Greenbelt Towns

Begun in 1935 through the New Deal's Resettlement Administration (RA), Greenbelt towns were designed to offer alternative suburban environments for working-class families residing in America's deteriorating and congested inner cities. Headed by Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford G. Tugwell, a Columbia professor of economics and social reformer, the RA operated the program with the goals of providing construction jobs for unemployed workers, demonstrating more appropriate design guidelines to create a better quality of life, and incorporating a social component realized in part through cooperative ventures. Design principles integrated Ebenezer Howard's model of a garden city and the vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) as implemented in the partially completed town of Radburn, New Jersey. Still, each of the town site designs—Greenbrook, New Jersey, which was never developed; Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin—reflected the distinct signature of the team assigned to it. Detractors considered the program social engineering and maintained that the government competed unfairly with private sector developers. Thus the program only lasted 18 months before legal challenges led to the decision to terminate it. By 1954, after a series of congressional hearings, the federal government had divested itself of all greenbelt town property. While the program never resulted in the widespread town-building movement anticipated at its outset, it did attract notable planners, engineers, and architects who implemented innovations in design and community building.

Established by executive order in 1935 and funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the Greenbelt Town Program was administered by the RA through its Suburban Resettlement Division headed by John Lansill. In addition to this new suburban town building program, the RA oversaw several existing rural programs created under the Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to improve conditions for farmers through refinancing and rehabilitating their farmsteads or providing opportunities for resettlement to more appropriate farming sites. As originally conceived, the Greenbelt Town Program would provide work relief, offer a model of community development, and develop housing for lower income families.

[Page 314]In order to determine the best location for these new communities, approximately a hundred urban areas were surveyed to identify those with a combination of consistent economic and population expansion, diverse industries offering sound wages and engaging in progressive labor practices, and a critical need for housing. Within the four urban areas that were ultimately chosen, town sites were identified based on their proximity to employment centers and on natural features such as topography, soils, and characteristics that would foster the combination of development, recreational, agricultural, and open spaces envisioned for each community.

Lansill worked with five consultants, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Tracy Augur, Russell Van Nest Black, and Earle Draper, the first four of whom were RPAA members. They functioned as general advisers and drafted studies such as cost analyses to determine short- and long-term financial outcomes associated with development and management of the towns. Frederick Bigger, also associated with the RPAA, was retained as chief of planning for the program and oversaw the daily work of the teams. At Greenbelt, near Washington, D.C., Hale Walker served as town planner and Reginald Wadsworth and Douglas Ellington as principal architects; at Greenhills, near Cincinnati, Justin Hartzog and William Strong served as town planners and Roland Wank and G. Frank Cordner as principal architects; at Greendale, near Milwaukee, Jacob Crane and Elbert Peets served as town planners and Harry Bentley and Walter Thomas as principal architects; and finally, at Greenbrook, New Jersey, near New Brunswick, town planners Henry Wright and Allan Kamstra worked with architects Albert Mayer and Henry Churchill.

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