A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Publicly Ed Rendell always exuded hope. Privately he anguished over his ability to effect the massive change needed to resurrect the city. He always wondered whether all anyone could do was supply hope in the way casinos pumped in oxygen to keep weary gamblers awake and stimulated during the wee hours of the morning.

  In anticipation of the official opening of the Pennsylvania Convention Center the following month, the city was planning an eleven-day extravaganza called Welcome America! Leading up to Independence Day, it would be replete with laser shows, fireworks displays, giant hoagies, and visits by both President Clinton and Vice President Gore. “I feel like the Roman emperor,” Rendell said during a planning session. “I can’t give decent city services. I want to close [city] health centers, and I want to cut back on [city] library hours, and here I am giving bread and circuses to the people.”

  II

  The mayor arrived at the airport tarmac to await the president, and he was well aware of the machinations that had taken place in preparation for the visit, the constant changes in locations and itinerary like something out of Mission: Impossible. “What a fiasco!” he whispered, but he was in a buoyant mood. Only an hour earlier, shining his shoes at his desk, he had seemed quite nervous, not about what he was going to say to the president—he seemed quite secure about that—but about what he was going to say at a wedding he had agreed to officiate at right before meeting the president. Fortunately the bride had cried in joy, and the mayor of course had started getting weepy too, just like a damn bridesmaid, and the whole thing had been beautiful, and as he stood on the hot asphalt waiting for a personal séance with the most powerful leader in the world, he seemed positively aglow.

  Some of his aides had thought he should push the issue of the navy yard, pressing the president on what the federal government could do to ease its transition from a massive defense installation to an industrial and economic center, particularly since word was out that Mercedes was shopping around for a site for its first U.S. plant. But rather than fog the president’s head with a myriad of issues, Rendell thought it was better to focus on one issue, the base closures recommended by the Pentagon, which would cost the city nearly ten thousand jobs.

  For the ride from the airport back to the city, he slid into the limo, where he and the president, as he later put it, “bullshitted” for three or four minutes. Then he spent the remaining seventeen minutes on the base closures. He pointed out that with the Pentagon’s proposal, the city would lose more jobs than just about any other place in the country. He showed Clinton a copy of an executive order issued by President Carter, noting that urban areas should be favored by the federal government in cases of consolidation or relocation. He knew these arguments carried some weight, but not the weight that mattered the most, so he gave Clinton two sets of numbers:

  Two point nine, four, and thirty-one.

  Nine, twenty-five, and seventy-four.

  The numbers seemed cryptic, one of those silly logic games the object of which is to figure out what each set had in common. The first set, Rendell explained, was for Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, where the jobs would go under the proposed relocation and consolidation plan: 2.9 percent was the unemployment rate; 4 percent was the poverty rate; and 31 percent was Clinton’s share of the votes in the presidential election. The second set was for Philadelphia: 9 percent was the unemployment rate; 25 percent was the poverty rate; and 74 percent was Clinton’s share of the votes in the presidential election.

  Clinton laughed.

  If there was another politician in the country who would make an appeal to the president this way, it was hard to know who it was.

  What Ed Rendell didn’t say was that in working so desperately to keep his city afloat, he wasn’t simply fighting the effects of a stingy Congress or the effects of the Reagan-Bush years, when the incidence of poverty in America’s cities had multiplied. He was also fighting one hundred years of history and federal policy that had willed his city and other cities like it into such a condition that the best he could do, the best any mayor could do, was beg from a speeding motorcade and depend on the strength of his charisma.

  III

  It was a map, and it lay buried and folded in a musty box of documents in the National Archives in Washington, untouched at this point except by a smattering of scholars driven enough to find it. It was color coded in shades of green and blue and yellow and red, and it was marked with the letters A, B, C, and D to correspond to the colors. It had held up well, and the colors looked as good now as they had in 1937, when a team of appraisers had spread over the city, quietly doing their work for the federal government. The map had divided the city into about twenty-five different sections, each section delineated by boundary marks, each section given a particular color and grade, depending on the appraisers’ determinations.

  The map was easy to read, even down to the street names. The appraisers had done their work well. It was hard to believe that in this map, in the careful and deliberate choice of colors and grades for each section of the city, like the inverse of a secret treasure, lay startling evidence of the seeds of the city’s destruction.

  But it was true, for the map, along with the other documents in that box, provided shocking insights into the reason the American city had seemed destined to fail as far back as the 1930s and the way the federal government, in terms that were blatant, racist, and unsanitized, had aided and abetted that destruction while opening up the floodgates of the suburbs.

  Location well-protected against encroachment …

  Lower part of section is threatened with Italian expansion.…

  Colored forcing way in some spots …

  Influx of Jewish has discounted values.…

  High grade Americans. Professional and Executives …

  These terse descriptions of Philadelphia had been typed succinctly across the neighborhood survey form, NS Form 8, without a single note of shock or regret. Headings such as “Negro,” “Infiltration of,” and “Foreign Born” were all part of the standard criteria to determine the level of risk in granting a mortgage. The more “Negro” there was, the more “Infiltration of” there was, the more “Foreign Born” there was, the less chance someone living in a particular neighborhood would get a mortgage.

  These survey forms and assessments, which in turn formed the basis for the color-coordinated map of the city, had been prepared by a federal agency called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. In the plethora of programs started by President Roosevelt in the New Deal era, it was hardly the most noteworthy. But as pointed out by Kenneth T. Jackson in his remarkable book Crabgrass Frontier, HOLC ended up affecting every facet of American life, from the future shape of cities to the future shape of suburbs to the blockade that kept minorities from the American dream of home ownership.

  Signed into law by Roosevelt in June 1933, HOLC refinanced tens of thousands of mortgages that were in danger of default because of the Depression. But the real value of HOLC, Jackson wrote in his book, a history of the suburbanization of the United States, was the way it “introduced, perfected and proved in practice the feasibility” of the modern mortgage. In the 1920s, a mortgage had an average life of five to ten years and then was subject to renewal. With the advent of HOLC, mortgages were extended to twenty years, and the payments were fully amortized. But as a precaution, the federal agency established exhaustive appraisal procedures to determine which areas of a city or suburb were more suitable for lending than others. Metropolitan areas all over the country were analyzed, including Philadelphia. The resulting maps may have looked clean and almost lovely with their different colors, but they were often brutal in their findings when it came to the future of the cities.

  “First Grade” areas, which were marked by the color green and the letter A, signified areas of a city that were well planned, virtually free of blacks and what HOLC appraisers referred to as “foreign-born white,” and therefore ripe for mortgage funds in the maximum amount available.

  �
��Second Grade” areas, which were marked by the color blue and the letter B, signified areas of a city that were still good but were beginning to fade around the edges a little bit. Mortgage lenders in these areas were advised to make loans 10 to 15 percent below the maximum limit.

  “Third Grade” areas, which were marked by the color yellow and the letter C, were characterized, according to HOLC literature, by “age, obsolescence, and change of style; expiring restrictions or lack of them; infiltration of a lower grade population.…” Mortgage lenders in these areas were advised to be very careful in making any loans.

  “Fourth Grade” areas, which were marked by the color red and the letter D, were characterized by “detrimental influences in a pronounced degree, undesirable population or an infiltration of it.” Mortgage lenders in these areas might well refuse to make loans altogether.

  For a city like Philadelphia, not only were the HOLC surveys devastating, but they also told an enormous amount about what the federal government privately thought of big cities (the surveys themselves, because of their inflammatory nature, were confidential). Philadelphia had older housing stock to begin with, and HOLC surveyors saw considerable risk in investing in much of it, particularly given what they saw as the combustible elements of blacks and foreign-born whites. Of the thirteen neighborhoods in the Philadelphia metropolitan area that received first-grade, or A, designations, none had a black presence. Only one had a foreign-born presence, but it was “nominal,” according to the survey form—as if you could hear the appraisers’ sighs of relief. In all, less than 5 percent of the total population of the city received first-grade designations and were therefore adorned with the vaunted color green.

  The bulk of the city received fourth-grade designations and was therefore awash in red on the survey map. South Philadelphia, right below the central business district, was painted red. So was North Philadelphia, right above the central business district. So was Kensington, home of the city’s greatest manufacturing plants. So was much of West Philadelphia and southwest Philadelphia.

  HOLC appraisers had this to say about an area of the city somewhat bloodlessly designated D18, a large swath of South Philadelphia, as an explanation for why it had received the lowest grade and been painted red: “No great demand for property in this section at any time. Many Negro families doubled up. Section has been slowly deteriorating for years. Italians are slowly driving Negroes out.” Section D6, in North Philadelphia, was dismissed because of what surveyors listed under “detrimental influences”: “Heavy concentration of Negro—properties in poor condition.” Section D13, also in North Philadelphia, was painted red not simply because of “nominal Negro population” but also because of “concentration of Jewish in Northern part.” Section C14, in West Philadelphia, fared slightly better, receiving not the lowest designation but the second lowest. But appraisers were hardly optimistic since “infiltration of Jewish into area have depressed values.” Section C15, in southwest Philadelphia, was considered risky as well, said the surveyors, because of “Negro encroachment from south and east.”

  If the HOLC appraisers damned the city, they delighted in the suburbs that ringed it, not simply because of the amount of undeveloped land there, but also because of the ethnic and racial purity. Virtually every suburban area that was appraised received a first- or second-grade designation. Rydal and Meadow Brook were praised because of residents the HOLC appraisers termed “high grade Americans.” The area comprising Brookline, Oakmont, South Ardmore, and Lanerach received high praise as well because its inhabitants were “all Americans.” Under the heading “Favorable Features,” the surveyors noted both “good transportation” to the city and “no colored.” The areas of Devon, Berwyn, and Dalesford were also praised because of the quality of their so-called Americans. So was Haverford—and Ridley Park, and Rosemont, and Springfield, and Villanova, and Wayne, and Paoli, and Newtown Square, and Lansdowne, and East Lansdowne.

  When suburban areas did not fare quite as well in the eyes of the appraisers, the reasons could be traced to the familiar concerns: Roslyn Station and Willow Grove had a “mixed population”; the area comprising Jenkintown, Wyncote, and Glenside had small pockets of “Negro settlements.”

  The irrevocable legacy of HOLC, Jackson and other historians have noted, lies in its appraisal system and the way in which it was copied and modeled by the greatest tool of housing ever developed, the Federal Housing Administration. By insuring long-term mortgages from private lenders, the FHA made home ownership more accessible than ever. Buoyed by the guarantee of the federal government, lenders were willing to shave more interest points off mortgages than ever before, amortize payments over twenty-five or even thirty years, and require a down payment of only 10 percent. The FHA, founded in 1934, was intended to help revive the nation’s dormant housing industry during the New Deal. But the ultimate influence of the FHA and its housing cousin, the Veterans Administration, went far beyond that, making the dream of home ownership available to millions of middle-class Americans, just as long as it was a dream that largely confined itself to the suburbs and not to the older cities.

  From its inception, wrote Mark I. Gelfand in A Nation of Cities, the FHA “red-lined [a term that presumably came from the color coordinates of the HOLC survey maps] vast areas of the inner cities, refusing to insure mortgages where the neighborhoods were blighted or susceptible to blight. This action practically guaranteed that these districts would deteriorate still further and drag cities down with them.”

  The FHA took a keen dislike to rental housing, which was predominant in cities. It disliked the construction of multifamily units, which were also predominant in cities, and it discouraged the use of loans for home repair. Its underwriting manual, as one social critic cited by Gelfand put it, “read like a chapter from Hitler’s Nuremberg laws.” Among some of its more established practices were the issuance of insurance only if steps were taken to minimize adverse influences, racial zoning, and tacit approval of restrictive covenants.

  From 1934 to 1972, the percentage of families owning homes in the United States increased from 44 percent to 63 percent. The majority of these families lived in the suburbs and never would have realized the dream of home ownership without the policies of the federal government. The majority of these homeowners weren’t born in the suburbs. As census data clearly show, they moved by the millions from cities that had been all but written off by the federal government in terms of the lasting viability of residential investment.

  There was something ironic about the seeds of the cities’ destruction being planted in the era of the New Deal, since Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to pay any deliberate attention to cities whatsoever. But much of what Roosevelt did was enact entitlement programs and dispense federal aid to keep cities from the brink of collapse and insolvency. He had little direct interest in the social viability of cities and even less love for them, and he did what he did because he needed the urban vote and the influence of urban legislators if he was going to push the New Deal through Congress. Like the vast majority of Americans, he found cities dirty and grimy and far too big for their own good. As he said in a speech in 1937 dedicating the Bonneville Dam in the Pacific Northwest: “Today many people are beginning to realize that there is inherent weakness in cities which become too large for their times and inherent strength in a wider geographical distribution of population.”

  In the 1950s, despite considerable downtown renewal, ten of the country’s fifteen largest municipalities lost population, and the percentage of people living in central cities in metropolitan areas dropped from 59 percent to 51 percent. Since the beginning of the Republic, the ’50s marked the first decade in which cities lost a significant share of their population, and this trend would only accelerate. In the age of the automobile, the only physical impediment to the suburbs’ domination was an effective way of getting to them from the city, and President Eisenhower took care of that in 1956, with the passage of the Highway Act, which created a for
ty-one-thousand-mile highway system that eviscerated city after city while making exodus to the suburbs easier than ever. City planners actually welcomed the expressway system because they thought it would hasten the return of shoppers downtown, but they were wrong, underestimating the degree to which Americans would embrace the flat and predictable flow of the suburban shopping mall and the antipathy that Americans have always had for the city, not to mention the degree to which cities were already beginning to buckle.

  “More and more of the old cities will show population declines,” Professor Raymond Vernon of Harvard had told a Senate subcommittee not in 1989 or 1979 or 1969 but in 1959. “More and more, they will be the repositories of those who are prepared to live in obsolescent housing—the lower income groups and the older citizens of the country.”

  Vernon predicted a loss of retail jobs as population sagged and a loss of manufacturing jobs as businesses looked for newer and more spacious sites in the suburbs. He also predicted a growth in downtown development because of the desirable location and the desirable address for the elite. Vernon shrewdly predicted that such residential areas as Boston’s Back Bay and Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and New York’s Upper East Side would thrive and represent city life at its finest. But it was all an illusion. “We must recognize that this kind of activity is limited to a minuscule portion of the old cities and will remain so limited,” Vernon told the subcommittee.