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the late 1930s as as I discussed with with Gail Radford the real estate industry was strong enough to defeat proposals for social housing and create this more limited system of public housing that that came to exist in the United States and that system was one that limited public housing to poor people that the private real estate industry was not going to serve which meant that the private sector didn't have to worry about government competition but but you write that in the 1940s the opposition to public housing grew even stronger and as a result it was close to getting killed off entirely in the mid 20th century and it only survived by becoming attached to a larger program of urban renewal but before we get to urban renewal which I do want to talk about what accounts for this intensified opposition to public housing at that moment given given that public housing was already limited to serving only those people who private industry didn't find it profitable to serve why the opposition if the forces of opposition already seemingly had gotten everything they wanted.

That's actually a very good question I think in part it has to do with the difference in the political environment between 1937 when the program was initially created and then 1949 when it had to be reauthorized in 1937 we're still in the middle of a depression we are in a situation of crisis economically and it's a pre-war period where anti-communism wasn't as as virulent a political strain as it became in the years after World War II. 1949 is a completely different kind of political economy and political environment and this is the year that the the public housing program has to be reauthorized by Congress. You have a and so it's a combination then of a rejuvenated and more vigorous opposition from the real estate industry as you as you described which is still concerned about its role and its prerogatives in the in the housing market and and they're simply better organized at this point they've seen 10 years of 10 to 12 years of public housing it becomes equated with socialist housing and so there's this ideological kind of attack against public housing it becomes something much bigger it's it's about big government it's about larger ideological questions in 1949 than it had been in 1937 and that's I think what accounts for significant strengthening of the opposition to it.