Hoovervilles

5 Key excerpts on "Hoovervilles"

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  Homelessness and the Built Environment

  Designing for Unhoused Persons

  • Jill Pable, Yelena McLane, Lauren Trujillo(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  At the turn of the century through the 1930s, most cities in the United States sought to address the vagrancy problem by constructing local poorhouses based upon institutional building models adapted from hospital and prison designs, or erecting clusters of unlocked huts referred to as “tramp dwellings.” In 1929, with the onset of the Great Depression, the need for such housing rapidly increased while the resources for new buildings and maintenance drastically diminished (Cresswell, 2001). By 1932, millions of Americans, hard-working men and women, had lost their homes and had to travel from place to place in search of employment. Some moved in with relatives, and, as unit densities soared, squatting became the norm. Others found shelter in one of the increasing numbers of buildings vacated after a business had closed, and families clustered in shantytowns near soup kitchens. Termed “Hoovervilles” (after Herbert Hoover, who was president of the United States when the Depression started and deemed culpable), at the height of the Depression, there were hundreds of these shelter camps across the country, with hundreds of thousands of people living in them. These settlements generally consisted of tents and shacks. Authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for trespassing, but they were largely tolerated out of necessity. Under the social welfare programs of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), unemployment and homelessness were alleviated through government-based jobs for skilled and unskilled laborers and assistance with reentering the rental housing market. President Roosevelt recognized that adequate housing was not only an individual need, but a societal need, and he declared the “right of every family to a decent home” in his 1944 State of the Union address (Roosevelt, 1944, para 69).

  2.5 Homeless man sitting in front of shack in shantytown known as Hooverville, Seattle, Washington, October 27, 1931.

  In Australia and New Zealand, the situation was very similar to that in the United States. The depressions of the 1890s and 1930s resulted in thousands of workers losing their jobs. Dilapidated infrastructure and overcrowded living conditions led to mass homelessness (Parliamentary Library Research Paper, 2014). Those who had to be “on the road” in search of work were mistrusted and treated with little sympathy (Waikato Times

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  Shantytown, USA

  Forgotten Landscapes of the Working Poor

  • Lisa Goff(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  10

  In the early years of the Depression, shantytowns were often a better option than the other alternatives open to transients looking for work: municipal lodging houses, flophouses, or the mission. Many resented the mandatory attendance at religious services demanded by missions. A 1933 article in The New Republic recounted the municipal lodger’s experience: standing in long lines monitored by the police; reciting personal information to strangers; stripping for medical exams, showers and delousing; surrendering their clothes and personal possessions for fumigation; bad food; lights out at 6:00 p.m.; communal sleeping rooms that smelled of disinfectant and human odors. “Men were fed and housed in large numbers in one building without even the privacy of cattle kept in separate stalls.” These disadvantages recall the drawbacks of Freedmen’s Villages experienced by African Americans after the Civil War, with the federal government again filling the role of disingenuous shepherd, prodding transients on to the next town with promises of available jobs or more appropriate housing. Shantytowns, which offered privacy and conviviality, were often a cut above not only municipal lodging houses and missions, but hobo “jungles” on the edges of cities, where transient men (for the most part) bedded down in tents or shelters made of cardboard and bits of scrap lumber.11

  There were numerous Hoovervilles in New York City during the 1930s. Commissioned to paint murals of New York life on the ceiling of the rotunda in the U.S. Customs House in New York City, artist Reginald Marsh made sketches for a panel called Soup Kitchen [East River Shanties] . Now in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, the watercolor sketch shows homeless African-American men gathered around a fire in a trash can, and a woman clutching a baby in front of a wooden shanty as her husband forages for materials nearby. Several other artists, including Louis Leon Ribak, Samuel Thal, and Charles Bayley Cook also painted Hoovervilles in the 1930s. One of the largest shantytowns in New York was Hoover City, located at Henry and Clinton streets in Brooklyn. By 1933, there were 600 people living in the 200 or so shanties in Hoover City, including a new baby. In addition to the usual scrap lumber, old pipes, and ash cans used to build shanties in previous decades, the Hoover City homes incorporated discarded truck bodies and floors made out of newfangled materials like linoleum. The moribund shipping industry also provided useful refuse: one resident made a bed out of two old metal sailors’ bunks.12

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  Homelessness in the 21st Century

  Living the Impossible American Dream

  • Stephanie Southworth, Sara Brallier(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Legends of America. www.legendsofamerica.com/20th-Hoovervilles/ .
• Heathcott, J. (2012). The strange career of public housing: Policy, planning, and the American metropolis in the twentieth century. Journal of the American Planning Association, 78(4), 360–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2012.740296 .
• Ibid.
• Rossi, P. H. (1990). The old homeless and the new homelessness in historical perspective. The American Psychologist, 45(8), 954–959. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.45.8.954 .
• The high-rise public housing projects concentrated poverty in areas without resources, often in areas of cities that were near jobs. This concentration, along with the new suburbs, created an unprecedented level of racial and economic segregation in American cities.
• These benefits mostly went to White veterans. The impact of these benefits will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2 .
• Rossi, P. H. (1990). The old homeless and the new homelessness in historical perspective. The American Psychologist, 45(8), 954–959.
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Chapter 2 Neoliberal Ideology and Homelessness

DOI: 10.4324/9781003325581-3

“I go here, I go there. No one understands that I can pay for housing. I just can’t pay that much. I need to be able to put gas in my car and eat.” Jared, a 40-year-old White male

Introduction

Social problems, such as homelessness, do not occur in isolation and can be mitigated with good policy decisions. The magnitude of homelessness we see today was not inevitable. As we discussed in Chapter 1 , in the late 1970s, homelessness had almost disappeared from the social landscape in the United States. In his 1976 book about the history of housing, Anthony Jackson wrote, “The housing industry trades on the knowledge that no Western country can politically afford to have its citizens sleep in the streets.”1