Housing Act of 1937
act of the United States Congress
The Housing Act of 1937 (Pub. L. 75–412, 50 Stat. 888, enacted September 1, 1937), formally the "United States Housing Act of 1937" and sometimes called the Wagner–Steagall Act, provided for subsidies to be paid from the United States federal government to local public housing agencies (LHAs) to improve living conditions for low-income families.
The act created the United States Housing Authority within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The act builds on the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the Federal Housing Administration. Both the 1934 Act and the 1937 Act were influenced by American housing reformers of the period, with Catherine Bauer Wurster chief among them. Bauer drafted much of this legislation and served as a Director in the United States Housing Authority, the agency created by the 1937 Act to control the payment of subsidies, for two years.
The sponsoring legislators were Representative Henry B. Steagall, Democrat of Alabama, and Senator Robert F. Wagner, Democrat of New York.
Although initially controversial, it gained acceptance and provisions of the Act have remained, but in amended form.
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The Housing Act of 1937 sought to eliminate what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described as "habitations which not only fail to provide the physical benefits of modern civilization but breed disease and impair the health of future generations."
The act had been successfully lobbied for by the New York City tenants' City-Wide Tenants Council and other public housing advocates of the time.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5916076. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937 and 1934.
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