“Lost City”: Public Housing, Urban Renewal, and Community in New London, Connecticut - Part 2, Coalitions and Constellations
This is the second post in a two-part series. You can read the first post here.
Of the 1,258 localities participating in the federal urban renewal program between 1949 and 1974, the vast majority were cities of 50,000 or less people. But most histories of renewal have until recently ignored small cities in favor of major metropolitan centers. A wave of new scholarship promises to complicate our understanding of the program. Among recent projects is an exhibition on renewal in “fringe cities” organized by MASS Design Group, a forthcoming MASS Design book and related research project at Harvard University, a special issue of the Journal of Planning History, and a digital publication at SUNY Albany.[1] This reckoning can help untangle the chain of cause and effect and separate the impact of local decision-making from more systemic social and economic trends. By revealing patterns in the experience of cities at different scales, it could inspire new perspectives on the political geography of urban change across a fuller spectrum of American urban landscapes. New London, where 34,182 people lived in 1960, is one such case study.
There is little ambivalence in New London today about the city’s brush with midcentury redevelopment. Just one article has argued for “taking the good with the bad” in assessing the Winthrop Urban Renewal Project’s legacy. More common is the observation that “thanks to urban renewal, New London was all but dead.”[2] The sentiment reflects common assumptions about the program nationwide. As one review of the Fringe Cities exhibition put it: “These [smaller] cities are still grappling with the scars wrought by urban renewal—neighborhoods razed, people displaced, communities fragmented, and declining economies.”
Actually, it is difficult to say what impact, if any, urban renewal had on New London’s overall economic fortunes. Economic indicators rose in the city during the fifties and into the late sixties while renewal was underway and fell in the seventies and eighties after it was completed. Those statistics track closely with the state and are similar to those of the nation as a whole, which plunged into a global recession after 1973. Looking at population figures alone, the similarly sized Connecticut cities (20,000 – 50,000 people) that participated in the program show a range of trends. Norwich, Torrington, and Ansonia, situated at some remove from a metropolitan center, followed New London’s curve. But cities on the periphery of New Haven and Hartford—Middletown, Bristol, Manchester, and Meriden—experienced steady population increase during the same period. More comparative analysis is needed to weigh the relative impact of renewal and other systemic factors on a small city’s economic trajectory.
Assessments of urban renewal tend to be caught up in questionable assumptions about the relationship between physical and social change in cities. The initial visions of “a jet-age rebuilt city, with glistening high-rise towers in fountain adorned plazas,” in Jon Teaford’s words, gave way to “a widening chasm between expectations and realities” when those projects failed to deliver the prosperity they promised. Racial segregation and the social and psychological wages of displacement in marginalized neighborhoods are well-documented direct outcomes of renewal’s ruptures in the urban fabric. But beyond that grievous score, redevelopment’s impact on cities’ overall socio-economic fortunes is uncertain.
Nevertheless, causal explanations often prevail. In the architectural community, such reasoning holds out the possibility of improved social outcomes through better design. More cynically, this kind of thinking serves to advance a new approach at the expense of a maligned precedent—as was the case with attacks on “tower in the park” public housing design in the seventies. Assigning causality to urban renewal also satisfies the very human desire to cast blame. It boils down to questions of power and authority. As one public comment on a review of Mapping Urban Renewal in New London put it: “The Communist Central Planners of the Democratic Party destroyed 300 years of community and history in New London.” Subtract the communism and add business interests, and we are not far from the pro-growth coalition, or “growth machine,” model that dominates political theory on midcentury urban development. Based on large metropolitan centers, the thesis describes renewal projects as carried out by “urban regimes” controlled by alliances of public and private sector elites focused on economic growth and real estate value extraction.[3] The model does not quite fit the experience of New London, which did not have such a cohesive and resourceful power base. It may be generally inadequate to describe urban renewal in small cities.[4]
I was struggling to pinpoint the exact ways in which New London seemed to elude familiar renewal narratives when I came across Lawrence Vale’s recent study of the federal HOPE VI housing program.[5] Launched in 1992, the program aimed to mitigate the worst legacies of renewal by sponsoring the demolition of public housing projects in favor of new public-private mixed-income developments. Vale finds that marked variations in a city’s approach to the program may be explained by reference to its experience with urban renewal years earlier. To arrive at that conclusion, he amends the “urban regime” thesis. A city’s success with HOPE VI depended on whether it had developed a broad coalition of public authorities, private interests, civic institutions, and citizen groups in the course of renewal. Cities that had empowered diverse agonistic “governance constellations” had the most multilateral decision-making and the most equitable outcomes.
“Assessments of urban renewal tend to be caught up in questionable assumptions about the relationship between physical and social change in cities.”
Vale studies four large cities, New Orleans, Boston, Tucson, and San Francisco, and describes civic arrangements that had an impact after the close of the renewal era, even as they emerged in its course. But his “constellations” model, attentive to expansive groups of social actors with divergent interests exercising unequal agency within a shifting field of power over time, suggests a better way to look at urban renewal in a small city. In the 1960s, New London was a progressive, ethnically diverse city that was rapidly growing more racially diverse at the height of the civil rights movement. Its council-manager form of government made political authority diffuse, and it had a combative political culture. Its business community was divided. It had many citizen groups and associations at odds with each-other that took on active roles in redevelopment events. New Londoners were often frustrated by this state of affairs, interpreting it as a vacuum of leadership. But the absence of a big-city type coalition of powerful elites created openings for public agency and initiative. Renewal in New London was a plural, if not exactly a pluralist, story. While the city may not have established an exemplary “pattern of power sharing,” its history invites a more multilateral understanding of urban renewal processes and legacies.[6]
“Public housing projects,” Vale writes, “are more than objects in the landscape; they are exercises in governance.”[7] As work wound down on our Mapping project, news arrived that the public housing complex Thames River Apartments, vacant since 2018, was finally set to be demolished (Figure 1). Built on a site cleared for the Winthrop project, described at the start of my first post, the complex was once the “key” to New London’s urban renewal. By the early 2000s, it became “a symbol of urban blight and the evils of poverty.” The history of public housing is intertwined with that of urban renewal. Built solely to satisfy federal relocation requirements, Thames River was immediately mismanaged and soon spuriously blamed for the city’s fiscal problems. As it suffered from corrosive disinvestment, Thames River became a ready scapegoat for a spectrum of urban ills. All the while, the complex cultivated a close-knit community, and an intermittently active but dedicated tenants’ association. Its history exemplifies the complexity of renewal’s legacy in the city.
Figure 1. Thames River Apartments, 2020. Photograph by author.
“Lost City”
The first tenants arrived in the three high-rises in spring 1967. As in other cities, the complex was stripped to bare bones to comply with federal caps on project costs, and the tenants were delighted with their new accommodations anyway. “They’re beautiful!” was the general consensus. Problems with vandalism and inadequate maintenance began before Thames River (then called Winthrop Apartments) was even fully occupied. At the close of the Winthrop project in 1975, numerous code violations in the buildings threatened condemnation, and the desperate New London Housing Authority (NLHA) sought to turn the complex over to the federal government.[8]
In the decades that followed, Thames River sank into the vortex of ills facing public housing nationwide: lack of maintenance, chronic vandalism, crime. NLHA funding came from the below-market rents on its properties, supplemented by meager federal per-unit subsidies. Sporadic infusions of state or federal grant funds provided always temporary and insufficient solutions—a foot patrolman one year, long-delayed renovations on a few units the next. When the drug epidemic arrived in New London in the 1980s, it spread through the city, but Thames River gained the reputation for drug-related crime. From 1990 on, the city periodically planned to demolish the complex, but could never find the funds.
Figure 2. Beverly Epps, left, and Barbara Daniels, right, of the Winthrop Apartments (today, Thames River Apartments) Tenant Association, 6 January 1983. The Day (New London, Conn.).
Meanwhile, the Thames River tenants’ association emerged as the one relatively constant source of community support. “Maybe the real solution rests with the tenants,” observed a maintenance supervisor in 1967 apropos vandalism. “It is something they’re going to have to take care of themselves.” Largely on a volunteer basis over the years, Thames River tenants cleaned and patrolled hallways, ran a community center, a food pantry, a preschool, after school programs, a computer center and a boxing club, and advocated with city authorities (Figure 2). As deteriorated as Thames River had become, tenants protested plans to raze the complex in the nineties. They pointed out that “people on the outside” had a skewed perception of life behind its walls. “There’s not a ghetto anywhere in New London,” said one tenant in 1990, “but the people from out of here, they have labeled it a ghetto.” People lived in the complex for decades, some grew up there and then returned again as adults. They described a tight-knit community, much as those who had lived in the areas cleared for renewal had described their neighborhoods half a century earlier (Figure 3).
“Renewal in New London was a plural, if not exactly a pluralist, story.”
Figure 3. Tenants in their Thames River apartment, 11 October 1990. The Day (New London, Conn.).
By the early 2000s, the NLHA was $1 million in debt and graded “troubled.” A class-action lawsuit sought to close Thames River Apartments. (New London’s earlier application for HOPE VI funds to demolish the complex was not successful.) The case was settled in 2014, and the last tenants moved out in 2018. Supplied with Section 8 vouchers, they commenced the uphill battle of overcoming the stigma of Thames River to find and retain housing in a market that remains extraordinarily hostile to low-income Americans.[9] As tenants left, their feelings echoed across the span of decades those of the people who moved into the complex in 1967: grief over the loss of a former community, joy and relief at finding a decent home (Figure 4). Standing outside her newly rented house—not unlike the first house demolished by the Winthrop urban renewal project—a mother of four reflected on her former life at Thames River: “How did it get so bad? I think they kept pushing us under the rug because it didn’t matter. We were like a lost city over there, surrounded by an industrial environment. No human being should be living in that place.”
Figure 4. Jeanne Ward standing outside her new home in New London, 13 June 2018. Photograph by Dana Jensen, The Day (New London, Conn.).
As Thames River awaits demolition, it is seen to symbolize a history of failed governance. It may be better viewed as the register of intertwined actions and decisions made by many in the community—much like the urban renewal project that created it. The Thames River tenants’ association should be counted among the many groups whose civic engagement shaped the legacy of renewal in the city. New London stands out for its diversified, active, and consequential community response. The history of the Winthrop Urban Renewal Project reveals a city struggling to shape its own fortunes—for better or worse, but collectively.
A note from the author: Some hyperlinks in this post connect to entries in the digital publication Mapping Urban Renewal in New London: 1941-1975.
Notes
[1] Important prior scholarship includes Douglas Appler, “Changing the Scale of Analysis for Urban Renewal Research: Small Cities, the State of Kentucky, and the 1974 Urban Renewal Directory,” Journal of Planning History 16, no. 3 (2017): 200-221; Nicholas Bauroth, “The Possibility of a Housing Authority: Elite Negotiations and the Establishment of an Urban Renewal Relocation Plan in Fargo, North Dakota,” Journal of Planning History 13 (November 2014): 314-56; Nicholas Bauroth, “The Reluctant Rise of an Urban Regime: The Exercise of Power in Fargo, North Dakota,” Journal of Urban History 37 (July 2011): 519-40; Andrea Smith and Rachel Scarpato, “The Language of ‘Blight’ and Easton’s ‘Lebanese Town’: Understanding a Neighborhood’s Loss to Urban Renewal,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 134 (April 2010): 127-164; David Schuyler, A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1940–1980 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
[2] “Urban Renewal: Taking the Good with the Bad,” The Day, 25 July 1984; Tom Condon, “My Kind of Town,” Hartford Courant, 2 August 1998.
[3] John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). For more recent perspectives, see Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker, eds., Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
[4] Using the example of urban renewal in Fargo, North Dakota, political scientist Nicholas Bauroth also fails to discern a cohesive and lasting urban regime, suggesting that the model is “not always applicable to smaller cities.” Bauroth, “The Reluctant Rise of an Urban Regime,” 534.
[5] Lawrence J. Vale, After the Projects: Public Housing and Redevelopment and the Governance of Poorest Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[6] Vale, After the Projects, 30.
[7] Vale, After the Projects, 43.
[8] “Martin Lists Reasons for Agency’s Move,” The Day, 20 August 1974; Greg Stone, “Winthrop Apts. Safety Violations Bring Possibility of Condemnation,” The Day, 12 December 1974.
[9] Section 8, now known as Housing Choice, vouchers are extremely difficult to obtain (just one in four eligible families receive it nationwide) and landlords discriminate against holders. There is a national shortage of 7.2 million affordable housing units for those with extremely low incomes (ELI). The demolition of public housing projects has exacerbated this housing shortage, as private market subsidies grossly fail to meet the demand. As of 2017, New London County had fifty-one available units per one hundred ELI households. See, e.g., Bryce Covert, “The Deep, Uniquely American Roots of Our Affordable-Housing Crisis,” The Nation, 24 May 2018; Ben Austen, “The Towers Came Down, and with them the Promise of Public Housing,” New York Times Magazine, 6 February 2018.
