Rethinking Gender in U.S. Housing Policy

Abstract

The federal government's complicity in racial discrimina tion in the development and administration of housing policy has been well documented,1 but the government's role in reproducing gendered federal housing policies in the United States has been largely unrecognized in political science. U.S. housing policy in the twentieth century is inextricably linked to perceptions of gender and the single family home, and the traditional nuclear family has been rendered a hegemonic entity. The politics of housing cannot be understood without an analysis of the effects that conceptions of gender have had on housing policy and in turn of the effects of such policy on the cultural and social norms surrounding gender. Although current housing policies reflect changed policy commitments from politi cally conservative administrations, pres ent access to housing remains family composition specific, which means that gender?alongside the more commonly recognized factors of race and class?is an integral part of the complex policy making matrix. Contemporary federal low-income housing programs continue to bear the mark of early housing pro grams, characterized by nuclear family and single-family home rhetoric orga nized around a male-breadwinner model, and thus reinforces the nuclear-family ideal. Nuclear-family-centered ideology crystal lized in the 1920s under the Hoover administration, escalated in the 1950s through suburbanization and urban disinvestment, and developed into policymaking that was increasingly punitive in the 1990s for those outside the nuclearand nuptial-family norm. Although federal housing policies have been shaped by numerous competing interests, the nuclear family has acted as the legitimate norm around which policy has been organized. Both the federal government and the courts have contributed to this gendered structure of housing policy; the federal gov ernment, through the creation of public policies and the sup port of private business interests and the courts through the adjudication of housing-related issues, both of which tolerate, nurture, and endorse gender-stratified policies. Obtaining and maintaining housing relies on the performance of gender, and, more specifically, on the formation of nuclear or quasi-nuclear families. Refraining Gendered Social Policy