“St. John’s Court Is No More”: Code Enforcement and The Baltimore Plan for Housing

By Daniel G. Cumming ~

It was an unusual commute. In the late 1930s, Dr. Huntington Williams, commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department, and Thomas J.S. Waxter, head of the Welfare Department, often shared a ride from their suburban neighborhoods to their downtown offices. The two officials must have enjoyed each other’s company as well as the opportunity to discuss their work. Since the depression, the Welfare Department had struggled to support an underemployed workforce in a city of nearly 900,000 people. The Health Department, too, grappled with the consequences of roughly 50,000 substandard homes and one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the country.

Along their route, a common enemy began to come into focus: so-called “blighted housing,” a ring of dilapidated neighborhoods surrounding the downtown core. As Waxter recalled, the two officials took detours to survey the alarming conditions. One experience in particular “brought Williams and me deeper into housing than we had ever been before.” Williams also described his growing conviction that health departments must become part of the solution: “only the barest approach has been made in most American communities so far.” Over the ensuing decades, Williams and Waxter would help coordinate a full-scale assault on “Baltimore’s worst slums.” Their efforts ultimately reshaped federal housing policy, including transformative urban renewal programs beginning in the 1950s.

Such shifts in national policy often have a local address. Adjacent the Baltimore City Jail sat St. John’s Court at 876-878 Homewood Avenue, a “small, dilapidated group of houses in an alley,” and ground zero for the city’s postwar housing programs. Historians rarely discuss St. John’s Court. Instead, large-scale initiatives that followed typically receive more attention, such as the Hygiene of Housing Ordinance (1941), The Baltimore Plan (1945), and U.S. Housing Acts (1949, 1954). This makes sense. But in returning to the original scene, we can sometimes uncover an underappreciated piece to the larger puzzle. Officials’ efforts at St. John’s led to a new housing code that granted unprecedented condemnation authority to the Health Department, powers the commissioner leveraged in future renewal projects. First though, Williams had to target a small block in East Baltimore, then in the name of public safety, wipe it clear off the map.

Baltimore had long been concerned with poor housing’s effect on public health, or “the question of the slums,” as posed in the Maryland Medical Journal (1901). Health experts influenced the city’s earliest slum clearance projects, such as Preston Gardens (1914–1919) and the infamous “Lung Block” (1929–1930). By the mid 1930s, moreover, the city’s Bureau of Building Inspection was already condemning buildings for demolition. The Health Department, however, had yet to define its official role in slum clearance. St. John’s Court was an unprecedented and consequential step in that direction.

This blog post—a dispatch from the National Library of Medicine (NLM)—can only begin to crack open a much larger history on housing and health in the postwar era. As the above suggests, one way this story can be told is through local policymakers finding common cause in New Deal administration. What St. John’s offers us, though, is a glimpse into how these mutual interests were fused together though officials’ interpretations of specific neighborhoods, especially those deemed threats. By exploring the NLM’s collection of Baltimore City Health News, a monthly report published by the Health Department, we can piece together how a single block came to play such an outsized role in shaping local then national policies. More specifically, we can see how local officials sharpened the idea that code enforcement could be an effective weapon against “blight,” a means to eliminate problems “in the interest of public safety.”

The Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) discovered St. John’s when it surveyed the area after the Housing Act of 1937. Hidden by a narrow passageway that opened into a cramped courtyard, St. John’s rented 23 rooms with no running water and one outdoor toilet to eight families, all poor and working-class African Americans. A discovery for some, a home for others.

From HABC’s perspective, St. John’s was a target for clearance, an example of tenements “unfit for human habitation,” and an obstacle to the future Latrobe Homes, a public housing project planned for construction across the street.

Homewood Avenue, however, was just beyond HABC’s project area. Housing Director C.D. Loomis turned to Williams for help. Worried about backlash but encouraged by Waxter, Williams decided to enlist the Health Department in 1939. According to a front-page article in Health News, St. John’s was “a rock-bottom slum,” one of the worst in the city. Derelict housing, moreover, risked exposing the public to infectious disease, especially tuberculosis which was a longstanding fear among city officials.

While true that tuberculosis festered in poor neighborhoods, spread easily in areas that lacked sanitary infrastructure, fears of tuberculosis in Jim Crow Baltimore unfurled through the racialization of low-income tenants and corresponding notions of “blight.” Health experts helped tether fears of contagion to renter-majority districts, predominately African American neighborhoods where the Health News reasoned that people “developed tuberculosis because of living in a blighted area.” At the same time, decades of housing policies fixated on protecting public health, property values, and racial order, mutually reinforcing notions infused with white supremacy. Apartheid thus reshaped the urban geography of “blight”—and white homeowners hardened its borders. For example, HABC designed the 701-unit Latrobe Homes for whites only, a barrier against Black Baltimoreans who attempted to move north of Eager Street. Housing officials then encouraged white homeowners to reinforce the boundary with racially restrictive covenants codified in property deeds.

Baltimore was already a national leader in segregationist housing policies. The  Segregation Ordinances of 1910–1913 were the first racial zoning laws in the U.S., and local developers helped spread its influence across the country until the Supreme Court ruled against the practice in Buchanan v. Warley (1917).

By 1938, HABC officials had already decided on the locations for public housing by revising a city survey of “blighted areas” undertaken four years earlier. When HABC “superimposed maps of urban problems,” including racial, sociological, economic, and environmental, on top of the original survey, officials layered racialized anxieties into their operative category of “blight,” revealing the internal mechanisms of apartheid policymaking in the process. Conferring with HABC, if not using its maps directly, Williams identified St. John’s as “dangerous” to “public safety.” The Health Department then condemned the property under Baltimore’s 1927 City Code, making St. John’s the first time the department had “proceeded under ordinance in the manner of slum clearance.” After an absentee owner forfeited his claim, officials evicted St. John’s tenants and razed its buildings to the ground.

Code enforcement opened the door for the Health Department to engage in slum clearance. Alongside Waxter and Loomis, Williams plus a “group of city officials who constituted a team with authority,” as he put it, began lobbying the City Council to expand the department’s condemnation powers. Health inspectors fanned across the city, issuing fines and hauling landlords to court. In the cases that followed, judges ruled in favor of the city’s growing appetite for slum clearance. With full legal backing, the City Council passed the landmark Ordinance on Hygiene of Housing in 1941, setting a new precedent in housing reform. Policymakers across the country soon flooded the department with requests for information, and Williams began publishing widely, including an article in the American Journal of Public Health titled “Housing as a Health Officer’s Opportunity.”

Baltimore emerged a national leader in housing policy, and the Health Department appeared poised to finally destroy its “ring of blight.” In 1947, the country’s first housing court was established, and a new division of beat cops, building inspectors, and health officers, called the Sanitarians, patrolled neighborhoods issuing tickets and court summons to tenants and landlords alike. The Baltimore Plan for Housing Law Enforcement, as the multi-pronged campaign became known, was celebrated widely. Even landlords welcomed the program as fines seemed a better deal than slum clearance and public projects threatening their monopoly on low-income housing.

The Baltimore Plan, however, was designed as a complement, not alternative, to public housing. Indeed, code enforcement helped clear the path for public projects. As St. John’s revealed, HABC recruited the Health Department to the work of condemnation, extending its reach beyond its designated area. A collaborative effort, the all-white Latrobe Homes displaced 589 households, and HABC ignored federal “composition rules” that insisted public projects reflect a neighborhood’s racial demographics. Instead, HABC forced Black residents (65 percent of the original area) deeper into East Baltimore, limiting their options to a long waitlist for segregated housing or subdivided apartments in a predatory rental market. Indeed, the new powers of the Health Department provided justification—and legal cover—to help bulldoze diverse neighborhoods and erect lasting monuments to apartheid.

After St. John’s was leveled, authorities scaled up from single buildings to entire blocks. The success of The Baltimore Plan launched local officials into the Eisenhower administration where they helped write the Housing Act of 1954. A return to the original scene, however, reminds us how local dynamics shaped national legislation. Williams and Waxter, from their morning commute to their policy collaborations, targeted a specific address to recast threats to public safety, rewrite the authority of public agencies, and even reshape notions of the public itself when deciding whose interests were worth protecting. Over time, their accomplishments outlasted their uncertain initial steps. Health News offers a window into the origins of Baltimore’s code enforcement program. Revisiting the articles on St. John’s and its aftermath, scholars can reexamine a controversial moment when local ordinances, federal programs, and national legislation were still years, if not decades, away. Exploring the entangled policies of health and housing in the late 1930s, moreover, we can begin to pull at the roots of a postwar apartheid system, one seeded by municipal codes, appointed officials, and expansions of public authority.

Daniel G. Cumming, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a joint appointment with an affiliated public-facing project, “Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation.” He is a 2020 NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine.