It's time to shut down HUD.

• Author: Husock, Howard

The Department of Housing and Urban Development "is an agency whose establishment was unnecessary, purview is of questionable constitutionality, and goals can be met better through the private housing industry."

The department of Housing and Urban Development, established in 1965, was intended to be a mechanism through which Federal grants, low-interest loans, and individual rent subsidies would be channeled to fund specific building and rebuilding projects. Although HUD had a broad mandate to improve urban life generally, there was no doubt where its chief focus lay. "The first challenge," Pres. Lyndon Johnson stated, was "to attack the problem of rebuilding the slums." It was the era of the affluent society, when the U.S. economy was viewed not only as a powerful, but perhaps even unstoppable engine of economic growth--one that allegedly was leaving a few groups behind. The most prominent was the blacks whose emigration from the rural South had peaked after World War II. That poor, formerly rural group was living in older housing vacated by more affluent whites, who were moving up and out to the expanding suburbs. The racial contrast was heightened by the 1964 and 1965 summer riots in Watts and Harlem.

The older urban residential neighborhoods blacks were moving to took on a collective national name--the inner city. Its existence was viewed as a rebuke to American prosperity. At the same time, the headlong rush of the middle class to the expanding suburbs dramatically was diminishing the cities' populations and tax bases.

It would be HUD's mission not just to respond to what sociologist Kenneth Clark termed the "dark ghetto"--in other words, poor, black, urban neighborhoods--but to "save" cities. In that context, HUD's mission was designed by its early leaders, including Robert Weaver, the former head of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, who became the first HUD Secretary and the first black Cabinet Secretary in any department, and Robert Wood, the former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Political Science Department, who became Under Secretary.

"Our most critical domestic problem," wrote Weaver in 1966, "is improving the quality of urban life for all Americans.... It is our goal to reconstruct the physical and social fabric of the American urban environment." That must be regarded, in retrospect, as a vast amplification of perceived problems. Although it is true that cities were losing population, their commercial downtown centers continued serving as the financial hubs for the expanding metropolitan areas. Rather than there being a generalized "urban crisis," something far more limited was occurring. People were leaving older, innerring residential neighborhoods (in effect, the first "suburban" residential areas outside the center city) that had been incorporated into cities during the Progressive Era. Those neighborhoods were found in various medium- and large-sized cities from Paterson, N.J., and Rochester, N.Y., to Oakland, Calif. Specific examples include Boston's Roxbury, Chicago's South Side, and the north side of Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Upwardly mobile families were choosing to move out of the multifamily homes and apartment buildings of such areas in favor of newer suburbs with detached homes and yards. Left behind were neighborhoods whose replacement populations (in many cases, made up of southern-born blacks) were less prosperous. The result was a group of inner-ring residential areas shabbier than the surrounding, rapidly expanding metropolitan area. The perceived problem, which was assumed to be long-term, lay in the cities' inner-ring residential areas.

Except perhaps for ghost towns and other small jurisdictions that had outlived their economic reason for being, Americans generally were accustomed to the idea that cities should become bigger and better. Instead, they were seeing the less-than-pleasant sight of neighborhoods in apparent decline, at least compared with their middle-class origins. Grand apartment buildings were being subdivided or, in some cases, simply abandoned because of lack of demand, Ironically, that could have been viewed as a fortuitous opportunity. Cheap, often well-built, used housing was becoming available when significant numbers of immigrants were arriving in town. Housing economists have termed that phenomenon "filtering"--passing down housing from the upwardly mobile to the next wave of aspirants.

If there were no over-all urban crisis and no sudden collapse of the economies of our cities, why did Weaver cast his role as broadly addressing such a crisis? Perhaps he did so out of fear that defining the mission more narrowly--as improving the black ghetto--would have had less political appeal. Indeed, it is striking that at a time of robust economic growth, Weaver justified HUD as an agency that was necessary to "contribute toward a better life for all income levels, all age levels, and all racial characteristics or religious beliefs."

Other HUD officials, however, often were more candid about the targeted nature of their mission. Under Secretary Wood told the National Association of Social Workers in 1966, "The impacted urban ghetto has, in a comparatively short period of time, become the most explosive social problem of our day." This was the essence of HUD: a massive intervention in poor black neighborhoods to fix up the buildings there, despite the fact that residents themselves could not pay for such improvements. Thus, "ghetto" housing would remain inexpensive and also would be "decent and sanitary," in the language of the National Housing Act of 1937. Why was that necessary, though? What was wrong with new urbanites using older housing until they could afford better? To understand HUD's intervention, one must look at the nation's essentially pessimistic and, arguably, patronizing view of the prospects of the black poor.

Even if one accepted the concept that less-than-ideal housing conditions were a stage of development, not its end point, the 1960s would have been a politically difficult period in which to defend such gradualism. As in the Appalachian mining towns, which had attracted attention during the 1960 presidential primary...