Much of Trussville's growth and development came from the Cahaba Project, a planned development of over 250 homes constructed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Government Resettlement Administration during the 1930s. The Cahaba Project was originally planned by staff at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute to be a rural community of small farmsteads raising potatoes and vegetables. By the middle of the decade it was decided to locate the community close enough to Birmingham to commute by public transit, so the site in Trussville was chosen. About 60 existing houses were demolished, with white residents moved to the Roper Hill community and cottages for African-Americans built on a 40-acre tract northwest of the Cahaba Project called "Washington Heights" or, more commonly, "The Forties".