With the war and depression both nearly over, officials in municipalities across the country began to reassess the needs of the post-war American city and search for a solution to what may have been its most urgent crisis: housing. Studies which began in 1944 resulted in Illinois' Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act of 1947 and, ultimately, in Truman's national Housing Act of 1949. The latter provided federal financing for slum clearance programs associated with urban renewal, allowed the FHA to insure mortgages, and extended federal money to build more than 800,000 public housing units in the U.S. Though the efficacy of urban renewal—a program of urban land redevelopment often closely associated with the two decades following World War II—is often debated, its effect on Chicago's physical and socioeconomic landscape is unquestionably significant.

1. Near West Side redevelopment project, block data work sheet, circa early 1940s.
2. The Slum... Is Rehabilitiation Possible? brochure, Chicago Housing Authority, 1946.
3. Woodlawn: A Study in Community Conservation, Chicago Plan Commission, July 1946.
4. Faith Rich (NAACP Housing Committee) to Ludwig Hilberseimer, July 12, 1949.
5. Ludwig Hilberseimer manuscript, "Chicago: The Hilberseimer Plan," February 1953.
6. Ludwig Hilberseimer, traffic redevelopment plan for the south side of Chicago, c.1955.
7. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Plan of Chicago with rectangular communities, c.1955.