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January 2015 Vol. 52 No. 5


Temple University Press


The following review appeared in the January 2015 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.

Social & Behavioral Sciences
History, Geography & Area Studies - North America

52-2732
HD7303
2014-3980 CIP
Fairbanks, Robert B. The war on slums in the Southwest: public housing and slum clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, 1935-1965. Temple, 2014. 242p index afp ISBN 9781439911150, $59.50; ISBN 9781439911174 ebook, $59.50.

This thoroughly researched regional study of how five southwestern cities—Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix, and Albuquerque—approached slum clearance and public housing has value for students interested in regionalism, urbanism, and the politics of social welfare.  Fairbanks (history, Univ. of Texas, Arlington) has authored several excellent books on housing and planning (e.g., Making Better Citizens, CH, Jul'89, 26-6322).  He structures this story chronologically, focusing historically on the behavior of the conservative urban southwestern business and civic leadership during the Great Depression and postwar era vis-à-vis federally funded public housing and slum clearance.  While southwestern city officials long believed (with reformers nationally) that slum environments housing poor minorities shaped behavior and thus threatened the city as a whole, Fairbanks explains that by the 1950s, urban southwesterners increasingly viewed public housing and slum clearance as intrusive and socialistic.  Bad individuals, not pathological environments, caused slums.  General studies of public housing and urban renewal, such as D. Bradford Hunt’s Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (CH, Dec'09, 47-2117), are numerous; Fairbanks provides a unique regional perspective useful for undergraduates and specialists alike.

--J. F. Bauman, University of Southern Maine

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.