Haddington Homes: “Row Housing as Public Housing”
Haddington's Vintage Rowhouses
By the 1950s, vintage rowhouses of this kind on the 5501 block of Vine Street were decaying or abandoned. The Public Housing Authority proposed to conserve 200 single homes to be occupied by single families, in the Authority’s first experiment with used housing.
In 1940, 5533 Vine St., the house shown at right in this photo, was the home of Robert Jones, age 49, an African American laborer in building and construction, whose family had resided here as early as 1935. Jones and his wife, Eleonora, age 42, were participants in the Great Migration, born in Georgia and Virginia respectively. Both had seven years of education. Likely a victim of the era’s depressed housing market, in which blacks were the last hired, Robert was unemployed throughout 1939 into 1940. Eleonora was employed for 60 hours weekly throughout 1939 as a maid. Her earnings of $600 for the year ($11,057 in 2019 dollars) may have been this poor family’s only source of income. Their daughter, Eleonora, age 14, was born in Pennsylvania, a fact that suggests the Joneses had migrated north at least by the mid-1920s.
In the late 1950s, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, as an alternative to building elevator towers, experimented with “conserving” (i.e., renovating) used housing as public housing in Haddington, a working-class neighborhood in racial transition.
Consistent with the 1954 Housing Act’s emphasis on housing rehabilitation, or conservation, the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) designated 200 abandoned or badly deteriorated houses for conservation and single-family occupancy in the Used Housing Program in Haddington, a working-class neighborhood in racial transition. The late 1950s–early 1960s experiment with “row housing as public housing” was not successful. In the early 21st century, the PHA built two new low-rise projects in this now African American neighborhood: Haddington Homes and Arch Homes.
The 1954 Housing Act shifted the federal focus in postwar urban redevelopment from slum clearance and housing development to housing rehabilitation, or conservation. In this vein, Philadelphia’s planning coordinator, William Rafsky, designated Haddington in West Philadelphia as the first neighborhood to demonstrate “row housing as public housing.”[1]
Rafsky was deeply worried by the Philadelphia Housing Authority’s segregated towers. His proposal for scattered-site public housing “in white neighborhoods such as Logan, Olney, and the Northeast,” however, crashed on the shoals of staunch white opposition. Rafsky was allied with the progressive Joint Committee on Public Housing Policy (JCPH).
This committee had been formed by the Philadelphia Housing Association, which was directed in the 1950s by Dorothy Montgomery, and the Citizens Committee on the City Plan. The JCPH, whose chair was Jefferson Fordham, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, decided on rehabilitated “used housing” as an alternative strategy, although it wasn’t clear how used housing would effectively promote racial integration. In any case, the JCPH proposal was supported by the Philadelphia Housing Authority (hereafter, the Authority) and endorsed by the U.S. Public Housing Administration, whose director, Charles Slusser, viewed it primarily as a cost-saving measure for the federal government.[2]
Haddington, the designated neighborhood for the Used Housing Program in West Philadelphia, the nation’s first, was bounded east-west by 52nd and 63rd streets, south-north by Market Street and Girard Avenue.
In the late-1950s, Haddington was a “non-industrial, middle-aged, white-collar neighborhood,” with “tightly packed attached, duplex, and free-standing dwellings,” whose residents bristled at the growing numbers of African Americans in West Philadelphia. The neighborhood was marked as “C” or “Conservation Area,” shorthand for on-the-verge-of-blight.[3]
Supporters of the plan, operationalized in 1958, gambled that whites primed to leave the working-class neighborhood, which was designated a “transitional area,” would choose to remain if affordable, attractive housing were available to them. Under the plan, the Authority “purchased two-hundred single homes for renovation and occupancy by single families in the Haddington Area.” Rehabilitation of the first house established a precedent for the others:
This two-story dwelling had been built at the turn of the century. Before the Authority bought the vacant, deteriorating dwelling from the bank, it was the only abandoned house on the block. The Authority completely modernized it, redecorated it with a new concrete porch adorned with an iron railing, and installed brand new windows, electric fixtures, kitchen appliances, plumbing, and wallpaper.[4]
By the late 1960s, the gamble to achieve a modicum of racial integration in Haddington, and other working-class neighborhoods, was doomed. Philadelphia’s civil rights movement had exposed the intense frustration of the city’s blacks, who endured “high unemployment, gnawing poverty, police brutality, abominable, overcrowded housing conditions, and poor city services, plus the bulk of the Authority’s mainly black-occupied high-rise public housing.”[5]
In 1964, the North Philadelphia ghetto erupted in rioting. Confronted with white hostility that was further inflamed by black volatility, the city’s housing planners gave up trying to integrate public housing. Henceforth, the used housing program and scattered-site housing more generally would be restricted to segregated neighborhoods, and 90 percent of the renters would be African American.
William Rafsky, who coordinated the redevelopment of used housing, focused the Authority’s attention on North Philadelphia’s decaying housing stock. He enlisted private developers as partners with the Authority. Selected developers contracted by the Authority would purchase and renovate abandoned houses on the open market and then sell them to the Authority at “predetermined list prices.”[6]
This arrangement, which involved a massive number of rehabilitations, soon outstripped the Authority’s capacity to monitor the quality of the developers’ work. Accordingly, City Hall, in 1966, got the state to authorize the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation (PHDC).
The PHDC was a land bank that would assemble the properties and oversee the used house process. The process did not go well. The problem of quality control persisted, labor costs to developers who had to deal with contentious unions produced slim profits, and the Authority was beset with soaring maintenance costs. By 1969, the used house program was viewed by news media and the federal government as dysfunctional.[7]
Philadelphia’s used housing program fell far short of the high expectations that had infused it in the late 1950s. This disappointment included Haddington Homes.
Context mattered greatly. In the postwar decades, deindustrialization and the outflow of jobs to suburbia intersected with the prospect of federally guaranteed home mortgages to push “white-collar and working-class whites” to seek greener pastures outside the city—resources and opportunities that were denied to most African Americans. White flight diminished the city’s tax base at a time when the federal government was losing interest in public housing. “Neither the Housing Authority nor . . . [those] left behind possessed the means to maintain blocks of aging row houses, whether built in the 1880s, 1890s, or late 1930s.”[8]
In the new Millennium, the Public Housing Authority has built new (as opposed to conserving old) row houses in the form of Arch Homes—73 units at 56th and Arch St. (a new version of an older project on the same site), and Haddington Homes—148 units in blocks around 55th and Vine, an adoption of the name assigned to Haddington’s 1950s–60s used house program. Both housing sites are administered from the PHA office at 5520 Vine Street.
Haddington's Vintage Rowhouses
By the 1950s, vintage rowhouses of this kind on the 5501 block of Vine Street were decaying or abandoned. The Public Housing Authority proposed to conserve 200 single homes to be occupied by single families, in the Authority’s first experiment with used housing.
In 1940, 5533 Vine St., the house shown at right in this photo, was the home of Robert Jones, age 49, an African American laborer in building and construction, whose family had resided here as early as 1935. Jones and his wife, Eleonora, age 42, were participants in the Great Migration, born in Georgia and Virginia respectively. Both had seven years of education. Likely a victim of the era’s depressed housing market, in which blacks were the last hired, Robert was unemployed throughout 1939 into 1940. Eleonora was employed for 60 hours weekly throughout 1939 as a maid. Her earnings of $600 for the year ($11,057 in 2019 dollars) may have been this poor family’s only source of income. Their daughter, Eleonora, age 14, was born in Pennsylvania, a fact that suggests the Joneses had migrated north at least by the mid-1920s.
Related Media
J.M. Brewer’s Map of Philadelphia, 1934.
Brewer was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s chief appraiser for the Philadelphia district. His detailed block-level map, printed in two sections, North and South, was used by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), whose redlining maps were to govern the nation’s home-lending policies and practices for the next three decades.
Brewer’s color-coded map shows Haddington’s population as African American (brown), excepting a small concentration of Italians (green). In the redlining scheme, the neighborhood had a D rating, which would disqualify it for federally insured mortgages or housing conservation.
Italians dominated the blocks west of 63rd St. below Haverford Avenue.
Map Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
This 1950 digital census map shows nonwhite housing occupancy in Haddington’s core blocks between 52nd and 60th streets.
U.S. Census of Housing, 1950, digital map by Douglas Ewbank
This photo shows a few vintage rowhouses on Race St. between 56th and Vodges—more houses of the kind that were targeted for the Housing Authority’s used house program.
John L. Puckett
This map published by the Philadelphia Housing Association in 1960 shows the geographical relationship of three areas that were studied by the Housing Association, a private watchdog organization led by Philadelphia activists for housing improvement. Haddington Leadership Area contained Haddington Homes.
Philadelphia Housing Association, A Citizen’s Guide to Housing and Urban Renewal, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Public Housing Association, 1960
This photo shows the entrance to the Housing Authority’s Arch Homes project at 56th and Arch St. Post-Millennial row housing built as public housing.
John L. Puckett
On 56th St., a rear wall of rowhouses in the Arch Homes complex.
John L. Puckett
Post-Millennial row housing as public housing, an adoption of the name assigned to Haddington’s 1950s–60s used house program. Haddington Homes and Arch Homes have the same design and landscape arrangements.
John L. Puckett
The image is a courtyard in Haddington Homes, on the south side of the 5500 block of Vine St.
John L. Puckett
Rowhouses on 56th St. between Market and Arch, just north of the Market Street Elevated.
John L. Puckett
Looking north, Haddington rowhouses on Spring St., near intersection with Race.
John L. Puckett
Looking south: 101 block Vodges near intersection with Race.
John L. Puckett
Haddington row houses on 53rd St. between Vine and Race.
John L. Puckett
Looking east from the 56th St. station of the Market Street Elevated. Market St. is the boundary between the Haddington and Cobbs Creek neighborhoods. The station is nearly four miles from Center City’s towers, visible in the background.
John L. Puckett
