Public housing and urban renewal represented two distinct efforts to change urban living patterns. First known as district replanning, urban renewal represented the desires of urban business owners, realtors, banks, and other corporate interests to improve property values and recapture potentially valuable land around downtown business districts. The public housing movement emerged in the 1930s as a coalition of social workers, intellectuals, religious leaders, and politicians who lobbied for Federal support for public housing. Their efforts led to the Housing Division of the new Public Works Administration (PWA-created 1933) which was charged with responsibility for housing for low-income families. These two groups were antagonistic in their aims, but cooperated to support the Federal Housing Act of 1949. The implementation of the 1949 legislation and its successor, the 1954 Housing Act changed patterns of living for millions of Americans and led to the adoption of the term Negro removal as one indication of those changes. In this paper, I focus on the research and policy recommendations of social scientists in the twenty years from 1945 to 1965. The intellectual endpoints for the study are taken from Black Metropolis (1945), the sociological analysis of Black progress and obstacles to progress in Chicago, and Dark Ghetto (1965), psychologist Kenneth B. Clark’s meditation on the failure of the “good intentions” of well-meaning white liberals and policy makers in regard to race and inner city life.