ABSTRACT
The scale of housing reform is a critical factor, too, in that it indicates a shift in the alignment of political forces in regard to housing. Millions of the new poor were culturally members of the middle class who had fallen from economic grace after 1929. The United States is a middle-class nation and will remain so. The middle class is so numerous that the "general good" is apt to be identified with middle-class interests. Mobility into the middle class has always been high enough to make the equation tolerable to the potential middle class. Consequently much "welfare" legislation is really for unionized workers, for the submerged middle class, for the half-poor or the pseudo-poor, or is so riddled with measures aimed at quarantining the larger society from by-products of poverty that the true interests of the poor. The dependent poor and the Negroes have never had much social and economic power.
