Part of the 20-building Brewster-Douglass housing project site in Detroit, seen in March 2011, two years after the last residents moved out. (Paul Sancya/AP)

Coded language, by definition, conveys much saying very little. And so those words allegedly uttered in McKinney, Tex., before a confrontation between police and black teens — "Go back to your Section 8 home" — evoked a particular and vivid set of assumptions.

The words were offensive because of what we think they meant in the charged context earlier this month in which police were called on black teens using a private community pool in a mostly white neighborhood. The teen who recounted what happened described those words as a "racial slur." We can imagine they meant that these children came from poor families, that the government helped their mothers pay the rent, that their quality as people was reflected in the quality of their housing.

In a broad sense, this is an American tradition: conflating where people live with who they are. "We've been doing that as a society for a really, really long time," says Lawrence Vale, an MIT professor who has written extensively about public housing. "And it's been racialized for a lot of that history."

This is the history of how public housing in the United States — originally conceived as enviable housing for working whites — has become a prism through which some Americans see poor blacks. It's a history that explains how some of the most visible public projects in big cities became, over decades, almost exclusively black, how the residents living there came to be among the country's most deeply impoverished. Today, households receiving government housing assistance — from traditional public housing to the private-market vouchers it inspired — live on average incomes of less than $13,000 a year.

This is a history that also helps explain how the outdated name of a bureaucratic-sounding federal program, Section 8, became a racially coded put-down.


A mother and child, residents of the Cabrini-Green public housing project in Chicago, play in a playground adjoining the project in 1981. (Charles Knoblock/AP)

The main public housing program in the United States was originally created in 1937 as the one of the last major acts of the New Deal. The goal of that act, though, was not to house the poor, but to revive the housing industry. In the middle of the Depression, housing construction had collapsed, and many communities faced a severe housing shortage.

In response, the federal government paid for the construction of hundreds of thousands of new housing units, many built on land where slums had been razed. The homes were considered modern and pristine, a dramatic step toward better housing from overcrowded urban tenements. Residents paid rent that was supposed to cover the costs of upkeep.

Most of these early projects were built for whites, and whites of a particular kind: the "barely poor," as Vale puts it — the upwardly mobile working class, with fathers working in factory jobs. Housing agencies required tenant families to have stable work and married parents. Children out of wedlock were rejected. Housing authority managers visited prospective tenants, often unannounced, to check on the cleanliness of their homes and their housekeeping habits.

"The idea — although people didn't tend to voice it explicitly — was that you could be too poor for public housing," Vale says. In many cities, the truly poor remained in the tenements.

Where comparable public housing was developed for blacks, it was strictly segregated. St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe project, completed in 1954, housed whites in the Igoe Apartments and blacks in the Pruitt Homes. More often, though, housing for blacks and whites was located in separate parts of a city.

By the 1960s, the tenants living in public housing began to grow more deeply poor and, particularly in big cities, much less white, in large part thanks to another set of active housing policies pushed next by the federal government.

In cities like Chicago and Detroit, public housing "became a black program," says the Economic Policy Institute's Richard Rothstein, "because the Federal Housing Administration created a different program for whites, which was a single-family suburban program."

From barely poor to deep poverty

The Federal Housing Administration financed the construction of new single-family homes in suburban developments (and government money plotted and paved the roads to get there). The FHA and the Veteran's Administration also guaranteed cheap mortgages for the families who moved there, making this new kind of owner-occupied housing often just as affordable as rents had been in public housing projects in the city. Like many of those original projects, though, the new homes were explicitly unavailable to blacks. The FHA required developers to use restrictive covenants barring blacks, and it denied black families the mortgages that allowed working-class whites to leave public housing.

As the white "barely poor" moved out