Housing Act of 1949 Creates Urban Renewal Program, Becomes "Negro Removal"

President Truman signs the Housing Act of 1949, establishing the Title I Urban Renewal Program that provides federal grants to local governments for slum clearance and redevelopment. While the act sets a goal of ensuring “a suitable home and decent living environment for all Americans,” it becomes what James Baldwin and others in Black communities call “Negro removal” due to its devastating effects on African American neighborhoods. Operating between 1949 and 1974, the program constitutes one of the most sweeping and systematic instances of modern destruction of Black property, neighborhoods, culture, community, businesses, and homes.

The program disproportionately targets predominantly African American neighborhoods, empowering local agencies to acquire land through eminent domain—meaning government can forcibly purchase properties deemed necessary for redevelopment. While relocation assistance is mandated, it proves often inadequate or non-existent, leaving many displaced families worse off. A 1968 study finds two-thirds of all “relocatees” and three-quarters of non-white families displaced are renters. While their landlords receive compensation for lost property, the families actually living in these buildings frequently receive nothing.

The scale of displacement is massive: as of 1963, some 39,399 businesses are reported displaced through urban renewal alone, with thousands more lost to the complementary federal highway program that often uses urban renewal to clear paths through Black neighborhoods. Perceptions of such neighborhoods as “blighted” lead to wholesale removal of thriving communities with insufficient compensation or alternative housing options for displaced households. The consensus among scholars is that Title I urban renewal mostly fails, in part because large-scale slum clearance proves a crude and largely unworkable redevelopment method that prioritizes land value over human communities.