Community Capitalism: How Housing Advocates, the Private Sector, and Government Forged New Low-Income Housing Policy, 1968–1996

Some scholars argue that the state jealously guards its power and budgets, slowly adding to them over time. Recent U.S. public policy history offers a challenge to this interpretation. Since the 1970s, the government has been shedding capacity. Government increasingly has relied on a new incentive structure to build institutional capacity outside of government. Low-income housing policies were the vanguard of this change. The federal housing bureaucracy grew from the 1930s to the 1960s but was bypassed in the 1970s in favor of a network of new players—state and local government, private and nonprofit corporations, and consultants. This new network has been effective in delivering housing producing more than 1 million subsidized homes in the 1980s and 1990s. This article outlines the political debates of over the evolution of this network - from a recommitment to low-income housing production in the 1960s, to attacks on government housing programs in the 1980s, and finally to a new consensus in the late 1980s over the decentralized housing development network infused with federal dollars.