Building Public Housing in Educative Neighborhoods: Seattle's Early Design Efforts, 1937–1947

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Numerous urban historians have examined the political debates and racial geographies that
resulted from American forays into the construction of low-cost public housing. For the most
part, this literature gives short shrift to education. Using local and federal housing authority as
well as local public school archives, I find that both the design and location of public housing in
Seattle were significantly influenced by national conversations on the building of what I call
‘educative neighborhoods.’
Far from the modernist, Corbusien designs often associated with public housing, Seattle’s early
designs were low-rise structures oriented around common green spaces and a community center,
with easy access to modern, neighborhood schools. In addition, over the course of his tenure,
Seattle Housing Authority Director Jesse Epstein remained adamant that public housing required
racial integration in order to truly fulfill its civic and educative promise. Yet, Epstein’s efforts to
build public housing and educative neighborhoods encountered opposition: from whites fearing
integration as well as the multiethnic residents of slum clearance sites who worried about
displacement and the bureaucratic take-over of existing cultural institutions.
I argue that this history is significant for three reasons. First, it inserts the important role of
educational ideas and institutions into a history of the creation and maintenance of economic and
racial segregation in 20th century urban America. Second, it introduces this idea of ‘educative
neighborhoods’ and examines how this idea played out in the planning, publicity, and building of
public housing in a place with a distinctive multiethnic, multiracial history. Third, it provides
some historical context for contemporary efforts to build or re-build educative neighborhoods
like those found in “community development” programs like the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s
Family Centered Community Change initiative and federal programs like Housing and Urban
Development’s Choice Neighborhoods and the Department of Education’s Promise
Neighborhoods.

Author

• Michael Bowman, Iowa State University