Federal intervention in community development is nothing new. During the 1930’s, the federal Resettlement Administration (“RA”) actively assisted rural families to relocate to communities planned by the federal government. The resettlement administration existed from April 1935 to December 1936, and in 1937, in response to public criticism and implementation challenges, the program was folded into the Farm Security Administration. Along with the community planning, the Administration was active in agricultural cooperative lending, farm loans, building migrant farm camps, the Photography Project, famous for its photographs by Dorothea Lange, film documentaries, and recordings of folk music.
The RA concentrated on three categories of settlements: part-time farmers near industrial centers, all-rural colonies for farmers, and villages with decentralized industry. The federal government formed the Federal Subsistence Homesteads Corporation as a non-profit entity for the purpose of buying, developing and leasing the property. Local corporations were used as well. With over 200 communities nationwide, the Administration developed two subsistence settlements in California: El Monte (100 units) and Reseda (40 units) (in some publications referred to as the San Fernando Homesteads). Unlike the exclusive agricultural State of California colonies of Durham and Delhi, these subsistence colonies were designed to support personal farming as a supplement to nearby industrial employment. Elwood Mead, a key strategist in California’s doomed earlier program and who had also been active in the South developing agricultural colonies, also served as a federal advisor for the national program, perhaps serving to modify the program to work in conjunction with industrial employment. The plots were small (one acre) and were designed to provide housing a modest income support through part-time farming. The El Monte project also included a sewer treatment plant. Little has been written of the Reseda settlement, although reportedly Dorothea Lange took photographs in both communities.
The Resettlement Administration was hampered by the fundamental fact that subsistence colonies in the past had largely failed, and a successful operating model did not exist. The federal program was politically controversial, and predictably short-lived. Efforts include east coast colonies focused on Jewish garment workers (Jersey Settlement, later called Roosevelt,) as well as Afro-American centric communities (Aberdeen Gardens, near Newport News, Virginia). Charges were leveled that the RA program had communistic leanings. Many of the sites failed due to poor agricultural capability or lack of meaningful employment opportunities for those developed as re-employment centers. The two California settlements fared better than most for a couple of key reasons. First, they were geographically located near meaningful employment opportunities. Second, they were planned and supported by local business interests and local planning interests, and not master planned and administered by the RA. As the national economy labors through another recession, will the federal government do any better this time around? Want to read more, try “Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program” available at http://www.archive.org/details/tomorrownewworld00conkrich.
