UCLA

Segregated housing became a subject for scientific inquiry between the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. In this dissertation, I trace studies of segregated housing to the planned communities that the federal government set in motion by building public housing after the Depression and subsidizing private housing after World War II. My project challenges the traditional separation of public housing and private housing in architecture scholarship, which has overlooked the similar historical concerns that shaped these neighborhoods and their reception, especially in the scientific community. My protagonists are architects and scientists. I define the latter group broadly to include social scientists and domestic scientists who conducted studies of tenant sociability in planned neighborhoods. These studies responded to the concern that planned communities strengthened racial and economic segregation, since public- and private housing were single-class neighborhoods that discouraged racial mixing. I uncover the surprising ways that tenancy studies, a marginalized subfield in the world of applied science, found its way into popular debates about segregation in U.S. politics and society. Scientific research on tenants and their dwellings appeared in mainstream literature, such as Life magazine, and it figured in national events, such as the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the NAACP used studies of integrated public housing to prove that peaceful desegregation was possible in public schools. By recovering the history of tenancy studies, I offer a new account of the struggle to desegregate American neighborhoods before 1965.