December 10, 2025 • 50 mins
In the summer heat of Birmingham, children faced police dogs and fire hoses. On a bus in Montgomery, a 15-year-old refused to stand. From Claudette Colvin to Rosa Parks, from Greensboro counters to the March on Washington—the Civil Rights Movement shook America awake. Yet, even as laws changed, maps and mortgages quietly redrew the lines of belonging.
In this episode of Built to Divide, Dimitrius Lynch tracks what happened after the marches. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination, but zoning boards found new tools to enforce it. Highways tore through Black neighborhoods in San Francisco and Detroit. Urban renewal became “Negro removal.” Birmingham forced the country to look. Kennedy named it a moral crisis. Johnson created HUD, appointing Robert C. Weaver, the first Black cabinet secretary. Then came the pivot—Section 235, 236, vouchers, block grants, Pruitt-Igoe, Moses vs. Jacobs, Nixon’s New Federalism, and a shift from building homes to subsidizing rent.
This is the story of how a movement won rights—but lost ground in planning rooms, mortgage offices, and zoning maps. How public housing gave way to vouchers. How the market replaced the public builder. And how America traded homes as social infrastructure for housing as financial asset.
If you want to understand why affordability collapsed, why public housing withered, why vouchers fall short, and how modern inequality took shape—Episode 4 shows the pivot point.
Episode Extras - Photos, videos, sources and links to additional content found during research.
Episode Credits:
Production in collaboration with Gābl Media
Written & Executive Produced by Dimitrius Lynch
Audio Engineering and Sound Design by Jeff Alvarez
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
The summer heat in Birmingham was stagnant, thick and assaulting like a blow to the faceas soon as you stepped outside.
It clung to the skin, to the cotton shirts of marchers, to the fur of police dogs.
You could see it in the glint of sunlight bouncing off the chrome of fire hoses.
(00:23):
It was 1963 and the sidewalks were trembling with the sound of footsteps, hundreds ofthem.
in rhythm, in defiance, in hope.
From Atlanta to Selma, from Montgomery to Chicago, the nation was coming apart and comingalive all at once.
The Civil Rights Movement wasn't just a protest.
(00:46):
It was an earthquake that began in sanctuaries and schoolhouses, shaking loose the mythsof separate but equal that had been sold and sewn into America and its architecture.
It all started in Montgomery with a 15 year old who refused to give up her seat to a whitewoman.
Montgomery had segregation policies everywhere.
(01:09):
On the bus, black people were required to sit in the back, foregoing convenience for whiteriders.
Drivers had flexibility to adjust section size based on the rider count.
But the expectation was that if a white person needed a seat,
a black person had to give up their seat and stand in the back.
(01:29):
On March 2nd, 1955, Claudette Colvin and three of her friends were sitting just beyond thehalfway point of a full bus.
They were asked to clear their entire row and all stand in the back for one white woman.
That day when the bus driver asked me to get up, I had this feeling come over me.
(01:54):
It felt like Harriet Tubman was holding me down, hands were holding me down on oneshoulder, and so John of Truth hands were holding me down on another shoulder.
And I was glued to the seat and I could hear the white passion is saying, she got to move,she got to move, that's the law, she got to move.
(02:15):
And I felt like
This is my time to take a stand for justice.
In that clip from Great Big Story, Colvin explains her thought process in the moment.
She was arrested that day for her dissent, becoming the first to violate Montgomery's bussegregation policy.
Now that story may sound familiar, but not the name.
(02:39):
More famously, Rosa Parks later defied the policy too.
At the time, Parks was a seamstress in a local department store.
but was also a secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People, or NAACP.
The NAACP got wind of Colvin's incident, but for the face of the resistance, leadershipcalculated that a teenager, who had also become pregnant out of wedlock by this point,
(03:09):
would not be good to publicize.
Instead, they rallied around Parks.
On the night of Parks' arrest,
The Women's Political Council, a group of black women working for the civil rightsmovement, circulated flyers sparking a 381-day boycott that turned bus seats into
battlefields and city blocks into crucibles of change.
(03:33):
In churches, people strategized by candlelight.
They whispered about court rulings and arrests, but they also whispered about courage, thekind that costs something.
By the early 1960s, that courage had spread north and south alike.
College students in Greensboro sat at lunch counters and refused to leave.
(03:55):
In Jackson, Mississippi, they were dragged from stools and beaten bloody while TV camerasrolled.
And in Washington, D.C., a young preacher stood before a quarter million people and daredto say the word dream out loud.
But that dream stood on the shaky ground of maps already drawn, red lines that stretchedacross every American city.
(04:20):
Even as marchers filled the streets demanding freedom, the geography of segregation washolding firm in brick, mortgage, and law.
Black families were confined by housing covenants that banned them from buying in whiteneighborhoods.
Banks denied loans on the grounds that the character of a community might change.
In cities like Chicago,
(04:41):
Los Angeles, and Detroit, entire black neighborhoods were carved up by new highways, theirhomes bulldozed in the name of progress.
The acclaimed writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin best communicated the moment.
A boy last week, was 16, in San Francisco, told me on television, thank God we got totalk, maybe somebody would start to listen.
(05:07):
He said, I got no country, I've got no flag, I'm only 16 years old.
And I couldn't say you do.
I don't have any evidence to prove that he does.
They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging, most northern citiesnow are engaged, in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out.
(05:31):
It means Negro removal.
That is what it means.
And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.
Now this, we're talking about human beings.
(05:57):
In Birmingham, Alabama, the movement initiated one of its most remarkable demonstrations,but also faced one of its most cruel consequences.
In 1963, just over 60 years ago, less than a generation, police chief Bull Connordisrupted the Birmingham Children's March through arrests and infamously ordering fire
(06:28):
hoses, turned up to 100 PSI at times to be unleashed on children as young as nine yearsold.
Police dogs lunged at protesters.
The images flooded the nightly news.
Black bodies hurled across pavement by streams of water so powerful they peeled bark offtrees.
(06:48):
Those pictures did what words could not.
They forced a nation to look.
That summer, President John F.
Kennedy called civil rights a moral crisis.
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet theirheirs, their grandsons are not fully free.
(07:11):
They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.
They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.
And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boats, will not be fully free until all itscitizens are free.
We preach freedom around the world and we mean it and we cherish our freedom here at home.
(07:36):
But are we to say to the world and much more importantly to each other that this is a landof the free except for the Negroes?
That we have no second class citizens except Negroes?
That we have no class or caste system?
No ghettos?
No master race except with respect to Negroes?
(07:59):
Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.
The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that nocity or state or legislative body can brutally choose to ignore them.
The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, north and south, wherelegal remedies are not at hand.
(08:25):
Regress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations.
parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.
We face therefore a moral crisis as a country and a people.
It cannot be met by repressive police action.
It cannot be left to increase demonstrations in the streets.
(08:48):
It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk.
It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body.
and above all, in all of our daily lives.
It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section ofthe country or another, or deplore the facts that we face.
(09:12):
A great change is at hand.
And our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful andconstructive for all.
Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence.
Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.
(09:39):
The following year, after the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon B.
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public places andemployment.
It was a legal victory born of unbearable sacrifice.
Yet, the work was far from over.
(09:59):
Discrimination didn't vanish.
It adapted.
In 1965, as activists marched from Selma to Montgomery,
Under the protection of federal troops, the first zoning boards were quietly rewritingcodes that would preserve racial and economic segregation without ever mentioning race.
(10:20):
In neighborhoods where deeds could no longer exclude by color, city planners began to doit by design through single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes, and mortgage policies that
priced out the very people civil rights laws claim to protect.
By the late 1960s, the battle lines had shifted north.
(10:41):
In Chicago, Martin Luther King Jr.
marched through white neighborhoods where residents pelted him with rocks.
In Detroit, Newark and Watts, frustrations raged into fire.
The Kerner Commission, officially known as the National Advisory Commission on CivilDisorders, would later conclude what millions already knew.
(11:04):
White racism
was the primary cause of the unrest in America and we were quote, moving toward twosocieties, one black, one white, separate and unequal, end quote.
In 1968, the Fair Housing Act became law.
It was meant to be the final blow against housing discrimination to open neighborhoods,credit and opportunity to all.
(11:30):
But the ink was barely dry when Martin Luther King Jr.
was killed on a balcony in Memphis, and the cities he marched through burned again.
The promise of fair housing was already colliding with the machinery of profit andpolitics.
The civil rights movement changed the law, but it couldn't yet change the landscape.
(11:51):
In the decade that followed, highways kept cutting through black communities, propertyvalues kept dictating who could belong,
and the American dream that ideal of stability and home remained fenced off by invisiblelines.
Because the architecture of exclusion is so ingrained, patient.
(12:11):
It doesn't always wear a hood or carry a sign.
Sometimes it hides in policy, zoning, and ballot sheets.
The marchers of the 1960s fought for civil rights on the streets.
Their children would have to fight for them at the planning board
the mortgage office and the city council meeting.
The dream wasn't dead, it was deferred, redesigned and resold.
(12:37):
I'm Demetrius Lynch and this is Built to Divide.
In less than a lifetime, in less than my own 57 years, America has become a highlyurbanized nation.
And we must face the many meanings of this new America.
(12:57):
Taking neighborhoods that exist already, and maybe they're not very attractive, and maybethey've only got poor people in, and maybe they've only got immigrants in.
But thinking, what can you do here to keep these people here and to make them feel that...
They're valued.
(13:28):
Last time we stepped off the deck of the USS Missouri and into a country racing to turnvictory into stability.
We followed Operation Magic Carpet as millions of GIs came home.
The GI Bill, FHA and VA loans and Fannie Mae as they rewired credit and a culture industryfrom Sears kit homes to glossy magazine spreads, selling the house as the heart of the
(13:54):
American dream.
We traced modernist experiments like the case study homes, then watched the market crownLevittown, mass produced suburbia as national policy.
And we reminded ourselves of the shadow, redlining covenants and zoning that decided whogot in and who didn't.
If you haven't listened to that episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to all theepisodes of this series in order.
(14:21):
Today we pick up where the dream hardens into doctrine.
the Fair Housing Act.
LBJ builds HUD and expands credit.
Section 235 and 236 rise and fall.
Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs fight over the city's soul.
And Nixon slams the brakes, pivoting from building units to cutting checks.
(14:44):
And we'll get into all of that after this break.
Episode 4, The Pivot.
(15:05):
The promise of a decent home in a suitable living environment sounded simple.
It was not.
It was never just a question of walls and roofs.
It was a question of who counted, who paid, and who was allowed to stay.
By the mid-1960s, the federal government had a housing system that could move mountains ofmoney and draw red lines with the same pen.
(15:30):
The Federal Housing Administration had steered credit for three decades.
stabilizing mortgages and standardizing appraisals and segregation that largely inhibitedopportunity for some to build wealth.
In neighborhood after neighborhood, lending rules quietly linked risk to race.
Black families and many immigrant families paid more for worse housing or were shut outaltogether.
(15:56):
Then came the civil rights decade and with it, a national reckoning.
If the law says we are equal,
What does it mean when risk maps disagree?
In Washington, reform gathered around an unlikely figure.
Republican Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, a Midwestern industrialist with a reformer'spitch.
(16:19):
Percy had watched the uprisings of the late sixties and drew a blunt conclusion.
Denying people a stake in their neighborhoods is dangerous for them, for cities and fordemocracy.
Fifth, therefore, I hope that we're going to offer our minorities and our blackpopulations in this country a chance to become a part of the economic and social fiber of
(16:44):
the country through ownership, ownership of their own homes, ownership of their ownbusinesses, ownership of their own financial institutions.
And I think the business community should dedicate itself to providing technicalassistance to our 22 million blacks in this country, just as we have the end of
World War II provided $110 billion since then in technical assistance to our enemies torebuild them, our allies to build them and developing nations.
(17:15):
We have a whole developing nation of American citizens in this country and we need nationbuilding at home first ahead of nation building abroad.
It was moral language, but not naive.
Percy's push came with urgency.
Fear of more summers like 1967 and 1968.
(17:36):
Fear of more neighborhoods feeling abandoned by their own country.
The thought was, if people own the structure, they're less likely to burn down the street.
Percy's urgency met an empathetic presidency that understood poverty.
Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath on Air Force One on November 22nd, 1963, with thenation in shock from JFK's assassination.
(18:02):
He brought to the job a lifetime of watching poverty up close.
First as a teacher of Mexican-American children in Cotuya, Texas, then as a congressmanwho understood the arithmetic of power.
LBJ believed government could be a tool for dignity.
Within months, he declared a war on poverty and then came the avalanche.
(18:24):
Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, and anti-pollution laws.
For civil rights,
He turned the full weight of the presidency towards the nation's conscience, the CivilRights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But housing was the hard one.
(18:45):
It wasn't just policy.
It was space, status, wealth, and a thousand local veto points that could choke reform atany phase.
In 1965, Johnson created a cabinet seat for the fight.
the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.
(19:15):
of America.
This legislation establishes the 11th Department of our Federal Government, the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development.
When our nation was born, the only departments of government were state and treasury andwar.
Our country and our government have grown greatly since that time.
(19:35):
But we have been sparing in creating new and additional departments, except the need hasbeen clear and compelling and continuing.
That is clearly the case for this, the newest department.
The America of our founding fathers was, of course, a rural America.
The virtues and values of our rural heritage have shaped and strengthened the Americancharacter for all our 189 years.
(20:03):
Our debt to this heritage is deep and abiding, and we shall honor it always.
When Thomas Jefferson spoke of rural virtues,
cities were insignificant on the countryside of this continent.
Only 5 percent of our people lived then in cities or villages.
America was the land of the farmer and the woodsman and the hunter and the mountaineer.
(20:26):
And even a century ago, when Abraham Lincoln asked the Congress to create a Department ofAgriculture, fewer than 20 percent of our people then lived in cities.
Now that day is gone.
It never will return.
In less than a lifetime, in less than my own 57 years, America has become a highlyurbanized nation.
(20:48):
And we must face the many meanings of this new America.
To lead this new department, Johnson made the historic selection of Robert C.
Weaver as its first secretary, the first black American to hold a cabinet post.
Weaver, an economist and academic, had served as a political administrator in New York,
(21:09):
as well as in DC, within Franklin Roosevelt and John F.
Kennedy's administrations.
This is Secretary Weaver discussing new programs in his department after appearing beforethe House Banking and Currency Subcommittee.
Do you foresee a clash here again between City Hall and the four?
No, because in this particular program, this program is going to be a program developedwith City Hall and developed by the local government, by the local government officials
(21:36):
who were elected, though they can't very well conflict with themselves anymore.
than any bureaucracy at the internal difficulty.
Can you give us just an estimate, if everything goes well, when could a city like New YorkCity actually become a beneficiary of this program?
Well, I'm not going to say when any city like any city can, but any city which comes intothis program would have, assuming that the laws passed, say, as of June of this year, they
(22:01):
would be a year's period during which they could be doing the planning and developingfirst their proposal.
getting into their planning and I would say that it should get underway within 12 to 18months after the law is passed.
Is it probable that New York City will be the first beneficiary under this?
This is up to time to decide and not for me.
HUD wasn't a single program.
(22:23):
It was a switchboard.
Mortgages, subsidies, urban renewal, public housing, insurance, all running throughfederal circuits.
And then in 1968, with riots fresh in memory and momentum in Congress,
the country passed the Fair Housing Act, a federal promise to end discrimination in thesale and rental of housing.
(22:47):
But law alone couldn't solve the problem or fix a market shaped by decades of exclusion.
The question was, what tool could change things locally?
If the New Deal steadied mortgage finance, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968tried to push production to scale, fast.
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The idea was simple, audacious, and deeply American.
Build our way out of the crisis and buy our way to stability.
Two new engines roared to life.
Section 236, cheap financing for moderate income rental housing to lower interest ratesand make projects pencil out.
(23:29):
Section 235, heavily subsidized home ownership for low and moderate income families.
Small down payments.
low monthly costs, and FHA insurance to incentivize lenders.
HUD also introduced the Turnkey program, which allowed local housing authorities to buyprivately built developments directly into the public housing inventory, a faster, cheaper
(23:57):
alternative to constructing massive new projects from scratch.
This approach was informed by lessons learned from the missteps of Pruitt-Igoe in St.
Louis.
Completed in 1954 as a symbol of modern urban renewal, Pruitt-Igoe's 33 high-rise towersbecame a case study and failure.
(24:18):
Underfunded maintenance, social isolation, rising crime, and neglect.
By the early 1970s, two-thirds of its units sat vacant, and the city made a dramaticchoice, demolition.
In response, HUD turned toward scattered site housing.
smaller clusters of public homes woven into existing neighborhoods instead of beingconcentrated in a single complex.
(24:46):
These homes could take many forms, single-family houses, duplexes, townhomes, or smallapartment buildings.
The intent was simple but profound.
Reduce the stigma of public housing, mix incomes, and give low-income families access tosafer, better-resourced communities.
(25:06):
Scattered site housing wasn't just an architectural adjustment, it was an ideological one.
A move away from containment towards connection to rebuild community rather than isolatepoverty.
Moving forward, the target was enormous.
Commissions called for millions of affordable units.
Weaver's HUD tried to blend public ambition with private speed so that sites, permits, andlenders wouldn't bottleneck the dream.
(25:34):
For a brief window it worked, with peak production in 69 and 70, subsidized unitsmultiplying and public and moderate income stocks surging.
For every abstract promise, there were people actually walking into their first home.
But Section 235 had two weaknesses.
One, it tethered opportunity to existing appraisal ecosystems, the very actors who hadlong tagged black neighborhoods as high risk.
(26:04):
Two, it depended on local brokers, lenders, and inspectors to act in good faith in marketswhere inciting panic had long been a business model.
In city after city, realtors and housing speculators continued the same cruel pattern.
They whispered to white owners, sell now.
(26:27):
fear spread and prices dropped.
Those same speculators could step in to buy depreciated homes from white families, thenturn around and sell it to a black family at much higher prices, using government-backed
programs like Section 235 and FHA loans to make poison sales look safe to lenders.
(26:49):
The deals were poisoned because appraisals were often fraudulently inflated
to make homes seem worth more than they really were.
Brokers also often rushed inspections, ignoring problems with the home to quickly closethe deal.
At first, the monthly payments looked manageable, but as soon as roofs leaked, furnacesbroke, and maintenance costs rose, these families couldn't keep up with the payments.
(27:17):
The government was then on the hook to cover the bank's losses.
Black homeowners
and the affected neighborhoods were subsequently blamed for the decline.
The cycle reinforced the narrative and the same trick was repeated on the next block.
In Philadelphia, between 1969 and 1971, thousands of Section 235 homes went intoforeclosure.
(27:41):
More than all FHA foreclosures since the 1930s.
Was 235 a bad idea?
It appears to have been good in principle
But the subsidy design made the program easy for bad actors to game and the market made itprofitable to prey on people, particularly in a racially tense environment.
(28:02):
Congressional hearings followed.
Inspectors were called out for rubber stamping.
Families, black mothers and veterans testified about promises made in neighborhoods leftunderwater, literally and financially.
The federal ideal was on trial, not just the program.
but faith in the government to deliver a fair deal.
(28:23):
While HUD was trying to stitch neighborhoods with subsidies, another story took shape, andit begins with a man who never met a bulldozer he didn't like.
Robert Moses, the master builder, had already redefined New York by the 1960s.
Since the 1920s, he was an urban planner known for aggressively pushing projects,including a slippery tactic
(28:48):
where he initiated projects that were grander than approved, knowing the legislature wouldeventually have to green light it to avoid the appearance of ineffective oversight.
Of course I am a limited objective boy.
I couldn't get anything done, nor could the people that are working with me on any otherbasis.
But on the other hand, it's ridiculous to say that things we're working on don't show anyimagination, that they're all...
(29:15):
uh
without uh vision and without regard to the future and that they're just these immediateshowy immediate things.
Now you take a thing like uh a project like Jones Beach for example.
Well we've been at Jones Beach since 1924.
That's a long time.
(29:39):
The original plan is no different from the present plan.
We've carried out about maybe
70 % of it, 75 % of it, in the course of 35 years.
That's how long it's taken.
And it just happens to be our good fortune or luck or whatever you may call it, that thepeople who originally conceived the idea are still around.
(30:00):
They're extant and maybe a little groggy, but they're still here.
Parks, pools, bridges, parkways, an empire of concrete and steel.
He knew how to draft a bill and how to bury a neighborhood.
Under New Deal dollars in the 1940s, he could move Earth faster than anyone.
(30:20):
He brought beaches to the masses and highways through the heart of the city.
But the price was brutal.
Coal blocks devastated in the name of urban renewal.
Tenements cleared for towers or roads.
Black and Puerto Rican communities sliced into islands by expressways.
(30:41):
History would later accuse him of more.
intentionally installing low bridges to keep buses and thus porter families off parkwaysto the shore, pool siding that tracked racial lines, and a thousand tactical maneuvers to
keep the city's best air for the few.
And then a counter voice emerged.
(31:02):
Jane Jacobs, writer and neighborhood activist, published The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities in 1961.
While Moses admired the bird's eye view, Jacobs argued for the block.
Eyes on the street, mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings next to new, human scalecomplexity.
(31:28):
I think a good place to begin, trying to make neighborhood hearts, where the action is.
If people get fond of their district, their neighborhood, and stay there, and if the cityis working the way it should, they begin to get connections, begin the next generation to
(31:51):
get better educations and so on.
And all of this is reflected in the neighborhood.
A heart is not in disembodied things that you just set down arbitrarily, like choosing theshopping center site.
It has to have an anatomy that runs into the neighborhood.
(32:15):
And the anatomy, the clue to it is what you always hear when people talk about a hangout.
Oh, it's the corner store or it's the corner bar.
There's always that word corner.
What does that mean?
Well, actually it means that there's an intersection and this corner is a powerful place.
(32:43):
If that intersection is of two or more pedestrian paths that go into the community, that'sthe anatomy that a heart has to have.
the very essence of is the place going to be interesting to walk in?
(33:04):
it going to be useful to walk in?
Is it going to get more so?
Is it going to get less so?
Now over time, if the heart is successful, oh it's going to change.
Taking the neighborhoods that exist.
already and maybe they're not very attractive and maybe they've only got poor people inand maybe they've only got immigrants in.
(33:31):
But thinking what can you do here to keep these people here and to make them feel thatthey're valued.
With the coalition of parents, shopkeepers, and artists representing Greenwich Village,SoHo, and Little Italy, she led the fight against Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway.
(33:54):
They won.
Moses gave cities infrastructure, but also scars.
Jacobs promoted a language to resist, but it also came with an unintended future.
Decades later, neighborhoods preserved for community would become luxury enclaves.
See, preservation without policy invites gentrification.
(34:16):
Policy without preservation can lead to erasure.
Both truths mattered, and both would collide with HUD's experiment.
Back in Washington, Johnson's exit and Richard Nixon's arrival as president did notimmediately slam the brakes on housing reform.
Nixon surprised some observers.
(34:38):
He initially seemed willing to extend pieces of Johnson's Great Society programs.
He named George Romney, former Michigan governor and an integration advocate to lead HUD.
And in the early years, HUD's spending actually grew.
But behind the scenes, another project gathered momentum, New Federalism.
(34:59):
As a direct reaction to the sweeping federal authority of the New Deal and Great Societypolicies that put the collective first,
The idea of new federalism was to dissolve that collective strength and pushdecision-making out of Washington via revenue sharing and block grants.
Nixon, a pragmatist with deep ties to the business community, sought to recentergovernment around efficiency and market-driven principles, an approach that appealed to
(35:30):
corporate leaders and fiscal conservatives wary of federal expansion and the strength ofthe people.
that came with it.
The idea was shaped and refined by three key advisors, Herbert Stein, Daniel PatrickMoynihan, and John Ehrlichman.
Stein, an economist and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, athink tank founded in 1938 by a group of New York businessmen, promoted limited government
(36:00):
and market efficiency, grounding new federalism in business-friendly economics.
Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, brought an interest in environmental andadministrative reform, emphasizing executive control and efficiency over sprawling
bureaucracy.
And Moynihan, a Democrat who had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, wastapped to be Nixon's aide after his controversial Moynihan report on black poverty, where
(36:31):
he was convinced that top-down welfare programs
often deepened dependency rather than opportunity.
At the time, the public face of federal housing programs and the moral justification forthem was largely the black community.
These initiatives, however flawed, were meant to correct decades of redlining,segregation, and systemic exclusion from wealth building.
(36:58):
Now, I want to be clear.
Income inequality cuts across every demographic.
But it's important to understand that because of the long legacy of race-basedexclusionary laws and policies, the black community had become a bellwether for the
nation's broader economic health, a measure of whether prosperity was truly shared orselectively withheld.
(37:22):
The 1970s and 80s marked another major economic turning point for the U.S.
You could see the culture shift in real time, a retreat from social investment
a resurgence of market-first ideology, and a growing downward pressure on American workingclass, especially on the low-income side of its two-track wealth system, where the Black
(37:45):
experience revealed the strain most clearly.
In 1973, the first domino fell.
Nixon announced a suspension of new HUD housing and urban development commitments.
The message was crisp and devastating.
construction programs were too expensive, benefited too few, and produced low qualityenvironments.
(38:15):
you
The implosion of Pruitt-Igoe just a year earlier had become a powerful symbol againstgovernment intervention.
In a stunning pivot, Nixon dismissed a decade of learning what works and what doesn't.
(38:37):
Instead of improvements, he abandoned the idea altogether.
The dramatic TV clip of a tower falling was easier to sell than a footnote about scattersite housing.
His special message to the Congress read in part,
Leaders of all political persuasions and from all levels of government have given a greatdeal of thought in recent years to the problem of low-income housing.
(39:06):
Many of them agree that the federally subsidized housing approach has failed and many ofthem also agree on the reasons for that failure.
The main flaw they point to in the old approach is its underlying assumption that thebasic problem of the poor
is a lack of housing rather than a lack of income.
(39:26):
Instead of treating the root cause of the problem, the inability to pay for housing thegovernment has been attacking the symptom.
We have been helping the builders directly and the poor only indirectly, rather thanproviding assistance directly to low-income families.
In place of this old approach, many people have suggested a new approach direct cashassistance.
(39:51):
Under this approach,
Instead of providing a poor family with a place to live, the federal government wouldprovide qualified recipients with an appropriate housing payment and would then let them
choose their own homes on the private market.
The payment would be carefully scaled to make up the difference between what a familycould afford on its own for housing and the cost of safe and sanitary housing in that
(40:17):
geographic area.
This plan would give the poor the freedom and responsibility to make their own choicesabout housing and it would eventually get the federal government out of the housing
business.
The market, not the public builder, would deliver shelter.
The government would provide vouchers, not units.
(40:40):
Choice would replace commitment.
Costs would substitute construction.
In September of 73, the White House released Housing in the 70s, a strategy paper thatread like a eulogy for public production.
It flagged failures of management, foreclosures in 236 and 235, and the high cost ofconstruction.
(41:03):
while also noting, almost in passing, that tax expenditures for homeowners dwarfedlow-income housing aid.
We'll discuss this more, but the biggest subsidy in American housing then, as now, waswritten into the tax code, not the budget, and it buoyed the middle and upper tiers of
(41:24):
society through mortgage interest deductions and property tax preferences.
But those weren't up for elimination.
Congress erupted.
Former HUD Secretary Weaver testified that there should be mixed strategies.
Fix existing housing where vacancies allowed, build where the shortage was real.
(41:46):
He warned that abandoning production entirely would lock neighborhoods into decay.
Cities and tenant groups denounced the impoundment of funds as executive overreach.
Lawsuits flew and mayors called the cuts catastrophic.
But remember,
There were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr.
(42:06):
and John F.
Kennedy in the late 60s.
As questions around the assassinations emerged, public trust in government began todecline in general, greasing the argument for reduced government.
The pivot on housing held, and with it a new language.
Decency measured in efficiency, equity measured in head counts.
(42:30):
If a voucher could serve three families at the cost of building one unit, the ledger saidthe voucher wins.
But the ledger rarely counted where those families could live, who accepted them, or whatpower they had at the leasing table.
As wealth capitalized on the opportunity, regaining its footing, the vulnerable no longerhad a champion.
(42:55):
This was the context for and emergence of the modern subsidy.
tenant-based assistance, the program we now know as Section 8 housing choice vouchers.
We'll examine it more closely in the next episode, but the theory was straightforward.
Give families portable purchasing power and stretch federal dollars further than publicprojects ever could.
(43:18):
Sometimes it worked, but landlords in high opportunity zip codes learned to say, we don'ttake vouchers, which was legal in many states.
One HUD official said, quote, we replace public ghettos with private ones.
The country simply replaced a federal obligation to build with the federal promise to payand then allow local rules to decide who could collect rules already framed by the two
(43:46):
track system, a system that only government is uniquely positioned to address.
Meanwhile, public housing withered, budgets shrank, maintenance delayed,
units boarded up, and demolitions outpaced replacements.
In some cities, HOPE 6, a HUD program intended to revitalize the most distressed publichousing projects into mixed income developments, did so but often at a lower unit count,
(44:16):
dispersing many of the original families with vouchers.
The consequences could be felt around the country.
In Chicago, with plastic taped over broken windows,
and the bite of winter rolling in, tenants organized rent strikes, demanding heat,repairs, and dignity.
In the Bronx, entire avenues burned, arson for insurance, and buildings landlords could nolonger finance or refuse to maintain.
(44:45):
In Los Angeles, subsidies gave access to a rotting unit, but downtown drew federal dollarsfor convention centers and stadiums.
This was the Community Development Block Grant at work.
Flexible federal funds directed to local governments for community development activitiesaimed at improving affordable housing, infrastructure, and economic opportunities,
(45:10):
primarily for low and moderate income residents.
Now there were some bright spots.
Community Development Corporations also sprang up.
Boston's Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Detroit's Community Land Trusts,
and Oakland's rehabilitations illustrated neighbors turning vacant buildings into housingon their own.
(45:32):
They proved that when communities steered the money, places could be repaired withoutexiling their people.
But they were rowing upstream against a river now widening towards financialization.
Mortgages bundled, sold, securitized.
Home as asset class, neighborhood as yield.
(45:52):
The New Deal had socialized risks
to spread the reward of ownership.
The 1970s and beyond privatized reward while socializing risk.
The pivot to treat housing as a line item instead of the platform for health, education,safety, and belonging proved to be devastating for society.
(46:13):
And this was just the beginning.
Half a century on, more than 2 million households rely on vouchers.
Only one in four eligible families ever gets one.
Public housing stock has fallen by hundreds of thousands of units from its peak.
In the places with the best schools and shortest commutes, zoning still walls off access.
(46:36):
In the places where vouchers stretch, jobs often don't.
What we cut in the 1970s was not just spending, we cut capacity.
The idea that a nation can plan, build, and keep a stock of housing that we maintain.
the same way we maintain infrastructure.
Because housing is the foundation of a healthy society.
(46:59):
What we lost was the ability to build where the market will not, repair what the marketwon't, provide support that converts to growth opportunities, change zoning to benefit the
commonwealth, and prioritize people over profits.
The most expensive housing policy in the world is the one that keeps paying for thefallout.
(47:22):
health emergencies, missed school, lost jobs, broken neighborhoods, and a vision thatblooms within the emptiness where trust should be.
In the following decade, the rise of advocacy and austerity defines what came next.
We'll meet Habitat for Humanity, swinging hammers where budgets shrink.
(47:44):
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, pushing policy from the margins,
and the groups protecting the mortgage interest deduction while encouraging divestmentfrom the public.
We'll follow deregulation from Milton Friedman to Margaret Thatcher's right to buy, tracehow vouchers expand while social programs contract, and watch deindustrialization hollow
(48:08):
cities just as gentrification and new urbanism promise walkable dreams, often without thepeople who live there first.
We'll also examine how the National Association of Realtors becomes a powerhouse inWashington, how master-planned empires like Irvine take shape, and why affordability keeps
(48:30):
slipping even as wealth expands.
Next time on Built to Divide.
found our guy.
Who?
Donald Bren.
Why?
Because Al, you and I look like a couple of gangsters from Detroit.
This guy looks like he came from Hollywood.
(49:02):
Thanks for listening.
Built to Divide is presented by Lines, my architecture and creative studio.
This podcast is produced in collaboration with Gable Media.
If you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and rate and review it on Apple podcasts andSpotify.
It really helps others find it.
And if you're looking for similar content, Built to Divide is part of the Gable Medianetwork where you can find even more like this.
(49:30):
Visit gablemedia.com.
That's G-A-B-L media.com.
And before I go, if you want to see additional photos, video clips and content that wentinto this episode, you can visit me at lines.studio slash podcasts.
Talk soon.
(50:00):
What is the diplomatic reception room used for besides receiving diplomats?
Well, it's the room that people see first when they come to the White House.
Everyone who comes to a state dinner here comes through it and leaves by it.
So I think it should be a pretty room.
It's the way I came in and it's a beautiful room.
The wallpaper is magnificent.
(50:21):
Yes, this is wallpaper that was printed in France about 1834.
It's all scenes of America.
The summer heat in Birmingham was stagnant, thick and assaulting like a blow to the faceas soon as you stepped outside.
It clung to the skin, to the cotton shirts of marchers, to the fur of police dogs.
You could see it in the glint of sunlight bouncing off the chrome of fire hoses.
(00:23):
It was 1963 and the sidewalks were trembling with the sound of footsteps, hundreds ofthem.
in rhythm, in defiance, in hope.
From Atlanta to Selma, from Montgomery to Chicago, the nation was coming apart and comingalive all at once.
The Civil Rights Movement wasn't just a protest.
(00:46):
It was an earthquake that began in sanctuaries and schoolhouses, shaking loose the mythsof separate but equal that had been sold and sewn into America and its architecture.
It all started in Montgomery with a 15 year old who refused to give up her seat to a whitewoman.
Montgomery had segregation policies everywhere.
(01:09):
On the bus, black people were required to sit in the back, foregoing convenience for whiteriders.
Drivers had flexibility to adjust section size based on the rider count.
But the expectation was that if a white person needed a seat,
a black person had to give up their seat and stand in the back.
(01:29):
On March 2nd, 1955, Claudette Colvin and three of her friends were sitting just beyond thehalfway point of a full bus.
They were asked to clear their entire row and all stand in the back for one white woman.
That day when the bus driver asked me to get up, I had this feeling come over me.
(01:54):
It felt like Harriet Tubman was holding me down, hands were holding me down on oneshoulder, and so John of Truth hands were holding me down on another shoulder.
And I was glued to the seat and I could hear the white passion is saying, she got to move,she got to move, that's the law, she got to move.
(02:15):
And I felt like
This is my time to take a stand for justice.
In that clip from Great Big Story, Colvin explains her thought process in the moment.
She was arrested that day for her dissent, becoming the first to violate Montgomery's bussegregation policy.
Now that story may sound familiar, but not the name.
(02:39):
More famously, Rosa Parks later defied the policy too.
At the time, Parks was a seamstress in a local department store.
but was also a secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People, or NAACP.
The NAACP got wind of Colvin's incident, but for the face of the resistance, leadershipcalculated that a teenager, who had also become pregnant out of wedlock by this point,
(03:09):
would not be good to publicize.
Instead, they rallied around Parks.
On the night of Parks' arrest,
The Women's Political Council, a group of black women working for the civil rightsmovement, circulated flyers sparking a 381-day boycott that turned bus seats into
battlefields and city blocks into crucibles of change.
(03:33):
In churches, people strategized by candlelight.
They whispered about court rulings and arrests, but they also whispered about courage, thekind that costs something.
By the early 1960s, that courage had spread north and south alike.
College students in Greensboro sat at lunch counters and refused to leave.
(03:55):
In Jackson, Mississippi, they were dragged from stools and beaten bloody while TV camerasrolled.
And in Washington, D.C., a young preacher stood before a quarter million people and daredto say the word dream out loud.
But that dream stood on the shaky ground of maps already drawn, red lines that stretchedacross every American city.
(04:20):
Even as marchers filled the streets demanding freedom, the geography of segregation washolding firm in brick, mortgage, and law.
Black families were confined by housing covenants that banned them from buying in whiteneighborhoods.
Banks denied loans on the grounds that the character of a community might change.
In cities like Chicago,
(04:41):
Los Angeles, and Detroit, entire black neighborhoods were carved up by new highways, theirhomes bulldozed in the name of progress.
The acclaimed writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin best communicated the moment.
A boy last week, was 16, in San Francisco, told me on television, thank God we got totalk, maybe somebody would start to listen.
(05:07):
He said, I got no country, I've got no flag, I'm only 16 years old.
And I couldn't say you do.
I don't have any evidence to prove that he does.
They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging, most northern citiesnow are engaged, in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out.
(05:31):
It means Negro removal.
That is what it means.
And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.
Now this, we're talking about human beings.
(05:57):
In Birmingham, Alabama, the movement initiated one of its most remarkable demonstrations,but also faced one of its most cruel consequences.
In 1963, just over 60 years ago, less than a generation, police chief Bull Connordisrupted the Birmingham Children's March through arrests and infamously ordering fire
(06:28):
hoses, turned up to 100 PSI at times to be unleashed on children as young as nine yearsold.
Police dogs lunged at protesters.
The images flooded the nightly news.
Black bodies hurled across pavement by streams of water so powerful they peeled bark offtrees.
(06:48):
Those pictures did what words could not.
They forced a nation to look.
That summer, President John F.
Kennedy called civil rights a moral crisis.
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet theirheirs, their grandsons are not fully free.
(07:11):
They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.
They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.
And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boats, will not be fully free until all itscitizens are free.
We preach freedom around the world and we mean it and we cherish our freedom here at home.
(07:36):
But are we to say to the world and much more importantly to each other that this is a landof the free except for the Negroes?
That we have no second class citizens except Negroes?
That we have no class or caste system?
No ghettos?
No master race except with respect to Negroes?
(07:59):
Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.
The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that nocity or state or legislative body can brutally choose to ignore them.
The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, north and south, wherelegal remedies are not at hand.
(08:25):
Regress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations.
parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.
We face therefore a moral crisis as a country and a people.
It cannot be met by repressive police action.
It cannot be left to increase demonstrations in the streets.
(08:48):
It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk.
It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body.
and above all, in all of our daily lives.
It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section ofthe country or another, or deplore the facts that we face.
(09:12):
A great change is at hand.
And our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful andconstructive for all.
Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence.
Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.
(09:39):
The following year, after the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon B.
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public places andemployment.
It was a legal victory born of unbearable sacrifice.
Yet, the work was far from over.
(09:59):
Discrimination didn't vanish.
It adapted.
In 1965, as activists marched from Selma to Montgomery,
Under the protection of federal troops, the first zoning boards were quietly rewritingcodes that would preserve racial and economic segregation without ever mentioning race.
(10:20):
In neighborhoods where deeds could no longer exclude by color, city planners began to doit by design through single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes, and mortgage policies that
priced out the very people civil rights laws claim to protect.
By the late 1960s, the battle lines had shifted north.
(10:41):
In Chicago, Martin Luther King Jr.
marched through white neighborhoods where residents pelted him with rocks.
In Detroit, Newark and Watts, frustrations raged into fire.
The Kerner Commission, officially known as the National Advisory Commission on CivilDisorders, would later conclude what millions already knew.
(11:04):
White racism
was the primary cause of the unrest in America and we were quote, moving toward twosocieties, one black, one white, separate and unequal, end quote.
In 1968, the Fair Housing Act became law.
It was meant to be the final blow against housing discrimination to open neighborhoods,credit and opportunity to all.
(11:30):
But the ink was barely dry when Martin Luther King Jr.
was killed on a balcony in Memphis, and the cities he marched through burned again.
The promise of fair housing was already colliding with the machinery of profit andpolitics.
The civil rights movement changed the law, but it couldn't yet change the landscape.
(11:51):
In the decade that followed, highways kept cutting through black communities, propertyvalues kept dictating who could belong,
and the American dream that ideal of stability and home remained fenced off by invisiblelines.
Because the architecture of exclusion is so ingrained, patient.
(12:11):
It doesn't always wear a hood or carry a sign.
Sometimes it hides in policy, zoning, and ballot sheets.
The marchers of the 1960s fought for civil rights on the streets.
Their children would have to fight for them at the planning board
the mortgage office and the city council meeting.
The dream wasn't dead, it was deferred, redesigned and resold.
(12:37):
I'm Demetrius Lynch and this is Built to Divide.
In less than a lifetime, in less than my own 57 years, America has become a highlyurbanized nation.
And we must face the many meanings of this new America.
(12:57):
Taking neighborhoods that exist already, and maybe they're not very attractive, and maybethey've only got poor people in, and maybe they've only got immigrants in.
But thinking, what can you do here to keep these people here and to make them feel that...
They're valued.
(13:28):
Last time we stepped off the deck of the USS Missouri and into a country racing to turnvictory into stability.
We followed Operation Magic Carpet as millions of GIs came home.
The GI Bill, FHA and VA loans and Fannie Mae as they rewired credit and a culture industryfrom Sears kit homes to glossy magazine spreads, selling the house as the heart of the
(13:54):
American dream.
We traced modernist experiments like the case study homes, then watched the market crownLevittown, mass produced suburbia as national policy.
And we reminded ourselves of the shadow, redlining covenants and zoning that decided whogot in and who didn't.
If you haven't listened to that episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to all theepisodes of this series in order.
(14:21):
Today we pick up where the dream hardens into doctrine.
the Fair Housing Act.
LBJ builds HUD and expands credit.
Section 235 and 236 rise and fall.
Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs fight over the city's soul.
And Nixon slams the brakes, pivoting from building units to cutting checks.
(14:44):
And we'll get into all of that after this break.
Episode 4, The Pivot.
(15:05):
The promise of a decent home in a suitable living environment sounded simple.
It was not.
It was never just a question of walls and roofs.
It was a question of who counted, who paid, and who was allowed to stay.
By the mid-1960s, the federal government had a housing system that could move mountains ofmoney and draw red lines with the same pen.
(15:30):
The Federal Housing Administration had steered credit for three decades.
stabilizing mortgages and standardizing appraisals and segregation that largely inhibitedopportunity for some to build wealth.
In neighborhood after neighborhood, lending rules quietly linked risk to race.
Black families and many immigrant families paid more for worse housing or were shut outaltogether.
(15:56):
Then came the civil rights decade and with it, a national reckoning.
If the law says we are equal,
What does it mean when risk maps disagree?
In Washington, reform gathered around an unlikely figure.
Republican Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, a Midwestern industrialist with a reformer'spitch.
(16:19):
Percy had watched the uprisings of the late sixties and drew a blunt conclusion.
Denying people a stake in their neighborhoods is dangerous for them, for cities and fordemocracy.
Fifth, therefore, I hope that we're going to offer our minorities and our blackpopulations in this country a chance to become a part of the economic and social fiber of
(16:44):
the country through ownership, ownership of their own homes, ownership of their ownbusinesses, ownership of their own financial institutions.
And I think the business community should dedicate itself to providing technicalassistance to our 22 million blacks in this country, just as we have the end of
World War II provided $110 billion since then in technical assistance to our enemies torebuild them, our allies to build them and developing nations.
(17:15):
We have a whole developing nation of American citizens in this country and we need nationbuilding at home first ahead of nation building abroad.
It was moral language, but not naive.
Percy's push came with urgency.
Fear of more summers like 1967 and 1968.
(17:36):
Fear of more neighborhoods feeling abandoned by their own country.
The thought was, if people own the structure, they're less likely to burn down the street.
Percy's urgency met an empathetic presidency that understood poverty.
Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath on Air Force One on November 22nd, 1963, with thenation in shock from JFK's assassination.
(18:02):
He brought to the job a lifetime of watching poverty up close.
First as a teacher of Mexican-American children in Cotuya, Texas, then as a congressmanwho understood the arithmetic of power.
LBJ believed government could be a tool for dignity.
Within months, he declared a war on poverty and then came the avalanche.
(18:24):
Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, and anti-pollution laws.
For civil rights,
He turned the full weight of the presidency towards the nation's conscience, the CivilRights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But housing was the hard one.
(18:45):
It wasn't just policy.
It was space, status, wealth, and a thousand local veto points that could choke reform atany phase.
In 1965, Johnson created a cabinet seat for the fight.
the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.
(19:15):
of America.
This legislation establishes the 11th Department of our Federal Government, the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development.
When our nation was born, the only departments of government were state and treasury andwar.
Our country and our government have grown greatly since that time.
(19:35):
But we have been sparing in creating new and additional departments, except the need hasbeen clear and compelling and continuing.
That is clearly the case for this, the newest department.
The America of our founding fathers was, of course, a rural America.
The virtues and values of our rural heritage have shaped and strengthened the Americancharacter for all our 189 years.
(20:03):
Our debt to this heritage is deep and abiding, and we shall honor it always.
When Thomas Jefferson spoke of rural virtues,
cities were insignificant on the countryside of this continent.
Only 5 percent of our people lived then in cities or villages.
America was the land of the farmer and the woodsman and the hunter and the mountaineer.
(20:26):
And even a century ago, when Abraham Lincoln asked the Congress to create a Department ofAgriculture, fewer than 20 percent of our people then lived in cities.
Now that day is gone.
It never will return.
In less than a lifetime, in less than my own 57 years, America has become a highlyurbanized nation.
(20:48):
And we must face the many meanings of this new America.
To lead this new department, Johnson made the historic selection of Robert C.
Weaver as its first secretary, the first black American to hold a cabinet post.
Weaver, an economist and academic, had served as a political administrator in New York,
(21:09):
as well as in DC, within Franklin Roosevelt and John F.
Kennedy's administrations.
This is Secretary Weaver discussing new programs in his department after appearing beforethe House Banking and Currency Subcommittee.
Do you foresee a clash here again between City Hall and the four?
No, because in this particular program, this program is going to be a program developedwith City Hall and developed by the local government, by the local government officials
(21:36):
who were elected, though they can't very well conflict with themselves anymore.
than any bureaucracy at the internal difficulty.
Can you give us just an estimate, if everything goes well, when could a city like New YorkCity actually become a beneficiary of this program?
Well, I'm not going to say when any city like any city can, but any city which comes intothis program would have, assuming that the laws passed, say, as of June of this year, they
(22:01):
would be a year's period during which they could be doing the planning and developingfirst their proposal.
getting into their planning and I would say that it should get underway within 12 to 18months after the law is passed.
Is it probable that New York City will be the first beneficiary under this?
This is up to time to decide and not for me.
HUD wasn't a single program.
(22:23):
It was a switchboard.
Mortgages, subsidies, urban renewal, public housing, insurance, all running throughfederal circuits.
And then in 1968, with riots fresh in memory and momentum in Congress,
the country passed the Fair Housing Act, a federal promise to end discrimination in thesale and rental of housing.
(22:47):
But law alone couldn't solve the problem or fix a market shaped by decades of exclusion.
The question was, what tool could change things locally?
If the New Deal steadied mortgage finance, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968tried to push production to scale, fast.
(23:09):
The idea was simple, audacious, and deeply American.
Build our way out of the crisis and buy our way to stability.
Two new engines roared to life.
Section 236, cheap financing for moderate income rental housing to lower interest ratesand make projects pencil out.
(23:29):
Section 235, heavily subsidized home ownership for low and moderate income families.
Small down payments.
low monthly costs, and FHA insurance to incentivize lenders.
HUD also introduced the Turnkey program, which allowed local housing authorities to buyprivately built developments directly into the public housing inventory, a faster, cheaper
(23:57):
alternative to constructing massive new projects from scratch.
This approach was informed by lessons learned from the missteps of Pruitt-Igoe in St.
Louis.
Completed in 1954 as a symbol of modern urban renewal, Pruitt-Igoe's 33 high-rise towersbecame a case study and failure.
(24:18):
Underfunded maintenance, social isolation, rising crime, and neglect.
By the early 1970s, two-thirds of its units sat vacant, and the city made a dramaticchoice, demolition.
In response, HUD turned toward scattered site housing.
smaller clusters of public homes woven into existing neighborhoods instead of beingconcentrated in a single complex.
(24:46):
These homes could take many forms, single-family houses, duplexes, townhomes, or smallapartment buildings.
The intent was simple but profound.
Reduce the stigma of public housing, mix incomes, and give low-income families access tosafer, better-resourced communities.
(25:06):
Scattered site housing wasn't just an architectural adjustment, it was an ideological one.
A move away from containment towards connection to rebuild community rather than isolatepoverty.
Moving forward, the target was enormous.
Commissions called for millions of affordable units.
Weaver's HUD tried to blend public ambition with private speed so that sites, permits, andlenders wouldn't bottleneck the dream.
(25:34):
For a brief window it worked, with peak production in 69 and 70, subsidized unitsmultiplying and public and moderate income stocks surging.
For every abstract promise, there were people actually walking into their first home.
But Section 235 had two weaknesses.
One, it tethered opportunity to existing appraisal ecosystems, the very actors who hadlong tagged black neighborhoods as high risk.
(26:04):
Two, it depended on local brokers, lenders, and inspectors to act in good faith in marketswhere inciting panic had long been a business model.
In city after city, realtors and housing speculators continued the same cruel pattern.
They whispered to white owners, sell now.
(26:27):
fear spread and prices dropped.
Those same speculators could step in to buy depreciated homes from white families, thenturn around and sell it to a black family at much higher prices, using government-backed
programs like Section 235 and FHA loans to make poison sales look safe to lenders.
(26:49):
The deals were poisoned because appraisals were often fraudulently inflated
to make homes seem worth more than they really were.
Brokers also often rushed inspections, ignoring problems with the home to quickly closethe deal.
At first, the monthly payments looked manageable, but as soon as roofs leaked, furnacesbroke, and maintenance costs rose, these families couldn't keep up with the payments.
(27:17):
The government was then on the hook to cover the bank's losses.
Black homeowners
and the affected neighborhoods were subsequently blamed for the decline.
The cycle reinforced the narrative and the same trick was repeated on the next block.
In Philadelphia, between 1969 and 1971, thousands of Section 235 homes went intoforeclosure.
(27:41):
More than all FHA foreclosures since the 1930s.
Was 235 a bad idea?
It appears to have been good in principle
But the subsidy design made the program easy for bad actors to game and the market made itprofitable to prey on people, particularly in a racially tense environment.
(28:02):
Congressional hearings followed.
Inspectors were called out for rubber stamping.
Families, black mothers and veterans testified about promises made in neighborhoods leftunderwater, literally and financially.
The federal ideal was on trial, not just the program.
but faith in the government to deliver a fair deal.
(28:23):
While HUD was trying to stitch neighborhoods with subsidies, another story took shape, andit begins with a man who never met a bulldozer he didn't like.
Robert Moses, the master builder, had already redefined New York by the 1960s.
Since the 1920s, he was an urban planner known for aggressively pushing projects,including a slippery tactic
(28:48):
where he initiated projects that were grander than approved, knowing the legislature wouldeventually have to green light it to avoid the appearance of ineffective oversight.
Of course I am a limited objective boy.
I couldn't get anything done, nor could the people that are working with me on any otherbasis.
But on the other hand, it's ridiculous to say that things we're working on don't show anyimagination, that they're all...
(29:15):
uh
without uh vision and without regard to the future and that they're just these immediateshowy immediate things.
Now you take a thing like uh a project like Jones Beach for example.
Well we've been at Jones Beach since 1924.
That's a long time.
(29:39):
The original plan is no different from the present plan.
We've carried out about maybe
70 % of it, 75 % of it, in the course of 35 years.
That's how long it's taken.
And it just happens to be our good fortune or luck or whatever you may call it, that thepeople who originally conceived the idea are still around.
(30:00):
They're extant and maybe a little groggy, but they're still here.
Parks, pools, bridges, parkways, an empire of concrete and steel.
He knew how to draft a bill and how to bury a neighborhood.
Under New Deal dollars in the 1940s, he could move Earth faster than anyone.
(30:20):
He brought beaches to the masses and highways through the heart of the city.
But the price was brutal.
Coal blocks devastated in the name of urban renewal.
Tenements cleared for towers or roads.
Black and Puerto Rican communities sliced into islands by expressways.
(30:41):
History would later accuse him of more.
intentionally installing low bridges to keep buses and thus porter families off parkwaysto the shore, pool siding that tracked racial lines, and a thousand tactical maneuvers to
keep the city's best air for the few.
And then a counter voice emerged.
(31:02):
Jane Jacobs, writer and neighborhood activist, published The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities in 1961.
While Moses admired the bird's eye view, Jacobs argued for the block.
Eyes on the street, mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings next to new, human scalecomplexity.
(31:28):
I think a good place to begin, trying to make neighborhood hearts, where the action is.
If people get fond of their district, their neighborhood, and stay there, and if the cityis working the way it should, they begin to get connections, begin the next generation to
(31:51):
get better educations and so on.
And all of this is reflected in the neighborhood.
A heart is not in disembodied things that you just set down arbitrarily, like choosing theshopping center site.
It has to have an anatomy that runs into the neighborhood.
(32:15):
And the anatomy, the clue to it is what you always hear when people talk about a hangout.
Oh, it's the corner store or it's the corner bar.
There's always that word corner.
What does that mean?
Well, actually it means that there's an intersection and this corner is a powerful place.
(32:43):
If that intersection is of two or more pedestrian paths that go into the community, that'sthe anatomy that a heart has to have.
the very essence of is the place going to be interesting to walk in?
(33:04):
it going to be useful to walk in?
Is it going to get more so?
Is it going to get less so?
Now over time, if the heart is successful, oh it's going to change.
Taking the neighborhoods that exist.
already and maybe they're not very attractive and maybe they've only got poor people inand maybe they've only got immigrants in.
(33:31):
But thinking what can you do here to keep these people here and to make them feel thatthey're valued.
With the coalition of parents, shopkeepers, and artists representing Greenwich Village,SoHo, and Little Italy, she led the fight against Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway.
(33:54):
They won.
Moses gave cities infrastructure, but also scars.
Jacobs promoted a language to resist, but it also came with an unintended future.
Decades later, neighborhoods preserved for community would become luxury enclaves.
See, preservation without policy invites gentrification.
(34:16):
Policy without preservation can lead to erasure.
Both truths mattered, and both would collide with HUD's experiment.
Back in Washington, Johnson's exit and Richard Nixon's arrival as president did notimmediately slam the brakes on housing reform.
Nixon surprised some observers.
(34:38):
He initially seemed willing to extend pieces of Johnson's Great Society programs.
He named George Romney, former Michigan governor and an integration advocate to lead HUD.
And in the early years, HUD's spending actually grew.
But behind the scenes, another project gathered momentum, New Federalism.
(34:59):
As a direct reaction to the sweeping federal authority of the New Deal and Great Societypolicies that put the collective first,
The idea of new federalism was to dissolve that collective strength and pushdecision-making out of Washington via revenue sharing and block grants.
Nixon, a pragmatist with deep ties to the business community, sought to recentergovernment around efficiency and market-driven principles, an approach that appealed to
(35:30):
corporate leaders and fiscal conservatives wary of federal expansion and the strength ofthe people.
that came with it.
The idea was shaped and refined by three key advisors, Herbert Stein, Daniel PatrickMoynihan, and John Ehrlichman.
Stein, an economist and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, athink tank founded in 1938 by a group of New York businessmen, promoted limited government
(36:00):
and market efficiency, grounding new federalism in business-friendly economics.
Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, brought an interest in environmental andadministrative reform, emphasizing executive control and efficiency over sprawling
bureaucracy.
And Moynihan, a Democrat who had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, wastapped to be Nixon's aide after his controversial Moynihan report on black poverty, where
(36:31):
he was convinced that top-down welfare programs
often deepened dependency rather than opportunity.
At the time, the public face of federal housing programs and the moral justification forthem was largely the black community.
These initiatives, however flawed, were meant to correct decades of redlining,segregation, and systemic exclusion from wealth building.
(36:58):
Now, I want to be clear.
Income inequality cuts across every demographic.
But it's important to understand that because of the long legacy of race-basedexclusionary laws and policies, the black community had become a bellwether for the
nation's broader economic health, a measure of whether prosperity was truly shared orselectively withheld.
(37:22):
The 1970s and 80s marked another major economic turning point for the U.S.
You could see the culture shift in real time, a retreat from social investment
a resurgence of market-first ideology, and a growing downward pressure on American workingclass, especially on the low-income side of its two-track wealth system, where the Black
(37:45):
experience revealed the strain most clearly.
In 1973, the first domino fell.
Nixon announced a suspension of new HUD housing and urban development commitments.
The message was crisp and devastating.
construction programs were too expensive, benefited too few, and produced low qualityenvironments.
(38:15):
you
The implosion of Pruitt-Igoe just a year earlier had become a powerful symbol againstgovernment intervention.
In a stunning pivot, Nixon dismissed a decade of learning what works and what doesn't.
(38:37):
Instead of improvements, he abandoned the idea altogether.
The dramatic TV clip of a tower falling was easier to sell than a footnote about scattersite housing.
His special message to the Congress read in part,
Leaders of all political persuasions and from all levels of government have given a greatdeal of thought in recent years to the problem of low-income housing.
(39:06):
Many of them agree that the federally subsidized housing approach has failed and many ofthem also agree on the reasons for that failure.
The main flaw they point to in the old approach is its underlying assumption that thebasic problem of the poor
is a lack of housing rather than a lack of income.
(39:26):
Instead of treating the root cause of the problem, the inability to pay for housing thegovernment has been attacking the symptom.
We have been helping the builders directly and the poor only indirectly, rather thanproviding assistance directly to low-income families.
In place of this old approach, many people have suggested a new approach direct cashassistance.
(39:51):
Under this approach,
Instead of providing a poor family with a place to live, the federal government wouldprovide qualified recipients with an appropriate housing payment and would then let them
choose their own homes on the private market.
The payment would be carefully scaled to make up the difference between what a familycould afford on its own for housing and the cost of safe and sanitary housing in that
(40:17):
geographic area.
This plan would give the poor the freedom and responsibility to make their own choicesabout housing and it would eventually get the federal government out of the housing
business.
The market, not the public builder, would deliver shelter.
The government would provide vouchers, not units.
(40:40):
Choice would replace commitment.
Costs would substitute construction.
In September of 73, the White House released Housing in the 70s, a strategy paper thatread like a eulogy for public production.
It flagged failures of management, foreclosures in 236 and 235, and the high cost ofconstruction.
(41:03):
while also noting, almost in passing, that tax expenditures for homeowners dwarfedlow-income housing aid.
We'll discuss this more, but the biggest subsidy in American housing then, as now, waswritten into the tax code, not the budget, and it buoyed the middle and upper tiers of
(41:24):
society through mortgage interest deductions and property tax preferences.
But those weren't up for elimination.
Congress erupted.
Former HUD Secretary Weaver testified that there should be mixed strategies.
Fix existing housing where vacancies allowed, build where the shortage was real.
(41:46):
He warned that abandoning production entirely would lock neighborhoods into decay.
Cities and tenant groups denounced the impoundment of funds as executive overreach.
Lawsuits flew and mayors called the cuts catastrophic.
But remember,
There were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr.
(42:06):
and John F.
Kennedy in the late 60s.
As questions around the assassinations emerged, public trust in government began todecline in general, greasing the argument for reduced government.
The pivot on housing held, and with it a new language.
Decency measured in efficiency, equity measured in head counts.
(42:30):
If a voucher could serve three families at the cost of building one unit, the ledger saidthe voucher wins.
But the ledger rarely counted where those families could live, who accepted them, or whatpower they had at the leasing table.
As wealth capitalized on the opportunity, regaining its footing, the vulnerable no longerhad a champion.
(42:55):
This was the context for and emergence of the modern subsidy.
tenant-based assistance, the program we now know as Section 8 housing choice vouchers.
We'll examine it more closely in the next episode, but the theory was straightforward.
Give families portable purchasing power and stretch federal dollars further than publicprojects ever could.
(43:18):
Sometimes it worked, but landlords in high opportunity zip codes learned to say, we don'ttake vouchers, which was legal in many states.
One HUD official said, quote, we replace public ghettos with private ones.
The country simply replaced a federal obligation to build with the federal promise to payand then allow local rules to decide who could collect rules already framed by the two
(43:46):
track system, a system that only government is uniquely positioned to address.
Meanwhile, public housing withered, budgets shrank, maintenance delayed,
units boarded up, and demolitions outpaced replacements.
In some cities, HOPE 6, a HUD program intended to revitalize the most distressed publichousing projects into mixed income developments, did so but often at a lower unit count,
(44:16):
dispersing many of the original families with vouchers.
The consequences could be felt around the country.
In Chicago, with plastic taped over broken windows,
and the bite of winter rolling in, tenants organized rent strikes, demanding heat,repairs, and dignity.
In the Bronx, entire avenues burned, arson for insurance, and buildings landlords could nolonger finance or refuse to maintain.
(44:45):
In Los Angeles, subsidies gave access to a rotting unit, but downtown drew federal dollarsfor convention centers and stadiums.
This was the Community Development Block Grant at work.
Flexible federal funds directed to local governments for community development activitiesaimed at improving affordable housing, infrastructure, and economic opportunities,
(45:10):
primarily for low and moderate income residents.
Now there were some bright spots.
Community Development Corporations also sprang up.
Boston's Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Detroit's Community Land Trusts,
and Oakland's rehabilitations illustrated neighbors turning vacant buildings into housingon their own.
(45:32):
They proved that when communities steered the money, places could be repaired withoutexiling their people.
But they were rowing upstream against a river now widening towards financialization.
Mortgages bundled, sold, securitized.
Home as asset class, neighborhood as yield.
(45:52):
The New Deal had socialized risks
to spread the reward of ownership.
The 1970s and beyond privatized reward while socializing risk.
The pivot to treat housing as a line item instead of the platform for health, education,safety, and belonging proved to be devastating for society.
(46:13):
And this was just the beginning.
Half a century on, more than 2 million households rely on vouchers.
Only one in four eligible families ever gets one.
Public housing stock has fallen by hundreds of thousands of units from its peak.
In the places with the best schools and shortest commutes, zoning still walls off access.
(46:36):
In the places where vouchers stretch, jobs often don't.
What we cut in the 1970s was not just spending, we cut capacity.
The idea that a nation can plan, build, and keep a stock of housing that we maintain.
the same way we maintain infrastructure.
Because housing is the foundation of a healthy society.
(46:59):
What we lost was the ability to build where the market will not, repair what the marketwon't, provide support that converts to growth opportunities, change zoning to benefit the
commonwealth, and prioritize people over profits.
The most expensive housing policy in the world is the one that keeps paying for thefallout.
(47:22):
health emergencies, missed school, lost jobs, broken neighborhoods, and a vision thatblooms within the emptiness where trust should be.
In the following decade, the rise of advocacy and austerity defines what came next.
We'll meet Habitat for Humanity, swinging hammers where budgets shrink.
(47:44):
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, pushing policy from the margins,
and the groups protecting the mortgage interest deduction while encouraging divestmentfrom the public.
We'll follow deregulation from Milton Friedman to Margaret Thatcher's right to buy, tracehow vouchers expand while social programs contract, and watch deindustrialization hollow
(48:08):
cities just as gentrification and new urbanism promise walkable dreams, often without thepeople who live there first.
We'll also examine how the National Association of Realtors becomes a powerhouse inWashington, how master-planned empires like Irvine take shape, and why affordability keeps
(48:30):
slipping even as wealth expands.
Next time on Built to Divide.
found our guy.
Who?
Donald Bren.
Why?
Because Al, you and I look like a couple of gangsters from Detroit.
This guy looks like he came from Hollywood.
(49:02):
Thanks for listening.
Built to Divide is presented by Lines, my architecture and creative studio.
This podcast is produced in collaboration with Gable Media.
If you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and rate and review it on Apple podcasts andSpotify.
It really helps others find it.
And if you're looking for similar content, Built to Divide is part of the Gable Medianetwork where you can find even more like this.
(49:30):
Visit gablemedia.com.
That's G-A-B-L media.com.
And before I go, if you want to see additional photos, video clips and content that wentinto this episode, you can visit me at lines.studio slash podcasts.
Talk soon.
(50:00):
What is the diplomatic reception room used for besides receiving diplomats?
Well, it's the room that people see first when they come to the White House.
Everyone who comes to a state dinner here comes through it and leaves by it.
So I think it should be a pretty room.
It's the way I came in and it's a beautiful room.
The wallpaper is magnificent.
(50:21):
Yes, this is wallpaper that was printed in France about 1834.
It's all scenes of America.
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