Support for housing programs has come from
federal, state, and municipal branches of government as well as
from philanthropies. Private-sector initiatives have also been
important in the development of affordable housing. For instance,
as noted earlier, during the 1940s the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company built two complexes—Peter Cooper Village and
Stuyvesant Town—that created thousands of new units for
moderate-income families. Metropolitan Life limited its profit to 6
percent and secured only modest subsidies from the federal
government and the City of New York. These private initiatives
helped form the basis for a rental housing program later
implemented by the federal government.
Since that
time, however, the cost of housing production has risen
substantially in real terms, and developments like Peter Cooper
Village and Stuyvesant Town can no longer reach either low- or
moderate-income families. As a result, the private sector has
joined with the public sector in creating partnerships to produce
low-income housing. The Local Initiatives Support Corporation
(lisc) is a notable
example. Corporate support has been a key to its success but the
projects it invests in also depend upon public subsidies in order
to reach low-income people. The Enterprise Foundation is another
example of a private-sector initiative that relies on federal and
local subsidies to provide low-income housing.
As a result,
the federal government now has primary financial responsibility for
large-scale low-income housing programs. State and local programs
have usually supplemented federal efforts, or tailored federal
programs to suit local conditions. Foundations have been
influential in alerting the public sector to special needs and in
testing programs that offer new responses to these needs. The Ford
Foundation has been especially active in this respect, most notably
by helping to launch the Neighborhood Housing Services program in
the 1970s, supporting Community Development Corporations from the
1960s through the 1980s, and funding
lisc, the Enterprise
Foundation, and other intermediary groups in the 1980s.
As noted in
Chapter 1, federal support for housing has been an important social
and economic force in the United States since the 1930s. Today,
there are some 5 million federally assisted units, or about 6
percent of the 85 million units in the total national housing
inventory. During its