Subsidized housing in the United States
In the United States, subsidized housing is administered by federal, state and local agencies to provide subsidized rental assistance for low-income households. Public housing is priced much below the market rate, allowing people to live in more convenient locations rather than move away from the city in search of lower rents. In most federally-funded rental assistance programs, the tenants' monthly rent is set at 30% of their household income. Now increasingly provided in a variety of settings and formats, originally public housing in the U.S. consisted primarily of one or more concentrated blocks of low-rise and/or high-rise apartment buildings. These complexes are operated by state and local housing authorities which are authorized and funded by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2020, there were one million public housing units. In 2022, about 5.2 million American households received some form of federal rental assistance.
Subsidized apartment buildings, often referred to as housing projects, have a complicated and often notorious history in the United States. While the first decades of projects were built with higher construction standards and a broader range of incomes and same applicants, over time, public housing increasingly became the housing of last resort in many cities. Several reasons have been cited for this negative trend including the failure of Congress to provide sufficient funding, a lowering of standards for occupancy, and mismanagement at the local level. In the United States, the federal government provides funding for public housing from two different sources: the Capital Fund and the Operating Fund. According to the HUD, the Capital Fund subsidizes housing authorities to renovate and refurbish public housing developments; meanwhile, the Operating Fund provides funds to housing authorities in order to assist in maintenance and operating costs of public housing. Furthermore, housing projects have also been seen to greatly increase concentrated poverty in a community, leading to several negative externalities. Crime, drug usage, and educational under-performance are all widely associated with housing projects, particularly in urban areas.
As a result of their various problems and diminished political support, many of the traditional low-income public housing properties constructed in the earlier years of the program have been demolished. Beginning primarily in the 1970s the federal government turned to other approaches including the Project-Based Section 8 program, Section 8 certificates, and the Housing Choice Voucher Program. In the 1990s the federal government accelerated the transformation of traditional public housing through HUD's HOPE VI Program. Hope VI funds are used to tear down distressed public housing projects and replace them with mixed communities constructed in cooperation with private partners. In 2012, Congress and HUD initiated a new program called the Rental Assistance Demonstration program. Under the demonstration program, eligible public housing properties are redeveloped in conjunction with private developers and investors.
The federal government, through its Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, spends $6 billion per year to finance 50,000 low-income rental units annually, with median costs per unit for new construction ranging from $126,000 in Texas to $326,000 in California.
History
Early efforts
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, government involvement in housing for the poor was chiefly in the area of building code enforcement, requiring new buildings to meet certain standards for decent livability, and forcing landlords to make some modifications to existing building stock. Photojournalist Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives brought considerable attention the conditions of the slums in New York City, sparking new attention to housing conditions around the country.Early tenement reform was primarily a philanthropic venture, with Model Tenements built as early as the 1870s which attempted to use new architectural and management models to address the physical and social problems of the slums. These attempts were limited by available resources, and early efforts were soon redirected towards building code reform. The New York Tenement Act of 1895 and Tenement Law of 1901 were early attempts to address building codes in New York City, which were then copied in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other American cities.
In 1910, the National Housing Association was created to improve housing conditions in urban and suburban neighborhoods through the enactment of better regulation and increased awareness. The NHA was founded by Lawrence Veiller, author of Model Tenement House Law, and consisted of delegates from dozens of cities. Over time, the focus of the housing movement shifted from a focus on proper building typology to community development on a broader scale, and the NHA dissolved in 1936.
The City of Milwaukee, under mayor Daniel Hoan, implemented the country's first public housing project, known as Garden Homes, in 1923. This experiment with a municipally-sponsored housing cooperative saw initial success, but was plagued by development and land acquisition problems, and the board overseeing the project dissolved the Gardens Home Corporation just two years after construction on the homes was completed.
Public Works Administration (PWA) Housing Division
Permanent, federally funded housing came into being in the United States as a part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Title II, Section 202 of the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed June 16, 1933, directed the Public Works Administration to develop a program for the "construction, reconstruction, alteration, or repair under public regulation or control of low-cost housing and slum clearance projects...". Led by the Housing Division of the PWA and headed by architect Robert Kohn, the initial, Limited-Dividend Program aimed to provide low-interest loans to public or private groups to fund the construction of low-income housing.Too few qualified applicants stepped forward, and the Limited-Dividend Program funded only seven housing projects nationally. In the spring of 1934, PWA Administrator Harold Ickes directed the Housing Division to undertake the direct construction of public housing, a decisive step that would serve as a precedent for the 1937 Wagner–Steagall Housing Act, and the permanent public housing program in the United States. Kohn stepped down during the reorganization, and between 1934 and 1937 the Housing Division, now headed by Colonel Horatio B. Hackett, constructed fifty-two housing projects across the United States, as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Atlanta's Techwood Homes opened on 1 September 1936 and was the first of the fifty-two opened.
File:Techwood1.jpeg|thumb|250px|Techwood Homes in Atlanta, first U.S. public housing project opened in 1936
Based on the residential planning concepts of Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, these fifty-two projects are architecturally cohesive, with composed on one to four story row house and apartment buildings, arranged around open spaces, creating traffic-free play spaces that defined community life. Many of these projects were built on slum land, but land acquisition proved difficult, so abandoned industrial sites and vacant land were also purchased. Lexington's two early projects were constructed on an abandoned horse racing track. At Ickes' direction, many of these projects were also segregated, designed and built for either whites or African-Americans. Race was largely determined by the neighborhood surrounding the site, as American residential patterns, in both the North and South, were highly segregated.
Coming out of the housing movement at the turn of the century, the 1930s also saw the creation of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which refinanced loans in order to keep the housing market afloat. The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration, which used only a small capital investment from the federal government to insure mortgages. Construction of public housing projects were therefore only one portion of the federal housing efforts during the Great Depression.
Housing Act of 1937
In 1937, the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act replaced the temporary PWA Housing Division with a permanent, quasi-autonomous agency to administer housing. The new United States Housing Authority Housing Act of 1937 would operate with a strong bent towards local efforts in locating and constructing housing and would place caps on how much could be spent per housing unit. The cap of $5,000 was a hotly contested feature of the bill as it would be a considerable reduction of the money spent on PWA housing and was far less than advocates of the bill had lobbied to get.Construction of housing projects dramatically accelerated under the new structure. In 1939 alone, 50,000 housing units were constructed—more than twice as many as were built during the entire tenure of the PWA Housing Division. Building on the Housing Division's organizational and architectural precedent, the USHA built housing in the build-up to World War II, supported war-production efforts and battled the housing shortage that occurred after the end of the war. In the 1960s, across the nation, housing authorities became key partners in urban renewal efforts, constructing new homes for those displaced by highway, hospital and other public efforts.
World War II Era
When US entry to World War II ended the era of New Deal reforms, the call for public housing from the NAACP, women's groups and labor unions was quieted. As part of the war mobilization, entire communities sprang up around factories manufacturing military goods. This influx put pressure on jobs and housing. During this period, rallies calling attention to the housing shortage were used by local and federal officials "to build support for housing legislation and to gain greater cooperation from private property owners who were reluctant to put the nation's housing needs before their own interests", since many property owners that were associated with the real estate, banking, and construction industries were rather averse to government regulation on public housing. In 1940, Congress therefore authorized the US Housing Authority to build twenty public housing developments around these private companies to sustain the war effort. There was considerable debate over whether these should be permanent dwellings, furthering reformer goals of establishing a broader public housing effort, or temporary dwellings in keeping with the timeliness of the need. The Defense Housing Division was founded in 1941 and would ultimately construct eight developments of temporary housing, though many ended up as long-term housing after the war.One of the most unusual US public housing initiatives was the development of subsidized middle-class housing during the late New Deal under the auspices of the Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division of the Federal Works Agency under the direction of Colonel Lawrence Westbrook. These eight projects were purchased by the residents after the Second World War and as of 2009 seven of the projects continue to operate as mutual housing corporations owned by their residents. These projects are among the very few definitive success stories in the history of the US public housing effort.
During World War II, construction of homes dramatically decreased as all efforts were directed towards the War. When the veterans returned from overseas, they came ready to start a new life, often with families, and did so with the funding resources of the G.I. Bill to start a new mortgage. However, there was not enough housing stock to accommodate the demand. As a result, President Truman created the office of Housing Expediter by executive order on January 26, 1946, to be headed by Wilson Wyatt. Through this office, government intervened in the housing market largely through price controls and supply chain restrictions, despite political pressure from some factions to directly construct housing. Efforts moved to focus exclusively on veterans housing, specifically a materials subsidy for housing construction. However, in the wake of the 1946 elections, President Truman believed there was insufficient public support to continue such materials restrictions and subsidies. The Veterans' Emergency Housing Program ended in January 1947 by an executive order from President Truman.