| The Great Depression precluded, with its calamity, the local grassrootsburgeoning of European-style low-cost housing in the United States, but created, withits opportunity, a federally-funded Public Housing Act from scratch. The legislativestruggle of this Housing Act of1937witnessed the competition and cooperationbetween a welfare program by NPHC-led slum public housers and a dream programby Bauer-led modern housing planners.This exhaustive legislation started with their competing bills. Obstructed by FHAand Congress, they compromised and united on the surface, with Bauer·s dreamseemingly gaining the upper hand by her housing knowledge and potent yet shallowlabor support. The NPHC then devised a slum strategy that was emotionally andpolitically powerful, despite Bauer·s unwillingness. After skillfully fighting off theFHA, CHC, Roosevelt himself and the Treasury Department, they finally struggledthrough the Congress, where the NPHC, with its slum strategy resonating withlegislators· poor-propensity and slightly liberalizing their attitudes, its action orinaction impeding Bauer, its poorhouse-supply harmonizing with the conservativesand real-estate interests, won over Bauer·s dream. Amendments to the dream bills setincome ceilings on renter admission, deleted Bauer·s ill-supported and controversialalternative agencies and demonstration projects, and forced the best medicine of slumclearance, hence a success of welfare public housing program.Through a historical case study that analyzes the socio-economic environment,and the complicated alignments and fights between various interest groups, with theirideas and attitudes traced and tracked, this paper examines the historical events andpolitical maneuvering leading to the adoption of a welfare housing policy and theelimination of a dream program, revealing the lessons and observations in thisunorthodox policy-making of Housing Act of1937. |
