HOUSING ACT 1949

Created by President Harry Truman as part of the Fair Deal program, the American Housing Act of 1949 provided federal funding to cities to cover the cost of acquiring areas of cities perceived to be "slums". Those sites were then given to private developers to construct new housing & public housing.

The main elements of the Act included:

• providing federal financing for slum clearance programs associated with urban renewal projects in American cities (Title I),
• increasing authorization for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance (Title II),
• extending federal money to build more than 800,000 public housing units (Title III)
• fund research into housing and housing techniques, and
• permitting the FHA to provide financing for rural homeowners.

This Act lead way to the Housing Act of 1954 which supported the main elements.