A Prayer for the City (39 page)

When suburban areas did not fare quite as well in the eyes of the appraisers, the reasons could be traced to the familiar concerns: Roslyn Station and Willow Grove had a “mixed population”; the area comprising Jenkintown, Wyncote, and Glenside had small pockets of “Negro settlements.”

The irrevocable legacy of HOLC, Jackson and other historians have noted, lies in its appraisal system and the way in which it was copied and modeled by the greatest tool of housing ever developed, the Federal Housing Administration. By insuring long-term mortgages from private lenders, the FHA made home ownership more accessible than ever. Buoyed by the guarantee of the federal government, lenders were willing to shave more interest points off mortgages than ever before, amortize payments over twenty-five or even thirty years, and require a down payment of only 10 percent. The FHA, founded in 1934, was intended to help revive the nation’s dormant housing industry during the New Deal. But the ultimate influence of the FHA and its housing cousin, the Veterans Administration, went far beyond that, making the dream of home ownership available to millions of middle-class Americans, just as long as it was a dream that largely confined itself to the suburbs and not to the older cities.

From its inception, wrote Mark I. Gelfand in
A Nation of Cities
, the FHA “red-lined [a term that presumably came from the color coordinates of the HOLC survey maps] vast areas of the inner cities, refusing to insure mortgages where the neighborhoods were blighted or susceptible to blight. This action practically guaranteed that these districts would deteriorate still further and drag cities down with them.”

The FHA took a keen dislike to rental housing, which was predominant in cities. It disliked the construction of multifamily units, which were also predominant in cities, and it discouraged the use of loans for home repair. Its underwriting manual, as one social critic cited by Gelfand put it, “read like a chapter from Hitler’s Nuremberg laws.” Among some of its more established practices were the issuance of insurance only if steps were taken to minimize adverse influences, racial zoning, and tacit approval of restrictive covenants.

From 1934 to 1972, the percentage of families owning homes in the United States increased from 44 percent to 63 percent. The majority of these families lived in the suburbs and never would have realized the dream of home ownership without the policies of the federal government. The majority of these homeowners weren’t born in the suburbs. As census data clearly show, they moved by the millions from cities that had been all but written off by the federal government in terms of the lasting viability of residential investment.

There was something ironic about the seeds of the cities’ destruction being planted in the era of the New Deal, since Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to pay any deliberate attention to cities whatsoever. But much of
what Roosevelt did was enact entitlement programs and dispense federal aid to keep cities from the brink of collapse and insolvency. He had little direct interest in the social viability of cities and even less love for them, and he did what he did because he needed the urban vote and the influence of urban legislators if he was going to push the New Deal through Congress. Like the vast majority of Americans, he found cities dirty and grimy and far too big for their own good. As he said in a speech in 1937 dedicating the Bonneville Dam in the Pacific Northwest: “Today many people are beginning to realize that there is inherent weakness in cities which become too large for their times and inherent strength in a wider geographical distribution of population.”

In the 1950s, despite considerable downtown renewal, ten of the country’s fifteen largest municipalities lost population, and the percentage of people living in central cities in metropolitan areas dropped from 59 percent to 51 percent. Since the beginning of the Republic, the ’50s marked the first decade in which cities lost a significant share of their population, and this trend would only accelerate. In the age of the automobile, the only physical impediment to the suburbs’ domination was an effective way of getting to them from the city, and President Eisenhower took care of that in 1956, with the passage of the Highway Act, which created a forty-one-thousand-mile highway system that eviscerated city after city while making exodus to the suburbs easier than ever. City planners actually welcomed the expressway system because they thought it would hasten the return of shoppers downtown, but they were wrong, underestimating the degree to which Americans would embrace the flat and predictable flow of the suburban shopping mall and the antipathy that Americans have always had for the city, not to mention the degree to which cities were already beginning to buckle.

“More and more of the old cities will show population declines,” Professor Raymond Vernon of Harvard had told a Senate subcommittee not in 1989 or 1979 or 1969 but in 1959. “More and more, they will be the repositories of those who are prepared to live in obsolescent housing—the lower income groups and the older citizens of the country.”

Vernon predicted a loss of retail jobs as population sagged and a loss of manufacturing jobs as businesses looked for newer and more spacious sites in the suburbs. He also predicted a growth in downtown development because of the desirable location and the desirable address for the elite. Vernon shrewdly predicted that such residential areas as Boston’s Back Bay and Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and New York’s Upper East
Side would thrive and represent city life at its finest. But it was all an illusion. “We must recognize that this kind of activity is limited to a minuscule portion of the old cities and will remain so limited,” Vernon told the subcommittee.

As Vernon described it, the rot included hundreds of square miles of space filled with “worn-out housing and outmoded factories which promise to be more and more neglected and underused in the decades ahead.” Given the magnitude of the problem, the forces of private markets would not be able to stem the rot, Vernon said. Nor would cities themselves, in light of tax bases that were already shrinking. “Some of these city areas, built at high densities for a horse-trolley era, should probably be redesigned for fewer people and more open space. But in how many cities could officials initiate and finance such a move?” The window of opportunity for a reversal was already narrow, and he urged the federal government to do something proactive, to help shape the future destiny of its cities before it was too late and a two-tiered America set in for good.

Richardson Dilworth, the mayor of Philadelphia in 1959, testifying before the same subcommittee on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, advocated federal assistance, not in the familiar terms of urban aid and entitlement programs, but in something far more lasting and socially meaningful. He argued for the establishment of a single government for each of the nation’s metropolitan areas, in which a chief executive would have true jurisdiction not only over the city but also over the suburbs ringing it. Such a form of government, Dilworth felt, would unite the city and its suburbs instead of dividing them along social and racial lines. “We cannot continue to set up one class against another,” he said. “That is being done today with the cities against the suburbs. We have to work out some program for the proper allocation of our industry, and … every mayor of a big city would feel that actually there should be one government—one local government—for every great metropolitan area and that this hodgepodge of governments creates conflicts, creates an enormous manner of additional problems, and leads to the inefficient, terrible tax burdens and makes it difficult to have any proper development in the area to meet the problems of democracy.”

The words of Vernon and Dilworth were prescient and bold. As it turned out, the men were not exaggerating at all. But given the federal attitude that had existed about cities at least as far back as the 1930s, their words were doomed to collect dust on some urban-studies shelf.

With the exception of the popular mythology of small-town girl and small-town boy making it big in the starry glitter of New York, cities had always held a place in American culture that was tenuous at best and reviled at worst. “Enthusiasm for the American city has not been typical or predominant in our intellectual history. Fear has been the more common reaction,” wrote Morton and Lucia White in
The Intellectual Versus the City.
“We have no persistent or pervasive tradition of romantic attachment to the city in our literature or in our philosophy, nothing like the Greek attachment to the
polis
or the French writer’s affection for Paris.” In examining the writings of Jefferson, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Poe, the Whites found what they called an “anti-urban roar,” particularly since American cities, unlike the great capitals of Europe, were first and foremost belching creatures of commerce.

“The city is doomed,” said Henry Ford, advancing the antiurban rhetoric. “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.”

Lewis Mumford, America’s great urban and social critic, in his 1938 book,
The Culture of Cities
, described big cities as on the verge of becoming “cemeteries for the dead,” built up without any human dimension and only to keep pace with population expansion and industrialization. “Forms of social life that the wisest no longer understood, the more ignorant were prepared to build. Or rather: the ignorant were completely unprepared, but that did not prevent the building,” wrote Mumford.

But cities were not simply condemned because they were big or ill tuned for the industrial expansion that had seized them. What
was
wonderful and exciting about them—the spontaneity, the togetherness of community, the creativity that comes from getting along and not getting along, the endless characters populating the streets, the chaos—never found a natural place in the American soul. The frontier spirit that was so intrinsic to the psyche of the country, the creed of individualism and ruggedness and privacy, of staking out your own piece of land and building your own house, hardly lent itself to the culture and spirit of the city. In 1890, when the Census Bureau determined that the western frontier no longer existed, that ideal of individualism was more difficult to satisfy. But the spirit of privacy, of having a separate space, exhibited itself through the patterns of settlement. In Europe, it was the cities that were valued and the suburbs that were devalued.
It was the city that was a desirable place to live and the suburbs that were a drab and undesirable place to live. It was the city that was the source of life, and the idea of being close to one another was not rejected but assumed. In the United States, the opposite prevailed. A man could no longer move his family west in search of his own private homestead. But at the very least, he could go ten or fifteen miles in any direction outside the city limits and find his own house on a tidy plot of land.

“Throughout America’s history we have always looked fondly on the small town as a well-spring of our moral virtues,” said MIT political science professor Robert T. Wood in a speech he delivered in 1959. “We have always believed in the sturdy yeoman. And we have always regarded the city as a real villain in our melodramas of growth as a nation.”

If the long-range goal of federal policy has always been to help cities grow and adapt to the ever changing dynamics of their populations, then federal policy has failed despite the goodness of its intentions. But if the long-range goal of federal policy has been the very opposite—to slowly and deliberately defrock cities, diminish their influence, and promote instead a distinct and separate suburban culture based on race and socioeconomics and privacy—then federal policy has been enormously successful.

“The lasting damage done by the national government was that it put its seal of approval on ethnic and racial discrimination and developed policies which had the result of the practical abandonment of large sections of older, industrial cities,” wrote Kenneth Jackson. “The financial community saw blighted neighborhoods as physical evidence of the melting-pot mistake. To them, cities were risky because of their heterogeneity, because of their attempt to bring various people together harmoniously. Such mixing, they believed, had but two consequences—the decline of both the human race and of property values.”

As Ed Rendell rode in a limousine with the president of the United States, he had a choice of ways in which to reinforce the point of what federal policy had really done to the country’s cities. He could point out, as he did so effectively, the inequity of taking jobs away from his own city, in which a quarter of the population was at the poverty level, and relocating them to an area in which 4 percent of the population was at the poverty level. As the motorcade made its way over I-95, he could have pointed to the navy yard and questioned the efficacy of silencing a place with 192 years of history and service to the country. To his left, he could have pointed out the malarial towers of Southwark and told the president how the federal government’s
answer to housing for the poor in the city, in the aftermath of slum removal (also known as Negro removal), had been these high-rise horrors that were doomed to fail. He could have mused aloud about what it meant that a federal Department of Agriculture had become a Cabinet-level department in 1889 whereas a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development had not been established until 1965.

Or he could have just given the president two maps: one would have been the map prepared by the federal HOLC appraisers in 1937, with its shades of green and blue and yellow and red; the other would have been a map of the city in 1993, similarly colored, showing the areas with the greatest loss of population and vacant housing. Holding the maps side by side, looking at them for several seconds, the president would have discovered what anyone else would have discovered: despite a span of fifty-five years and eleven months, they were virtually the same in terms of what they revealed; they were mirrors of each other.