The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved

Abstract

Surely the most polarizing and enduring policy controversy in the annals of government-assisted housing concerns the direction of True North. Where is it most beneficial to point the enacted housing subsidy streams? Are the underhoused’s needs most sensibly ad-dressed by steering resources to the household—the demand side of the market—confer-ring sufficient purchasing power to compensate for lack of affordable housing in the marketplace? Or is True North in precisely the opposite direction, on the supply side? In that view, a concerned government best overcomes the housing deficit—with greater certainty and, in the long term, more cost effectively—by producing or inducing a supply of new housing, affordability assured by subcost rents. HUD’s 30th anniversary is a good time for a meditative retrospect on the nature, origins, and settlement of that controversy. Settlement there has been. It is beyond doubt, and has been for some years, that the battle has gone substantially and seemingly permanently in favor of a household-targeted strat-egy. A paradigmatic shift has occurred. Supply-siders, who reigned supreme during the life of government-assisted housing, are now relegated to the sidelines. They make do with diminishing Federal production programs, eking out reinforcements from State and

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