Tales from the attic: Covering the capital in the 1950s

Sam Smith - in the late 1950s, I was sent by WWDC News to interview a woman who was refusing to move out of her house in the Southwest urban renewal area. Hundreds of acres had been leveled around her and still she clung on like a survivor of the Dresden carpet bombing.

The project, the largest in the nation, had begun in April 1954 and five years later some 550 acres had been cleared. Only 300 families remained to be relocated. More than 20,000 people and 800 businesses had been kicked out to make way for the plan. Some 80% of the latter never went back into operation.

The design was hailed by planners and liberals; a 1955 report for the District was titled No Slums in Ten Years. Not everyone was so sanguine, however. In a 1959 report of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Rt. Rev. Msg. John O'Grady said, "It is sad. It is not urban renewal; it is a means of making a few people rich. Instead of improving housing conditions, it is shifting people around from one slum to another."

The Supreme Court disagreed. In 1954 it had upheld the underlying law and in a decision written by none other than William O. Douglas, declared:

It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled . . . The experts concluded that if the community were to be healthy, if it were not to revert again to a blighted or slum area, as though possessed by a congenital disease, the area must be planned as a whole.

In another instance, I was sent to look into reports that a white family was about to be evicted from an Alexandria, VA., public housing project because their 14 year old daughter had given birth to an illegitimate baby.

Said the housing project director: "We follow the policy against illegitimate children pretty rigidly, otherwise the project would get a bad name. We must frown on all such anti-social conduct."

I asked him whether the project took similar action against families with juvenile delinquents and he said it had no hard and fast rules. Would he consider a juvenile delinquent who stole cars or engaged in similar activities a worse influence in the project than a girl with an illegitimate child? He said no, because the baby was living proof of the girl's misdoing and would have contact with other children.