ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Housing and Urban Development (HUD) various, often overlapping, programs for subsidizing housing to bring its costs within the means of the poor and near poor. It describes HUD's housing subsidy programs and examines the hectic history of these programs during the past decade as well as into the disputes over the merits of housing production subsidies in contrast to direct subsidy payments to the poor. Public housing became the haven of the rural blacks, the culturally deprived, the broken families, the welfare recipients, the permanent poor. Social prejudice produced bitter local resistance to public housing projects and social turmoil within them. Pruit-Igoe was only the most dramatic of many similar public housing debacles. The Rent Supplement Program emerged from the Congress as a private substitute for public housing, a substitute designed to serve the same low-income levels as public housing did.
