Abstract
As one of the country's first urban renewal projects under the 1954 Housing Act, Cleveland’s Garden Valley featured private apartments intended for middle-class African Americans. However, it was built on a landfill and offered living conditions far below what its residents expected. Analysis of where tenants moving into the project came from and where they moved afterward underlines their suburbanizing aspirations. Into the 1960s, Garden Valley came under increasingly harsh criticism for reinforcing segregation. Poor living conditions at the project catalyzed tenant activism, and it can additionally be regarded as a striking example of what is now called environmental racism.
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