IN THIS previous entry, I discussed a few of the ways in which suburban life seems to lack an organic quality and has the feel of a thing artificially created. To expand a bit on this point, below is a long quote from E. Michael Jones’s book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing, in which he discusses the role of the federal government in clearing cheap housing in the cities, in this case Philadelphia, and destroying cohesive residential pockets in which various groups — the Irish, Italians, Poles, blacks — once lived both separate and close to one another. On September 1, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the United States Housing Act, which gave the federal government, acting in concert with local housing authorities, the authority to clear “slums,” which often included dwellings owned, not rented, by their inhabitants, and to provide low-rent housing in its place. The creation of public housing is similar in many ways to the story of Obamacare and so many other instances of the expansion of state power in the name of freeing the people from want. In the end it was decided by an assertion of “raw judicial power.”

The constitutionality of the government’s entry into the housing market was challenged almost immediately, but on June 30, 1938, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania handed down its decision in favor of the PHA [Philadelphia Housing Authority]. In Dornan v. The Philadelphia Housing Authority, et al., Judge Horace Stern upheld the arguments of the Authority by holding that slum clearance and the incident construction of low-rent housing is a public purpose and that “the power of eminent domain was properly conferred” when it was used to tear down the housing that had to be cleared for the projects to rise in their place. “The elimination of unsafe and dilapidated tenements,” Judge Stern wrote, “is a legitimate object for the exercise of the police power.” He then launched into a panegyric on the benefits which would accrue if big government were to apply the principles of modern hygiene and science to the housing situation. “The veriest tyro in the study of social conditions,” opined Mr. Justice Stern in the florid language of the time, “knows tha the existence of slums is a menace to the health and happiness of the communities in which they exits.” What followed was a curious mixture of classic American upper-class Yankee moralizing, faith in science, and heavy-handed condescension which assumed that only those in positions of power could help the denizens of the “slums.” Slums, according to Stern, are bad “because they exert a pernicious moral influence upon those unfortunate enough to be obliged to live in them and thereby engender those proclivities of youth to crime which have been characterized by many in high places as a disgrace to our civilization.” Since everyone could be presumed to be in favor of moral behavior, “it is now found necessary to resort to the more drastic and comprehensive method of demolishing such structures simultaneously and over more extended areas.” Urban renewal was, in other words, not only morally justified, it was morally mandated.

[…]

The state opinion had much in common with Berman v. Parker, the federal Supreme Court decision which would get handed down sixteen years later. In both decisions, concerns about hygiene and morals and the social engineering of the behavior of the inhabitants of the housing to be constructed at government expense at some future date took precedence over the property rights of those who were being dispossessed to make that housing possible. By June 30, 1939, the USHA had earmarked a total of $32 million for slum clearance and low rent housing in Philadelphia. With local loans this raised the total available for the program to approximately $35 million.

Public housing, however, was only one part of the New Deal’s entry into the housing business. The other half was represented by the Federal Housing Authority, whose purpose was to guarantee mortgages. Until this point mortgages rarely covered anything approaching the full value of the house for the full term of the mortgage. If one mortgage expired during a downturn in the economy when money was tight, the homeowner often lost his home because he couldn’t get another mortgage to finance the rest of the purchase price. Federal reform of this issue was a good idea, but as in virtually every other instance of government involvement in housing the good that it did became the thin edge of the wedge of social engineering. Just as the USHA chose Bauhaus Wohnmaschinen (Walter Gropius’s term for the house of the future; literally “living machines”) as its model urban dwelling for the poor, the FHA in 1939 asked each of its fifty regional offices to send in plans for six “typical American houses.” The photos and dimensions were initially used for a National Archives exhibit, but more subtly they became the paradigm of what kind of house the FHA would guarantee a mortgage. Since virtually all of the “typical American houses” were single bungalows or colonials on ample lots with driveways and garages, that meant that most of the mortgage money the FHA would provide went to the suburbs. It also meant that the Philadelphia row house was decertified as typically American and that meant that the traditional housing in cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore was effectively eliminated from eligibility for loan guarantees.

{The Slaughter of Cities, pp 67-69.] 

Jones goes on to argue that this federal intervention resulted in the large, monoracial ghettoes we have today.

— Comments —

Ephrem writes:

This discussion reminds me of a quote from the Catholic author Christopher Dawson:

But while we may well congratulate ourselves that English social life has not been poisoned by class hatred and class war, it does not follow that the complete penetration of English culture by bourgeois standards and ideals is a good or admirable thing. It is even possible that the victory of the bourgeois has meant the destruction of elements that are not merely valuable but essential to English life, since the English tradition is something much wider and deeper than the machine-made urban and suburban culture by which it has been temporarily submerged.

Actually we have only to open our eyes to see that this criticism is justified. The devastated areas of industrial England and the cancerous growth of the suburbs are not merely offensive to the aesthetic sense, they are symptoms of social disease and spiritual failure. The victory of bourgeois civilization has made England rich and powerful, but at the same time it has destroyed almost everything that made life worth living. It has undermined the natural foundations of our national life, so that the whole social structure is in danger of ruin.

Looked at from this point of view the distinctive feature of the bourgeois culture is its urbanism.It involves the divorce of man from nature and from the life of the earth. It turns the peasant into a minder of machines and the yeoman into a shopkeeper, until ultimately rural life becomes impossible and the very face of nature is changed by the destruction of the countryside and the pollution of the earth and the air and the waters.

 Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind

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