ABSTRACT
Housing for the ill-housed has never been the central feature of United States housing policy, not even of public housing policy. The ill-housed and those who identified with their problems were a large enough part of the population so that programs addressed at their needs might be considered truly mainstream programs. The impact of the concept that the market is the mainstream, that government action should be limited to remedying market "failures." The most ill-housed, the poorest, are then relegated to treatment "outside" the market; all others are dealt with "inside the market". The chapter looks at the history of public housing to see what dogs have wagged the public housing tail. The combination was formidable and produced, in New York City, more local and state government-built housing between 1948 and 1951, without any federal assistance, than was built by government in any other similar period in that city's history with all funding sources—federal, state, and city, combined.
