Joining a robust collection of works examining race, class, and housing, A World More Concrete exposes how strategies of land development reflected and constructed power, race, and class in Miami, Florida, and how real estate and its control informed modern notions of liberalism. Along the way, Nathan Connolly reveals the heretofore overlooked role of rental housing development and landlord power in the making of the twentieth-century city. Organized into three sections, and drawing on government program and gubernatorial records, interviews, and newspaper and radio stories, A World More Concrete sorts through the foundation building (roughly the late 1800s to the Great Depression), construction (1930s and 1940s), and renovation (post-World War II) of the relationship between real estate, power, and citizenship.
Miami’s early twentieth-century development was, Connolly explains, informed by racial practices and protocols common to U.S. cities. As job opportunities lured Bahamians and others to Miami, whites felt the need to tighten the boundaries of Colored Town, the locus of black housing originally launched by railroad magnate Henry Flagler. Expressing a pragmatism that would endure the next few decades, the land-owning blacks of the Colored Board of Trade agreed to firmer racial segregation if it dampened the worst elements of white terrorism and protected black property and capital. Status distinctions within black Miami continued to emerge, in part through national origin. Blacks of British and British colonial descent networked through South Florida’s Overseas Club, for example. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, in contrast, allowed Miamians of color to organize across national origin. South and west of the city, white real estate visionaries worked with self-appointed representative of the Seminole people, Tony Tommie, to seize “the last frontier” of South Florida. This land, along with aging and black neighborhoods throughout Miami, would be worked and reworked as political leaders and real estate interests realized their vision of a Pan-American “Magic City.”
Exploding population growth strained housing resources and forced vigorous debates about black housing conditions and racial boundaries throughout the mid-twentieth century. The burgeoning black-occupied Railroad Shop neighborhood so alarmed white residents of adjacent Allapattah that various white civic organizations petitioned Miami leadership to condemn the black neighborhood for use as a park or playground for Allapattah’s white residents. Officials complied, and Railroad Shop families who did not successfully negotiate with the city or otherwise accept relocation were summarily evicted. Connolly’s history, however, is much more than a retracing of white fear of black encroachment.
Filling a significant gap in our understanding of urban development and the business of housing, Connolly sorts through the (big) business of rental housing development, exposing the influence, workings, and power of landlords, property managers, and the larger rental housing industry. Particularly rich is Connolly’s description of white Luther Brooks and his Bonded Collection Agency, which managed property for black and white rental housing owners across the city. As he grew the Bonded agency to operate satellite offices and employ a host of (black) maintenance men and (white) rent collectors, Brooks became one of the most powerful real estate operators in South Florida. Brooks cultivated a paternalistic relationship with staff and tenants, and drawing on this web of personal relationships, he and others like him (black and white) controlled significant black tenant voting power that was used to oppose public housing and support other private housing interests. While Brooks was white, Connolly’s narrative of Bonded’s work exposes the interracial nature of rental housing investment and development. While whites were the majority of housing investors and landlords, blacks owned substantial rental property and participated in the growth and maintenance of the rental housing market. In Miami, Connolly explains, property ownership and exploitation was a multiracial project, and rental property owners allied across race to move that project forward.
From the 1930s onward, white and black propertied interests used a variety of tools and techniques to wring value from Miami land. Federal Housing Authority (FHA) programs allowed developers to rapidly expand rental housing, and particularly apartments intended for black occupation. In doing so, investors shifted the rental housing landscape from one of run-down, wooden shotgun shacks to that of “concrete monsters”: two- to three-story apartments with few amenities and little green space. In 1948 Miami’s FHA-backed rental housing increased ten times and then tripled again the following year, making it the most rapid expansion of FHA rental underwriting anywhere in the United States. This was no small matter, Connolly notes. Besides changing Miami’s housing landscape, apartment builders demonstrated the “success” of private enterprise in providing low-cost housing. Using these successes, the rental housing industry asserted free enterprise’s ability to effectively respond to black housing needs and squelched new public housing proposals; from 1940 to 1954, no new public housing launched in Dade County. In the process of land development, the state-provided tools of eminent domain and condemnation proved remarkably flexible and were used to establish racial boundaries (as happened in Railway Shop) and clear property for private development (as occurred in the Central Negro District). As Connolly shows, propertied interests frequently deployed eminent domain and condemnation in the name of advancing black aims and preserving sound race relations.
In their embrace of property as a mode of power and voice, black property owners advanced their interests with an “equalization” understanding of civil rights that, in practice, meant acceptance of segregation if accompanied by equalization of entitlements. This “entrepreneurial common sense” (p. 176) largely eschewed protest politics and favored conferencing as a negotiation strategy. Even as black property owners sought to dismantle racial apartheid, they worked to protect their propertied interests and to possess what whites had long used to maintain their privilege: infrastructural power. By the 1960s, in suburban Brownsville, blacks practiced a propertied culture that they presumed accompanied suburban home ownership. When the Miami Housing Authority—having consulted black leaders they perceived to speak for “the Negro”—planned a second wave of public housing for the neighborhood, residents fought the proposal using (white-promulgated) suburban property entitlements, such as the right to choose one’s neighbors. However, it was to no avail. Despite such setbacks, blacks remained committed to the promise of property ownership and its relationship to citizenship.
A World More Concrete is an ambitious, complex work. Connolly sorts through roughly seventy years of race, class, evolving notions of liberalism, citizenship, and property to flesh out how structures of power emerged, responded to challenges, and evolved over time. In doing so, he reveals the tools, techniques, and assumptions of residential property development (including unrestrained propertied exploitation) as it unfolded in twentieth-century Miami, and how residential property ownership shaped black notions of citizenship and freedom. A World More Concrete fills gaps in our knowledge and challenges previously held assumptions, and it is a valuable contribution to urban and business history.
