This paper will focus on the evolution of federal housing policy, from the first policies in the 1930s to the current policies, with a consideration for the shifting priorities within the programs. The many goals and a brief history of housing policy in the United Stated will be established. With a dilution of goals and many responsibilities, an emphasis will be placed on low-income housing and the role the federal government has played. The many shifts in attitude towards public assistance will be discussed, as the government moved from building and providing the housing towards the demand-side of providing vouchers. Three case studies of individual cities will serve as case studies to demonstrate these principals. There were some early investigations in the housing sector that the federal government sponsored. The earliest, in 1892, was a report of city slums in four different cities. By 1909, a report by the President’s Housing Commission had recommended that the federal government purchase swellings in slums to then improve or replace so that there would be more healthy homes for the poor. (US House of Representatives 108th Congress, 2004) While these recommendations were not followed through with, it illustrates that the government was aware of the development of slum-like conditions but did not yet take any action on these studies or recommendations. Meanwhile, the federal government did take action to house workers and soldiers during World War I. In 1918, it was authorized for realty companies to use fedral loans to build housing for shipyard workers. The US Housing Corporation, existing for a short time during World War I, was authorized to build and manage community housing for many different war w... ... middle of paper ... ...ng Act of 1974 introduced major changes to federal housing policy yet again. Community development block grants were established; communities would need to compete for these grants and could be used for different housing and community improvements. Section 8 was established as well. This changed the subsidies to enable the federal government to pay the difference between fair market rent and 30 percent of the resident’s income. It could be applied to new or existing privately owned housing; in order to be eligible, residents had to be “low income” or make less than 80 percent of the median income according to family size. To improve the attractiveness of Section 8 to construction companies and banks, the Tandem arrangement was created in 1974. Works Cited http://www.knowledgeplex.org/kp/text_document_summary/scholarly_article/relfiles/hpd_0202_listokin.pdf
Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project is notorious in the United States for being the most impoverished and crime-ridden public housing development ever established. Originally established as inexpensive housing in the 1940’s, it soon became a vast complex of unsightly concrete low and high-rise apartment structures. Originally touted as a giant step forward in the development of public housing, it quickly changed from a racially and economically diverse housing complex to a predominantly black, extremely poor ghetto. As it was left to rot, so to speak, Cabrini-Green harbored drug dealers, gangs and prostitution. It continued its downward spiral of despair until the mid 1990’s when the Federal Government assumed control the Chicago Housing Authority, the organization responsible for this abomination. Cabrini-Green has slowly been recovering from its dismal state of affairs recently, with developers building mixed-income and subsidized housing. The Chicago Housing Authority has also been demolishing the monolithic concrete high-rise slums, replacing them with public housing aimed at not repeating the mistakes of the past. Fortunately, a new era of public housing has dawned from the mistakes that were made, and the lessons that were learned from the things that went on for half a century in Cabrini-Green.
This brought about the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act -- the G.I. Bill of Rights". The programs were meant to not only educate and train the returning soldiers, but also help them obtain low interest mortgages and business loans. These loans are backed by the Veterans Administration and guaranteed by the government. Most of the suburbs were built as small communities with strip malls. This meant that all families had to have at least one car, if not two, for a second job.
Jeffries, John. Wartime America: The World War II Home Front. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Print. American Way.
Goetz, Edward G.. New Deal ruins: race, economic justice, and public housing policy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. Print.
U.S. cities experienced rapid growth and change, and also faced new challenges following the end of World War II. The consolidation of ghettos in the inner city and the rise of suburbs are two of the characteristics and problems that consequently arose for U.S. cities. One of the biggest projects created as a solution was the public housing project. These public houses however, although in paper they seemed like a great idea, in practice they actually proved not be such a great project because they brought several tensions and problems to cities and neighborhoods.
Housing segregation is as the taken for granted to any feature of urban life in the United States (Squires, Friedman, & Siadat, 2001). It is the application of denying minority groups, especially African Americans, equal access to housing through misinterpretation, which denies people of color finance services and opportunities to afford decent housing. Caucasians usually live in areas that are mostly white communities. However, African Americans are most likely lives in areas that are racially combines with African Americans and Hispanics. A miscommunication of property owners not giving African American groups gives an accurate description of available housing for a decent area. This book focuses on various concepts that relates to housing segregation and minority groups living apart for the majority group.
The United States’ government had always had a hand on our country’s housing market. From requiring land ownership to vote, to providing public housing to impoverished families, our government had become an irremovable part of the housing market. The effects of these housing policies can affect American residents in ways they might not even recognize.
One of the first times the federal government stepped in to help deal with homelessness was during the Great Depression, and did just this when they instituted the Federal Transient Service, which funded work training programs, shelters, health centers, housing, and work camps from 1933 to 1936 (Street News Service, 2010). This program was shut down in 1936 when the Roosevelt administration decided to fund Social Security (Street News Service, 2010). Later, as the National Coalition for the Homeless reports, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act is one of the only major federal legislation in response to homelessness, and it’s been amended four times since its original introduction (National Coalitio...
This paper will be predominantly focusing on public housing within Ontario. Not only will it look at the basics of Ontario but examine more directly on Regent Park within Toronto. It will discuss what public housing is and the explanation for why it exists, the government housing programs that are present with regards to public housing and the results of the government programs. The Purpose of this essay is to argue that the problem of public housing will never
Compare and contrast the ways in which housing inequalities are discussed from the perspectives of social policy and criminology, and economics (TMA 02)
Sidney, Mara S. 2003. Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.
The government should provide more services to combat poverty. During the Great Depression during the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal to provide relief. These services helped a lot of people in poverty. The programs of the New Deal were successful because by 1940, “the economy was roaring back to life with a surge in defense-industry production” (FDR creates the WPA).One of the services that the government offers to prevent poverty and homelessness is the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. This program generates housing affordable to very low and low- income residents of Los Angeles. This program doesn’t really help because “Los Angeles has become a City where rental and for-sale housing is well beyond the reach of the working poor as well as moderate-income residents, which results in increased overcrowding and little disposable income for the other neces...
There were not many options in housing available for black Americans, so they were forced to buy houses “on contract”. With this type of contract, the owner of the house would buy it a lower market price, and then sell the house to black families usually double the price that it was bought for. The family would then make costly monthly payments until they paid off the house, but would have to pay for maintenance and upkeep of the house as well. If the family could not make a payment then they would be kicked out of the house, and lose all of the money that was put into it, and another family would take their place and the cycle would continue. Contract owners made enormous sums of money off the misfortune of African-American families, and in the process created some of America’s ghettos
Wilson, W.J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
The New Deal consisted of a host of programs. The Agriculture Adjustment Act actually paid farmers for cutting farm production, so that reduced supply would serve to raise prices of food grain. The Civilian Construction Corps was created in 1933 to provide work to people, by employing them to create trails and civil works in public parks. The Civil Works Administration was envisaged to create high paying jobs in the construction industry, but was shelved due to high cost to industry. To combat foreclosures on housing loans due to the Depression, the Federal Housing Administration was created to monitor mortgages and loans. This initiative was accompanied by creation of the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, to assist in the refinancing of loans. The...