The New Deal Programs In The 1930's

The Great Depression created an opportunity for the United States to move in a new direction. With the country in shambles, many turned to our President with the hope that he would have a plan. President Roosevelt enacted his New Deal programs in the 1930’s, in order to revamp the economy and return America to its prosperous ways. The New had policies concerned with not only job creation, but also with important issues such as banking. One of the most controversial sites of policy experimentation was housing. With millions losing their jobs during the Great Depression, foreclosures began occurring with increasing frequency, and the housing market plummeted. The answer proposed to this problem was a push to get people out of the cities, and

And they found that the value of a home in the city did not hold as well as the value of a suburban home. In the industrialization period millions moved to the city because that was where the jobs were. Suburbs were undesirable because people had no way to commute to the city effectively. This was one of the contradictions of the recommendation the government made in terms of mortgages. The areas with the best access to transportation, were the cities. However one invention changed that. The car allowed people to travel to the city from the suburbs. In the 1930’s when the FHA was pushing for suburban living, the car was becoming more and more popular. Underwrites of the FHA were told to regard the automobile as an adequate way for people to travel. This meant that the value they bestowed upon suburban houses would not be lessened based on the lack of access to public transportation. “The automobile…had ‘accelerated the decentralization of the cities’” (Hyman 65). The housing policy had created a system were automobile was an essential part of everyday lives. People could move out of the overcrowded cities and into their new lives in the suburbs. Another factor that could erode the value of the home was racial

20% of the evaluation of a home by the underwriters of the FHA came down to “adverse influences”. These influences were mostly concerned with racial mixing. The FHA program saw the mixing of the races, as something that devalues a property. By doing this, the program was openly advocating for white’s only housing developments. The FHA was seen as ‘redlining’ mortgages for ethnic and racial minorities. In 1947 the FHA appointed race relation officers to oversee their practices and determine if there was anything that could be done to stop this discrimination. “In the 1940s, FHA officials seem to believe their policies were merely race neutral, and simply reflected a naturally occurring market.” (Hyman 141) this belief was contradictory to the facts. Black access the FHA’s housing and mortgages was meager. This deep rooted prejudice of African Americans prevented them from having the same rights to a fair mortgage as their white counterparts. This was not all the FHA’s fault however. A lot of the blame can be pushed towards the investors themselves. The FHA did not make the loans, they only insured them. The FHA said “finding buyers for those mortgages proved difficult”. (Hyman 142) The factors that allowed the expansion of the suburbs for the whites, did not hold for the blacks. Investor, made up predominately of white men, simply favored their own kind. There was not the same level of certainty that the lender