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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: rosemary.ndubuizu@georgetown.edu.
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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 

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