Historically, housing policy in the United States has pursued a variety of policy goals that reach well beyond the bounds of shelter. While housing policy can be viewed as social policy, its primary function was seldom the alleviation of poverty. U.S. housing policy has weathered a particularly disjointed history, throughout which concerns about class and race, as well as opportunity and responsibility, have been constant. The first efforts to regulate housing focused on housing conditions, relying on the rationale that the poor constituted both threats to public health and to economic development. Public attention to the abysmal conditions in which immigrants lived in the large industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was brought to light through investigative reports, pioneering social surveys, and public exhibits. Booth’s seminal social survey of London, conducted in the 1890s and published after the turn of the century, made the connection between working poverty and housing conditions and was influential in subsequent public discussions of housing and planning policy in Britain.