> NY Times, February 27, 2000
> Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened
> By ROSALYN BAXANDALL and ELIZABETH EWEN
> Reviewed by SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
> The authors do not accept it as some kind of fact of nature that the
> suburbs should have been developed almost entirely by private capital. They
> write at length about the New Deal planned community of Greenbelt, Md., as
> a potential model for public housing in suburbia
> Louis Proyect
Baxandall is co-editor (with Linda Gordon) of _America's Working Women:
1600 to the Present_ and Ewen is author of _Immigrant Women in the Land
of Dollars: Life and Culture in the Lower East Side, 1890-1925...both
are really good...
Authors probably mention that Greenbelt was one of 3 'garden communities'
completed by federal government in 1930s - others were Greenhills, OH &
Greendale, WI. Each was based on turn-of-20th-century theories of
England's Ebenezer Howard positing high degree of educational and social
services & surrounding open space to prevent sprawl.
Greenbelt Town Program, little-remembered New Deal project, was intended
as conscious effort to disperse urban populations into communities of
10,000 (How many folks recall that New Deal included Resettlement
Administration?) 3 'Green' towns were stark contrast to sub-standard
urban public housing that feds built in 1930s. Growing conservatism of
New Deal after 1937 shut project down before 4th community in New Jersey
began construction.
For quite different reasons, federal gov't built towns in Los Alamos,
NM, Oak Ridge, TN, and Cape Canaveral, FL... Michael Hoover
