Greenbelt: FDR's Utopia in the Woods

The city you're passing, Greenbelt, Maryland, was not built the way cities are usually built. There were no land speculators, no competing railroad interests, no individual homeowners making separate decisions. It was designed all at once, from the ground up, by the federal government of the United States, as a demonstration of how Americans ought to live.

It was nineteen thirty-five. The Great Depression had been grinding for six years. Franklin Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration, led by economist Rexford Tugwell, was searching for ways to put unemployed men to work while also proving that poverty was not inevitable, that good design could produce good lives. The administration chose three locations across the country to build what they called greenbelt towns, communities ringed by protected woodlands and farmland, designed around pedestrian paths, shared spaces, and cooperative ownership. Greenbelt, Maryland, was the most ambitious of the three.

Construction crews, many of them unemployed workers, built eight hundred eighty-five housing units between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen thirty-eight. The finished town had a school, a library, a swimming pool, a theater, a cooperative grocery, and a community center, all within walking distance of every home. The cooperative grocery still operates today, more than eighty years later, and the community newspaper grew from the original Greenbelt Cooperator into today's Greenbelt News Review.

But Greenbelt's origin carried a profound contradiction. The workforce that built it was racially integrated. The community that moved in was not. Because of segregation, only white families were permitted to apply for residency when the town opened in nineteen thirty-seven. The utopia had a color line drawn around it.

In the early nineteen fifties, the government sold Greenbelt's housing stock to a nonprofit corporation of veterans, and the city grew outward in the postwar boom. The original planned neighborhood, now called Old Greenbelt, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains one of the most intact examples of New Deal urban planning in America.