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THE US ABANDONED AFFORDABLE HOUSING. WE CAN CREATE IT AGAIN.  
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Fran Quigley
September 21, 2025
Jacobin
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_ 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 rever _

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
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eviction each year. Prior to this moment, they were among the more
than seven million [[link removed]]
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
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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_
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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 [[link removed]]
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
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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
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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
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The following year, the American Housing Act of 1949
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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 [[link removed]],
along with the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD). Public housing projects were again on the rise
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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 [[link removed]] 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
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the only income they had.

The result was a massive explosion in homelessness. As Western
Regional Advocacy Project director Paul Boden put it
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“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
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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
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and an inevitable decline in available units. The for-profit real
estate industry — which has consistently and energetically resisted
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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
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public housing units today compared to more than a million at the turn
of the century.

The fiscal starvation of public housing led to severe maintenance
problems and an inevitable decline in available units.

The struggles of US public housing were not inevitable. There are
several public housing success stories
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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
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attractive, high-quality social housing. Eighty percent of
Singapore’s residents
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

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Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana
University McKinney School of Law.

* Public Housing; Affordable Housing; Evictions; Inequality;
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