Symbolic Settlements:
The American Ideological Tension Between Private Homes and Public Housing
Lawrence J. Vale
Associate Professor and Associate Head,
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

As the twenty-first century begins, two forms of domestic settlement in American cities stand as polar opposites. At one extreme, there is the vast plaid of the residential streetscape, the full flowering of the traditional American ideological emphasis on the middle-class single family home. At the other end of the domestic spectrum, there is the public housing project, housing the nation's poorest populations in vilified superblocks of low modernist urbanism. This paper examines the relationship between these two forms of settlement, emphasizing their shared cultural origins and ongoing tensions.

The paper begins by examining 1920s propaganda touting the moral advantages of single-family homes and homeownership. These ideas and the images used to advance them--promulgated by the real estate industry and by a variety of home-oriented magazines
--reveal a great deal about the social and cultural expectations regarding class and gender that, then as now, have colored American approaches to housing provision. This growing ideological emphasis on the moral superiority of the single-family owned home (strongly supported by the federal government) forms the essential backdrop to discussion of the emergence of any government-sponsored alternative.

I next compare these attempts to enshrine the single-family home with contemporaneous American efforts to propose a form and rationale for large-scale housing projects comprised of apartments. Although the form of the American public housing project is usually seen as derivative of workers' housing experience in Europe, I argue that distinctively American cultural factors also played a significant role. In the United States, the goal was to design housing projects in a way that maximized their aesthetic distance from the existing urban fabric of lightless and airless tenements, yet was also intended to maximize the cultural continuity with older notions of village greens and individual homes. I demonstrate this using three kinds of examples. First, I explore Clarence Perry's evolving concept of the Neighborhood Unit, examining how it was intended to be applied to single-family districts as well as inner-city apartment areas (on slum-clearance sites) in the 1920s and 1930s. Second, I examine the village-oriented language employed by Nathan Straus (first administrator of the United States Housing Authority), and other early public housing supporters. Finally, I examine some of the ways that early public housing projects were photographed to emphasize their spatial and cultural continuity with traditional American spaces and values.

I then examine the way that public housing design of the 1950s and 1960s lost all connection and orientation to traditional forms of American urbanism, just as its chosen clientele ceased to be the favored upwardly-mobile working poor that initially populated the projects and had inspired their creation. Once intended as a reward mechanism for carefully-vetted nuclear families with stable records of employment, public housing projects became transmuted into coping mechanisms (or even containment vehicles) for the very poor. Correspondingly, as forms of settlement, housing projects lost all remaining vestiges of links to earlier forms of high-status space. What was once touted as the urban heir to the village green became little more than ill-maintained treeless expanses of asphalt-covered "open space."

By way of conclusion, I examine recent attempts to reintroduce the dominant ideology of the single family home and traditional streetscape back into public housing, focusing on an example from Boston now known as Orchard Gardens Estates. Many of the most ambitious public housing redevelopment efforts of the late-1990s (conducted under the auspices of HUD's HOPE VI program) are premised on the need for such a symbolic shift. These redevelopment efforts are deliberately intended to transform the most notorious examples of failed urban public housing into mixed-income communities that can attract and hold the sorts of upwardly-mobile working families that once dominated the projects of the 1930s and 1940s. Housing authorities (and their architects) clearly see housing and settlement design as encoding a system of values. Old projects, once designed in distinctive ways (ostensibly to demonstrate their distinct superiority over the cold-water flats of slums and tenements), are now being transformed into reassuringly familiar landscapes. Now, instead of a contrast with the slum, the key symbolic shift entails the maximum possible repudiation of the form of public housing itself. This re-imaging of public housing, achieved through a manipulation of symbols, is intended to foster and permit a corresponding socio-economic transformation of occupancy. As public housing is reconceptualized to approach the norms of private homes, the tensions between the two settlement forms stand revealed but not resolved.

Lawrence Vale, is an Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Urban Studies and Planning department at MIT. His research and teaching center on urban design and housing. He is the author of three books examining government-sponsored environments, including Architecture, Power, and National Identity (1992), which received the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians. His most recent work has examined the history, politics, and design of American public housing. From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors was released in October 2000 by Harvard University Press, and a second volume, Three Public Neighborhoods, is forthcoming. This research has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received both the 1997 Chester Rapkin Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and a 1999 Place Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association and the journal Places. He is also Co-Editor, with Sam Bass Warner, Jr., of Imaging the City : Continuing Struggles and New Directions, forthcoming in early 2001 from the Center for Urban Policy Research Press.