The US housing departments ambitious initiatives of the 60s and 70s created urban communities that were both mixed race and mixed income. Though many didnt last, are there lessons in them for Donald Trumps new housing secretary?
Innovation is, to put it mildly, not one of the first attributes that come to mind when you think of Hud the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, soon to be overseen by Donald Trumps former Republican rival Ben Carson. Yet this wasnt always the case.
Imagine urban and suburban communities that banned cars, collected trash in pneumatic tubes, offered prototype community video chat capabilities, built elaborate pedestrian and cycle networks, and carefully retained existing foliage. You may not be thinking of the Jetsons, but products of the groundbreaking Hud New Towns initiatives in the late 1960s and early 70s.
Whats more, these aims were achieved while paying real and successful attention to creating both mixed-income and mixed-race communities.
So where should Carson go to be inspired by these pioneering projects? The catch is (with a few exceptions) federal support for them had sputtered by the mid-70s and vanished entirely in subsequent years, leaving at best, mere fragments of their once grand ideals.
The genuine problems with some of these projects now perceived as failures, if recalled at all eclipsed their admirable qualities in historical memory. These are qualities that might have offered Carson models for a country that is currently experiencing acute housing shortages in many of its metropolitan areas.
In the 70s, 15 projects were approved for Title VII support, most on greenfield sites near existing metropolitan areas. Two were in cities: Roosevelt Island (previously known as Welfare Island) in New York and Riverside Plaza in Minneapolis. Another, Soul City, was distant both from any nearby cities and prevailing practices of building them, as an effort to build a genuinely multi-racial community, spearheaded by an African American developer and African American architects.
There were many inventive elements on the drawing board, and some became a reality. If most developments were substantially suburban in character, planning mainly for single family homes, they often integrated higher density elements or multi-family homes, as well as significant efforts at pedestrian friendliness.
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