American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt repudiated the federal government’s traditional noninvolvement with the private housing market in an effort to revitalize the moribund construction industry. Under the auspices of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration’s Housing Division purchased or condemned land and built a modest amount of low-income housing. With the passage of the Wagner-Steagall Act in 1937, the federal government assumed permanent responsibility for the construction of public housing by offering generous loans and grants to local housing authorities. By the early 1960s, concern for the poor led reformers to look beyond the nation’s big cities and to consider the provision of low-income housing for Native Americans on isolated reservations. This new use for public housing was due to a fundamental change in federal Indian policy that called for a greater commitment to the development of reservation land. Rejecting the policy of termination, whereby the government sought to dissolve tribal allegiances and foster assimilation, federal authorities attempted to improve housing as a key component of the effort to revitalize reservation life. After a halting beginning, public housing proliferated on reservations so much so that federal assistance became a crucial component of Indian housing on tribal land. By the 1990s, with public housing projects being demolished nationwide and privatization schemes being developed for the nation’s poor, the greatest success of the ill-fated public housing experiment could arguably be found on Native American reservations. In addition, public housing became a highly visible manifestation of the federal government’s endorsement of Indian self-determination. In the mid-twentieth century, reformers seeking to enlist government aid in the provision of low-income housing found some of the worst living conditions on Indian reservations. A Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) study conducted in 1962 placed the median annual income for Indians at $1,500- a figure several thousand dollars below the average in the United States- and the 360,000 Indians who lived on reservations at that time relied heavily on government support for their continued existence.