In the summer heat of Birmingham, children faced police dogs and fire hoses. On a bus in Montgomery, a 15-year-old refused to stand. From Claudette Colvin to Rosa Parks, from Greensboro counters to the March on Washington—the Civil Rights Movement shook America awake. Yet, even as laws changed, maps and mortgages quietly redrew the lines of belonging.

In this episode of Built to Divide, Dimitrius Lynch tracks what happened after the marches. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination, but zoning boards found new tools to enforce it. Highways tore through Black neighborhoods in San Francisco and Detroit. Urban renewal became “Negro removal.” Birmingham forced the country to look. Kennedy named it a moral crisis. Johnson created HUD, appointing Robert C. Weaver, the first Black cabinet secretary. Then came the pivot—Section 235, 236, vouchers, block grants, Pruitt-Igoe, Moses vs. Jacobs, Nixon’s New Federalism, and a shift from building homes to subsidizing rent.

This is the story of how a movement won rights—but lost ground in planning rooms, mortgage offices, and zoning maps. How public housing gave way to vouchers. How the market replaced the public builder. And how America traded homes as social infrastructure for housing as financial asset.

If you want to understand why affordability collapsed, why public housing withered, why vouchers fall short, and how modern inequality took shape—Episode 4 shows the pivot point.

Episode Extras - Photos, videos, sources and links to additional content found during research.

Episode Credits:

Production in collaboration with Gābl Media

Written & Executive Produced by Dimitrius Lynch

Audio Engineering and Sound Design by Jeff Alvarez

The summer heat in Birmingham was stagnant, thick and assaulting like a blow to the face

as soon as you stepped outside.

2

It clung to the skin, to the cotton shirts of marchers, to the fur of police dogs.

3

You could see it in the glint of sunlight bouncing off the chrome of fire hoses.

4

It was 1963 and the sidewalks were trembling with the sound of footsteps, hundreds of

them.

5

in rhythm, in defiance, in hope.

6

From Atlanta to Selma, from Montgomery to Chicago, the nation was coming apart and coming

alive all at once.

7

The Civil Rights Movement wasn't just a protest.

8

It was an earthquake that began in sanctuaries and schoolhouses, shaking loose the myths

of separate but equal that had been sold and sewn into America and its architecture.

9

It all started in Montgomery with a 15 year old who refused to give up her seat to a white

woman.

10

Montgomery had segregation policies everywhere.

11

On the bus, black people were required to sit in the back, foregoing convenience for white

riders.

12

Drivers had flexibility to adjust section size based on the rider count.

13

But the expectation was that if a white person needed a seat,

14

a black person had to give up their seat and stand in the back.

15

On March 2nd, 1955, Claudette Colvin and three of her friends were sitting just beyond the

halfway point of a full bus.

16

They were asked to clear their entire row and all stand in the back for one white woman.

17

That day when the bus driver asked me to get up, I had this feeling come over me.

18

It felt like Harriet Tubman was holding me down, hands were holding me down on one

shoulder, and so John of Truth hands were holding me down on another shoulder.

19

And I was glued to the seat and I could hear the white passion is saying, she got to move,

she got to move, that's the law, she got to move.

20

And I felt like

21

This is my time to take a stand for justice.

22

In that clip from Great Big Story, Colvin explains her thought process in the moment.

23

She was arrested that day for her dissent, becoming the first to violate Montgomery's bus

segregation policy.

24

Now that story may sound familiar, but not the name.

25

More famously, Rosa Parks later defied the policy too.

26

At the time, Parks was a seamstress in a local department store.

27

but was also a secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP.

28

The NAACP got wind of Colvin's incident, but for the face of the resistance, leadership

calculated that a teenager, who had also become pregnant out of wedlock by this point,

29

would not be good to publicize.

30

Instead, they rallied around Parks.

31

On the night of Parks' arrest,

32

The Women's Political Council, a group of black women working for the civil rights

movement, circulated flyers sparking a 381-day boycott that turned bus seats into

33

battlefields and city blocks into crucibles of change.

34

In churches, people strategized by candlelight.

35

They whispered about court rulings and arrests, but they also whispered about courage, the

kind that costs something.

36

By the early 1960s, that courage had spread north and south alike.

37

College students in Greensboro sat at lunch counters and refused to leave.

38

In Jackson, Mississippi, they were dragged from stools and beaten bloody while TV cameras

rolled.

39

And in Washington, D.C., a young preacher stood before a quarter million people and dared

to say the word dream out loud.

40

But that dream stood on the shaky ground of maps already drawn, red lines that stretched

across every American city.

41

Even as marchers filled the streets demanding freedom, the geography of segregation was

holding firm in brick, mortgage, and law.

42

Black families were confined by housing covenants that banned them from buying in white

neighborhoods.

43

Banks denied loans on the grounds that the character of a community might change.

44

In cities like Chicago,

45

Los Angeles, and Detroit, entire black neighborhoods were carved up by new highways, their

homes bulldozed in the name of progress.

46

The acclaimed writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin best communicated the moment.

47

A boy last week, was 16, in San Francisco, told me on television, thank God we got to

talk, maybe somebody would start to listen.

48

He said, I got no country, I've got no flag, I'm only 16 years old.

49

And I couldn't say you do.

50

I don't have any evidence to prove that he does.

51

They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging, most northern cities

now are engaged, in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out.

52

It means Negro removal.

53

That is what it means.

54

And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.

55

Now this, we're talking about human beings.

56

In Birmingham, Alabama, the movement initiated one of its most remarkable demonstrations,

but also faced one of its most cruel consequences.

57

In 1963, just over 60 years ago, less than a generation, police chief Bull Connor

disrupted the Birmingham Children's March through arrests and infamously ordering fire

58

hoses, turned up to 100 PSI at times to be unleashed on children as young as nine years

old.

59

Police dogs lunged at protesters.

60

The images flooded the nightly news.

61

Black bodies hurled across pavement by streams of water so powerful they peeled bark off

trees.

62

Those pictures did what words could not.

63

They forced a nation to look.

64

That summer, President John F.

65

Kennedy called civil rights a moral crisis.

66

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their

heirs, their grandsons are not fully free.

67

They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.

68

They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.

69

And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boats, will not be fully free until all its

citizens are free.

70

We preach freedom around the world and we mean it and we cherish our freedom here at home.

71

But are we to say to the world and much more importantly to each other that this is a land

of the free except for the Negroes?

72

That we have no second class citizens except Negroes?

73

That we have no class or caste system?

74

No ghettos?

75

No master race except with respect to Negroes?

76

Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.

77

The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no

city or state or legislative body can brutally choose to ignore them.

78

The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, north and south, where

legal remedies are not at hand.

79

Regress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations.

80

parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

81

We face therefore a moral crisis as a country and a people.

82

It cannot be met by repressive police action.

83

It cannot be left to increase demonstrations in the streets.

84

It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk.

85

It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body.

86

and above all, in all of our daily lives.

87

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of

the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face.

88

A great change is at hand.

89

And our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and

constructive for all.

90

Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence.

91

Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

92

The following year, after the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon B.

93

Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public places and

employment.

94

It was a legal victory born of unbearable sacrifice.

95

Yet, the work was far from over.

96

Discrimination didn't vanish.

97

It adapted.

98

In 1965, as activists marched from Selma to Montgomery,

99

Under the protection of federal troops, the first zoning boards were quietly rewriting

codes that would preserve racial and economic segregation without ever mentioning race.

100

In neighborhoods where deeds could no longer exclude by color, city planners began to do

it by design through single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes, and mortgage policies that

101

priced out the very people civil rights laws claim to protect.

102

By the late 1960s, the battle lines had shifted north.

103

In Chicago, Martin Luther King Jr.

104

marched through white neighborhoods where residents pelted him with rocks.

105

In Detroit, Newark and Watts, frustrations raged into fire.

106

The Kerner Commission, officially known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil

Disorders, would later conclude what millions already knew.

107

White racism

108

was the primary cause of the unrest in America and we were quote, moving toward two

societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal, end quote.

109

In 1968, the Fair Housing Act became law.

110

It was meant to be the final blow against housing discrimination to open neighborhoods,

credit and opportunity to all.

111

But the ink was barely dry when Martin Luther King Jr.

112

was killed on a balcony in Memphis, and the cities he marched through burned again.

113

The promise of fair housing was already colliding with the machinery of profit and

politics.

114

The civil rights movement changed the law, but it couldn't yet change the landscape.

115

In the decade that followed, highways kept cutting through black communities, property

values kept dictating who could belong,

116

and the American dream that ideal of stability and home remained fenced off by invisible

lines.

117

Because the architecture of exclusion is so ingrained, patient.

118

It doesn't always wear a hood or carry a sign.

119

Sometimes it hides in policy, zoning, and ballot sheets.

120

The marchers of the 1960s fought for civil rights on the streets.

121

Their children would have to fight for them at the planning board

122

the mortgage office and the city council meeting.

123

The dream wasn't dead, it was deferred, redesigned and resold.

124

I'm Demetrius Lynch and this is Built to Divide.

125

In less than a lifetime, in less than my own 57 years, America has become a highly

urbanized nation.

126

And we must face the many meanings of this new America.

127

Taking neighborhoods that exist already, and maybe they're not very attractive, and maybe

they've only got poor people in, and maybe they've only got immigrants in.

128

But thinking, what can you do here to keep these people here and to make them feel that...

129

They're valued.

130

Last time we stepped off the deck of the USS Missouri and into a country racing to turn

victory into stability.

131

We followed Operation Magic Carpet as millions of GIs came home.

132

The GI Bill, FHA and VA loans and Fannie Mae as they rewired credit and a culture industry

from Sears kit homes to glossy magazine spreads, selling the house as the heart of the

133

American dream.

134

We traced modernist experiments like the case study homes, then watched the market crown

Levittown, mass produced suburbia as national policy.

135

And we reminded ourselves of the shadow, redlining covenants and zoning that decided who

got in and who didn't.

136

If you haven't listened to that episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to all the

episodes of this series in order.

137

Today we pick up where the dream hardens into doctrine.

138

the Fair Housing Act.

139

LBJ builds HUD and expands credit.

140

Section 235 and 236 rise and fall.

141

Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs fight over the city's soul.

142

And Nixon slams the brakes, pivoting from building units to cutting checks.

143

And we'll get into all of that after this break.

144

Episode 4, The Pivot.

145

The promise of a decent home in a suitable living environment sounded simple.

146

It was not.

147

It was never just a question of walls and roofs.

148

It was a question of who counted, who paid, and who was allowed to stay.

149

By the mid-1960s, the federal government had a housing system that could move mountains of

money and draw red lines with the same pen.

150

The Federal Housing Administration had steered credit for three decades.

151

stabilizing mortgages and standardizing appraisals and segregation that largely inhibited

opportunity for some to build wealth.

152

In neighborhood after neighborhood, lending rules quietly linked risk to race.

153

Black families and many immigrant families paid more for worse housing or were shut out

altogether.

154

Then came the civil rights decade and with it, a national reckoning.

155

If the law says we are equal,

156

What does it mean when risk maps disagree?

157

In Washington, reform gathered around an unlikely figure.

158

Republican Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, a Midwestern industrialist with a reformer's

pitch.

159

Percy had watched the uprisings of the late sixties and drew a blunt conclusion.

160

Denying people a stake in their neighborhoods is dangerous for them, for cities and for

democracy.

161

Fifth, therefore, I hope that we're going to offer our minorities and our black

populations in this country a chance to become a part of the economic and social fiber of

162

the country through ownership, ownership of their own homes, ownership of their own

businesses, ownership of their own financial institutions.

163

And I think the business community should dedicate itself to providing technical

assistance to our 22 million blacks in this country, just as we have the end of

164

World War II provided $110 billion since then in technical assistance to our enemies to

rebuild them, our allies to build them and developing nations.

165

We have a whole developing nation of American citizens in this country and we need nation

building at home first ahead of nation building abroad.

166

It was moral language, but not naive.

167

Percy's push came with urgency.

168

Fear of more summers like 1967 and 1968.

169

Fear of more neighborhoods feeling abandoned by their own country.

170

The thought was, if people own the structure, they're less likely to burn down the street.

171

Percy's urgency met an empathetic presidency that understood poverty.

172

Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath on Air Force One on November 22nd, 1963, with the

nation in shock from JFK's assassination.

173

He brought to the job a lifetime of watching poverty up close.

174

First as a teacher of Mexican-American children in Cotuya, Texas, then as a congressman

who understood the arithmetic of power.

175

LBJ believed government could be a tool for dignity.

176

Within months, he declared a war on poverty and then came the avalanche.

177

Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, and anti-pollution laws.

178

For civil rights,

179

He turned the full weight of the presidency towards the nation's conscience, the Civil

180

But housing was the hard one.

181

It wasn't just policy.

182

It was space, status, wealth, and a thousand local veto points that could choke reform at

any phase.

183

In 1965, Johnson created a cabinet seat for the fight.

184

the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.

185

of America.

186

This legislation establishes the 11th Department of our Federal Government, the Department

of Housing and Urban Development.

187

When our nation was born, the only departments of government were state and treasury and

war.

188

Our country and our government have grown greatly since that time.

189

But we have been sparing in creating new and additional departments, except the need has

been clear and compelling and continuing.

190

That is clearly the case for this, the newest department.

191

The America of our founding fathers was, of course, a rural America.

192

The virtues and values of our rural heritage have shaped and strengthened the American

character for all our 189 years.

193

Our debt to this heritage is deep and abiding, and we shall honor it always.

194

When Thomas Jefferson spoke of rural virtues,

195

cities were insignificant on the countryside of this continent.

196

Only 5 percent of our people lived then in cities or villages.

197

America was the land of the farmer and the woodsman and the hunter and the mountaineer.

198

And even a century ago, when Abraham Lincoln asked the Congress to create a Department of

Agriculture, fewer than 20 percent of our people then lived in cities.

199

Now that day is gone.

200

It never will return.

201

In less than a lifetime, in less than my own 57 years, America has become a highly

urbanized nation.

202

And we must face the many meanings of this new America.

203

To lead this new department, Johnson made the historic selection of Robert C.

204

Weaver as its first secretary, the first black American to hold a cabinet post.

205

Weaver, an economist and academic, had served as a political administrator in New York,

206

as well as in DC, within Franklin Roosevelt and John F.

207

Kennedy's administrations.

208

This is Secretary Weaver discussing new programs in his department after appearing before

the House Banking and Currency Subcommittee.

209

Do you foresee a clash here again between City Hall and the four?

210

No, because in this particular program, this program is going to be a program developed

with City Hall and developed by the local government, by the local government officials

211

who were elected, though they can't very well conflict with themselves anymore.

212

than any bureaucracy at the internal difficulty.

213

Can you give us just an estimate, if everything goes well, when could a city like New York

City actually become a beneficiary of this program?

214

Well, I'm not going to say when any city like any city can, but any city which comes into

this program would have, assuming that the laws passed, say, as of June of this year, they

215

would be a year's period during which they could be doing the planning and developing

first their proposal.

216

getting into their planning and I would say that it should get underway within 12 to 18

months after the law is passed.

217

Is it probable that New York City will be the first beneficiary under this?

218

This is up to time to decide and not for me.

219

HUD wasn't a single program.

220

It was a switchboard.

221

Mortgages, subsidies, urban renewal, public housing, insurance, all running through

federal circuits.

222

And then in 1968, with riots fresh in memory and momentum in Congress,

223

the country passed the Fair Housing Act, a federal promise to end discrimination in the

sale and rental of housing.

224

But law alone couldn't solve the problem or fix a market shaped by decades of exclusion.

225

The question was, what tool could change things locally?

226

If the New Deal steadied mortgage finance, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968

tried to push production to scale, fast.

227

The idea was simple, audacious, and deeply American.

228

Build our way out of the crisis and buy our way to stability.

229

Two new engines roared to life.

230

Section 236, cheap financing for moderate income rental housing to lower interest rates

and make projects pencil out.

231

Section 235, heavily subsidized home ownership for low and moderate income families.

232

Small down payments.

233

low monthly costs, and FHA insurance to incentivize lenders.

234

HUD also introduced the Turnkey program, which allowed local housing authorities to buy

privately built developments directly into the public housing inventory, a faster, cheaper

235

alternative to constructing massive new projects from scratch.

236

This approach was informed by lessons learned from the missteps of Pruitt-Igoe in St.

237

Louis.

238

Completed in 1954 as a symbol of modern urban renewal, Pruitt-Igoe's 33 high-rise towers

became a case study and failure.

239

Underfunded maintenance, social isolation, rising crime, and neglect.

240

By the early 1970s, two-thirds of its units sat vacant, and the city made a dramatic

choice, demolition.

241

In response, HUD turned toward scattered site housing.

242

smaller clusters of public homes woven into existing neighborhoods instead of being

concentrated in a single complex.

243

These homes could take many forms, single-family houses, duplexes, townhomes, or small

apartment buildings.

244

The intent was simple but profound.

245

Reduce the stigma of public housing, mix incomes, and give low-income families access to

safer, better-resourced communities.

246

Scattered site housing wasn't just an architectural adjustment, it was an ideological one.

247

A move away from containment towards connection to rebuild community rather than isolate

poverty.

248

Moving forward, the target was enormous.

249

Commissions called for millions of affordable units.

250

Weaver's HUD tried to blend public ambition with private speed so that sites, permits, and

lenders wouldn't bottleneck the dream.

251

For a brief window it worked, with peak production in 69 and 70, subsidized units

multiplying and public and moderate income stocks surging.

252

For every abstract promise, there were people actually walking into their first home.

253

But Section 235 had two weaknesses.

254

One, it tethered opportunity to existing appraisal ecosystems, the very actors who had

long tagged black neighborhoods as high risk.

255

Two, it depended on local brokers, lenders, and inspectors to act in good faith in markets

where inciting panic had long been a business model.

256

In city after city, realtors and housing speculators continued the same cruel pattern.

257

They whispered to white owners, sell now.

258

fear spread and prices dropped.

259

Those same speculators could step in to buy depreciated homes from white families, then

turn around and sell it to a black family at much higher prices, using government-backed

260

programs like Section 235 and FHA loans to make poison sales look safe to lenders.

261

The deals were poisoned because appraisals were often fraudulently inflated

262

to make homes seem worth more than they really were.

263

Brokers also often rushed inspections, ignoring problems with the home to quickly close

the deal.

264

At first, the monthly payments looked manageable, but as soon as roofs leaked, furnaces

broke, and maintenance costs rose, these families couldn't keep up with the payments.

265

The government was then on the hook to cover the bank's losses.

266

Black homeowners

267

and the affected neighborhoods were subsequently blamed for the decline.

268

The cycle reinforced the narrative and the same trick was repeated on the next block.

269

In Philadelphia, between 1969 and 1971, thousands of Section 235 homes went into

foreclosure.

270

More than all FHA foreclosures since the 1930s.

271

Was 235 a bad idea?

272

It appears to have been good in principle

273

But the subsidy design made the program easy for bad actors to game and the market made it

profitable to prey on people, particularly in a racially tense environment.

274

Congressional hearings followed.

275

Inspectors were called out for rubber stamping.

276

Families, black mothers and veterans testified about promises made in neighborhoods left

underwater, literally and financially.

277

The federal ideal was on trial, not just the program.

278

but faith in the government to deliver a fair deal.

279

While HUD was trying to stitch neighborhoods with subsidies, another story took shape, and

it begins with a man who never met a bulldozer he didn't like.

280

Robert Moses, the master builder, had already redefined New York by the 1960s.

281

Since the 1920s, he was an urban planner known for aggressively pushing projects,

including a slippery tactic

282

where he initiated projects that were grander than approved, knowing the legislature would

eventually have to green light it to avoid the appearance of ineffective oversight.

283

Of course I am a limited objective boy.

284

I couldn't get anything done, nor could the people that are working with me on any other

basis.

285

But on the other hand, it's ridiculous to say that things we're working on don't show any

imagination, that they're all...

286

uh

287

without uh vision and without regard to the future and that they're just these immediate

showy immediate things.

288

Now you take a thing like uh a project like Jones Beach for example.

289

Well we've been at Jones Beach since 1924.

290

That's a long time.

291

The original plan is no different from the present plan.

292

We've carried out about maybe

293

70 % of it, 75 % of it, in the course of 35 years.

294

That's how long it's taken.

295

And it just happens to be our good fortune or luck or whatever you may call it, that the

people who originally conceived the idea are still around.

296

They're extant and maybe a little groggy, but they're still here.

297

Parks, pools, bridges, parkways, an empire of concrete and steel.

298

He knew how to draft a bill and how to bury a neighborhood.

299

Under New Deal dollars in the 1940s, he could move Earth faster than anyone.

300

He brought beaches to the masses and highways through the heart of the city.

301

But the price was brutal.

302

Coal blocks devastated in the name of urban renewal.

303

Tenements cleared for towers or roads.

304

Black and Puerto Rican communities sliced into islands by expressways.

305

History would later accuse him of more.

306

intentionally installing low bridges to keep buses and thus porter families off parkways

to the shore, pool siding that tracked racial lines, and a thousand tactical maneuvers to

307

keep the city's best air for the few.

308

And then a counter voice emerged.

309

Jane Jacobs, writer and neighborhood activist, published The Death and Life of Great

310

While Moses admired the bird's eye view, Jacobs argued for the block.

311

Eyes on the street, mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings next to new, human scale

complexity.

312

I think a good place to begin, trying to make neighborhood hearts, where the action is.

313

If people get fond of their district, their neighborhood, and stay there, and if the city

is working the way it should, they begin to get connections, begin the next generation to

314

get better educations and so on.

315

And all of this is reflected in the neighborhood.

316

A heart is not in disembodied things that you just set down arbitrarily, like choosing the

shopping center site.

317

It has to have an anatomy that runs into the neighborhood.

318

And the anatomy, the clue to it is what you always hear when people talk about a hangout.

319

Oh, it's the corner store or it's the corner bar.

320

There's always that word corner.

321

What does that mean?

322

Well, actually it means that there's an intersection and this corner is a powerful place.

323

If that intersection is of two or more pedestrian paths that go into the community, that's

the anatomy that a heart has to have.

324

the very essence of is the place going to be interesting to walk in?

325

it going to be useful to walk in?

326

Is it going to get more so?

327

Is it going to get less so?

328

Now over time, if the heart is successful, oh it's going to change.

329

Taking the neighborhoods that exist.

330

already and maybe they're not very attractive and maybe they've only got poor people in

and maybe they've only got immigrants in.

331

But thinking what can you do here to keep these people here and to make them feel that

they're valued.

332

With the coalition of parents, shopkeepers, and artists representing Greenwich Village,

SoHo, and Little Italy, she led the fight against Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway.

333

They won.

334

Moses gave cities infrastructure, but also scars.

335

Jacobs promoted a language to resist, but it also came with an unintended future.

336

Decades later, neighborhoods preserved for community would become luxury enclaves.

337

See, preservation without policy invites gentrification.

338

Policy without preservation can lead to erasure.

339

Both truths mattered, and both would collide with HUD's experiment.

340

Back in Washington, Johnson's exit and Richard Nixon's arrival as president did not

immediately slam the brakes on housing reform.

341

Nixon surprised some observers.

342

He initially seemed willing to extend pieces of Johnson's Great Society programs.

343

He named George Romney, former Michigan governor and an integration advocate to lead HUD.

344

And in the early years, HUD's spending actually grew.

345

But behind the scenes, another project gathered momentum, New Federalism.

346

As a direct reaction to the sweeping federal authority of the New Deal and Great Society

policies that put the collective first,

347

The idea of new federalism was to dissolve that collective strength and push

decision-making out of Washington via revenue sharing and block grants.

348

Nixon, a pragmatist with deep ties to the business community, sought to recenter

government around efficiency and market-driven principles, an approach that appealed to

349

corporate leaders and fiscal conservatives wary of federal expansion and the strength of

the people.

350

that came with it.

351

The idea was shaped and refined by three key advisors, Herbert Stein, Daniel Patrick

Moynihan, and John Ehrlichman.

352

Stein, an economist and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a

353

and market efficiency, grounding new federalism in business-friendly economics.

354

Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, brought an interest in environmental and

administrative reform, emphasizing executive control and efficiency over sprawling

355

bureaucracy.

356

And Moynihan, a Democrat who had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was

tapped to be Nixon's aide after his controversial Moynihan report on black poverty, where

357

he was convinced that top-down welfare programs

358

often deepened dependency rather than opportunity.

359

At the time, the public face of federal housing programs and the moral justification for

them was largely the black community.

360

These initiatives, however flawed, were meant to correct decades of redlining,

segregation, and systemic exclusion from wealth building.

361

Now, I want to be clear.

362

Income inequality cuts across every demographic.

363

But it's important to understand that because of the long legacy of race-based

exclusionary laws and policies, the black community had become a bellwether for the

364

nation's broader economic health, a measure of whether prosperity was truly shared or

selectively withheld.

365

The 1970s and 80s marked another major economic turning point for the U.S.

366

You could see the culture shift in real time, a retreat from social investment

367

a resurgence of market-first ideology, and a growing downward pressure on American working

class, especially on the low-income side of its two-track wealth system, where the Black

368

experience revealed the strain most clearly.

369

In 1973, the first domino fell.

370

Nixon announced a suspension of new HUD housing and urban development commitments.

371

The message was crisp and devastating.

372

construction programs were too expensive, benefited too few, and produced low quality

environments.

373

you

374

The implosion of Pruitt-Igoe just a year earlier had become a powerful symbol against

government intervention.

375

In a stunning pivot, Nixon dismissed a decade of learning what works and what doesn't.

376

Instead of improvements, he abandoned the idea altogether.

377

The dramatic TV clip of a tower falling was easier to sell than a footnote about scatter

site housing.

378

His special message to the Congress read in part,

379

Leaders of all political persuasions and from all levels of government have given a great

deal of thought in recent years to the problem of low-income housing.

380

Many of them agree that the federally subsidized housing approach has failed and many of

them also agree on the reasons for that failure.

381

The main flaw they point to in the old approach is its underlying assumption that the

basic problem of the poor

382

is a lack of housing rather than a lack of income.

383

Instead of treating the root cause of the problem, the inability to pay for housing the

government has been attacking the symptom.

384

We have been helping the builders directly and the poor only indirectly, rather than

providing assistance directly to low-income families.

385

In place of this old approach, many people have suggested a new approach direct cash

assistance.

386

Under this approach,

387

Instead of providing a poor family with a place to live, the federal government would

provide qualified recipients with an appropriate housing payment and would then let them

388

choose their own homes on the private market.

389

The payment would be carefully scaled to make up the difference between what a family

could afford on its own for housing and the cost of safe and sanitary housing in that

390

geographic area.

391

This plan would give the poor the freedom and responsibility to make their own choices

about housing and it would eventually get the federal government out of the housing

392

business.

393

The market, not the public builder, would deliver shelter.

394

The government would provide vouchers, not units.

395

Choice would replace commitment.

396

Costs would substitute construction.

397

In September of 73, the White House released Housing in the 70s, a strategy paper that

read like a eulogy for public production.

398

It flagged failures of management, foreclosures in 236 and 235, and the high cost of

construction.

399

while also noting, almost in passing, that tax expenditures for homeowners dwarfed

low-income housing aid.

400

We'll discuss this more, but the biggest subsidy in American housing then, as now, was

written into the tax code, not the budget, and it buoyed the middle and upper tiers of

401

society through mortgage interest deductions and property tax preferences.

402

But those weren't up for elimination.

403

Congress erupted.

404

Former HUD Secretary Weaver testified that there should be mixed strategies.

405

Fix existing housing where vacancies allowed, build where the shortage was real.

406

He warned that abandoning production entirely would lock neighborhoods into decay.

407

Cities and tenant groups denounced the impoundment of funds as executive overreach.

408

Lawsuits flew and mayors called the cuts catastrophic.

409

But remember,

410

There were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr.

411

and John F.

412

Kennedy in the late 60s.

413

As questions around the assassinations emerged, public trust in government began to

decline in general, greasing the argument for reduced government.

414

The pivot on housing held, and with it a new language.

415

Decency measured in efficiency, equity measured in head counts.

416

If a voucher could serve three families at the cost of building one unit, the ledger said

the voucher wins.

417

But the ledger rarely counted where those families could live, who accepted them, or what

power they had at the leasing table.

418

As wealth capitalized on the opportunity, regaining its footing, the vulnerable no longer

had a champion.

419

This was the context for and emergence of the modern subsidy.

420

tenant-based assistance, the program we now know as Section 8 housing choice vouchers.

421

We'll examine it more closely in the next episode, but the theory was straightforward.

422

Give families portable purchasing power and stretch federal dollars further than public

projects ever could.

423

Sometimes it worked, but landlords in high opportunity zip codes learned to say, we don't

take vouchers, which was legal in many states.

424

One HUD official said, quote, we replace public ghettos with private ones.

425

The country simply replaced a federal obligation to build with the federal promise to pay

and then allow local rules to decide who could collect rules already framed by the two

426

track system, a system that only government is uniquely positioned to address.

427

Meanwhile, public housing withered, budgets shrank, maintenance delayed,

428

units boarded up, and demolitions outpaced replacements.

429

In some cities, HOPE 6, a HUD program intended to revitalize the most distressed public

housing projects into mixed income developments, did so but often at a lower unit count,

430

dispersing many of the original families with vouchers.

431

The consequences could be felt around the country.

432

In Chicago, with plastic taped over broken windows,

433

and the bite of winter rolling in, tenants organized rent strikes, demanding heat,

repairs, and dignity.

434

In the Bronx, entire avenues burned, arson for insurance, and buildings landlords could no

longer finance or refuse to maintain.

435

In Los Angeles, subsidies gave access to a rotting unit, but downtown drew federal dollars

for convention centers and stadiums.

436

This was the Community Development Block Grant at work.

437

Flexible federal funds directed to local governments for community development activities

aimed at improving affordable housing, infrastructure, and economic opportunities,

438

primarily for low and moderate income residents.

439

Now there were some bright spots.

440

Community Development Corporations also sprang up.

441

Boston's Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Detroit's Community Land Trusts,

442

and Oakland's rehabilitations illustrated neighbors turning vacant buildings into housing

on their own.

443

They proved that when communities steered the money, places could be repaired without

exiling their people.

444

But they were rowing upstream against a river now widening towards financialization.

445

Mortgages bundled, sold, securitized.

446

Home as asset class, neighborhood as yield.

447

The New Deal had socialized risks

448

to spread the reward of ownership.

449

The 1970s and beyond privatized reward while socializing risk.

450

The pivot to treat housing as a line item instead of the platform for health, education,

safety, and belonging proved to be devastating for society.

451

And this was just the beginning.

452

Half a century on, more than 2 million households rely on vouchers.

453

Only one in four eligible families ever gets one.

454

Public housing stock has fallen by hundreds of thousands of units from its peak.

455

In the places with the best schools and shortest commutes, zoning still walls off access.

456

In the places where vouchers stretch, jobs often don't.

457

What we cut in the 1970s was not just spending, we cut capacity.

458

The idea that a nation can plan, build, and keep a stock of housing that we maintain.

459

the same way we maintain infrastructure.

460

Because housing is the foundation of a healthy society.

461

What we lost was the ability to build where the market will not, repair what the market

won't, provide support that converts to growth opportunities, change zoning to benefit the

462

commonwealth, and prioritize people over profits.

463

The most expensive housing policy in the world is the one that keeps paying for the

fallout.

464

health emergencies, missed school, lost jobs, broken neighborhoods, and a vision that

blooms within the emptiness where trust should be.

465

In the following decade, the rise of advocacy and austerity defines what came next.

466

We'll meet Habitat for Humanity, swinging hammers where budgets shrink.

467

The National Low Income Housing Coalition, pushing policy from the margins,

468

and the groups protecting the mortgage interest deduction while encouraging divestment

from the public.

469

We'll follow deregulation from Milton Friedman to Margaret Thatcher's right to buy, trace

how vouchers expand while social programs contract, and watch deindustrialization hollow

470

cities just as gentrification and new urbanism promise walkable dreams, often without the

people who live there first.

471

We'll also examine how the National Association of Realtors becomes a powerhouse in

Washington, how master-planned empires like Irvine take shape, and why affordability keeps

472

slipping even as wealth expands.

473

Next time on Built to Divide.

474

found our guy.

475

Who?

476

Donald Bren.

477

Why?

478

Because Al, you and I look like a couple of gangsters from Detroit.

479

This guy looks like he came from Hollywood.

480

Thanks for listening.

481

Built to Divide is presented by Lines, my architecture and creative studio.

482

This podcast is produced in collaboration with Gable Media.

483

If you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and rate and review it on Apple podcasts and

Spotify.

484

It really helps others find it.

485

And if you're looking for similar content, Built to Divide is part of the Gable Media

network where you can find even more like this.

486

Visit gablemedia.com.

487

That's G-A-B-L media.com.

488

And before I go, if you want to see additional photos, video clips and content that went

into this episode, you can visit me at lines.studio slash podcasts.

489

Talk soon.

490

What is the diplomatic reception room used for besides receiving diplomats?

491

Well, it's the room that people see first when they come to the White House.

492

Everyone who comes to a state dinner here comes through it and leaves by it.

493

So I think it should be a pretty room.

494

It's the way I came in and it's a beautiful room.

495

The wallpaper is magnificent.

496

Yes, this is wallpaper that was printed in France about 1834.

497

It's all scenes of America.