"Negro Removal"

Interpretation of "Urban Renewal" from writer James Baldwin

HOUSING ACT 1954

"Urban renewal" was a phrase popularized with the passage of the Housing Act of 1954, which made these projects more enticing to developers by, among other things, providing FHA-backed mortgages. Because of the ways in which it targeted the most disadvantaged sector of the American population, novelist James Baldwin famously dubbed Urban Renewal "Negro Removal" in the 1960s.

Public housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis & Cabrini Green in Chicago became internationally infamous for its poverty, crime and segregation (majority black).