Housing Act of 1949

The Housing Act of 1949 originated amid World War II, when despite thousands of units of government-built temporary housing units, plus some Federal Housing Administration-assisted, and a few “experimental” cooperative or mutual housing projects, planners predicted an unprecedented demand for decent shelter. However, in 1943, Washington's concern for a “depression-free” postwar economy loomed even larger. That year, Guy Greer, Alvin Hansen, and Charles Ascher of the soon-to-be-dismantled National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) outlined plans for rebuilding American cities. Many wartime strategies for combating urban (central city) blight, like Hansen's and Greer's, involved mobilizing federal funds to write down inflated downtown land values. These strategies informed the 1944 urban redevelopment bill drafted by Greer and Hansen for the NRPB's Special Committee on Postwar Economic Planning and Policy. Although this bill floundered, it was in basic form the Wagner-Ellender-Taft (W-E-T) legislation introduced in Congress in 1945. That bill, which also called for the creation of a permanent National Housing Administration, provided federal grants to local redevelopment authorities to purchase and clear urban slums.

From the outset, consensus surrounded the redevelopment provisions of the proposed legislation; meanwhile, opposition swirled around the inserted housing clauses. By 1945, the predicted national housing shortage had arrived. The new president, Harry S. Truman, joined by the stalwart Ohio Republican Senator Robert Taft, championed housing legislation to ease the crisis. The battle lines quickly formed. Taft and New York Senator Robert Wagner, backed by housing professionals such as Catherine Bauer Wurster and Lee Johnson of the National Association of Housing Officials, anchored the one side, which favored the resumption of a large-scale government housing program. Staunchly opposed [Page 357]stood Senators Jesse Wolcott and Joseph McCarthy, together with the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the National Association of Home Builders, and the American Savings and Loan League.

Taft insisted that urban redevelopment be linked to housing. As long as American GI families doubled up with parents and friends in cramped residential quarters and families in western Pennsylvania found shelter in abandoned beehive coking ovens, urban redevelopment plans, argued Taft, should be limited to urban areas that were “predominately residential” in character. Redevelopment areas, that is, should be developed for “predominately residential purposes.” On the other hand, Cincinnati planner Alfred Bettman viewed redevelopment as part of the comprehensive planning process. Slums, he contended, represented one facet of the larger problem of urban blight. Therefore, he considered it wrong to clear slums for housing only. In any case, housing stood as a central purpose of Senate Bill 1070, reported in February 1949, a bill establishing a national housing objective and providing federal aid to assist slum-clearance projects and low-rent public housing projects. For the first and only time, in Title I of the bill, Congress articulated a national housing policy. The 1949 bill's preamble declared that the nation's general welfare and security required not only a remedy for the serious housing shortage and elimination of slums and blighted areas, but “the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”

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