The Extraordinary Times wishes you all a happy and prosperous new year. Our first Q&A of 2023 is with Dr. Julie D. Turner. Turner holds a doctorate in US History from Miami University of Ohio and has taught for the University of Cincinnati, Xavier University, and Miami University. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century US culture and society, along with the history of design, cities, and technology. She is the author of Best-Laid Plans: The Promises and Pitfalls of the New Deal Greenbelt Towns (University of Cincinnati Press, 2023). * What inspired you to write about the Greenbelt Towns established under the New Deal's Resettlement Administration in the 1930s? I went to middle school in Greenhills, in the building that was their original school and community center. I've always had an interest in the past and in design, so the building intrigued me. It was only years later that I started to learn the history of the town, and then I was hooked. Although I didn't live in Greenhills (the school district was shared with a neighboring community), I had a good friend who lived in one of the original homes and it just seemed so different from what I was used to. For some reason the era of the 1920s-1940s fascinates me, and here was this great story so close to home. My research eventually focused on the entire Greenbelt experiment, not just on Greenhills, but it was that local connection that pulled me in. As I learned more about the program that built the towns, I found the idea of the federal government paying for, planning, and building entire towns fascinating. It's definitely something I can't imagine happening today. This doesn't show that politicians were generally more willing to experiment back then, but it does illustrate just how desperate they were to find a way out of the economic and human disaster that surrounded them, especially once their constituents demanded action. * Describe your research process. What source or discovery most excited you?
I started by visiting archives to see what I could find. My first research trip was to Cornell University, which houses the papers of several men who were key figures in the planning. Having no idea how to go about this research, I took my digital camera and just snapped pictures of every document that seemed potentially useful, which was my standard practice from then on, though I got better at organizing and knowing what I wanted to look at as I went along. I also visited the two other towns—Greenbelt, Maryland, and Greendale, Wisconsin—and saw artifacts from the early residents and even stayed in an original apartment in Greenbelt for a week. This introduced a whole new dimension to understanding the towns, the creators, and the families who first moved in. The most enlightening research was the personal interviews I did with some original Greenbelt residents, who were just children in those early years. The most time-consuming portion of my research was conducted in archives and libraries, especially the National Archives, the Special Collections at the University of Kentucky, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York. For the most part, when just sorting through files of government documents and snapping endless photos of them, the exciting "Eureka" moment doesn't happen often. Still, there were some great finds, particularly in the FDR Library. The papers of Rexford Tugwell, who conceived of and initially headed the program, are held there. Getting to hold in my hands letters and memos to and from Tugwell, to and from FDR, and even between Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband was wonderful. But my favorite find was a letter from a struggling family written to the First Lady asking for help in finding a home. It was so personal and so pained; it was really moving. I tracked down two of the children from that family, and they had no idea their parents had reached out to Mrs. Roosevelt like this. They also never secured a home in any of the Greenbelt towns. But they were so excited to know that this piece of their family history was in the presidential library and they very kindly gave me permission to use their family's story in my book. * On balance, what is the legacy of the Greenbelt Towns in shaping America? The Greenbelt program and the towns it created offer a wonderful snapshot of the concerns of the Depression era, the desperation of so many citizens, but also the political animosity of the time. It shows how grand plans just aren't enough in the face of budget constraints and partisan differences. The program set out to build towns to serve as models for future residential growth, but it was a very different model—that of cookie-cutter homes set in often-isolated, sprawling, car-centric suburbs—that eventually prevailed. The Greenbelts show one dream of how the American landscape might have looked, though it was almost certainly an unrealistic dream given how much federal money had to be spent to bring the communities to life and the general resistance to such governmental "interference" in the free market once the worst of the Depression had passed. The program changed the lives of thousands of families for the better, not just those who moved into the towns, but those who had family members employed building the homes, public buildings, and infrastructure for the communities or working in industries providing materials for the construction. The Greenbelt program, and the New Deal overall, showed what was politically possible, but also highlighted the sharp contrasts in how Americans viewed the role of their government. Town planners still look at the Greenbelt model as a study in innovative thinking. The towns offered something new, although with many aspects borrowed from previous concepts. Federal funding gave the designers a freedom to experiment that private development rarely, if ever, offers. They could play with ideas and dream big. Even if economic and political realities limited the possibility of creating more such communities, I can't help but imagine how different the nation would be if it were filled with Greenbelt-like towns rather than the suburbs that dominate so much of the landscape. * What lessons could today's politicians and urban planners draw from this legacy? What politicians could learn depends entirely on the attitudes they bring to the topic. Those who believe that the government owes its citizens the basics of a decent life, including decent housing, will see the Greenbelts as a noble and visionary effort. They would likely lament that the project wasn't more successful and wasn't widely used as at least a partial inspiration for future development. Those who believe strongly that it's the responsibility of each individual to work hard and create a more prosperous lifestyle for themselves almost certainly see the Greenbelt program as extreme government overreach. There is no overlap between those two positions, just as there was none in the 1930s. A more pragmatic lesson politicians could possibly take away from this history, if they cared to learn it, is that the low-income housing efforts of the decades following World War II should have borrowed more from the Greenbelt idea. Isolated high-rise housing projects failed miserably, as the planners of the Greenbelts surely would have predicted. Housing means more than providing a roof over a family's head. Decent housing also means safety and green space and areas for children to play. In the end, the Greenbelt towns didn't actually house the neediest of the poor and working class, so it never served as a good model for what we think of as true low-income housing. But the planners and administrators clearly understood that substandard living environments will almost inevitably produce an under-served underclass. Urban planning students do study the Greenbelts, and possibly someone out there is attempting to find a way to bring this model to life again. The idea of cozy, walkable communities still sounds inviting today—possibly more inviting now because of our current climate crisis and the need to become less dependent on fossil-fuel-guzzling cars. But the reality is that private enterprise builds homes and, by extension, builds communities. The Greenbelt model would be expensive to replicate, so it's hard to imagine that such a plan could be implemented for any but fairly wealthy residents. Unfortunately, the main lesson for planners has been one that has been learned over and over again: that providing affordable housing in safe, pleasant neighborhoods cannot be done on a tight budget. Private builders don't see a profit in such a plan, and public initiatives require too high a level of government spending to earn the approval of the populace at large. These are the same problems the Greenbelt program was intended to address, but in the end the effort simply proved that an inexpensive solution that provides adequate homes to those most in need remains elusive.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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