1949: “Urban Blight”
To address so-called “urban blight” within the United States, the federal government, in coordination with states and cities, passed the Housing Act of 1949.
This act was the first in a series of acts that were intended to help transition the United States from a war economy to a post-war economy (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 57). Part of this transition involved developing city centers to become places of commerce and interest. As developers surveyed the land, they often found that areas inhabited by Black communities were needed to enact their ideal recreation of the city. In essence, areas that the government had forced Black communities to inhabit that had sub-par infrastructure and where the Federal Government declined to provide housing loans were then declared “blight” by the same government and seized from the Black community in the name of redevelopment and the post-war economy. Thompson Fullilove (2016) found that “once those [i.e., blighted] areas had been defined, the city had the task of developing a ‘workable plan’… once the plan was approved, the designated areas could be seized by using the government’s power of eminent domain” (p. 58).
After the land was seized and its occupants—mostly African Americans—displaced, the cities then partnered with developers to build “businesses, educational and cultural institutions, and residences for middle- and upper-income white people” (p. 59).
High-rise public housing was built in cases where the land could not be used for profit.
In St. Louis, one such example of this type of public housing was the Pruitt-Igoe complex, which “became part of a citywide rent strike and a center of Black Nationalist organizing just years before its demolition was begun in 1972 (Izzo & Looker, 2022, p. 38).
The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments complex in St. Louis.
Source: Wikipedia
“Urban blight” became yet another euphemism that gave white politicians and commercial developers access to areas of the city deemed valuable for future economic development.
Despite representing some of the city’s most depressed residents in need of revitalization, African Americans were pushed out, relocated to other depressed areas of the city, and left in the same, if not worsening, circumstances.