all regardless of race, religion, or national origin.