Recently, the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in the United States Senate (1) determined that two-thirds of America’s inadequate housing is in rural areas. That is, of the seven million substandard units in this country, about four million are outside metropolitan areas. However, counting only those dwellings with deteriorating structures and without plumbing facilities seriously understates the true severity of the problem. If we also consider all over-crowded housing inadequate (that is, all units with more than one occupant per room), then additional millions of units would be added to the rural housing problem in the 1970s. The need over the next ten years has been estimated by the Rural Housing Alliance (2) to be 13.5 million new and rehabilitated housing units, of which seven million or 700,000 a year must be subsidized.

More importantly, measuring inadequate housing only by the number of substandard units focuses solely on the housing unit itself. Housing broadly defined includes three basic elements: a physical dwelling unit, its inhabitants and their behavior toward the unit, and its surrounding environment. Thus, improvements in physical dwelling units cannot be considered in isolation from other factors. Rather, they must be linked to changes in occupant behavior and to overall environmental upgrading. Clearly then, the systems approach appears to be a method for isolating the critical components of the problem.