Low Rent, High-Rise, Y'all

"Once in office, Weaver presided over a great expansion of public housing. More affordable housing was built under the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 than at any other time in the nation's history, and Weaver's proposals were the ones the administration followed. A national fair-housing law was finally passed in 1968, with Weaver lobbying Congress to support it. Yet these were also the years of the riots in cities like Detroit, of deepening poverty and deindustrialization. Black radicals criticized the housing projects that Weaver helped to build as simply reconstituting the ghetto in new ways. They rejected his quest for a race-blind meritocracy; in a July 1967 column, Jimmy Breslin quoted one such activist: 'You know what everybody says about Weaver? They say, "He's light and bright and damn near white."' Weaver was deeply troubled by the riots, which he argued represented a deepening 'community despair and hopelessness' that could only be undone by concerted government action. But the Great Society lasted just a few years, razed by the politics of backlash as white city dwellers reacted to the housing projects rising in their neighborhoods by fleeing the cities in a panic about living next door to blacks. The public housing projects that Weaver had once viewed as the beachhead of a better society came instead to more closely resemble holding pens for the poorest of the poor, people left out of any social compact whatsoever. The projects became exactly what Weaver had once wanted above all to avoid: a second ghetto. Not only the vision of public housing but the buildings themselves seemed to have failed."

In The Nation, Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Wendell Pritchett's Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City.