Introduction
Everyone needs a house. Rich people poor people; all people are included. This is a problem, because housing costs a great deal of money. Poor people that can barely afford food and clothing also have a difficult time finding affordable housing. As a result, some live in unsafe and unsanitary conditions that are badly in need of repair.
Body
To understand the current plight of public housing in America, one must go back to the beginning. The program had its origins in the Housing Act of 1937, a landmark piece of federal legislation that was never intended to serve the dire poor and that listed the provision of low-income housing only as a secondary purpose. The primary intent of the bill was to stimulate employment and help revive a stagnant construction industry devastated by the Depression. The government would enter into a long-term commitment with local housing authorities to finance construction costs; the authorities would be responsible for funding the operating expenses, primarily through rental income, and the residents would be working-class families, hard-pressed by hard times, who would reap the benefit of lower rents.
While not denying that serious problems exist in some cities, many public housing advocates say the Administration and the press have been so obsessed with the failures in the system, that they have ignored recent successes. Boston, for example, long considered one of the horror stories of public housing, has rehabilitated more than 1,300 vacant units and has turned a $2.3 million deficit into a $6.8 million reserve fund in the last four years. St. Louis, which became a national symbol of the public housing fiasco with the dynamiting of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project in 1972, has since salvaged other problem-plagued projects by turning over the management to private and nonprofit groups, some of which are operated by the tenants themselves.............
