Housing Policy: Public Housing: A Brief History The Housing Act of 1937 laid the foundation for public housing (Mitchell, 1985). This act was enacted by the Roosevelt administration,” in an effort to boost construction in the real estate industry” (Blau, 2014). It is the program we know today as Public Housing. The Public Housing program was designed to bring the country out economic distress as well as provide shelter to the poor after the Great Depression (Erickson, 2009). Racial segregation played a prominent role in public housing. After World War II, many low income properties were built to deal with the housing shortage in America. African Americans were the most impacted by the housing shortages, because of laws that governed where Louis, these project-based aid were high rise projects. All of these complexes were located downtown St. Louis, or near downtown St. Louis. On the Southside, you had the Darst -Webbe towers. On the Northside you had Cochran Gardens, the Vaughn Towers and the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, and. in the mid-city area, the Blumeyer (Urban Review). The Pruitt-Igoe was the first to be built in the St. Louis area, it was also the first to be destroyed and torn down. Pruitt-Igoe was originally built for low to mid income white people in the late 1950’s. As a result of segregation, white people began to move out of Pruitt-Igoe and into other neighborhoods near downtown, neighborhoods where black people were not allowed to go. I can remember my mother telling me that black people were not allowed cross Grand Avenue, which is now called Midtown. Due to white people moving out the Pruitt-Igoe, they still needed someone to live in this housing project to collect rents. They began to move poor or low income black people in them. They stopped keeping maintenance up and they began to go down. Elevators weren’t working. People had to walk up possibly 9 flights of stairs to get to their apartments. When the heat or plumbing facilities weren’t working, no one would come and repair it. People living there were very hardened by their living conditions. People began to move out leaving a lot of empty units. It became a new eyesore in the city. It became crime ridden and vandalized. People were afraid for their lives. It became the ghetto. As a result, they were torn down, and eventually they got rid of all high rise public housing complexed and began to build more single family unit
In 1942, a public housing development went up on Chicago’s near north side to house veterans returning from World War II. They were known as the Francis Cabrini Homes, and “were built in an area that had undergone massive slum clearance”. They consisted of fifty-five two and three story redbrick buildings arranged as row houses, resembling army barracks. The Francis Cabrini Homes housed 600 racially diverse families un...
Goetz, Edward G.. New Deal ruins: race, economic justice, and public housing policy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. Print.
Spirits in the United States were high after World War II. The triumph over Germany brought with it a sense of accomplishment which made the country feel as if it had the ability to achieve anything and could overcome all odds. Unfortunately for soldiers coming home high spirits did not guard them from the shortage of affordable housing. In 1946, the head of the Office of Price Administration estimated that over 1.4 million houses were needed to house returning veterans and home front workers. Even at the highest rate of construction it would take twelve years to house everyone properly and affordably. The Federal Government realized the problems the cities were facing and decided that it would be best for local governments to mandate the situation along with federal funding. In order for local government to accomplish this task the Housing Act of 1949 was passed.
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 Chicago Housing Authority came about as a means to manage the large amount of poor Black residents. " In 1949, Congress, in addressing a postwar housing crisis, had authorized loans and subsidies to construct 810,000 units of low rent housing units nationwide" (p.21, Kotlowitz). During the 1950's the first of these new developments were constructed- The Cabrini homes were some of them. These first developments were only one or two stories and were well received by the city and its residents. Then the Chicago Housing Authority hired architects who designed a new type of development. A high-rise building (known as a project) with each unit having at least 15 to 19 floors, and approximately 5-15 buildings within each development. There was a political battle as to where these Projects would be built. After many meetings and court decisions they were finally built at the edges of the existing Ghetto's.
American urban housing system was not in a very good state at the end of Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had started to return back to the mainland, filled with the dream of better and improved life (Baxandall and Ewen, 2000). Euphoric and buoyed by a hard fought and historic win, where U.S had established its military supremacy in the world, these people had great dreams and aspirations to continue in the legacy of that supremacy. This aspiration manifested itself most prominently in their demand for housing infrastructure, built with modern age planning, design, and latest infrastructure: houses that could symbolize the United States great power stature and their own triumph in being a part of this transition. Meanwhile the Congress announced special housing loans for returning war veterans where they could get loans on zero down-payment and little mortgage. Suddenly there was a great boom in the demand of urban housing, compared to which the available apartments fell drastically short (Baxandall and Ewen, 2000). Millions of war veterans and citizens were homeless or living in makeshift...
So why would one have the connection with minorities and poverty? Could there possibly be some sort of relation between race and class? This all started with our Federal Housing Agency or the FHA. In the book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness the author George Lipsitz put extensive research into how the FHA started and how its agency ties into minorities receiving loans or the lack of. In 1934 the FHA was provided from the government who then gave the agency’s power to private home lenders, and this is when racial biasness came into place through selective home loans. Lipsitz says “[the] Federal Housing Agency’s confidential surveys and appraiser’s manuals channeled almost all of the loan money toward whites and away from communities of color”(5). These surveys were conducted by the private lenders who had free reign to prove the loans to whomever they want. Because the minorities did not get a chance to receive the FHA loans that they needed, they are then forced to live in urban areas instead of suburban neighborhoods. There was this underground suburban segregation going on with these private lenders, which would then greatly diminish better opportunities for minorities to live in better neighborhoods.
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.
St. Louis, Missouri is where the Pruitt-Igoe urban housing complexes were built in the year of 1954. Originally the plan was that public housing would liberate people who were living in poor and dangerous slums. Little did they know that the Pruitt-Igoe would be just as bad, if not even worse. All considered, Pruitt-Igoe was a massive failure. Unfortunately, from the beginning segregation was included in the process of the building. As the Guardian states “Pruitt-Igoe became an economic and racial ghetto soon after it opened. The design, drawn up when Missouri law still mandated the segregation of public facilities, originally designated the Pruitt half of the complex (named after second world war fighter pilot Wendell O Pruitt) for black residents only, and the Igoe half (after former US Congressman William L Igoe) as white only.”
In contrast to popular assumption, discrimination in public housing is becoming more prevalent than ever before. Testing done by the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston has found that today people of color are discriminated against in nearly half of their efforts to buy, sell, finance, or rent property (“1968-Present Housing Discrimination). The statistics are even worse when considering colored people who have families as the testing found that they are discriminated against approximately two thirds of the time (“1968-Present Housing Discrimination”) In addition to facing great difficulty in property affairs, people of color are less likely to be offered residence in desirable locations. 86 percent of revitalized
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
The Future for Chicago Public Housing In big cities across America, the consensus is public housing doesn't work. And in Chicago, it's coming down. Chicago began using federal housing dollars to blow up or knock down high-rise public housing in 1993. The plan shifted into high gear when the city signed a $1.5 billion deal with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Sidney, Mara S. 2003. Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.
For centuries people have relied on public housing each year in Canada. Public housing is a known problem that does not get talked about often. Public housing is defined as a federal, provincial or local housing program that is provided for people with low incomes (XXX).
From slavery to Jim Crow, the impact of racial discrimination has had a long lasting influence on the lives of African Americans. While inequality is by no means a new concept within the United States, the after effects have continued to have an unmatched impact on the racial disparities in society. Specifically, in the housing market, as residential segregation persists along racial and ethnic lines. Moreover, limiting the resources available to black communities such as homeownership, quality education, and wealth accumulation. Essentially leaving African Americans with an unequal access of resources and greatly affecting their ability to move upward in society due to being segregated in impoverished neighborhoods. Thus, residential segregation plays a significant role in