Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Tease: 75th Anniversary of Public Housing in US Coming This Weekend.

On September 1, 1937 the first public housing law was signed into law, so this weekend we will hit the 75th anniversary of public housing in the US.   

I will be doing a presentation at the Cascade Chapter NAHRO conference in Vancouver on Monday September 10 (event page HERE) that will include a presentation with links to a wide variety of on line public housing background materials, including Oregon materials, so for now I will stick to a personal note. 

My Family Public Housing History Began in 1944.
I have boxes of old stuff that I haven't had the heart to throw away. I recently began the slow process of finally throwing some of this stuff away and I ran across an old rent receipt (pasted below) that my mother had for NorWayne, a large public housing project built near Detroit as part of the war effort (picture of a NorWayne unit also included).  Looks like rent was $35 a month and utilities were less than $5.  Rent was for December 1944, just 9 months after my brother was born, and a year before my sister and 3 years before I was born.  

Later, after my parents divorced, we moved into another large public housing project in Detroit when I was 5 years old and we lived there until I started high school.



Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog

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