Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy

Some scholars argue that the state jealously guards its power and budgets, slowly adding to them over time. Recent U.S. public policy history offers a challenge to this interpretation. Since the 1970s, the government has been shedding capacity. Government increasingly has relied on a new incentive structure to build institutional capacity outside of government. Low-income housing policies were the vanguard of this change. The federal housing bureaucracy grew from the 1930s to the 1960s but was bypassed in the 1970s in favor of a network of new players—state and local government, private and nonprofit corporations, and consultants. This new network has been effective in delivering housing producing more than 1 million subsidized homes in the 1980s and 1990s. This article outlines the political debates of over the evolution of this network - from a recommitment to low-income housing production in the 1960s, to attacks on government housing programs in the 1980s, and finally to a new consensus in the late 1980s over the decentralized housing development network infused with federal dollars.