ABSTRACT
The moratorium led to the termination of the subsidized rental housing programs of the Great Society. Any proposal for assistance which rings of "foreclosure" to an "absentee slum landlord" would meet with considerable social and political resistance. HUD and Congress decided to help the owners and the tenants. In October of 1976, the HUD Assistant Secretary for Housing promulgated a memorandum facilitating the conversions of non-profits to limited distribution entities and the private investors were off and running. HUD refused to face the failure of programs that could work only by overestimating the income of tenants and underestimating expenses. When the days of reckoning came all of HUD's masons and all the heavy layers of financial and administrative patchwork were insufficient to shore up a program whose surface was undermined by structural defects. The foreclosure would have been a hard bullet to bite for HUD managers.
