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The Urban Renewal Movement In Omaha, 1954-1970, Donald Louis Stevens Jr.

Student Work

By 1954, the year President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a national housing act, one hundred years had passed since a group of Iowa businessmen crossed the Missouri River and surveyed Omaha City. The townsite formed the only metropolis in Nebraska at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Suffering from age and neglect, sections in and around the downtown core of Omaha became the object of a controversial crusade by civic leaders. A variety of business, labor, professional and government interests accepted the Eisenhower legislation as a practical way to rebuild the deteriorated areas. The law contained a slum clearance scheme …