No 1949 Housing Act

Just wondering if anyone has taken a decent look at the impacts of eliminating the 1949 Housing Act? It seems to take a lot of the blame for both facilitating sprawl and white flight while also building much of the worst inner city public housing. Interesting TLs could reasonably alter this in any number of ways... but what kind of timeline are we looking at without the act at all? Anybody have thoughts on whether the act alone would be enough to significantly improve the health of major American cities? On the other hand, would there be a real threat of a housing affordability crisis without a good chunk of the subsidies for suburban development in the fifties and sixties?
 
You'd probably want a replacement act that is better rather than just nothing getting done at all if you want to improve the cities, otherwise people are going to just be stuck in increasingly low quality slums.
 
You could replace it with an Urban Renewal and housing initiative that reinvigorates the inner cities. People will want suburbs at some point .. but I would think there could be a way to keep business in the cities. you also need to deal with American racial ideas at the same time I am afraid. I would also think stipulations to reuse existing land would be a good idea in that this would limit the sprawling lots of vacant buildings. better interstate planning at the same time would be nice touch as well.

by 49 American Troops are home. they are taking advantage of the GI bill and going to university in droves. by 52/54 these new graduates will have good jobs and all the pent up frustrations of the depression and war years will over flow. trick is to get people to reinvest in their towns, cities and villages and also promote business to do the same.
 
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Wasn't there something about suburbanisation being encouraged, in order to reduce the vulnerability of population to atomic bombing?
 
You could replace it with an Urban Renewal and housing initiative that reinvigorates the inner cities. People will want suburbs at some point .. but I would think there could be a way to keep business in the cities. you also need to deal with American racial ideas at the same time I am afraid. I would also think stipulations to reuse existing land would be a good idea in that this would limit the sprawling lots of vacant buildings. better interstate planning at the same time would be nice touch as well.

You don't want to fund 'urban renewal' of that era without so many qualifiers you'd have to call it something else. Urban renewal in that time meant bulldozing so-called 'slums' because they happened to have a lot of blacks, Italians, etc living in them, and "obviously" it'd be better to build a big access highway through that space to make movement in and out of the city easier. "But don't worry"; the planners would say, "We have plans for public housing, they'll be very nice." Spoiler: They weren't.

To improve things in this era, you'd have to get planners at all levels of government more interested in organic redevelopment of cities that allowed for gradual modernization and expansion of urban housing stock rather than big, disruptive projects. Unfortunately, this was the heyday of big disruptive projects, and politicians and planners don't often get a lot of credit for an effective policy of gradualism.
 
To improve things in this era, you'd have to get planners at all levels of government more interested in organic redevelopment of cities that allowed for gradual modernization and expansion of urban housing stock rather than big, disruptive projects. Unfortunately, this was the heyday of big disruptive projects, and politicians and planners don't often get a lot of credit for an effective policy of gradualism.

My thinking exactly. Big programs in this era really don't seem to hold out much hope, and suburbanization is going to happen in a big way even with no subsidy. Which leaves me wondering how things would go if the market was more or left alone in the fifties - certainly suburbanization would have happened in a big way, especially if the highway still get built, but I wonder if the hit to urban renewal might be beneficial overall between keeping cities populated even if the conditions are awful and leaving salvageable communities rather than superblocks...

Of course if businesses flock to the suburbs anyway the end result might just be that when and where ghettoization happens the physical conditions are even worse...
 
By 49 American Troops are home. They are taking advantage of the GI bill and going to university in droves.
The white ones certainly, the black ones not so much. Thanks to the New Deal's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) from the 1930s which drew up colour-coded maps as guides with rich white areas marked in green lines and poor black areas with red lines to show their undesirability other organisations such as banks and insurance companies followed their lead when making loan or insurance decisions, likewise the Federal Housing Administration that was created to offer federal insurance for new housing construction. As I understand things the GI Bill didn't offer mortgages directly but offered federal insurance against loans extended by private lenders, which since blacks often couldn't get in their neighbourhoods thanks to redlining meant they were unintentionally excluded from one of the major benefits, they also faced being barred from buying homes in the suburbs legally by racial covenants until 1948 and even after that unofficially until the passage of the Housing Rights Act in 1968. The educational part also apparently ran into obstacles since many institutions were still segregated or only took limited numbers of minorities and others such as the historically black colleges and universities or trade schools suddenly found themselves massively under resourced and swamped often having to turn people away.
 
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