Abstract
Between 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a nuclear family structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 91-115 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Social Science History |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgments. This research was partially supported by the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD041023). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in Montréal, Québec, Canada, November 2017. We are grateful for the comments we received from Evan Roberts, Joe Soss, Steve Ruggles, and two anonymous reviewers for Social Science History. Scott Dallman and Angira Mondal assisted with the data analysis.
Funding Information:
1The complete-count 1940 census microdata come from a collaboration between the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) and Ancestry.com, a commercial genealogical organization. With grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, the MPC subsidized the data entry of census variables that Ancestry.com would not ordinarily capture. In return for the subsidy, Ancestry.com agreed to make the resulting database, disseminated through IPUMS USA, freely available for scientific research.
Publisher Copyright:
© Social Science History Association, 2020.
