ABSTRACT
The sociologist Herbert Gans has called my attention to the importance of tuberculosis and the alleged or real threat of it in the slumclearing and “model tenement” movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the feeling being that slum housing “bred” tuberculosis. The shift from tuberculosis to cancer in planning and housing rhetoric had taken place by the 1950s. “Blight” (a virtual synonym for slum) is seen as a cancer that spreads insidiously, and the use of the term “invasion” to describe when the nonwhite and poor move into a middle-class neighborhood is as such a metaphor borrowed from culture as from the military: the two discourses overlap. 1
