Abstract
Public housing advocates argue that the nation should expand the federal public housing program as part of an effort to increase the supply of affordable rental housing. This paper examines federal public housing construction in the largest US cities over the period 1937–1967, a period during which the public housing program was the primary program to provide low-income households with affordable rental housing. Public housing is found to depend upon the population level of the city, factors that characterize the housing stock as of 1950, the poverty level in the city, and the size of the nonwhite population in the city. The National Commission on Urban Problems (National commission on urban problems 1968, page 128) found that this supply response meant that “… the great need of the large central cities for housing for poor families was largely unmet.” Changes in racial segregation from 1940 to 1960 are found to be unrelated to public housing construction. While the current situation is different in many respects from circumstances of these earlier decades, a renewed effort to supply public housing might produce similar outcomes.
Highlights
Passage of the Housing Act of 1937 was a political victory for the advocates of public housing in the US Numerous histories of public housing in the USA have been written; the recent book by Bradford Hunt [1] provides an informative, concise summary
The federal public housing program in the USA began with the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933
This study shows that the quantity of public housing that was constructed in 46 major cities in the first 30 years of the program largely can be explained by a small number of variables: the population of the city, the nature of the housing stock, the incidence of poverty, and the percentage of nonwhite population
Summary
Passage of the Housing Act of 1937 was a political victory for the advocates of public housing in the US Numerous histories of public housing in the USA have been written; the recent book by Bradford Hunt [1] provides an informative, concise summary. Urban Studies Research housing policy is a much more complex web of programs that includes federal demand-side housing vouchers, lowincome housing tax credits that enable the private sector to supply subsidized rental housing to households with modest incomes, and an ongoing program to replace the current public housing stock with mixed-income housing developments that include public housing.
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