History constructs the house that sometimes holds us traces the chaotic policies of housing removal and tenant relocation that were central to the mid 20th-century federal urban renewal programs. The research for this project coincided with the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, a moment in time that would lay bare a crisis of social care, and how the legacies of unequal housing and infrastructure development have led to the disastrous housing policies of our own time. Drawing from archival collections in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, the layered images reflect the intimacy and violence of bureaucratic systems. In decentering established narratives of Urban Renewal programs, we can hear community anti-displacement histories, and the insistence of doing memory work to understand the systemic roots of generational housing injustice. The scale and accordion structure of the book allows the reader to experience the pages as a landscape, moving inside and outside architecture, time, and memory.

Through records of local and federal housing authorities and adjacent archives, connections are made between racialized housing policy and funding of “Model Cities” that connect histories of land speculation formed from the colonial era to the present-day real estate industry in the urban northeast. In both New Haven and New York City, the logics of high modernist architecture prevalent in the post war period through the 1960’s, mapped people through race,

class, and spatiality into what James Scott refers to in his book Seeing Like a State, the technology of housing. New York’s municipal planners drafted projects inspired by utopic architects like Le Corbusier, which created new public housing models reconstructing American legacies of racist housing policy as ‘Modern’.

Alex notes “as I began research at the New Haven Historical Society, it became clear that the relationship between housing, land values, and surveillance of the Black community was a narrative that verberated through time in the historical record from urban renewal back to the colonial era. While in the library I came across a photograph in the Housing Authority files that pictured a seemingly neutral family living room scene. However; the image was in a collection of staged or observed photographs of Black families in neighborhoods that were slated for “renewal” removal. Behind the seated family, their living room wall covered in a neocolonial New England toile. This elegantly designed pattern, which essentially depicts the erasure of Native peoples from their land by settler conquest centuries before, became a site for me to consider past and present displacements.

A PDF of this book and a corresponding research guide are available to download for free at alexcallender.com.

Book Price: $600
Shipping: $60 (S/H + insurance)
Total: $660.00