OHC
deep green blue collar rainbow
- Location
- Little Beirut
- Pronouns
- they/she
In the 1970s, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick undertook one of the era's many fascinating failed experiments: he tried to build a city from scratch in rural Warren County, North Carolina, with a goal of Black uplift through entrepreneurial New Urbanism. The project was called Soul City.
As the name indicates, it was kind of a utopian dream, but very distinct from the hippies' intentional communities of the same era. First, Soul City was supposed to be a genuine, full-sized city, with civic institutions, shops, and a manufacturing base. It wasn't communal, either; McKissick promoted "Black capitalism" (which he said was a mixture of free enterprise and socialism - redistribution of wealth via targeted state investment in Black communities and businesses) and he wanted his residents to own their homes. The most important difference, though, was that Soul City was to be partially underwritten by the federal government under the New Communities Act. This law was supposed to respond to overcrowding in cities and the failures of "urban renewal," and promoted public-private partnerships to build new towns across the nation. As you might imagine its ambitious goals quickly dissipated in the malaisey economics of the 70s and several of the projects failed, leaving only a few suburban communities like The Woodlands, Texas, as its legacy.
Over the course of the 1970s, McKissick received a sputtering stream of funds from HUD as he purchased land (a former slave plantation), surveyed the site, and began building basic infrastructure. HUD did pony up a lot of money, but there was always a lot of hesitation around the project. McKissick was not an experienced property developer or urban planner, the idea of building a city from scratch in an isolated spot was a very risky investment, racists of both the quiet liberal and screaming reactionary varieties were opposed, and there was a general suspicion that the project was Black separatist in nature and that the government would be funding a segregated community. But this was the era of activist government, McKissick had an okay relationship with the Nixon administration, and the project did keep on ticking - until it just didn't, and died a drawn-out death after HUD cut it off in 1979. Today, the only remains of Soul City are one little housing development in the middle of nowhere, flanked by the city's factory building. In a brutal turn of events, the factory shell has been incorporated into the nearby state prison and now houses inmates making soap for 15 cents an hour.
The biggest reason Soul City didn't work out seems to have been a Catch-22 in attracting investors. McKissick and company talked to dozens of companies who were theoretically interested in locating factories in Soul City, but who wanted a guarantee they'd have enough infrastructure and enough of a population base to run those factories. Without anyone committing to invest, though, McKissick couldn't promise any of those things. The federal grants and loans weren't enough to support a city on their own, and as years went by and the economy worsened and nobody took the plunge, it became clear that it was never going to happen. Probably the best chance for Soul City to break the cycle was in early 1973, when the Morse Electro Products Corporation - manufacturers of sewing machines and stereos - agreed to build a plant employing 350 people. But HUD dragged its feet for a few months on restructuring the Soul City development corporation's debt, which was one of the issues Morse wanted resolved before signing the deal. After too long without a response, Morse pulled out.
It seems like Soul City was viable enough as an idea that a small POD like Morse investing could have broken the chicken-egg cycle and gotten some people and businesses moving in. Surviving the economy of the 70s would have been difficult, of course; Morse Electro ran into some financial trouble later on in the decade and other potential employers would have too. But what if it had made it through?
The plan was for 18,000 residents by 1989 and 44,000 by 2004. That's a little ambitious, given its projected economic base, although manufacturing towns have stayed viable and grown in the New South economy, so who knows. McKissick wanted both to provide jobs for local Black people (hence the city's location in an impoverished and sleepy county) and to attract residents from Northern cities in a reversal of the Great Migration. Soul City was supposed to be integrated, although in practice the only white people who ever lived there were some of McKissick's aides and I'd imagine a lot of white Americans in the 1980s would feel wary of moving to a "Black city" with a strongly political name and purpose. What would the political implications be here? Would Soul City inspire more entrepreneurial uplift projects? Worth noting that both Harvey Gantt and later-Representative Eva Clayton worked on the project at different points.
If you use Google Maps to look at what was built, you can imagine what it was supposed to look like: roundels of villages of single-family homes and apartments, with central hubs of businesses for each village. The plan was inspired by Jane Jacobs but also by James Rouse, the shopping mall mogul and suburban developer, and you can see some of both influences in the sprawly-but-community-focused design. If Soul City had worked, would planned towns on the New Communities Act model be revisited after the economy rebounded?
As the name indicates, it was kind of a utopian dream, but very distinct from the hippies' intentional communities of the same era. First, Soul City was supposed to be a genuine, full-sized city, with civic institutions, shops, and a manufacturing base. It wasn't communal, either; McKissick promoted "Black capitalism" (which he said was a mixture of free enterprise and socialism - redistribution of wealth via targeted state investment in Black communities and businesses) and he wanted his residents to own their homes. The most important difference, though, was that Soul City was to be partially underwritten by the federal government under the New Communities Act. This law was supposed to respond to overcrowding in cities and the failures of "urban renewal," and promoted public-private partnerships to build new towns across the nation. As you might imagine its ambitious goals quickly dissipated in the malaisey economics of the 70s and several of the projects failed, leaving only a few suburban communities like The Woodlands, Texas, as its legacy.
Over the course of the 1970s, McKissick received a sputtering stream of funds from HUD as he purchased land (a former slave plantation), surveyed the site, and began building basic infrastructure. HUD did pony up a lot of money, but there was always a lot of hesitation around the project. McKissick was not an experienced property developer or urban planner, the idea of building a city from scratch in an isolated spot was a very risky investment, racists of both the quiet liberal and screaming reactionary varieties were opposed, and there was a general suspicion that the project was Black separatist in nature and that the government would be funding a segregated community. But this was the era of activist government, McKissick had an okay relationship with the Nixon administration, and the project did keep on ticking - until it just didn't, and died a drawn-out death after HUD cut it off in 1979. Today, the only remains of Soul City are one little housing development in the middle of nowhere, flanked by the city's factory building. In a brutal turn of events, the factory shell has been incorporated into the nearby state prison and now houses inmates making soap for 15 cents an hour.
The biggest reason Soul City didn't work out seems to have been a Catch-22 in attracting investors. McKissick and company talked to dozens of companies who were theoretically interested in locating factories in Soul City, but who wanted a guarantee they'd have enough infrastructure and enough of a population base to run those factories. Without anyone committing to invest, though, McKissick couldn't promise any of those things. The federal grants and loans weren't enough to support a city on their own, and as years went by and the economy worsened and nobody took the plunge, it became clear that it was never going to happen. Probably the best chance for Soul City to break the cycle was in early 1973, when the Morse Electro Products Corporation - manufacturers of sewing machines and stereos - agreed to build a plant employing 350 people. But HUD dragged its feet for a few months on restructuring the Soul City development corporation's debt, which was one of the issues Morse wanted resolved before signing the deal. After too long without a response, Morse pulled out.
It seems like Soul City was viable enough as an idea that a small POD like Morse investing could have broken the chicken-egg cycle and gotten some people and businesses moving in. Surviving the economy of the 70s would have been difficult, of course; Morse Electro ran into some financial trouble later on in the decade and other potential employers would have too. But what if it had made it through?
The plan was for 18,000 residents by 1989 and 44,000 by 2004. That's a little ambitious, given its projected economic base, although manufacturing towns have stayed viable and grown in the New South economy, so who knows. McKissick wanted both to provide jobs for local Black people (hence the city's location in an impoverished and sleepy county) and to attract residents from Northern cities in a reversal of the Great Migration. Soul City was supposed to be integrated, although in practice the only white people who ever lived there were some of McKissick's aides and I'd imagine a lot of white Americans in the 1980s would feel wary of moving to a "Black city" with a strongly political name and purpose. What would the political implications be here? Would Soul City inspire more entrepreneurial uplift projects? Worth noting that both Harvey Gantt and later-Representative Eva Clayton worked on the project at different points.
If you use Google Maps to look at what was built, you can imagine what it was supposed to look like: roundels of villages of single-family homes and apartments, with central hubs of businesses for each village. The plan was inspired by Jane Jacobs but also by James Rouse, the shopping mall mogul and suburban developer, and you can see some of both influences in the sprawly-but-community-focused design. If Soul City had worked, would planned towns on the New Communities Act model be revisited after the economy rebounded?