n the country.
That study "found New York, Boston, St. Louis just awful, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia considerably less poisonous, but couldn't think of much the federal government could do about the problem other than restrict immigration" (Mayer 179 80).
Sixteen years later in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Housing Commission with only temporary powers, and that body came up with a far more vast and specific program of improvement than had the 1892 Labor Commissioner. The Roosevelt Housing Commission "recommended that the federal government condemn, purchase, and rehabilitate much of the nation's slum housing" (Mayer 180). However, at that time, unlike later in the Depression years, the poor and the immigrants suffering the most in those slums simply did not have the clout to bring on themselves the kind of national attention they needed and the kind of attention which would focus on the poor's housing needs in the 1930s. Therefore, the call for federal involvement went unheeded in 1908. In fact, as Mayer notes, the idea of federal ownership of housing for purposes of righting slum conditions has never proved a popular one in the United States, although in England, the East Bloc, and other nations such a notion has proved feasible and fairly effective. In 1918, however, the U.S. Government was involved in such ownership when it hurriedly constructed 16,000 units for war workers, although immediately after World War I the units were sold (Mayer 180).
The federal government first became deeply involved in housing problems only after those problems affected the lives of far more than merely the chronic poor and immigrants.
As Fisher writes, "With the Great Depression, the role of government in housing . . . underwent a fundamental change in theory if not always in practice. The first federal responses to the housing side of the Depression crisis construction of new housing plunged by the mid...