The US Abandoned Affordable Housing. We Can Create It Again.
America’s packed eviction courts and overflowing homeless shelters are the result of decades of deliberate policy choices. We once made better choices rooted in a commitment to providing decent, affordable housing for all. It’s not too late to reverse course.
The US once made a commitment to housing all our people and made phenomenal progress on fulfilling that promise. Abandoning it was a choice, and we can still choose to recommit to decent, affordable housing for all. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
My colleagues and I work at a law school clinic that represents tenants in eviction court, which means we get a front-row seat to the US housing crisis. The people we see lined up in front of a judge waiting to see what day they will be forced from their homes are among the estimated 3.6 million households that face eviction each year. Prior to this moment, they were among the more than seven million people who are behind on their rent or mortgages at any given time. By the time we see them, they are at risk of joining the record number of unhoused people in the United States.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We know that because it didn’t used to be this way. As I wrote in my book Lessons From Eviction Court: How We Can End Our Housing Crisis, the United States once made a commitment to housing all our people, and made phenomenal progress on fulfilling that promise. From the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s through the ’70s, very few people in our country were homeless. Those who were homeless were mostly older men living in cheap hotels, so-called flophouses. At the time, researchers predicted that even that level of homelessness would be eliminated by the end of the 1970s.
As part of the New Deal, the United States created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration. These agencies and the Veterans Administration purchased, insured, and issued mortgages to protect at-risk homeowners. They also provided millions of others with opportunities to buy houses through significantly lower down payments and interest rates, often with monthly payments that were less expensive than renting.
The New Deal also launched public housing efforts via the Public Works Administration, which built over fifty public housing projects across the country. A few years later, the United States Housing Act of 1937 established a permanent federal framework for public housing through the United States Housing Authority, providing subsidies to local agencies for building and operating public housing specifically for low-income families. Consequently, construction of public housing ramped up even further.
This was the beginning of a decades-long effort to eliminate the nation’s housing woes. In 1948, the United States signed the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The following year, the American Housing Act of 1949 set the goal of ensuring a “decent home in a suitable living environment for every American family.” For many years, the United States took that goal seriously. Recognizing that affordable housing cannot be left to the for-profit market, we made the significant government investment necessary to fulfill the promise of housing Americans.
In the 1960s and ’70s, home purchase support was buttressed by rent support programs, along with the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Public housing projects were again on the rise during this period, with many famous federally funded projects being erected in cities across the country.
Then, quite suddenly, our nation abandoned those noble commitments. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and a compliant Congress slashed funding for affordable housing by nearly 80 percent. At the same time, people living in state hospitals were deinstitutionalized. Benefits for people living with disabilities were also cut, and eligibility for those benefits was so tightly restricted that hundreds of thousands of people lost the only income they had.
The result was a massive explosion in homelessness. As Western Regional Advocacy Project director Paul Boden put it, “Racism, poverty, and addiction all existed before 1982. What did not exist was a homeless shelter.”
The Fiscal Starvation of Public Housing
But blaming only Reagan and the 1980s Congress for our 2025 crisis ignores the role of neglect by the elected leaders of the last four decades. Public housing is a necessary, proven response to the needs of millions of Americans who cannot afford market-rate housing. Since the late 1990s, there has been a freeze on the creation of new public housing, and existing projects’ repair needs have gone unmet due to drastic underfunding.
The fiscal starvation of public housing led to severe maintenance problems and an inevitable decline in available units. The for-profit real estate industry — which has consistently and energetically resisted public housing from its inception in the 1930s — has cynically used the deterioration of public housing stock to claim that the public housing experiment in the United States has failed and must be abandoned altogether.
Along with other damaging legislation, private real estate interests and their political allies succeeded in passing the 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which was part of the Clinton-era “end welfare as we know it” cuts to federal anti-poverty programs. As a result, there are only 807,000 public housing units today compared to more than a million at the turn of the century.
The struggles of US public housing were not inevitable. There are several public housing success stories across the country, thriving communities that have managed to survive institutional neglect. And public housing is both prevalent and successful in other nations where it enjoys both adequate funding and political support. Sixty percent of residents in Vienna, Austria, live in attractive, high-quality social housing. Eighty percent of Singapore’s residents live in similarly desirable public housing flats.
Compare that to the eviction courts where we work, where the human cost of abandoning public housing and other affordable housing measures is on full display.
Virtually all of our clients are low-income and thus technically eligible for a federal housing subsidy that would cap their housing costs at 30 percent of their income. It is hard to overstate how impactful getting this subsidy would be. With it, a household with a low-wage or disability income of $1,200 per month would pay less than $400 for a public housing apartment. A federal housing subsidy also comes with a guarantee of substantially more renter protections from arbitrary evictions and rent increases than tenants have in the private housing market.
But our clients don’t have federal subsidies, because they are all among the unfortunate 75 percent of Americans who are eligible for housing assistance but unable to get it because the program is so underfunded. So instead, they pay $1,000 or more in the private housing market — a percentage of income that our nation’s overflowing eviction courts prove is untenable. In the cruelest game of musical chairs imaginable, three out of four people eligible for one of our only remaining good housing subsidies are forced to idle on years-long waiting lists while they pay extortionate rents, facing eviction and homelessness if they fall behind.
The Privatization of Affordable Housing
In contrast to the struggle of low-income renters, corporate landlords rake in tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies and tax benefits, including write-offs for depreciation of their properties, lower capital gains tax rates and deferred payments, estate tax exemptions, and abatements from state and local governments. At the same time, wealthy homeowners benefit from tens of billions per year in mortgage interest and property tax deductions, along with capital gains exemptions for profits from home sales.
Remarkably, even our low-income housing programs in the United States benefit corporate landlords. Many of our programs operate by directing government dollars to for-profit landlords through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and HUD voucher and project-based programs. The true beneficiaries of these programs were revealed when President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill slashed food and health care funding for the poor yet actually increased funding for the developer-enriching LIHTC program.
This diversion of affordable housing dollars to for-profit landlords is virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. Most nations take the logical and efficient approach of directing their affordable housing investments to government or nonprofit organizations.
So can we. American history and the examples set internationally demonstrate that more and better public housing can go a long way to solving our housing crisis. In the interim, we can end the unnecessarily difficult struggle for scarce housing subsidies by making assistance available to all who qualify, just as we do with programs like SNAP and other food assistance programs, and, in most states, Medicaid.
Our packed eviction courts, overflowing homeless shelters, and millions of households on the verge of being put out on the street are the result of policy choices. We once made better ones, and we can do so again.