Frank Wilkinson's Legacy

The obituaries for Frank Wilkinson,  who died January 2 at 91, primarily focused on his role as a leading opponent of McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and government spying on citizens. In 1958,  Wilkinson was one of the last people ordered to prison for defying HUAC.  He appealed his contempt citation all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5 to 4 against him. After spending nine months in federal prison in 1961, Wilkinson through the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, spend more than a decade fighting to dismantle HUAC, which was finally abolished in 1975. Wilkinson also fought the FBI.  He sued the FBI to obtain its files on him, eventually getting 132,000 documents,  which revealed that the agency had been spying on him for 38 years. A federal judge order the FBI to end its surveillance of Wilkinson.

At a time when the Bush Administration is conducting an assault on civil liberties in the name of national security, Wilkinson’s battles to protect free speech are worth recalling.  But it is often forgotten that Wilkinson began his career as an activist for affordable housing.  His crusade for civil liberties because he was fired from the Los Angeles Housing Authority  -- the city's public housing agency, where he was a high-ranking official -- during the McCarthy era because of his radical politics.

Today, many consider public housing to be a failed experiment in "big government" social engineering. But for Wilkinson's generation of idealists -- who came of age in the Depression of the 1930s -- public housing was part of a broad movement for social reform and economic justice. To the extent that public housing now bears the stigma of failure, it is due not to the progressive values that inspired Wilkinson and others, but to the political influence of right-wing forces who fought to undermine public housing from the beginning. 

Los Angeles and other cities again face a severe shortage of affordable housing. Many of the same battles that Wilkinson fought 50 years ago -- -- over land use, government subsidies for the poor, racial integration, and “not in my backyard” opposition to low-cost housing -- confront the current generation of public officials and civic leaders.

Until the Depression, most American opinion leaders believed that the private market, with a helping hand from private philanthropy, could meet the nation's housing needs. Reformers who wanted government to play a major role in housing were a lonely voice in the political wilderness. In the first three decades of the 20th century, a few unions and settlement house reformers built model housing developments for working class families, but without government subsidy. The nation's economic collapse provided reformers with a political opening to push their "radical" ideas that the federal government should subsidize "social housing" and help create a noncommercial sector free from profit and speculation. Like their European counterparts, they envisioned it for the middle-class as well as the poor.

These reformers - economists, planners, architects, social workers, and journalists - had faith in the positive role of government on people and communities. They believed that well-designed housing with adequate amenities (such as playgrounds and child care centers) could uplift the poor.
Led by housing activist Catherine Bauer (who later became the first woman professor at Berkeley's urban planning school) and progressive labor unions (through the Labor Housing Conference, founded in 1934), they pushed for well-designed, mixed-income, noncommercial, government-subsidized housing projects, sponsored by unions, church groups, other non-profit organizations, and government agencies. During its first few years, the New Deal build a few model developments that reflected this vision. They included day care centers, involved residents in cultural and educational activities, and were physically attractive enough so that middle-class families wanted to live there. The reformers hoped to turn these prototype projects into a permanent government program.

But the reformers were soon outmaneuvered by the real estate industry, led by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. The industry -- worried that well-designed and affordable government-sponsored housing would compete with the private sector for middle-class consumers -- warned about the specter of "socialism." With the enactment of the Wagner Public Housing Act in 1937, the real estate industry began to sabotage the program by restricting its funding and by giving local governments discretion over whether and where to locate developments. After WW2, recognizing the pent-up demand for housing and fearing competition from public housing, the industry mobilized a major campaign against the program.  It successfully. pressured Congress to limit it to the very poor . From 1950 to 1970, the median income of public residents fell from 64 percent to 37 percent of the national median. Senators from the South made sure that local governments had the authority to keep public housing racially segregated.

With limited budgets, many projects were poorly constructed and/or badly designed - ugly warehouses for the poor - stigmatizing "government housing" as housing of last resort. Local housing authorities -- typically dominated by business and real estate representatives -- often located public housing developments in areas without adequate stores, transportation, or schools, and isolated from middle-class neighborhoods, contributing to the concentration of poor people in cities. The problems we now associate with public housing were not inevitable. They were due to political choices made in Congress and at the local level.

By the time Wilkinson -- who grew up Beverly Hills,  had been a Republican as a student at UCLA and originally intended to become a Methodist minister -- joined the LA Housing Authority in 1942, public housing was already controversial. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron, a reform-minded liberal Republican elected in 1938, nevertheless supported public housing and later backed Wilkinson's idea to promote racial integration within the city's developments. A number of large developments were constructed in the early1940s, starting with the 610-unit Ramona Gardens in 1941.

After World War 2, Bowron sought to expand the program, especially for the many veterans who faced a desperate housing shortage. He endorsed a plan to raze many homes in the tight-knit Chavez Ravine neighborhood replace them with a large public housing development to be designed by world-class architect Richard Nuetra that would include two dozen 13-story buildings and more than 160 two-story houses, as well as new playgrounds and schools. Bowron, Wilkinson and other reformers viewed the housing plan for Chavez Ravine as a way to improve living conditions poor Angelenos, especially Mexican-Americans who lived in the neighborhood's substandard homes.
The “battle of Chavez Ravine” has become a legend of urban planning, inspiring a recent album by guitarist Ry Cooder, a  play by the Culture Clash theater group, and many books and academic  In July 1950,  Chavez Ravine residents received letters from the city telling them that they should sell their homes to make the land available for the proposed project.  The residents were told that they would have first choice for the new homes. A few residents resisted but most left quietly.
The city's landlords, homebuilders, and business leaders, along with right-wing political groups, mobilized to oppose building any more developments, including the Chavez Ravine plan. They, too, wanted to bulldoze the neighborhood, but they had other designs for the area, so close to the city’s downtown. They utilized the era's anti-communist "Red Scare" paranoia to characterize the Chavez Ravine proposal -- and public housing in general -- as socialist planning. One way to attack public housing was to attack its leading advocate, Wilkinson, as a dangerous Communist. Brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to answer their questions on First Amendment grounds and was fired from his job and sent to federal prison, starting Wilkinson on a new career path as a civil liberties activist.

The same business leaders who opposed Wilkinson and public housing also ended Bowron's political career. They handpicked Congressman Norris Poulson to run against Bowron and orchestrated his mayoral victory in 1953. During his campaign, Poulson vowed to stop the Chavez Ravine plan and other examples of "un-American" spending. Under Poulson, the city bought back the Chavez Ravine site from the federal government at a cut-rate price. Several years later, City Councilmember Ken Hahn gave Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley a helicopter tour of the area and pointed to the empty 300 acre Chavez Ravine site adjacent to downtown and at the intersection of major freeways. The team moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and opened  Dodger Stadium two years later. The city obviously broke its promise to the former residents of the neighborhood, scattered by the city’s bulldozer, to relocate them in better housing.

Versions of LA’s battle over public housing were repeated in cities across the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, lobbying by the real estate industry and conservatives assured that public housing would be targeted exclusively for the very poor.  Public housing became identified with drug wars and crime, places where children are afraid to walk to school, and elderly tenants, for whom hallways and elevators are as dangerous as streets, are afraid to leave their apartments. Movies such as Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991) by Matty Rich, who grew up in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, and books such as Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, chronicling life in the Chicago projects, portrayed public housing as more a trap than a ladder.

Not surprisingly, middle class families resisted siting developments in their neighborhoods.  Public housing became more unpopular politically, leading to a cycle of government neglect and underfunding which, in turn, led to poor construction design, inadequate maintenance, racial segregation, stigmatization, and further concentration of the very poor. Construction of new public housing developments ended in the 1970s during the Nixon administration. Eventually, only 1.3 million public housing units were built - less than 1% of the nation’s housing.. It was replaced by other kinds of government-subsidized housing, which eventually evolved into today's largest federal program, Section 8 vouchers, which are essentially food stamps for housing.

Despite the popular stereotype, high-rises account for only one-quarter of public housing buildings. But high-rise projects, most of them in the largest cities, account for many of the problems. and cast a giant shadow on the entire program. A decade ago, Congress enacted the Hope VI program to encourage local housing authorities to tear down troubled high-rise public housing developments and replace them with scattered-site housing. This has improved neighborhoods but with the consequence of reducing the overall number of subsidized units for the poor.

Despite their problems, public housing developments are often better than privately-owned slum housing, which in many cities are the major housing option for the poor. That is why, in LA and most other cities, there are long waiting lists for public housing.

American politicians still use misleading stereotypes about public housing to attack the very idea of government activism. During his 1996 campaign, for example, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole told the National Association of Realtors that public housing was "one of the last bastions of socialism in the world" and said that local housing authorities have become "landlords of misery." More recently, after the Katrina hurricane destroyed much of New Orleans' subsidized housing, concentrated in the city poorest areas, Congressman Richard Baker (R-LA) was overheard telling lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
As a result of such sentiments, the U.S. spends less on government housing subsidies for the poor than any other democratic country. Housing subsidies for the poor are a lottery, not an entitlement. The entire U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development budget is only $32 billion, which provides housing assistance for less than one-quarter of the nation’s poor. And while the number of poor people has increased since President George W. Bush took office, his administration is cutting housing subsidies for low-income families.

Some federal funds are still used to build new housing for the poor -- mainly by giving tax breaks to corporations that invest in low-income apartments. Ironically, most of today’s  government-subsidized housing is built by nonprofit community development organizations. They are typically well-designed to fit into neighborhoods and small-scale compared with the massive public housing towers built in the 1950s and 1960s. A growing number of these developments are mixed-income and provide child care, job training, and education and art programs. In other words, they look similar to the kind of projects that early housing reformers and their offspring,, like Frank Wilkinson, envisioned. But without sufficient federal subsidies, these community groups lack the resources to seriously address housing shortage for the poor.

Today, America’s cities are trying to  address a serious  housing crisis, but without the federal government as a partner.  In many cities and inner-ring suburbs, few working families, including many middle-income households, can afford to purchase a home.  Many low-income families spend over half their incomes just to pay rent. More than a million Americans are homeless at some point during the year. Across the nation, a new generation of housing reformers - tenant organizers, community development groups, homeless advocates, and others -- are waging a crusade for more livable cities and metro areas.

Under progressive Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for example, Los Angeles -- where at least 80,000 pepole are homeless -- is trying to deal with the legacy of this federal neglect. The city has one of the most severe housing shortages in the nation. Elected officials, business groups, community organizations, labor unions, religious leaders, and housing advocates are wrestling with policy ideas -- such as $1 billion housing bond, an inclusionary zoning law to require mixed-income housing, and stronger code enforcement against slumlords -- to meet the growing need. But, as in Wilkinson's time, there are political forces that resist reform. Business-back schemes to revitalize downtown LA -- such as the Grand Avenue project and the gentrification of Skid Row -- include few housing units for the city's low-income working class. The influential Central City Assn., the lobbying arm of downtown developers and businesses, opposes inclusionary zoning, despite the fact that over 100 California communities have already adopted the policy.

In the struggle for better housing, Wilkinson was a visionary.  He fought for incremental reforms but he saw them as steppingstones to a broader social justice agenda. Like his fight to protect the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, Wilkinson viewed decent, safe, affordable housing as a basic human right. The best tribute to Frank Wilkinson's memory would be a city where people can afford to live in any neighborhood, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or income.