Urban Housing Activities of the Federal Government

Abstract

POSITIVE action by the Federal Government in recent years has focused attention on the problems of supplying more, better, and cheaper housing. Since the advent of the New Deal the air has been charged with advocacy and counter-advocacy of pet schemes and special-interest programs to supply the Nation with better housing conditions. Many have looked to the public treasury as the mythical Bellerophon looked to Pegasus to wing their pet causes to an accomplished fact. In the Government was the font of funds by which America could be remade overnight! Others have looked upon the Government as an ogre which would reach out its claws and encompass the functions of private enterprise. Conflicts of opinion over the function which should be assumed by Goverrment in housing have been sharp. Reconciliation of divergent points of view have seemed impossible. Catapulted into action as we were because the reimployment of men was of pressing concern, and without the advantage of much previous thinking about the problems of supplying housing by governmental agencies, it is not surprising that we grasped at expedients which appeared readily available. Amid the confusion of the housing controversies of the past few years, over-emphasis has been characteristic of the proponents of divergent schools of thought. This is easily understandable when one considers that the pressure of emergency made housing primarily a potential vehicle for increasing employment of men. Housing was only a means to an end and not an end in itself. Until it could gain consideration as an end in its own right, it was too much to expect the Government to develop a long-range program. Under the stress of the emergency period, opportunism was the rule. In the field of housing this opportunism led to the assumption by multiple governmental agencies of the functions of supplying and promoting new construction of dwellings. The numerous press releases of these agencies conveyed to the public the impression that the Government was becoming a major producer of housing. In view of its activities, therefore, any analysis of the housing resources of the country must take account of Government as a supplier of new housing.