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Page 4

It was certainly a difficult proposition for Americans.

Except perhaps for ghost towns and other small jurisdictions

that had outlived their economic reason for being, Americans

were more or less accustomed to the idea that cities should

become bigger and better.  Instead, Americans were seeing

the less-than-pleasant sight of neighborhoods in apparent

decline, at least compared with their middle-class origins.

Grand apartment buildings were being subdivided or, in some

cases, simply abandoned because of lack of demand.  Ironi-

cally, that could well have been viewed as a great and

fortuitous opportunity.  Cheap, often well built, used

housing was becoming available when significant numbers of

immigrants were arriving in town.  Housing economists have

termed that phenomenon "filtering"--that is, passing down

housing from the upwardly mobile to the next wave of aspi-

rants.

If there was no overall urban crisis and no sudden

collapse of the economies of our cities, why did Secretary

Weaver cast his role as broadly addressing such a crisis?

Perhaps he did so out of fear that casting the mission more

narrowly, as improving the black ghetto, would have had less

political appeal.  Indeed, it is striking that at a time of

robust economic growth, at a level for which we yearn today,

Weaver justified HUD as an agency that was necessary to

"contribute toward a better life for all income levels, all

age levels, and all racial characteristics or religious

beliefs."6  Other HUD officials, however, were often more

candid about the targeted nature of their mission.  Under

Secretary Robert Wood told the National Association of

Social Workers in 1966, "The impacted urban ghetto has, in a

comparatively short period of time, become the most explo-

sive social problem of our day."7  This was the essence of

HUD: a massive intervention in poor black neighborhoods to

fix up the buildings there, despite the fact that residents

themselves could not pay for such improvements.  Thus,

"ghetto" housing would remain inexpensive and would also be

"decent and sanitary," in the language of the National

Housing Act of 1937.  But why was that necessary?  What was

wrong with new urbanites' using older housing until they

could afford better?  To understand HUD's intervention, one

must look at the nation's essentially pessimistic and,

arguably, patronizing view of the prospects of the black

poor.

Was the "Black Ghetto" Permanent?