Trends in Substandard Housing 1940–1980

“A decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family” has remained an elusive goal since it was first stated by Congress in the Housing Act of 1949. This owes in large part to the difficulty of translating the goal into practical definitions of housing objectives, and of developing reasonably precise estimates of U.S. housing quality, especially as these estimates may be changing over time. This paper discusses the difficulties involved in measuring housing (in)adequacy, reviews previous definitions of U.S. housing quality, and delineates a measure of housing inadequacy. Then, based upon this current measure, the numbers of inadequate housing units are calculated for 1973–1978 (years for which complete Annual Housing Survey data are available), melded with the traditional measure of “substandard” housing for the years 1940–1970, and predicted for 1979–1980 (years for which only core AHS data were currently available). The study's principal findings are twofold: First, The U.S. housing stock has shown a fairly steady improvement in average quality during the last forty years, a trend that appears to be continuing. Second, while the search for better measures of housing quality must continue, HUD's current definition of physically inadequate housing represents the state of the art and, with proper calibration, provides a reasonably consistent basis for measuring U.S. housing quality over time.