In 1918, Congress made the United States Ship-Building Corporation the first federal entity in the affordable housing field by authorizing $100 million to build 25 war-worker projects providing more than 5,000 homes. Previously, in 1892, Congress had authorized $20,000 for a federal investigation of slum conditions. And in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed the President’s Housing Commission to look into the need for decent housing for low-income Americans and recommended federal aid. Nothing came of either effort.1 This bit of history reveals a pattern of housing programs and funding that continues to this day: Affordable housing is not deemed to be an end in itself, but a way to serve another purpose, for example, to house defense workers during the world wars, to create jobs during the Depression, to provide an antidote to civil unrest in the 1960s, or to stimulate the economy in today’s Great Recession.

This will not be a chronological history. Rather, it primarily addresses key areas: public housing, nonprofit and private-sector programs, tax incentives for housing, housing preservation, and low-income home ownership. Fair housing, a subject of crucial importance, presents a long, separate, and important story that cannot readily be summarized here.2 I participated in the legislative struggles that produced the programs to be discussed, except for the 1937 enactment of public housing when I was only two years old. Although this history will be accurate and factual, the interpretations and perspectives included are those of the author. If any are controversial and serve to keep the reader awake, so much the better.

As World War I produced the United States Ship-Building Corporation, the Great Depression produced public housing. Significantly, Congress did not address decent housing for low-income Americans as its first priority in the New Deal era. The primary concern was to stabilize the housing market for middle-income Americans by creating a mechanism to encourage banks to lend money for home purchases. The first seminal piece of housing legislation, the National Housing Act of 1934,3 created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), now an integral part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to insure single-family housing loans. Congress amended this act through the years to ensure multifamily projects and, as will be later discussed, added some subsidy programs to the mix. But basically, FHA should be viewed as an insurance company with middle-class housing as its prime concern.