Good Neighbor Project

The Good Neighbor Project is a housing initiative within the Lindbergh administration’s Homestead 42 plan, intended to bring non-Jewish families into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. Its language of civic enrichment and its practical use of relocation incentives make it a quieter instrument of the administration’s assimilation policy: the neighborhood is not simply asked to change, but reorganized through government direction and financial arrangements.

Place Within the Homestead Plan

The project is described as a previously unpublicized section of Homestead 42. While the larger initiative offered selected families government-funded moves to new regions, the Good Neighbor Project worked within established Jewish neighborhoods, introducing non-Jewish residents there. The two policies shared an official rationale of strengthening Americans’ connection to the country, but their methods differed: one dispersed Jewish families from their homes, while the other changed the composition of the communities they left behind.

The project operated alongside the Office of American Absorption and corporate participation in Homestead 42. In a separate explanation of the relocation system, Evelyn describes New Jersey assignments represented by pins on maps, with destinations coordinated among offices, Washington headquarters, receiving states, and participating corporations. That administrative framework gives the housing policy the appearance of distributed planning rather than a decision made by one official. In the project’s operation, however, government edict and financial incentives shaped where families could live.

How the Project Changed a Neighborhood

On October 1, 1942, two Summit Avenue flats vacated by families relocated under Homestead 42 were occupied by Italian families from the First Ward. Their new housing had effectively been assigned by government order, softened by a rent discount of 15 percent: $6.37 off a monthly rent of $42.50. The Department of the Interior paid the discount to the landlord during the initial three-year lease and for the first two years of its three-year renewal, producing a five-year period of support.

The households were not portrayed as moving under identical circumstances to the families removed. Rather, the government’s financial arrangement encouraged their entry into the neighborhood while making the replacement part of a planned policy. The new residents downstairs included a mother, father, son, and grandmother. The father worked as a night watchman, and the family had come from a cold-water flat in a tenement. Herman already knew the family through years of collecting insurance premiums from customers in the First Ward; he visited after they moved in, hoping the grandmother would recognize him as the agent who had sold her husband the policy that paid for his burial.

Official Rationale and Community Fears

The program’s stated purpose was to enrich the Americanness of everyone involved by introducing increasing numbers of non-Jewish residents into Jewish neighborhoods. At home, and sometimes at school, residents heard a different account: that the project, like Just Folks, was intended to weaken Jewish social solidarity and reduce the community’s electoral strength in local and congressional elections. The narrative presents this as the community’s understanding of the policy, not as a public admission by its administrators.

The feared scale of the change was substantial. If displacement and replacement proceeded according to the agency’s timetable, Christians might become the majority in at least half of the country’s twenty most heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods by the beginning of Lindbergh’s second term. In that prospect, the language of integration becomes inseparable from the prospect of political reordering. The project makes demographic change legible as a matter of addresses, leases, mapped assignments, and subsidies, while its consequences are experienced as a threat to the continuity and collective influence of a community.