"Know with Reasonable Exactness Which Houses Should Be Torn down”: the American Public Health Association’s Housing Appraisal Method and Urban Renewal

Carolyn Swope, Columbia University

In 1937, the American Public Health Association (APHA) established a Committee on the Hygiene of Housing, which developed an appraisal method for assessing the healthfulness of housing and neighborhoods. The method was developed at a time when cities were increasingly turning to large-scale slum clearance and redevelopment, including federal urban renewal programs. The APHA intentionally and eagerly worked with city officials to put the method to use delineating and targeting “blighted” areas, in the name of addressing substandard and unsanitary conditions. Policymakers and practitioners argued that the method offered an objective, scientific, and definitive means to evaluate housing and determine appropriate action – producing reams of spatial data to this effect. However, in fact, the indicators included were hardly neutral and penalized the dense, mixed-use communities typical of lower-income urban neighborhoods. The method was widely used to justify neighborhood demolition and displacement across cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., to name a few. Despite the role of the method in facilitating harmful interventions, its history is little recognized or studied. In this presentation, I overview the method’s design and operation, and show how it produced spatial “knowledge” that concretized marginalized communities as in need of destruction. I highlight in particular how the method’s claims to objectivity provided a screen of technical professionalism which masked its actual subjectivity.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 129. The City and Its Environments