Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968

rdf:langString Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968

rdf:langString Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968

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rdf:langString Title 42—Public Health and Welfare

rdf:langString Title 12—Banks and Banking

rdf:langString S. 3497

rdf:langString John Sparkman

rdf:langString March, 1968

rdf:langString Senate

rdf:langString House

rdf:langString Senate

rdf:langString An act to assist in the provision of housing for low and moderate income families, and to extend and amend laws relating to housing and urban development.

rdf:langString The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, Pub.L. 90–448, 82 Stat. 476, enacted August 1, 1968, was passed during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration. The act came on the heels of major riots across cities throughout the U.S. in 1967, the assassination of Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, and the publication of the report of the Kerner Commission, which recommended major expansions in public funding and support of urban areas. President Lyndon B. Johnson referred to the legislation as one of the most significant laws ever passed in the U.S., due to its scale and ambition. The act's declared intention was constructing or rehabilitating 26 million housing units, 6 million of these for low- and moderate-income families, over the next 10 years. The act authorized $5.3 billion in spending over its first three years, designed to fund 1.7 million units over that time. In the longer term, the act was designed to cost $50 billion over 10 years, had it ever been fully implemented. Its policies were to be implemented by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had been created in 1965. The legislation provided a significant expansion in funding for public programs, such as Public Housing. But it also marked a shift in federal programs, increasingly focusing on using private developers as a strategy to encourage housing production of affordable units. Though the program's 10-year ambitions were not achieved, in some ways it set the tone for future U.S. approaches to policy because of this focus on public-private joint initiatives in achieving public ends.