Section 8

Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937 (created through a 1974 amendment to the act) provides rental assistance in the form of payments to private landlords [Page 1174]in order to subsidize the costs of renting low-rent residences to low-income households. More than 3 million American households are served through the various programs funded By Section 8, which are managed By the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The Housing Act, or Wagner-Steagall Act (sponsored By Democratic Congressman Henry Steagall of Alabama and Robert Wagner of New York), was the second major housing act of the New Deal period that sought to remedy the problems of the Great Depression and the economic infrastructures that had led to it, following the National Housing Act of 1934, which had provided funding for the construction of residences for low-income families and to slow down the rate of foreclosures. The 1937 act was notable for having the support of Robert A. Taft and Allen Ellender, opponents of the New Deal overall, leaders of the conservative coalition that formed in response to the expansion of the federal government, and ideological forefathers of Today's Republican Party. The 1934 act had created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA); the 1937 act created the United States Housing Authority (USHA), an agency within the Department of the Interior, which handled housing matters in the days before HUD. USHA was eventually absorbed into the Housing and Home Finance agency in 1947, which was itself dissolved and succeeded By HUD when it was formed in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, which were designed as a continuation and maturation of the New Deal policies a generation earlier.

One reason for the support of the conservatives was that elements of the bill were perceived as a compromise between doing nothing and the possibility of a nationalized housing industry—which may seem unrealistic in hindsight but which must have seemed no more radical than some of the other changes wrought to the structure of American business By the previous years of the New Deal. This compromise also limited the extent of public housing legislation, which conscientiously maintained a spacer gap between the upper-income limits that qualified a household for subsidized housing and the lower-income limits of those who could afford the nonsubsidized housing provided By the private sector. Section 8 housing, By design, does not provide housing for all those who can't afford it but only for those least able to afford it. Section 8 housing was also originally racially segregated, then desegregated in the 1950s, though as with many neighborhoods throughout the country, de facto segregation has continued.

Other than the creation of HUD, notable amendments to the Housing Act of 1937 have included the Housing Act of 1949, which came at the economic ebb following the end of World War II and funded urban renewal programs as well as refunding public housing programs; the 1965 Leased Housing Program, which (until superceded in 1974) provided subsidized housing for eligible families By assigning them to a unit from a master list of available eligible housing, setting a rent based on need and income and separately paying the landlord the difference between that adjusted rent and the fair market value; and the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which created the Section 8 class of housing, essentially broadening and streamlining the 1965 program while divorcing it from its reliance on a specific list of housing units.

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