ABSTRACT
Federal housing policies encouraged a surge in white homeownership after the war, mostly in suburbs. Ironically, the affluence and high expectations in the postwar decades contributed to what was called an "urban crisis". Military spending spurred urban growth on the West Coast; coalitions of politicians and business boosters, who even before World War II had made their cities the locations of naval bases and the aircraft industry, aggressively lobbied for more military bases and repair facilities. Federal housing policies encouraged a surge in white homeownership after the war, mostly in suburbs. Ironically, the affluence and high expectations in the post-war decades contributed to what was called an "urban crisis". Once one of the nation's most acclaimed public housing complexes, the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, built in 1954, came to symbolize the unworkable qualities of poorly designed low-income housing. This chapter discusses the Racial transition in that neighborhood only increased the ferocity of white resistance in other parts of Chicago.
