Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T21:11:39.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

REAGAN’S AUSTERITY BUREAUCRATS

Examining the Racial and Gender Bias of Ronald Reagan’s Housing Vouchers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2020

Rosemary Nonye Ndubuizu
Rosemary Nonye Ndubuizu*
Affiliation:
Department of African American Studies, Georgetown University
*
*Corresponding author: Rosemary Nonye Ndubuizu, Department of African American Studies, Georgetown University, 478 Intercultural Center, 37th and O Streets, N.W., Washington D.C. 20057. Email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration initiated a dramatic policy shift towards a new housing voucher program, which simultaneously resulted in a near-halt in public and project-based assisted housing funding. When analyzing this historic policy shift, many affordable housing scholars have overemphasized race-absent narratives about fiscal austerity to explain the Reagan administration’s policy rejection of public housing and embrace of housing vouchers. To present a more comprehensive and intersectional history of the Reagan administration’s transition to housing vouchers, I employ an alternative methodological lens that I call Black feminist critical policy studies. This paper traces how the Office of Management and Budget and Housing and Urban Development officials relied on obscured racial and gender bias in their debate informing Reagan's alternative housing voucher program. By revealing the social bias endemic in the Reagan administration’s housing debate, this article illustrates that housing vouchers were not simply a neutral, cost-efficient policy tool but helped ensure low-income black mothers’ continued subjection to anti-welfare backlash, housing discrimination, and paternal supervision.

Keywords

Housing VouchersLow-Income Black WomenWelfare ReformAusterityand Black Feminist Critical Policy Studies
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Fall 2019 , pp. 535 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2020 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arax, Mark (1985a). Welfare Project Periled as Private Sector Fails to Respond. Los Angeles Times, November 19.Google Scholar
Allegra, (1981). Women and Children Hardest Hit By Reagan’s Budget Axe. Off Our Backs, 11(4): 6–7.Google Scholar
Arax, Mark (1985b). Self-Sufficiency Project Purses Elusive Dream. Los Angeles Times, September 5.Google Scholar
Arena, John (2012). Driven From New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.10.5749/minnesota/9780816677467.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arias, Melanie Kayser Schmidt (2013). Experimental Citizens: The Experimental Housing Allowance Program and Housing Vouchers as American Social Policy in the 1970s and 1980s. January 1, diss, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Berger, Michele Tracy (2005). Coming Out of the Shadows: Rethinking Gender, Deviance, and Feminist Critical Policy Studies. NWSA Journal, (17)1: 212–225.10.2979/NWS.2005.17.1.212CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumenthal, Sidney (1980). Reagan’s Brain-Trusters. Boston Globe, July 13, p. 1.Google Scholar
Chappell, Marisa (2010). The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.10.9783/9780812201567CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Lizabeth (2003). A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Coleman, Milton (1983). More Reliant on Aid Than Whites, Blacks Hit Harder by Cuts. Washington Post, December 4.Google Scholar
Glazer, Nathan (1981). “The Zone of Destruction.” The Public Interest, Fall.Google Scholar
Goetz, Edward G. (2018). The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hancock, Ange-Marie (2006). The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Hays, R. Allen (2012). The Federal Government and Urban Housing. New York: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Huscock, Howard (2004). The Housing Reform That Backfired. City Journal (Summer).Google Scholar
Huscock, Howard (2000). Let’s End the Housing Vouchers. City Journal (Autumn).Google Scholar
Inwood, Joshua (2014). Neoliberal Racism: the ‘Southern Strategy’ and Expanding Geographies of White Supremacy. Social & Cultural Geography, 16(4): 407–423.10.1080/14649365.2014.994670CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Maria Miro (1985). Plan Designed to Aid Women Family Heads Avoid Welfare. Providence Journal, October 9.Google Scholar
Jones-Deweever, Avis, Dill, Bonnie Thorton, and Schram, Sanford (2009). Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in the Workforce, Education, and Training Under Welfare Reform. In Dill, Bonnie Thornton and Zambrana, Ruth E. (Eds.) Emerging Intersections Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy and Practice, pp. 150–179. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Jeremy (2016). Housing Vouchers: A Case Study of the Partisan Policy Cycle. Social Science History, 40(1): 63–91.10.1017/ssh.2015.81CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Daniel Stedman (2014). Maters of the University: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kempster, Stephen, and Parry, Ken (2011). Grounded Theory and Leadership Research: A Critical Realist Perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(1): 160–120.10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.12.010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurwa, Rahim (2015). Deconcentration without Integration: Examining the Social Outcomes of Housing Choice Vouchers Movement in Los Angeles County. City & Community, 14(4): 364–391.10.1111/cico.12134CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawler, Joseph (2018). Ben Carson: Overhauling HUD rents ‘just as effective as building more housing.’ Washington Examiner, May 4.Google Scholar
Malone, Julia (1981). Low-cost Housing: Reagan Cuts Spark Debate Over U.S. Aid. The Christian Science Monitor, March 30.Google Scholar
Mariano, Ann (1986). Housing Budget Criticized. Washington Post, February 8.Google Scholar
Mariano, Ann (1985a). HUD Awarded More Funds Than It Sought. Washington Post, December 7.Google Scholar
Mariano, Ann (1985b). Housing Policy Faces New Challenges. Washington Post, November 24.Google Scholar
McGirr, Lisa (2002). Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
National Archives at College Park. College Park, MD.Google Scholar
New York Times, The (1976). ‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign. The New York Times, February 15.Google Scholar
Orlebeke, Charles J. (2000). The Evolution of Low-Income Housing Policy, 1949 to 1999. Housing Policy Debate, 11(2): 489–520.10.1080/10511482.2000.9521375CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierson, Paul (1994). Dismantling the Welfare State?: Reagan, Thatche,r and the Politics of Retrenchment. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511805288CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piven, Frances Fox (2001). Globalization, American Politics, and Welfare Policy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , 577(September): 26–37.10.1177/000271620157700103CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rich, Spencer (1983). Blacks Worse Off Than a Year Ago, Urban League Study Finds. The Washington Post, January 20.Google Scholar
Roberts, Dorothy (2014). Complicating the Triangle of Race, Class, and State: The Insights of Black Feminists. Ethics and Racial Studies, 37(10): 1776–1782.10.1080/01419870.2014.931988CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Dorothy (1998). Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, David (1981). Blacks Would Feel Extra Impact From Cuts Proposed by President. The New York Times, June 2.Google Scholar
Salins, Peter D. (1980). The Ecology of Housing Destruction: Economic Effects of Public Intervention in the Housing Market . New York: New York University Press for the International Center for Economic Policy Studies.Google Scholar
Scott, Darryl (1997). Contempt & Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.10.5149/uncp/9780807846353CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Neil (1970). Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People. Journal of the American Planning Association 45(4): 538–48.10.1080/01944367908977002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Rich, and Evans Teeley, Sandra (1981). HUD Aides Warn Cuts could Mean Riots at Projects: HUD Officials Warn Spending Cuts could Cause Riots at Projects. The Washington Post, December 4.Google Scholar
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. House of Representatives (1988). Hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development, H.R. 918, Jesse Gray Housing Act, 100th Cong., Second Session, May 11.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. Senate (1982). Hearings before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development, Fiscal Year 1983 HUD Authorizations, 97th Cong., Second Session, April 15.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. Senate (1982a). Hearings before the Committee on the Budget, Budget Issues for Fiscal Year 1983, 97th Congress, Second Session, March 23.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. House of Representatives (1982b). Hearings before the Committee on Budget, H.R. 5731, Housing and Urban-Rural Recovery Act of 1982, Part 1, 97th Cong., Second Session, March 23.Google Scholar
Vale, Lawrence (2013). Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226012599.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vale, Lawrence J., and Freemark, Yonah (2012). From Public Housing to Public-Private Housing. Journal of the American Planning Association, 78(4): 379–402.10.1080/01944363.2012.737985CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Rhonda (2014). The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality. New York: Oxford University.Google Scholar
Winnick, Louis (1995). The Triumph of Housing Allowance Programs: How a Fundamental Policy Conflict Was Resolved. Cityscape, 1(3): 95–121.Google Scholar