Slum Clearance Referendum of 1950

The Slum Clearance Referendum of 1950 empowered the City of Little Rock to accept federal assistance to remove dilapidated urban housing. Using funds provided under the 1949 Federal Housing Act the city tore down 628 houses and replaced them with 928 low-rent apartment units. Clyde E. Lowry, a Little Rock insurance executive, spearheaded the successful 1950 effort to a pass the referendum. Slum clearance was later renamed "urban renewal."

History of Slum Clearance

In 1930 city planner John Nolen said of the city, "Little Rock has handicaps, common to many communities, among the the extreme ideas in community development -- those people who are too conservative to go ahead and those people over eager to go ahead without giving consideration to others." Exactly twenty years later members of the Little Rock Housing Authority began pushing local citizens to accept matching slum clearance funds available under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949. The local funding match would come from a local bond issue for improvements to black-only Gillam Park.

In the fall of 1949 the Little Rock City Planning Commission identified 3,115 "blighted" houses in the city, about ten percent of the total housing stock. Most were described as overcrowded, lacking modern plumbing, or structurally deficient, and almost all (2,818) were occupied by black residents. The commission found particularly grave slum conditions in the East End, Granite Mountain neighborhood, South End, Broadway, and Livestock showgrounds neighborhood. Local fire chief Gann L. Nalley noted 344 fires in these neighborhood in only the last four years.

Debate over the proposal was vigorous, in some ways rivaling the debate over integration later in the decade. Conservatives, some of whom organized themselves into the Taxpayers Defense Council, dubbed urban renewal "socialistic." Liberals called it "Negro removal." Adolphine Terry, who organized a citizen's Committee for Progress in 1949 to address the problem of slum housing, called it "an exercise in responsible democracy and a solution to health problems among the poor." City health officer William P. Scarlett agreed that clearance was desperately overdue. Remembering the 1946 typhus outbreak in the city, Scarlett recalled "one big frame house in a bad housing area" contained thirty-three residents, six cases of typhus, babies covered in fleas, and numerous rats.

The Board of Directors of the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, citing the potential for acquisition of condemned East End land for airport and industrial expansion, lined up in favor of the ordinance. Many on the pro-ordinance side agreed with Flossie Parker of the Pulaski County Juvenile Court who argued that young people in the area "have been deprived by their environment of an understanding of why society expects them to conform to its rules." The opposition Taxpayers Defense Council complained that what these youths needed was not improved housing -- there were no slums in Little Rock in their estimation -- but better parenting. In the end the forces for social and infrastructural reform won by a slim margin. A referendum on the issue passed on May 9, 1950, by a margin of 5,032 to 4,026 with majority black support.

Gillam Park was upgraded from an undeveloped lot to include a swimming pool, pavilions, baseball diamond, and small amusement park. In return, the federal government supplied $3 million funds for the Booker Homes project in the minority Granite Mountain neighborhood near the east end of Gillam Park. Granite Mountain was described in official planning documents as "the largest and most blighted area in the City of Little Rock." The neighborhood was identified and demolished after the extra-constitutional Operation Honesty found the neighborhood noncontributing to the local property tax base. Operation Honesty was a self-selected citizen's group supported by the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, the Central Trades and Labor Council, and school and other civic leaders.

The project included four hundred new homes for black families. The $1.3 million Granite Mountain slum clearance effort by the Little Rock Housing Authority and Urban Progress Association led to the condemnation and demolition of one hundred and seventy two small homes scattered over 100 acres and occupied by black Little Rock residents. Only two of the homes had indoor plumbing. Residents instead fetched water from free-standing faucets. Sixty-nine new homes replaced the older structures. One thousand low-rent apartment units were also approved. The clearance, approved on December 3, 1954, by the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, was part of the Central Little Rock Urban Renewal Project.

The battle over slum clearance was contentious. On the 1200 block of East Second Street, on land now occupied by the Clinton Library one landowner pushed four houses into the Arkansas River rather than seeing them removed by the city and himself billed for the clearance. Remembered Raymond Rebsamen ten years later, "When the urban renewal was first proposed, I was one of the few business men who spoke out in its favor. And don't think we didn't have plenty of opposition. Little Rock had some knock-down, drag-out, name-calling sessions prior to the referendum and before public forums, including our former City Council."

Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette has since argued that "[l]ocal authorities could get federal grants for so-called slum clearance and they could clean out an old slum, which in almost every case, of course, tended to be a black neighborhood. And then they were required, if they did that, to provide equivalent housing within presumably the reach of the income groups of the displaced. And then they could then sell this land for any purpose. It didn't have to be for housing if they built equivalent housing somewhere else."

The federal Housing Act of 1954 expanded the provisions of the Housing Act of 1949 to go beyond simply eliminating slums to providing financial assistance for urban renewal. The 1954 act required Workable Programs documents showing how local communities planned to eliminate substandard housing, bring life back to old neighborhoods, and prevent the recurrence of blight.

References

• "Chamber Directors Back New City Slum Clearance Program," Arkansas Gazette, May 4, 1950.
• Blaine Delaney, "Vote for Housing," Arkansas Gazette, May 4, 1950.
• Gene Foreman, "Urban Renewal: A Decade of Progress Has Brought Impressive Changes to Little Rock," Arkansas Gazette, May 29, 1960.
• Metroplan, A Workable Program for the City of Little Rock, Arkansas (November 1955).
• Sara Alderman Murphy, Breaking the Silence: Little Rock's Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1963 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 20-23.
• John Nolen, City Plan: Little Rock, Arkansas (Cambridge, MA: Hale J. Walker and Justin R. Hartzog Associates, 1930), 6.
• "On Condemnation," Arkansas Gazette, May 4, 1950.
• Raymond Rebsamen, Little Rock: Poised Poised for Progress, (Little Rock, AR: Urban Progress Association, 1960).
• Mort Stern, "The City Health Department Finds It Expensive Business to Fight Slum-Bred Diseases," Arkansas Gazette, May 5, 1950.
• Mort Stern, "In the City of Roses One Out of Ten Families Lives in a Crowded, Unsanitary House," Arkansas Gazette, May 3, 1950.
• Mort Stern, "You Begin to Understand the Problem of the Slum Dweller When You Visit Him at Home," Arkansas Gazette, May 4, 1950.
• "Taxpayers! Look at This 'Heart Throbbing' Picture and Story That the Arkansas Gazette and the Political Bosses are Using to Cram Socialist Public Housing Down Your Throats! [advertisement]" Arkansas Gazette, May 5, 1950.