Definition
Slum clearance — formally codified as Title I of the federal Housing Act of 1949 — was a mid-twentieth-century American urban-policy program that subsidized the demolition of blighted urban neighborhoods and their replacement with new housing. Local agencies acquired neighborhood-scale properties through eminent domain, demolished existing buildings, wrote down land costs with federal subsidies, and sold the cleared sites to private developers at below-market prices.
The program ran from 1949 through approximately 1974, when the Community Development Block Grant program absorbed its functions. Across its quarter-century, slum clearance demolished neighborhoods housing roughly 1.6 million Americans — disproportionately Black, Latino, and working-class — and replaced them with mid-rise and high-rise housing that the displaced residents almost universally could not afford to return to.
Why slum clearance matters
The mechanism
Title I worked through a five-step process:
Step 1 — Designation. A local Slum Clearance Committee (or equivalent agency) identified a neighborhood as blighted. The blight finding triggered federal eligibility.
Step 2 — Acquisition. The agency acquired all properties in the designated area through eminent domain at appraised market value.
Step 3 — Demolition. All buildings were demolished. Residents were evicted, ideally with relocation assistance, often without.
Step 4 — Write-down. The federal government subsidized the difference between the agency's acquisition cost and the fair re-use value of the cleared land. The write-down was typically two-thirds federal, one-third local.
Step 5 — Disposition. The cleared, written-down land was sold or leased to a private developer at below-market price, with the developer building new housing or commercial use.
The economic logic was that the write-down would attract private capital to neighborhoods the market would not otherwise serve. The political logic was that the new development would expand the tax base and attract middle-class residents.
The Moses critique in The Power Broker
Caro's case-study topics in The Power Broker (Topic 41, Rumors and the Report of Rumors; Topic 43, Late Arrival) document specific failures of New York's Title I program under Moses's Slum Clearance Committee:
Sweetheart deals with politically connected developers. Title I designations went to developers with relationships to Moses, often at appraised land values well below fair market. Moses-favored developers reaped substantial profits.
Inadequate relocation. The 1949 Act promised relocation assistance for displaced residents. In practice the assistance was minimal; residents were often given 90-day notices and inadequate alternatives. Many ended up in deteriorating South Bronx buildings or moved out of the city entirely.
Eviction in haste. Residents were rushed out on tight timelines justified by construction urgency that frequently did not hold. Buildings were demolished; construction was then delayed for cost overruns. The haste of the eviction had not been necessary.
Destruction of stable communities. Many neighborhoods designated as blighted were in fact stable working-class communities with low crime rates and established social networks. The blight designation was often pretextual.
The Citizens Union investigation of 1959-1960 and the World-Telegram/Post investigative reporting that followed forced Mayor Wagner to reduce the Slum Clearance Committee's mandate and shift authority to a new Housing and Redevelopment Board.
Slum clearance's legacy
The cumulative legacy of Title I includes:
- Permanent demolition. 1.6 million displaced; thousands of acres of neighborhoods gone permanently. Subsequent policy could not undo the demolition.
- The racial wealth gap. Many of the demolished neighborhoods were homeownership clusters in Black communities; the demolition stripped accumulated property wealth that took decades to start to rebuild.
- Distrust of urban planning. The community-organizing movement against urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s — Jane Jacobs, the Greenwich Village preservation fights, the Lower Manhattan Expressway resistance — fundamentally shaped subsequent planning practice.
- The contemporary skepticism of blight designation. Modern affordable-housing and community-development practice treats the blight finding with deep skepticism, recognizing it as the historical foothold for slum clearance.