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The Tolerance Point: Race, Public Housing, and the Forest Hills Controversy, 1945-75 Author: Daniel A. Wishnoff Dissertation School: City University of New York Pages: 303 Publication Date: September 2005 Availability: Access Number: 10774 Abstract: This dissertation examines New York City's efforts to establish a racially integrated public housing program from 1945 to 1975. It focuses on the struggle against the city's 1966 plan to construct a low-income project (housing mostly poor African-American and Puerto Rican families) in Forest Hills, Queens (a Jewish, middle-income neighborhood). I argue that the protests and political compromises that punctuated the Forest Hills controversy symbolized the failure of the city's integration policies and contributed to the decline and fall of its public housing program. This study also examines the efforts of the housing reformers who created the nation's first public housing program in New York. Housing reformers initially backed the city’s early racial policy that strictly segregated individual housing projects. During the 1940s, as the Black population in a handful of projects that were located in White neighborhoods increased, housing reformers agued that through careful management public housing could promote interracial living and possibly end segregation. After World War II, racial barriers lifted, but the interracial vision for public housing was postponed. Robert Moses, who dominated the city's public housing program, built the majority of the city's low-income projects in poor neighborhoods experiencing racial transition. Moses' placement of the projects combined with the simultaneous migration of thousands of poor African-American and Puerto Rican families to the city created a public housing program that by 1960 was predominantly minority. Refusing to live in projects with large minority populations, Whites fled public housing. The dissertation also examines efforts of housing reformers and the New York City Housing Authority to create more racially balanced projects. After failing to attract more Whites to predominantly minority projects, housing reformers lobbied for what would later be known as scatter-site housing: the construction of low-income projects in predominantly White, middle-income neighborhoods to promote integration. The scatter-site housing policy was implemented by Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1966. Angry protests by ethnic Whites against scatter-site projects slated for their communities forced the Lindsay administration to scale back the number of projects. In 1971, with only a few scatter-site projects built, construction began on the project in Forest Hills. The protests in Forest Hills, fueled by a mixture of racial intolerance, middle-class backlash, a rising fear of crime, and Jewish militancy, forced the Lindsay administration in to an embarrassing compromise that drastically altered the size and scope of the scatter-site project. The Nixon administration considered Forest Hills and example of government mandated "forced integration" and froze all federal funding for public housing in 1973. The cut crippled the city's public housing program. After Forest Hills, the Housing Authority focused its efforts on maintaining its existing stock of housing and built very few new projects. My dissertation demonstrates that the struggle to integrate public housing effectively hastened the decline of public housing in New York. |
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