John F. Bauman is Visiting Research Professor at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine and the author of books and journal articles on a broad range of modern urban policy issues.
As the dominant response to the housing needs of low-income residents since the 1930s, public housing in the Philadelphia region provided shelter for thousands. Over the years, however, as needs as well as programs changed, the city and the region struggled to provide safe, decent, and sanitary living quarters when the private market failed to produce suitable ...
Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway was gridlocked from the first day of its operation in November 1958. Envisioned by city planners as a panacea for economy-suffocating urban traffic congestion, but built on flawed engineering assumptions about traffic flows, the expressway ignored any concern for postwar social and regional realities. Rather than being acclaimed, within years the highway ...
In response to the rising tide of unemployment nationally, and after the short-lived Civil Works Administration (CWA) failed to stem that tide, Congress in May 1935 created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the “alphabet soup” of economic recovery programs enacted as part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). Later ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy