The Future of a Utopian Community

Having grown up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I fondly remember the neighborhoods and ever-widening suburbs of the ever-growing metropolitan area. Each community was like a small town within itself. With names such as Oxen Hill, Forestville, and Greenbelt, the names are iconic with beauty, parks and green spaces. Their names alone bring memories of Mayberry, One of those communities, Greenbelt, even houses a state park, a national park and a forest preserve.

They called it a “planned utopia,” a “folly” and a “communist boondoggle” when New Deal architects proposed one of their boldest experiments yet in 1935: a community created, built, populated and even furnished entirely by the federal government.

Greenbelt - the crunchy Maryland suburb admired in progressive circles as one of the nation’s longest-running co-op communities - is about to welcome back its creator, having been selected as the new home of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI? In a town with a co-op supermarket where directors meet each month to debate cashier wages, seasonal wine rotations and solar panels? Where locals catch bluegrass, open mic poetry and drag story hour at New Deal Cafe?

Yes, this community of blue collar, union kind of cooperative legacy going back from the very beginning, where the earliest residents may not have even been connected to the Federal government.

Greenbelt was meant to be President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prototype for America’s utopian community, where families had green space and community resources for as little as $18 a month. There were apartments, rowhouses and some free-standing homes among the 885 units finished by 1937.

When Roosevelt took office in 1933 amid the wreckage of the Great Depression, more than a million Americans were homeless, cities were cluttered with shantytowns and density swelled as unhoused families doubled and tripled up.

The Resettlement Administration was created to address the crisis at the urging of agricultural economist Rexford G. Tugwell, who said the United States needed to urban-plan its way out of the housing problem.

Tugwell drove Roosevelt out here, actually, and said: "Look at this beautiful land. Let’s build a city here. Let’s build a small city and show the world how we can combine the best of both city and country living," according to Greenbelt Museum.

The government began ad campaigns with posters that asked: “Which Playground for Your Child? Greenbelt or Gutter?”

The construction was part of the New Deal plan, hiring unemployed men to build the entire city from blueprints. The builders created a series of “super blocks,” with houses facing a collective green space. The sidewalks were not along the road but inside the space.

The backs of the homes became the service areas, where milk was delivered and laundry was hung, but only during approved hours.

And that was the rub for some.

It was a collective with strict rules and standards. Though the homes were built by black and white workers, only applications - 5,000 for the 885 units - from white married couples were accepted. The government’s housing managers carefully screened for income and compatibility, social engineering to ensure harmony in the new utopia whose manager reported, after its first year, had “not a shrewish housewife anywhere along the crescent.”

“America’s most famous test-tube city, Greenbelt, Maryland - often referred to by its neighbors as Utopia - is 1-year-old this month,” wrote Christine Sadler in an October 9, 1938, article in The Washington Post.

“It was last October that the first carefully selected families moved into the meticulously planned community 12 miles from the National Capital, with the Government as their landlord, friend and adviser,” Sadler wrote.

The planners told Sadler that, psychologically, the town was thriving.

“We think it is because everybody knows everybody else’s salary. All economic inhibitions are thus removed and there is no keeping up with the Joneses,” Otis Kline Fulmer, a managerial assistant at Greenbelt, told Sadler.

“The results show up in an increased zest for life, community co-operation and happy faces,” Fulmer said. Just one family moved out in the first year (reportedly over a dog issue), and “only four Greenbelters were arrested in the year and all the arrests were for speeding,” he said.

The nursery school, cafe, movie theater, grocery store and even the newspaper were run as cooperatives. Children organized their own Gum Drop Cooperative, with 92 children buying in at 10 cents a share. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was beloved in the town and visited often.

Within the first year, Greenbelt had a pinochle club, bridge club, rifle club, camera club, bowling club, Scouts and American Legion, among other groups. The new residents happily called themselves “joiners.”

But early on, some on Capitol Hill chafed at becoming landlords.

“A national scandal” is what Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia called Greenbelt, which he nicknamed “Tugwelltown” in a July 5, 1937, Washington Post story.

Greenbelt was costing taxpayers $16,182 a unit to build, while the average American home was constructed for just $4,000.

Before the project even broke ground, an editorial in The Post called it “Tugwell’s Folly.” Soon Tugwell was being called “Rex the Red,” and Greenbelt was derided as a “communist boondoggle.”

Only three of Tugwell’s green utopias were built; the others were in Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenhills, Ohio.

Of the three, Greenbelt was the most fully realized plan.

Construction of other greenbelt cities stalled, and in the post-World War II United States, Levittown - the sprawling, car-centric model of American living - took over as the suburban template.

This hit hard in 1949 and 1950, when the government divested from Greendale and Greenhills, selling off the land and homes. The same fate befell Greenbelt in 1953, “ringing down the curtain on one of the most publicized experiments of the early New Deal,” The Washington Post’s Harrison P. Hagemeyer wrote.

The town’s newspaper, continuously published as Greenbelt Cooperator since 1937, changed its name to Greenbelt News Review after the town was sold to Greenbelt Veteran Housing Corporation.

Unlike in other greenbelt cities, the art-deco homes and the co-ops remain. And their legend lives on to this day.

The new manager of Greenbelt Co-op Supermarket stated, “I’ve been working in co-ops for 30 years, and I was bragging when I landed a job here, in co-op land. There’s something really special about a place that still lives by the co-op ideals.

The mayor said that even as other housing developments, a shopping mall and now the FBI expand Greenbelt’s population, the original core of the 1937 New Deal utopia will not change much.

It is pretty much part of the town's DNA, the mayor said, noting that Takoma Park - the Maryland suburb with the hippiest reputation - actually spun its co-op off Greenbelt’s.

That spirit of cooperation is alive and well in Greenbelt.