The Housing Act of 1961 first brought open-space preservation into federal law.

Evidence

The federal government also began to support open-space preservation. Though the land-bank proposal was killed, a pioneering program to aid city and county governments in acquiring open space was included in the Housing Act of 1961 despite opposition from fiscal conservatives in both parties. Federal aid for open-space acquisition increased significantly in the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson made a campaign for “natural beauty” a key part of the Great Society environmental agenda. Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall argued that his greatest task was “to hold open spaces against the sprawl of suburbia.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 527

Categorization

• SHARE: A specific federalism history nerd would enjoy that open-space preservation entered national policy through the Housing Act — housing law as the vehicle for early environmental spending, decades before EPA-style agencies existed.
• XREF: connects to: Open-space preservation could proceed through purchase without touching property rights. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 521