The Delicate Dance of Postwar Public Housing Construction: Navigating Federalism in Chicago and Milwaukee

Joel Rast, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The period following World War II was a time of widespread experimentation in the rebuilding of cities, including expansive public housing and urban renewal programs funded through the U.S. Housing Act of 1949. This paper examines the redevelopment efforts of two cities, Chicago and Milwaukee, focusing especially on public housing. The project is a comparative historical study based mainly on extensive archival research in both cities. Both Chicago and Milwaukee incorporated public housing into their redevelopment efforts, but their approaches were very different. Chicago emphasized private investment in its redevelopment program with public housing playing a supporting role, serving mainly as relocation housing for residents displaced by urban renewal. Milwaukee, by contrast, put public housing at the center of its strategy for rebuilding the city’s blighted areas. Nevertheless, Milwaukee proved to be a laggard in public housing construction, ranking well behind Chicago and other cities. What explains this puzzling outcome? I argue that differences in the coalitions that mobilized around public housing and urban renewal in the two cities were more favorable to public housing in Chicago than Milwaukee. In Chicago, the linkage of public housing with opportunities for profit discouraged traditional enemies of public housing, especially builders and realtors, from opposing the program. In Milwaukee, by contrast, real estate interests mobilized against public housing, frequently playing on the racial fears of working-class whites. Lacking development plans that required relocation housing for displaced residents, as did their counterparts in Chicago, Milwaukee builders and realtors had no reason to temper their opposition. I find that differences in the behavior of real estate interests in the two cities largely explain Milwaukee’s comparatively weak performance in public housing construction.

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 Presented in Session 168. Racialized Local Spaces