Home → Libraries and Collections → "A Decent Home . . . for Every American Family": Postwar Housing Shortage Victims Testify before Congress
 
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"A Decent Home . . . for Every American Family": Postwar Housing Shortage Victims Testify before Congress

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Author:
Subject:
Humanities
Institution Name:
American Social History Project/Center for History and New Media
Collection:
Many Pasts (CHNM/ASHP)
Grade Level:
Secondary, Post-secondary
Abstract:

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee, including Frank L. Sundstrom, Representative of New Jersey, created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, New Jersey spokespersons for tenants quoted the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner legislation and described housing conditions, while a number of tenants related their own difficult living situations.

Languages:
English
Material Type:
Primary Source
Media Format:
Text/HTML
Conditions of Use:
Custom License
Fair Use for educational purposes
Copyright Holder:
Copyright 1998-2005 American Social History Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

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