Tenement Renewal in New York City in the 1930s: The District-Improvement Ideas of Arthur C. Holden

Abstract

During the Great Depression, New York planner Arthur C. Holden offered reformers an alternative to the eminent domain and broad slum clearance favored by most proponents of low-rent public housing. Holden advocated the technique of pooling properties in an equity trust, that is, of transforming tenement owners into shareholders of a district corporation empowered to manage, selectively demolish, and redevelop real estate. He tried the experiment among property owners on blocks of the Lower East Side and in Chelsea, but he could not overcome their residual individualism. A product of the 1930s debates about eminent domain, Holden’s ideas anticipated much of the 1960s disillusionment toward slum clearance by distant government authority.