History of Public Housing

--Dedication of the William Igoe Homes, St. Louis, 1956.

In 2012 I served as guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association on 75 years of public housing in the U.S. The purpose was to mark the anniversary of the passage of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937, which launched the federal public housing program. The journal issue included an introduction, six feature articles, and six brief 'planning notes' on specific topics, all by leading scholars in the field. I am making available here (by clicking the image above) the overview piece that I wrote titled "The Strange Career of Public Housing: Policy, Planning, and the American Metropolis in the Twentieth Century."