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.
There have been many changes that have been made in response to what has happened in reference to American Cities. First, there was the Fair housing act. This act helped to stop discrimination against African Americans and other minorities. The purpose of the law is to defend every American’s essential right to fair housing—the choices of where to live and whether to own a home, for instance, it did not take account based on race, disability, and the numerous other threatened
Downs has sought to dispel myths surrounding housing policy. The first myth he debunks is the myth that all government-sponsored urban policies have failed. Downs believes that although they had resulted in greater hardships for poorer neighborhoods, the policies have given great benefits to a majority of urban American families. While he does not consider these policies to be a complete success, he refuses to call them failures due to the fact that they did indeed improve the standard of living for most of urban America. Downs also calls to our attention the effect of housing policies on the number of housing units. Starting in 1950, housing policies were aimed at ending the housing shortage until focus was shifted to low income households in the midst of the Vietnam War. To Downs, ending the shortage was important because it was affecting the American way of life. Couples were delaying marriage, extended families were living in one home, and overcrowded housing led to overcrowded local facilities, such as schools. Downs also argues that this overcrowding led to an inescapable cycle of “substandard”
The Housing Act of 1949 expanded the federal role in mortgage insurance and the construction of public housing. The act gave city officials the money to carry out their ambitions of reviving the American city. Title I, authorized on...
The significance of the G.I. Bill to the social and economic development of the United States cannot be overstated. Once a bastion of upper-class intellectuals, university education was now opened up to people from every income level. Practical subjects, such as business and engineering, gained popularity, resulting in a better trained, more productive workforce. Furthermore, the enhancement of Veterans Administration Hospitals has allowed veterans to receive low-cost, quality healthcare, increasingly important to an aging veteran population. Often closely associated with university hospitals, many important research developments have taken place through VA Hospitals, including the development of dialysis machines. Finally, the availability of low-interest mortgages is widely credited with facilitating the post-war housing boom and growth of suburbs. Developments such as Levittown were built expressly with the intent of providing housing for returning soldiers and their families. Nearly 20% of all single-family homes built from 1945-1965 were financed, at least in part, by the G.I. Bill's loan guarantee program. With these subsidies, veterans were able to afford improved housing, fostering the emergence of a new middle class.
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 Making of the Ghetto: One of the biggest forms of equity is home ownership, and between 1933 and 1978, the Federal
Wilson, W.J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Terner presents the beginning of a solution to the affordable housing problem in his article Affordable Housing: An Impossible Dream? in The Commonwealth, published June 1994. His company founded from an anonymous $600,000 donation is a non-profit organization that builds quality, affordable housing for low-income families. Its effects, however, are limited. One project just opened in San Francisco with 3,000 applicants and 108 acceptances, which can be looked at as pretty dismal statistics. “This is just a drop in the bucket,” writes Terner, ‘the real question is how to expand and replicate.” (Terner, p. 392) It is this expansion that the bulk of the article argues for. Terner values a fair chance for all citizens at the “American Dream” and this chance involves the whole community. Terner mentions the “NIMBY” syndrome, or Not-In-My-Back-Yard Syndrome, where communities support the concept of affordable housing, but none that are to be built in their community. Ideally one could turn to the government for help with problems such as housing, but National, State, and local governments have proven themselves to be ...
It is often easy to castigate large cities or third world countries as failures in the field of affordable housing, yet the crisis, like an invisible cancer, manifests itself in many forms, plaguing both urban and suburban areas. Reformers have wrestled passionately with the issue for centuries, revealing the severity of the situation in an attempt for change, while politicians have only responded with band aid solutions. Unfortunately, the housing crisis easily fades from our memory, replaced by visions of homeless vets, or starving children. Metropolis magazine explains that “…though billions of dollars are spent each year on housing and development programs worldwide, ? At least 1 billion people lack adequate housing; some 100 million have none at all.? In an attempt to correct this worldwide dilemma, a United Nations conference, Habitat II, was held in Istanbul, Turkey in June of 1996. This conference was open not only to government leaders, but also to community organizers, non governmental organizations, architects and planners. “By the year 2000, half the world’s people will live in cities. By the year 2025, two thirds of the world population will be urban dwellers ? Globally, one million people move from the countryside to the city each week.? Martin Johnson, a community organizer and Princeton professor who attended Habitat II, definitively put into words the focus of the deliberations. Cities, which are currently plagued with several of the severe problems of dis-investment ?crime, violence, lack of jobs and inequality ?and more importantly, a lack of affordable and decent housing, quickly appeared in the forefront of the agenda.
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
Compare and contrast the ways in which housing inequalities are discussed from the perspectives of social policy and criminology, and economics (TMA 02)
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...
“One out of every two hundred homes will be foreclosed every month, making 205,000 new families enter into foreclosure,” Mortgage Bankers Association. The housing industry in the United States is undergoing an unfortunate crisis. There are way too many homes being foreclosed, which cause a ripple of problems.
Affordable housing in the United States describes sheltering units with well-adjusted housing costs for those living on an average, median income. The phrase usually implies to applied rental or purchaser housing within the financial means of lower-income ranges specific to the demographics of any given area. However, affordable housing does not include those living in social housing owned by government and non-profit organizations. More specifically, the targeted range for housing affordability sets below 30 percent of a household's annual income, including all applicable taxes, utility costs and home owners insurance rates. If the mean income per household breaches the 30 percent mark, then the agreed status becomes labeled as "unaffordable" by most recognizable financial institutions.