Monday, June 26, 2006

Frank Wilkinson's Legacy

Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:09:39 -0400
To:
From: "Tenant"
Subject: This is worth reading ... the other stadium fight

NB - This was sent by a friend...
The following snippet is from a documentary about him done by the BBC:
"I think the greatest irony in reviewing these monstrous FBI files is
that, to quote them, 'It does not appear that Wilkinson has shown the
willingness or capability of engaging in any act that would
significantly interfere with or be a threat to the survival and
effective operation of our government.' That was their *own* judgment
at a time [when] they were wasting millions of dollars on 132,000
pages of surveillance and disruption of my work.


The records you see on this table show that it all began with my work
in housing. We had a dream that Los Angeles would become the first
city in America free of slums. That entire dream was ended with this
beautiful stadium. The BBC documentary shows Wilkinson walking around
the field in Dodger Stadium." - Tenant


Robert Sherrill. First Amendment Felon: The Story of Frank
Wilkinson, His 132,000-Page FBI File, and His Epic Fight for Civil
Rights and Liberties_ (New York: Nation Books): 14 - 15.


January 7, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Frank Wilkinson's Legacy
by Peter Dreier

The obituaries for Frank Wilkinson, who died January 2 at 91,
primarily focused on his role as a leading opponent of McCarthyism,
the House Un- American Activities Committee, and government spying on
citizens. In 1958, Wilkinson was one of the last people ordered to
prison for defying HUAC. He appealed his contempt citation all the
way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5 to 4 against him. After
spending nine months in federal prison in 1961, Wilkinson through the
National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, spend more than a
decade fighting to dismantle HUAC, which was finally abolished in
1975. Wilkinson also fought the FBI. He sued the FBI to obtain its
files on him, eventually getting 132,000 documents, which revealed
that the agency had been spying on him for 38 years. A federal judge
ordered the FBI to end its surveillance of Wilkinson.

At a time when the Bush Administration is conducting an assault on
civil liberties in the name of national security, Wilkinson's battles
to protect free speech are worth recalling. But it is often forgotten
that Wilkinson began his career as an activist for affordable
housing. His crusade for civil liberties began when he was fired from
the Los Angeles Housing Authority -- the city's public housing
agency, where he was a high-ranking official -- during the McCarthy
era because of his radical politics.

Today, many consider public housing to be a failed experiment in "big
government" social engineering. But for Wilkinson's generation of
idealists -- who came of age in the Depression of the 1930s -- public
housing was part of a broad movement for social reform and economic
justice. To the extent that public housing now bears the stigma of
failure, it is due not to the progressive values that inspired
Wilkinson and others, but to the political influence of right-wing
forces who fought to undermine public housing from the beginning.
Los Angeles and other cities again face a severe shortage of
affordable housing. Many of the same battles that Wilkinson fought 50
years ago -- -- over land use, government subsidies for the poor,
racial integration, and ?not in my backyard? opposition to low-cost
housing -- confront the current generation of public officials and
civic leaders.

Until the Depression, most American opinion leaders believed that the
private market, with a helping hand from private philanthropy, could
meet the nation's housing needs. Reformers who wanted government to
play a major role in housing were a lonely voice in the political
wilderness. In the first three decades of the 20th century, a few
unions and settlement house reformers built model housing
developments for working class families, but without government
subsidy. The nation's economic collapse provided reformers with a
political opening to push their "radical" ideas that the federal
government should subsidize "social housing" and help create a
noncommercial sector free from profit and speculation. Like their
European counterparts, they envisioned it for the middle class as
well as the poor.

These reformers - economists, planners, architects, social workers,
and journalists - had faith in the positive role of government on
people and communities. They believed that well-designed housing with
adequate amenities (such as playgrounds and child care centers) could
uplift the poor.

Led by housing activist Catherine Bauer (who later became the first
woman professor at Berkeley's urban planning school) and progressive
labor unions (through the Labor Housing Conference, founded in 1934),
they pushed for well-designed, mixed-income, noncommercial,
government subsidized housing projects, sponsored by unions, church
groups, other non-profit organizations, and government agencies.
During its first few years, the New Deal build a few model
developments that reflected this vision. They included day care
centers, involved residents in cultural and educational activities,
and were physically attractive enough so that middle-class families
wanted to live there. The reformers hoped to turn these prototype
projects into a permanent government program.

But the reformers were soon outmaneuvered by the real estate
industry, led by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. The
industry -- worried that well-designed and affordable
government-sponsored housing would compete with the private sector
for middle-class consumers --warned about the specter of "socialism."
With the enactment of the Wagner Public Housing Act in 1937, the real
estate industry began to sabotage the program by restricting its
funding and by giving local governments discretion over whether and
where to locate developments. After WW2, recognizing the pent-up
demand for housing and fearing competition from public housing, the
industry mobilized a major campaign against the program. It
successfully. pressured Congress to limit it to the very poor . From
1950 to 1970, the median income of public residents fell from 64
percent to 37 percent of the national median. Senators from the South
made sure that local governments had the authority to keep public
housing racially segregated.

With limited budgets, many projects were poorly constructed and/or
badly designed - ugly warehouses for the poor - stigmatizing
"government housing" as housing of last resort. Local housing
authorities -- typically dominated by business and real estate
representatives -- often located public housing developments in areas
without adequate stores, transportation, or schools, and isolated
from middle-class neighborhoods, contributing to the concentration of
poor people in cities. The problems we now associate with public
housing were not inevitable. They were due to political choices made
in Congress and at the local level.

By the time Wilkinson -- who grew up Beverly Hills, had been a
Republican as a student at UCLA and originally intended to become a
Methodist minister -- joined the LA Housing Authority in 1942, public
housing was already controversial. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron,
a reform minded liberal Republican elected in 1938, nevertheless
supported public housing and later backed Wilkinson's idea to promote
racial integration within the city's developments. A number of large
developments were constructed in the early1940s, starting with the
610- unit Ramona Gardens in 1941.

After World War 2, Bowron sought to expand the program, especially
for the many veterans who faced a desperate housing shortage. He
endorsed a plan to raze many homes in the tight-knit Chavez Ravine
neighborhood replace them with a large public housing development to
be designed by world-class architect Richard Nuetra that would
include two dozen 13- story buildings and more than 160 two-story
houses, as well as new playgrounds and schools. Bowron, Wilkinson and
other reformers viewed the housing plan for Chavez Ravine as a way to
improve living conditions poor Angelenos, especially
Mexican-Americans who lived in the neighborhood's substandard homes.
The ?battle of Chavez Ravine? has become a legend of urban planning,
inspiring a recent album by guitarist Ry Cooder, a play by the
Culture Clash theater group, and many books and academic articles.
In July 1950, Chavez Ravine residents received letters from the city
telling them that they should sell their homes to make the land
available for the proposed project. The residents were told that they
would have first choice for the new homes. A few residents resisted
but most left quietly.

The city's landlords, homebuilders, and business leaders, along with
right-wing political groups, mobilized to oppose building any more
developments, including the Chavez Ravine plan. They, too, wanted to
bulldoze the neighborhood, but they had other designs for the area,
so close to the city?s downtown. They utilized the era's
anti-communist "Red Scare" paranoia to characterize the Chavez Ravine
proposal -- and public housing in general -- as socialist planning.
One way to attack public housing was to attack its leading advocate,
Wilkinson, as a dangerous Communist. Brought before the House
Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to answer their
questions on First Amendment grounds and was fired from his job and
sent to federal prison, starting Wilkinson on a new career path as a
civil liberties activist.

The same business leaders who opposed Wilkinson and public housing
also ended Bowron's political career. They handpicked Congressman
Norris Poulson to run against Bowron and orchestrated his mayoral
victory in 1953. During his campaign, Poulson vowed to stop the
Chavez Ravine plan and other examples of "un-American" spending.
Under Poulson, the city bought back the Chavez Ravine site from the
federal government at a cut-rate price. Several years later, City
Councilmember Ken Hahn gave Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O?Malley a
helicopter tour of the area and pointed to the empty 300 acre Chavez
Ravine site adjacent to downtown and at the intersection of major
freeways. The team moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and opened Dodger
Stadium two years later. The city obviously broke its promise to the
former residents of the neighborhood, scattered by the city?s
bulldozer, to relocate them in better housing.

Versions of LA?s battle over public housing were repeated in cities
across the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, lobbying by the real
estate industry and conservatives assured that public housing would
be targeted exclusively for the very poor. Public housing became
identified with drug wars and crime, places where children are afraid
to walk to school, and elderly tenants, for whom hallways and
elevators are as dangerous as streets, are afraid to leave their
apartments. Movies such as Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991) by Matty
Rich, who grew up in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, and books such as
Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, chronicling life in the
Chicago projects, portrayed public housing as more a trap than a
ladder.

Not surprisingly, middle class families resisted siting developments
in their neighborhoods. Public housing became more unpopular
politically, leading to a cycle of government neglect and
underfunding which, in turn, led to poor construction design,
inadequate maintenance, racial segregation, stigmatization, and
further concentration of the very poor. Construction of new public
housing developments ended in the 1970s during the Nixon
administration. Eventually, only 1.3 million public housing units
were built - less than 1% of the nation?s housing.. It was replaced
by other kinds of government-subsidized housing, which eventually
evolved into today's largest federal program, Section 8 vouchers,
which are essentially food stamps for housing.

Despite the popular stereotypes, high-rises account for only one-
quarter of public housing buildings. But high-rise projects, most of
them in the largest cities, account for many of the problems. and
cast a giant shadow on the entire program. A decade ago, Congress
enacted the Hope VI program to encourage local housing authorities to
tear down troubled high-rise public housing developments and replace
them with scattered-site housing. This has improved neighborhoods but
with the consequence of reducing the overall number of subsidized
units for the poor.

Despite their problems, public housing developments are often better
than privately-owned slum housing, which in many cities are the major
housing option for the poor. That is why, in LA and most other
cities, there are long waiting lists for public housing.

American politicians still use misleading stereotypes about public
housing to attack the very idea of government activism. During his
1996 campaign, for example, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole
told the National Association of Realtors that public housing was
"one of the last bastions of socialism in the world" and said that
local housing authorities have become "landlords of misery." More
recently, after the Katrina hurricane destroyed much of New Orleans'
subsidized housing, concentrated in the city poorest areas,
Congressman Richard Baker (R-LA) was overheard telling lobbyists, "We
finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it,
but God did."

As a result of such sentiments, the U.S. spends less on government
housing subsidies for the poor than any other democratic country.
Housing subsidies for the poor are a lottery, not an entitlement. The
entire U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development budget is
only $32 billion, which provides housing assistance for less than
one- quarter of the nation?s poor. And while the number of poor
people has increased since President George W. Bush took office, his
administration is cutting housing subsidies for low-income families.

Some federal funds are still used to build new housing for the poor
-- mainly by giving tax breaks to corporations that invest in
low-income apartments. Ironically, most of today?s government
subsidized housing is built by nonprofit community development
organizations. They are typically well-designed to fit into
neighborhoods and small-scale compared with the massive public
housing towers built in the 1950s and 1960s. A growing number of
these developments are mixed-income and provide child care, job
training, and education and art programs. In other words, they look
similar to the kind of projects that early housing reformers and
their offspring,, like Frank Wilkinson, envisioned. But without
sufficient federal subsidies, these community groups lack the
resources to seriously address housing shortage for the poor.
Today, America?s cities are trying to address a serious housing
crisis, but without the federal government as a partner. In many
cities and inner-ring suburbs, few working families, including many
middle-income households, can afford to purchase a home. Many
low-income families spend over half their incomes just to pay rent.
More than a million Americans are homeless at some point during the
year. Across the nation, a new generation of housing reformers -
tenant organizers, community development groups, homeless advocates,
and others -- are waging a crusade for more livable cities and metro
areas.

Under progressive Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for example, Los
Angeles -- where at least 80,000 people are homeless -- is trying to
deal with the legacy of this federal neglect. The city has one of the
most severe housing shortages in the nation. Elected officials,
business groups, community organizations, labor unions, religious
leaders, and housing advocates are wrestling with policy ideas --
such as $1 billion housing bond, an inclusionary zoning law to
require mixed-income housing, and stronger code enforcement against
slumlords -- to meet the growing need. But, as in Wilkinson's time,
there are political forces that resist reform. Business-back schemes
to revitalize downtown LA -- such as the Grand Avenue project and the
gentrification of Skid Row -- include few housing units for the
city's low-income working class. The influential Central City Assn.,
the lobbying arm of downtown developers and businesses, opposes
inclusionary zoning, despite the fact that over 100 California
communities have already adopted the policy.

In the struggle for better housing, Wilkinson was a visionary. He
fought for incremental reforms but he saw them as steppingstones to
a broader social justice agenda. Like his fight to protect the First
Amendment?s guarantee of free speech, Wilkinson viewed decent, safe,
affordable housing as a basic human right. The best tribute to Frank
Wilkinson's memory would be a city where people can afford to live in
any neighborhood, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or income.

Peter Dreier teaches political science and directs the Urban &
Environmental Policy program at Occidental College.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0107-27.htm

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