Public Housing

Public housing in the U.S. was born in the 1930s with much hope, but it failed to sustain the promise of providing “decent, safe, and sanitary housing” intended by the authors of the program. The optimism that surrounded the program during the New Deal evaporated by the mid-1950s in most cities, and by the late 1970s, public housing became synonymous in the public mind with government mismanagement, concentrated poverty, and racial discrimination. Public housing struggled for a host of reasons, including the use of unpopular architectural designs, the selection of sites to reinforce segregation, the loss of working-class tenants, and the structural inadequacies of federal subsidies. As a result, most public housing projects spiraled downward physically and became socially isolated housing of last resort. While many cities began tearing down their most problematic projects in the mid-1990s, most of the 1.4 million apartments built between 1937 and 2000 survive today and continue to provide affordable but problem-ridden shelter to the nation's poor.

The activists who led the drive for state-sponsored housing during the New Deal divided into two camps. First, Progressive slum reformers, long interested in the link between bad housing and public health, successfully lobbied Congress in 1933 for federal subsidies to rehouse slum dwellers in large-scale projects. As a result, the Public Works Administration built over 21,000 apartments between 1934 and 1938. While these projects offered a model for later public housing, limited subsidies made rents disappointingly high. Second, modern housing planners argued for a federal role in planning housing complexes designed along European lines for the American working class. These projects, they argued, should be built on vacant land on the fringes of the city; they criticized slum rebuilding as a wasteful bailout of slum owners.

This second group, led by European housing expert and labor activist Catherine Bauer and Cleveland councilman Ernest Bohn, had the most influence on public housing legislation, but they could not control the program's implementation at the local level. As influential advisers to Senator Robert F. Wagner, they successfully overcame internal opposition from the Roosevelt administration and external pressure from real estate forces to enact the 1937 Housing Act. The law offered local housing authorities (LHAs) deep subsidies to house families who could not afford to house themselves. Congress rejected Bauer's idea of allowing nongovernmental organizations, such as labor unions, to participate in the program. The law allowed LHAs to choose vacant land or slum sites, but most opted for slum projects targeted at the “deserving poor” over Bauer's vision of modern housing on the urban fringes for the working class.

Public housing struggled to sustain congressional support throughout its history. Despite a reasonable record of accomplishment by 1939, an increasingly conservative Congress denied additional funds for public housing. Wartime housing demand revived the program, and various agencies built over 600,000 units of public housing, though roughly three quarters of these units were temporary in nature. After the war, congressional opposition again blocked new authorizations for permanent public housing, despite an enormous postwar housing shortage. Following Democratic victories in the 1948 elections, Congress enacted the 1949 Housing Act, authorizing 135,000 units of public housing per year. But first the Korean War and then renewed congressional opposition whittled this figure down to an average of 35,000 units per year through the 1950s. Public housing barely survived termination in the first year of the Eisenhower administration and limped along until 1968, when urban riots and concern over investments in cities sparked a brief revival of the program. Following the high-profile demolition of St. Louis's ill-conceived Pruitt-Igoe high-rise project in 1973, the Nixon administration imposed a moratorium on housing programs, marking the end of an era for the public housing program.

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