My personal take on 60 years of national affordable housing policy begins in 1965, when my wife, our 6-month-old daughter, and I first arrived in Chapel Hill. Me, fresh out of graduate school, a newly minted assistant professor of city and regional planning, charged with building an affordable housing curriculum and research program when the national average price of an existing home was $20,000, while we bought ours for under $17,000. 

President Kennedy had banned segregation in federally funded housing by executive order in 1962, but when the Stegmans arrived on campus three years later, it was still legal for property owners and real estate firms in Chapel Hill and across the country to discriminate against people of color in the sale or rental of privately owned housing. This would be our reality until President Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Also in 1968, in precedent-setting legislation, Congress proclaimed a national housing goals decade, declaring a national need to build or rehabilitate 26 million housing units in the next 10 years, including an average of 600,000 units a year to be reserved for low- and moderate-income families. In response to that challenge, through various public, private, and mixed financing mechanisms, as well as tax advantages, new federally subsidized starts and rehabs topped out at 470,000 units in 1970, more than doubling the previous year’s level, with December production peaking at a historic monthly level of 50,000 deeply subsidized unit starts. 

In short, by the time I came up for my first tenure-track review, the country was witnessing a supply-side national affordable housing strategy for the ages, one that would soon be sharply curtailed and never repeated. 

The only way to make it easier for people to access good housing is for the federal government to become a major housing force once again. But, this time, not with the gusher of deeply subsidized production we saw when I started out. Although that history will not be repeated, it is not too far a stretch to conceive the contemporary federal role as a reliable funding partner to support effective state and local affordable housing production strategies that lack the volume and resources to achieve maximum impact. This essay lays out such a blueprint.