The Federal Government and Urban Housing

Book excerpt: This book provides a complete picture of federal housing and community development policy during the last sixty years. Since the first edition was published in 1985, the quality and quantity of published works on U.S. housing policy have increased considerably. But this book still stands out from other works in the breadth of its coverage and analysis. This second edition covers virtually every major program that has attempted to provide housing for disadvantaged persons and compares and contrasts their underlying approaches to housing problems. It also examines the impact of major community development programs--urban renewal and Community Development Block Grants--on urban housing. The coverage of U.S. housing policy extends through the first year of the Clinton administration. Most notably, Hays calls into question the generally negative appraisal of housing programs that is widespread in the public policy and urban politics literature. He shows that although most of these programs have experienced major problems, none has been an unqualified failure, and most have improved the housing conditions of millions of people. Placing the federal government's attempts to deal with housing problems within a broader analytical framework by relating them to long and short-term political changes, Hays argues that the political variable with the most impact on the course of housing policy has been ideology--in particular, the ideological orientations of the various presidential administrations during the past sixty years.