Housing Initiatives

As new roads and highways were built, they became part of an urban renewal strategy that, along with the loss of manufacturing firms, destabilized older urban neighborhoods with their old street grids and established communities and character. Highways were superimposed on older city neighborhoods, leaving many downtowns a pedestrian-unfriendly patchwork of highway ramps, empty lots, parking structures and isolated buildings.

The 1949 Housing Act aimed to redevelop downtowns and create public housing projects to relocate existing residents. Using modernist architecture to create high-rise apartment buildings that replaced older neighborhoods did not have the intended effect of creating a new downtown. Suburbs had caught on as the model of affluence, and they were the new trend in housing development.