As we learned earlier in this chapter,
the 1950s meant a big boom for the suburbs and a decline for the city. We see
how this happened with Detroit where it is now more or less a ghost town, which
is far from the big, bustling city it was in the 1920s and 1930s. As discussed
in the book, this made way for the “urban renewal” projects that followed.
Urban renewal was programs that were
aimed at creating affordable housing and income earning civic projects. Of
course this did not end up working out as planned, out of the about 126,000
houses that were torn down for the project, about 28,000 were built leaving
multiple people without the homes they were promised. The HUD project came into effect in the 1960s
and it was increasingly clear that the project did more to segregate blacks and
keep them out of the suburbs where the middle class whites were than to really
build good affordable housing.
When looking at the HUD website one of
the main things they promote is safe and sanitary affordable housing, but how many
of the Section 8 houses are actually like that? Even if they are actually clean
houses, the wait list can be a mile long, leaving some people homeless until
their voucher comes in. The fact that there is so little affordable housing is
a result of the urban renewal projects of the late 1940s. It also says on the website that they have had an increase in the amount of funds available, but they are only for people
I personally do not really know the
perfect answer to making more affordable housing for people of low income. We
can make it easy by just saying that we should just build more housing, but in
a city like Chicago where almost every inch is filled, our only option is to rebuild
the housing we have now. Now this only solves part of the problem because it
does not solve what happens to the housing when the landlords do not keep it up
or where to put the people that live in those housing areas while it is being
rebuilt. So what do you think is the best way to solve this problem?
Here is the website for HUD:
http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/programdescription/cert8
Housing low income people is a really complex and hard issue to resolve with no real concrete solution. I feel like you share the sentiments of a lot of people in this country when you say you don't know the perfect answer to this problem. You didn't really connect this post to any outside material which I would have liked to see. Other than that it was a good post.
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