What Accounts for the Intensified Opposition to Public Housing?

The real estate industry was strong enough to defeat proposals for social housing and create this more limited system of public housing in the late 1930s. In 1949 when it had to be reauthorized in 1937 we're still in the middle of a depression, anti-communism wasn't as virulent a political strain as it became after World War II. You have a combination then of a rejuvenated and more vigorous opposition from the real estate industry which is still concerned about its role and its prerogatives in the housing market. It becomes equated with socialist housing and so there's this ideological kind of attack against public housing.