Housing Act of 1954

The housing and urban renewal legislation of 1954 addressed the perceived shortcomings of the 1949 Housing Act, the Wagner-Ellender-Taft housing and urban redevelopment legislation. The 1949 act had spurred massive slum clearance but only modest city rebuilding and minimal progress toward the law's stated goal of a “decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” Meanwhile, urban blight spread ominously into the city neighborhoods bordering the central business district (CBD)—the old streetcar suburbs. Racial anxieties, incipient disinvestment, and suburbanization engendered by the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration unleashed white flight and spread blight. The 1954 Housing Act aimed to halt that invidious process.

Fearing the onset of untrammeled urban blight and dubious about the effectiveness of Washington-directed redevelopment, President Dwight David Eisenhower in 1953 convened an Advisory Committee on Government Housing Problems and Programs chaired by the father of the suburban mall, Baltimore developer James Rouse. Like Rouse, urbanist Miles Colean drew inspiration from Baltimore's Waverly neighborhood, a blighted inner city district remade using a mixture of zoning, housing code enforcement, and other “conservation” tools, rather than blanket slum clearance and public housing. In Renewing Our Cities, Colean—who would sit on the Rouse advisory committee—featured the Baltimore plan of code enforcement, strict occupancy controls, and housing rehabilitation as the centerpiece of what he now called urban renewal. Colean's concept of renewal assigned private enterprise the central role in combating blight via rehabilitation. It urged the federal government to catalyze private residential development via FHA insurance, and it charged cities with the main responsibility for eradicating (via strict zoning and housing codes) the overall problem of blight.

Rouse's report, submitted in December 1953, reflected Colean's idea for renewing entire cities through conservation and rehabilitation as well as the developer's belief in the primacy of capitalist leadership in planning and carrying out city rebuilding. The 1954 Housing Act flowed directly from the Rouse committee's findings. First, the law altered the discourse about city rebuilding from redevelopment to renewal. Simultaneously, it broadened the venue for renewal from the historic CBD into the urban gray areas (streetcar neighborhoods) surrounding the central city. In these so-called conservation areas, it was hoped that private enterprise would team with city planners, public health officials, and code enforcement officials to rehabilitate neighborhoods. Therefore, the word project was redefined to include not only the slum acquisition and clearance actions in the CBD (as defined in the 1949 law) but also the conservation of blighted and deteriorated “gray areas” by undertaking plans for voluntary housing repairs and rehabilitation consistent with urban renewal plans. Such plans could include spot removal of dangerously dilapidated structures in the broadened blight area. Indeed, as in the 1949 law, the 1954 law made federal loans and grants available for demolition as well as for the installation of streets, utilities, and other vital infrastructure. Such grants and loans were now contingent on localities presenting to the federal Urban Renewal Administration a workable plan. Section 701 actually provided special matching grants for states to support the planning process. It also established a renewal service to further assist the planning process. Consistent with its capitalistic intent, the 1954 law added Section 123 and Section 221 to the 1934 National Housing Act to finance the purchase, construction, and rehabilitation of low-cost one- to four-family housing in the conservation areas. Section 220 helped families displaced by renewal action to afford to purchase housing.

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