Public housing lost middle-class support once it became poor-only housing

Evidence

In the background of Urban Renewal, and its various recensions, was the dream of the city beautiful: the dream of rational, clean, civilized life in a beautiful and pleasing location. The actual impact of the programs was different. Urban Renewal sometimes disrupted and destroyed old and established neighborhoods. It had nothing to replace them with. The New Deal had begun to build public housing. At first, this was quite popular. During the Great Depression, millions of people lost their homes. Public housing could have helped solve their program. But when hard times ended, public housing was no longer a haven for the submerged middle class. It housed the poor and the very poor. Many of these were black. The real estate lobby became an implacable enemy of public housing. Conservatives hated its flavor of socialism. And the program was never big enough to service the needs of the urban poor. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4163

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch99 claims that welfare benefits once granted to masses become politically irreversible, and to the reader’s environmental-justice thread. — connects to: The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1740; Federal housing programs institutionalized residential segregation through redlining and demolition — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1196

Broader Connections

• The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1740
• Federal housing programs institutionalized residential segregation through redlining and demolition #qualifies (0.72) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1196