Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles

by Don Parson, Kevin Starr (Foreword)

During the 1990s, Los Angeles - like many other cities across America - began demolishing public housing projects that had come to symbolize decades of failed urban policies. But public housing was not always regarded with such disdain. In the years surrounding World War II, it had been a popular New Deal program, viewed as a force for positive social change and supported by a broad coalition of civic, labor, religious, and community organizations. Socially conscious architects and planners developed innovative and livable projects that embodied the latest theories in urban design. With sharp historical perspective, Making a Better World traces the rise and fall of a public housing ethic in Los Angeles and its impact on the city's built environment. In the caustic political atmosphere of Joseph McCarthy's America, public housing opponents accused the city's housing authority of communist infiltration, effectively eliminating the left from debates over the city's development. In place of public housing, conservative forces promoted a pro-private growth agenda that redefined urban renewal and reshaped modern Los Angeles. No conventional public housing projects have been constructed in Los Angeles since 1955. In this era of skyrocketing housing prices, especially in urban areas, Don Parson's examination not only gives us the recent history of a city, but also opens up a new debate on a current national crisis in providing shelter for low-income Americans.

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jacob Woocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best books written on LA politics and housing. The Red Scare did a number on this city.

[Nils Jepson · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good! this is a pretty traditional HISTORY which i feel like i haven't really engaged with in a long time. parson outlines every single detail -- from how HUD funding mechanisms work to the political compromises in the 1949 Housing Act to how certain LA judges voted to how the Community Redevelopment Agency was born, how its districts/projects were drawn and what that planning process looked like. it's all important and essential but also kind of a bit much. parson, however, excels at tying threads together and building arguments out of disparate points. here he argues that the Red Scare and the associated dismantling of electoral leftism and the Roosevelt coalition led to urban policy to shift away from people-focused "community modernism" and towards "corporate modernism." in both cases, the city is still centrally planned but, in the former, the social planning is focused on public housing and a centralized right to the city (my words!) and, in the latter, towards subsidizing the corporatized urban growth machine. both efforts saw displacement and slum clearance through eminent domain in an effort to "modernize" the city; however the first, parson argues, provided a public solution to the failures of the private market while the second simply removed these "failures" from sight.

ultimately, really helpful in that, while not super explicitly, Making a Better World explores how planning shifted from its original, rather leftist origins of advocating for government intervention and a de-commodified city towards being used as a mechanism to "open" the city up to financialized, corporate interests that see urban issues as yet another arena for investment, accumulation and dispossession (under the guise of a centralized regime) -- housing for all to "community reinvestment," "redevelopment" to "renewal" and back again, electoral activism to movement activism, public to private.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since New Urbanism took off and became intensified under the moniker of "smart growth," designers have moved away from the Modern legacy of postwar suburbanization to champion walkable neighborhoods and dense, mixed-use development. But harp as we might on the need for a more integrated transportation system to foster connectivity, these composite elements seldom emerge into a vision of vibrant local community without changing a fundamental value that was espoused during the synchronous rise of automobile culture, and that is home ownership as the apotheosized single family private residence. More