Federal Housing Administration in the context of "Department of Housing and Urban Development"

The National Act of 1934, H.R. 9620, Pub. L. 73–479, 48 Stat. 1246, enacted June 27, 1934, also called the Better Housing Program, was part of the New Deal passed during the Great Depression in order to make housing and home mortgages more affordable. It created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC).

The Act was designed to stop the tide of bank foreclosures on family homes during the Great Depression. With this, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used this act to fulfill his goal towards a government program funded by private investments, avoiding the reliance on taxpayer funds. The passing of the bill alleviated unemployment by making credit more accessible through banks and lending organizations. Both the FHA and the FSLIC became the main federal agencies that worked to create the backbone of the mortgage and home building industries, until the 1980s. The FHA's guarantee against losses for mortgage lenders allowed for a system of regular monthly mortgage payments. The FHA mortgage insurance program became an effective strategy for increasing investment in the mortgage market and still continues to be. (See Savings and loan crisis and Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 that ended the FSLIC, whose activities were moved to the FDIC.)

Broadacre City was an urban or suburban development concept proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright throughout most of his lifetime. He presented the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932. A few years later he unveiled a very detailed twelve-by-twelve-foot (3.7 × 3.7 m) scale model representing a hypothetical four-square-mile (10 km) community. The model was crafted by the student interns who worked for him at Taliesin, and financed byEdgar Kaufmann. It was initially displayed at an Industrial Arts Exposition in the Forum at the Rockefeller Center starting on April 15, 1935. After the New York exposition, Kaufmann arranged to have the model displayed in Pittsburgh at an exposition titled "New Homes for Old", sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration. The exposition opened on June 18 on the 11th floor of Kaufmann's store. The model is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Wright went on to refine the concept in later books and in articles until his death in 1959.

Residential segregation is the physical separation of two or more groups into different neighborhoods—a form of segregation that "sorts population groups into various neighborhood contexts and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level". While it has traditionally been associated with racial segregation, it generally refers to the separation of populations based on some criteria (e.g. race, ethnicity, income/class).

While overt segregation is illegal in the United States, housing patterns show significant and persistent segregation along racial and class lines. The history of American social and public policies, like Jim Crow laws, exclusionary covenants, and the Federal Housing Administration's early redlining policies, set the tone for segregation in housing that has sustained consequences for present-day residential patterns.

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 Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA), or Ginnie Mae, is a government-owned corporation of the United States Federal Government within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It was founded in 1968 and works to expand affordable housing by guaranteeing housing loans (mortgages) thereby lowering financing costs such as interest rates for those loans. It does that by guaranteeing investors the on-time payment of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) even if homeowners default on the underlying mortgages and the homes are foreclosed upon.

Ginnie Mae guarantees only securities backed by single-family and multifamily loans insured by government agencies, including the Federal Housing Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Public and Indian Housing, and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development. Ginnie Mae neither originates nor purchases mortgage loans nor buys, sells or issues securities. The credit risk on the mortgage collateral underlying its mortgage-backed securities primarily resides with other insuring government agencies.