The primary reason that public housing has (arguably) contributed to poverty lies in its
origins: the Federal urban renewal program. While the policy goal of the 1949 Housing
Act was “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,”
its public purpose was to eliminate bad housing, not to rehouse slum dwellers. In effect,
urban renewal was to eliminate blight, or declining property values, not to clear and
rebuild slums for their residents. By placing urban renewal under the rubric of a housing
program, downtown development interests gained the much-needed support of progressive
advocates for low-income housing, thereby co-opting their opposition (Weiss, 1980).
Because participation in the Federal urban renewal program was voluntary, the extent
of public housing construction varied across and within regions. Many municipalities,
particularly in suburban areas, chose not to participate in urban renewal, whereas the ones
that did, typically older inner cities with a pre-existing impoverished population, gained
a disproportionate concentration of public housing (Jackson, 1985). Within these cities,
planners tended to locate new housing within or adjacent to black neighborhoods out of
political expediency, as elected officials typically wielded veto power over site selection
(Meyerson and Banfield, 1955; Massey and Denton, 1993; Hirsch, 1983). By the 1960s,
the Brooke Amendment led housing authorities to begin admitting welfare recipients
and other destitute groups, instead of focusing on the working poor (Jackson, 1985). The
result of these political factors was that the low- to medium-density housing of the inner
cities was replaced by high-density towers and formerly working-class neighborhoods
became segregated by race and income on an unprecedented scale (Massey and Denton,
1993). For the first time, the governments were clearly at fault for “making the second
ghetto,” or reinforcing patterns of segregation (Hirsch, 1983).
