When America Decided Housing Was Public Work: Wheeling in the 1943 Housing Yearbook

Every so often, a document appears that does not just tell us what happened. It tells us what a generation of officials thought they were building.

The 1943 Housing Yearbook, published by the National Association of Housing Officials, is one of those documents. It is not a neighborhood memoir. It is not a civil rights report. It is not a protest from tenants or a local newspaper editorial. It is a professional yearbook written by and for the people who were helping build America’s new public housing system.

That makes it powerful, but also complicated.

It is a self-report from the housing establishment at a moment when the United States was trying to solve an enormous national housing crisis. The country was at war. Workers were moving by the millions. Factories were expanding faster than cities could absorb. Rent control, construction controls, public housing, war housing, slum clearance, local housing authorities, federal agencies, emergency priorities, and postwar planning were all being pulled into one national conversation.

And there, inside this national directory of America’s housing machinery, appears Wheeling.

The yearbook lists the Wheeling Housing Authority among the official administrative housing agencies of the United States. It names Harry C. Miller as chairman, J. A. Bloch as vice-chairman, and John M. Cunningham, Andrew C. M. Hess, and Archibald L. Klieves as members. It also lists J. W. Pratt as secretary, with the Authority’s address on Grandview Street in Wheeling, West Virginia.

That small listing matters.

It places Wheeling inside a national transformation.

The city was not merely reacting to local poverty, local slums, or local politics. It was participating in a new American experiment: the idea that housing conditions were not just private misfortune, but public responsibility.

A Yearbook With a Point of View

The first thing to understand about the 1943 Housing Yearbook is that it is not pretending to be detached from the housing movement. Its editors state plainly that the publication is meant to summarize the condition of housing in the United States for housing officials, board members, administrators, and agencies involved in public financing, planning, construction, and operation of housing.

That makes the document both useful and revealing.

It gives us numbers, agency names, program structures, legal categories, and national trends. But it also gives us the worldview of the people inside the system. These were officials trying to prove that public housing was necessary, organized, practical, patriotic, and ready for a larger postwar role.

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, that distinction is important. We are often working with the records left behind by institutions: school boards, newspapers, courts, city governments, state agencies, and now housing authorities. Those sources are essential, but they are never the whole story. They show us what officials recorded. They do not always show us what residents endured, what families feared, what Black communities lost, or what was left unsaid.

The 1943 Housing Yearbook is valuable because it shows how the housing establishment explained itself while the system was still young.

The Depression Created the Tool

The yearbook is clear that public housing in America was largely a product of the Great Depression. Before the 1930s, only a few cities were understood to have the power to directly plan, build, and operate housing. The early public housing movement grew out of New Deal emergency programs, especially the desire to create work, clear slums, and provide decent housing for families of low income.

That history matters for Wheeling.

When we write about poor housing conditions in Wheeling, especially for Black residents and low-income families, we are not writing about something unusual or accidental. We are writing about a national crisis that forced the country to reconsider what government owed its people.

The yearbook describes the rise of local housing authorities as one of the most important developments of the era. The numbers are striking. In 1935, the yearbook listed only 16 county and municipal official administrative housing agencies. By 1938, that number had grown to 119. By 1939, it had jumped to 226. By 1941, it reached 521.

Even after some wartime contraction, the 1943 directory still listed 422 county and municipal official administrative housing agencies.

That is the birth of a national infrastructure.

And Wheeling was in it.

The 1937 Law Changed the Landscape

The yearbook identifies the United States Housing Act of 1937 as a major turning point.

That law helped accelerate the creation of local housing authorities across the country. These authorities were public corporate bodies created under state law, usually by action of a city or county government.

They had broad powers. They could acquire property, plan housing, construct projects, manage housing, and operate related facilities for families of low income. They did not have taxing power, but they could become powerful local institutions through federal loans, subsidies, and cooperation agreements with city governments.

That legal structure helps explain why the Wheeling Housing Authority’s early history deserves careful attention.

The Authority was not simply another city department. It was a public body with its own board and its own legal identity, operating in cooperation with local and federal government.

That independence could allow action. It could also create distance between public decision-making and the communities most affected by those decisions.

That tension remains important even today.

Wheeling Was Part of a West Virginia Network

The 1943 directory lists several West Virginia housing authorities, including Charleston, Huntington, Martinsburg, Mount Hope, Wheeling, and Williamson. This reminds us that Wheeling was part of a statewide and national movement.

The listing for Wheeling is brief, but its meaning is large.

Harry C. Miller appears as chairman of the Wheeling Housing Authority. The other listed members were J. A. Bloch, John M. Cunningham, Andrew C. M. Hess, and Archibald L. Klieves. J. W. Pratt was listed as secretary. In the language of the yearbook, these men were part of America’s official housing apparatus at the very moment public housing was being redefined by war.

For our Foundation, these names are not just administrative details. They are part of the chain of responsibility. If we are going to understand housing in Wheeling, we must know who held authority, who made decisions, who signed plans, who represented the city, and who was absent from the table.

That last question matters deeply.

In the 1940s, Black Wheeling residents were among those most affected by overcrowding, segregated opportunity, limited housing choice, and urban redevelopment decisions. Yet the official machinery of housing was overwhelmingly controlled by others.

The yearbook tells us who the system named.

Our work asks who the system served, who it displaced, and who it failed to hear.

War Changed Everything

The 1943 yearbook is dominated by World War II. By then, public housing had been pulled into the war effort.

Before the war, public housing had focused heavily on slum clearance and low-rent housing for underprivileged families. But after the United States entered World War II, the housing system shifted dramatically. The yearbook explains that public housing “enlisted for the duration.” Its long-term social mission was largely set aside so that housing agencies could provide shelter for war workers.

That was not a small adjustment. It was a national pivot.

In 1942, the federal government reorganized housing through the creation of the National Housing Agency. The Federal Public Housing Authority became one of its major units. Public housing construction for traditional low-rent purposes was suspended, and wherever possible, projects were converted to serve the needs of war workers.

The federal government began controlling where housing could be built, how much it could cost, what materials could be used, what size units could be, who could occupy them, and what rents could be charged.

The yearbook notes that by the end of 1942, more than 75 million people lived in areas under federal rent control.

That is an astonishing figure. It shows how housing, once treated as a mostly local and private matter, had become a central concern of national policy.

Housing for Whom?

One of the most revealing sections of the yearbook asks a deceptively simple question: housing for whom?

The wartime answer was narrow. New war housing was generally reserved for essential in-migrant war workers. In other words, priority went to workers who had moved into a community for war production. Resident workers, even if they were living in terrible conditions, often did not qualify.

This is one of the most important insights in the yearbook.

The government knew bad housing existed. It knew resident families were living in dangerous and inadequate conditions. But wartime policy often placed production needs above local suffering. Housing was built where it served the war machine most urgently.

That does not make the program meaningless. It makes it honest to study.

The housing crisis of Black families, poor families, and long-settled residents did not disappear because the nation went to war. In many places, it was pushed to the side. The national housing system had capacity, authority, money, and urgency. But the question of who counted first remained political.

That question belongs at the center of Wheeling’s housing history.

The Numbers Were Enormous

The yearbook gives a sense of the scale of the national housing emergency.

It estimated that over a three-year period ending in June 1943, accommodations would be found or provided for roughly three million migrant war workers. About 1.7 million would be absorbed into existing housing. Another 1.3 million would require new construction.

By the end of 1942, the non-farm public housing program totaled about 700,000 units in all stages of development. War units outnumbered low-rent units by more than four to one.

The Federal Public Housing Authority reported that the public war housing program under the federal government consisted of 561,748 units at the close of 1942. Of those, 485,254 were under FPHA jurisdiction or control.

The yearbook also reported that FPHA inherited about 130,847 low-rent units when it was created. In other words, the emergency war housing program quickly dwarfed the older low-rent housing program.

This is critical context. When people today think of housing authorities, they often think first of long-term public housing projects. But in the early 1940s, the system was being reshaped by wartime urgency, material shortages, migration, industrial labor needs, and federal control.

Wheeling’s housing story unfolded inside that national machinery.

Local Authorities Were the Foundation

For all the federal power described in the yearbook, the document repeatedly returns to the importance of local housing authorities. Federal officials saw local authorities as the “true foundation” of public housing.

That phrase matters.

The federal government could provide law, loans, subsidies, standards, and wartime direction. But local authorities knew the land, the politics, the neighborhoods, the city government, and the local pressures. They were expected to select sites, manage projects, work with tenants, and connect housing developments to community life.

This is where Wheeling becomes especially important.

The local authority was the hinge between national policy and local consequence. A decision made in Washington could create funding or authorize a program. But a decision made in Wheeling could determine where a project was built, which neighborhood changed, which families moved, and whose living conditions improved or worsened.

That is why we cannot study Wheeling housing history only from the top down. We need both the national policy and the local footprint.

The Yearbook’s Blind Spots

Because the yearbook is a self-report from housing officials, it is also revealing for what it does not emphasize.

Race is not centered.

That absence is not neutral.

By 1943, Black Americans were living under Jim Crow segregation across much of the country, including in housing, schools, employment, recreation, and public accommodations. Federal housing policy itself was deeply entangled with segregation, racial exclusion, redlining, and unequal access to mortgage credit. Public housing could offer relief, but it could also reinforce segregation through site selection, tenant assignment, neighborhood clearance, and racially separate projects.

The yearbook speaks often of “slums,” “low-income families,” “war workers,” “migrants,” and “community facilities.” But it rarely speaks with the moral clarity that Black communities would have used to describe the housing crisis they faced.

That is why this document must be read alongside local Black experience.

In Wheeling, the Foundation has already been documenting a long arc of housing struggle: segregated neighborhoods, poor living conditions, Black workers and company housing, the role of industry, the rise of housing projects, the politics of redevelopment, and the ongoing question of who benefits when a city decides to “improve” itself.

The yearbook gives us the official language. Our work restores the human stakes.

The Warning About Redevelopment

One of the most powerful parts of the 1943 yearbook comes near its discussion of postwar planning. The editors warn that urban redevelopment cannot simply replace low-rent dwellings with high-rent dwellings and call that progress.

That warning feels startlingly modern.

The yearbook recognized that rebuilding bad urban areas would require more than clearing land. It would require rehousing people whose incomes were too low to obtain modern housing in the private market. It warned that redevelopment plans needed to calculate the real cost of rehousing displaced families.

That is a sentence Wheeling still needs to hear.

Too often, cities have celebrated clearance before asking where people went. Too often, “blight” became a word used to describe places where people still had memories, churches, corner stores, neighbors, and roots. Too often, the promise of redevelopment has carried hidden costs for Black communities and low-income families.

The 1943 yearbook, even from inside the housing establishment, understood the danger: redevelopment without rehousing is not justice. It is removal.

The National Story Helps Explain the Local One

Why should the Foundation share a national housing yearbook with readers focused on Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley?

Because Wheeling’s housing history did not happen in isolation.

The city’s housing authority was part of a national rollout. Its leaders were listed alongside authorities across the country. Its powers came from a legal and political movement that began in the Depression, expanded through the 1937 Housing Act, and transformed during World War II.

To understand Wheeling’s later housing projects, slum clearance debates, urban renewal decisions, and modern housing authority structure, we need to understand the original promise and pressure of this system.

Public housing began with a moral claim: that dangerous, overcrowded, unhealthy housing was not merely a private problem. It was a public problem.

But public power is never automatically benevolent. It can build. It can clear. It can rescue. It can displace. It can listen. It can ignore.

That is why the Foundation’s work matters.

We are not simply collecting old documents. We are building a fuller public memory. We are placing Wheeling’s Black history inside the larger American story and insisting that local people, especially those most affected, belong in the interpretation.

Wheeling in the Machinery

The listing of the Wheeling Housing Authority in the 1943 Housing Yearbook may look modest: a name, a board, a secretary, an address.

But behind that listing is a national shift.

By 1943, America had decided that housing could be planned, financed, built, managed, regulated, and studied as a public function. It had created local authorities by the hundreds. It had reorganized federal agencies. It had imposed rent controls. It had redirected public housing toward war production. It had begun imagining the postwar city.

Wheeling was part of that.

And for Black Wheeling, that national machinery would become more than policy. It would become lived experience. It would shape where families could live, what housing was considered adequate, which neighborhoods were targeted, which voices were heard, and which stories had to wait decades to be told properly.

The 1943 yearbook helps us see the system from the inside.

The Foundation’s role is to make sure we also see it from the ground.

-T

Sources and Notes

• National Association of Housing Officials, Housing Yearbook, 1943, edited by Hugh R. Pomeroy and Edmond H. Hoben, Publication No. N175, Chicago, 1943.

• The 1943 directory listing for the Wheeling Housing Authority names Harry C. Miller as chairman; J. A. Bloch as vice-chairman; John M. Cunningham, Andrew C. M. Hess, and Archibald L. Klieves as members; and J. W. Pratt as secretary.

• This post also draws on the Foundation’s continuing research into Wheeling housing history, including the legal creation of housing authorities, the emergence of public housing as a response to poor living conditions, and the later local consequences of redevelopment, segregation, and housing policy in Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley.