From gateway to ghetto: The social and political development of public housing policy, 1935-1965

The following study provides an examination of public housing and low-income housing policy from 1935 to 1965. Existing studies of public housing have typically focused on descriptive accounts of the failures of public housing or on economic assessments of dollars spent, units constructed and construction wages generated. The purpose of this study, however, is to situate public housing policy in existing debates and practice of American political process and social welfare policy. The study is anchored by the examination of the process that produced the 1937, 1949, and 1965 Housing Acts and organized around a political framework that highlights structural, governmental, and political influences on policy formation.;The findings of this study suggest that select interest aggregation aptly describes the policy process at work. In this framework, the specific historical contexts and atmospherics of structural, governmental and political influences offer indirect linkages to the more direct electoral considerations that push policymakers to select particular housing policies. In the placation of select economic or business interests as well as the social and political desires of their constituencies, policymakers compromise, conciliate and converge on the aggregate interests of business elites and voters. Moreover, by direct implication, "poverty politics" and "race politics" are filtered through these very same political calculations and increasingly became central to the development of the public housing program. At bottom, the evaluation of public housing policies suggest that the objective of re-housing low-income families has been submerged among complimentary and competing economic and societal management policy objectives.;Using primary and secondary archival and historiographic data, the research is organized around careful examination of Congressional documents, sundry other government documents and papers, newspapers, journals, and the papers and documents of critical organizations and individuals. In addition to highlighting the particulars of political activity and democratic process that envelope the American experience with social welfare policy, this study illuminates and interrogates lay and academic debates on race and poverty and their integral role in the progression of public housing policy.