David Van Riper Director of Spatial Analysis, ISRDI and Ryan Allen, Associate Professor, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota

Between 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census (April 1, 1940), the U.S government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing. Aside from archival accounts focused on specific cities or housing projects, we know little detail about the early public housing tenants who benefitted from this housing. Existing literature asserts that residents who experienced a descent from middle class status to poverty during the Great Depression, called the “submerged middle class” by some scholars, were targets for public housing during this era. To investigate this claim, we use a unique methodology that identifies 101,482 residents of public housing in the U.S. at the time of the census and comparison groups of residents from neighborhoods and cities where public housing developments were located. We also successfully link a subsample of each of these groups of residents with the 1930 Census. Results from our descriptive analysis suggest that public housing did indeed select relatively well educated, upwardly mobile residents. However, we find limited evidence that public housing residents were part of a submerged middle class. Rather, public housing residents tended to be middle class in 1930 and remained middle class in 1940.

Captions are autogenerated and may contain errors.