Description

The Galveston Housing Authority was formed on 08 April 1940, in the heady days of the New Deal. The idea was simple; it was better for low-income people to live in properties owned, controlled, and subsidized by the government than to live in privately owned properties that they paid for themselves. This new formula would give them a hand up and out of poverty.

“In this conception—articulated by Catherine Bauer in her influential 1936 "Modern Housing" and embraced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the National Housing Act of 1937—public housing authorities were to run apartment buildings as permanent public utilities, with publicly financed construction keeping rents low.

It's hard to exaggerate how mistaken this idea was, even when Bauer and other advocates first formulated it. From the end of the Civil War up until 1937, private builders had erected a dizzying variety of housing for the striving poor as they improved their condition over time.”
How Charlotte is Revolutionizing Public Housing

This philosophy was reinvigorated and reinforced by the Great Society in 1964.
Next week will be the 69th anniversary of the GHA, so it may be time to actually ask the question; how well has it worked? Have many of the previous residents of GHA housing projects used their stay there as a stepping stone to successfully become self-sufficient in the private sector, or have many families remained in the projects for generation after generation?