Preserving and Visualizing Public Housing: New Deal Public Housing and the National Register of Historic Places

A majority of public housing histories have focused heavily on management, architects, and planners. New works have continued to give great insight into these issues from Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s Public Housing That Worked (2008) to D. Bradford Hunt’s Blueprint for Disaster (2009). But for roughly the last decade, specifically with books like Rhonda Williams’ The Politics of Public Housing (2004) and Amy Howard’s More Than Shelter (2014), something akin to a new public housing history has established itself. Building upon the spatial turn in political and urban-suburban history to examine the grassroots level—a level all too often overlooked in the majority of public housing histories—these studies have begun to probe how residents shaped the top-down policy of twentieth-century urban renewal. Inspired by the actions of former residents, my paper looks to extend this line of scholarship into the realms of public history and digital humanities.

This paper presents visualizations along two lines of inquiry: first, mapping of all public housing built between 1933 and 1949 and those places subsequently listed on the National Register of Historic Places and, second, graphing how academics and historically-black newspapers have covered public housing from the 1930s to roughly 2000. Both lines of inquiry are undertaken in the spirit of digital historian David Staley who, in Computers, Visualization, and History, convincingly argues that digital visualization can be a “main carrier of the meaningful information” (xii). Moreover, using JSTOR and ProQuest databases, I employ distant reading methodology of the type of Franco Moretti—specifically topic modeling—to historical coverage of public housing to analyze and visualize this information. Combined with the public history insights of the likes of Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place, collaborative digital projects, research, and preservation hold important implications for academic historians.