"You emphasize the importance of FDR and WW2 as essential to the formation of a bond between the government and the people, and to a commitment to the idea of “the right to a decent home and a living wage for every American." But both the FDR presidency and WW2 were one time events whose influence was bound to fade, and their impact appears to have been shallower than you seem to assume. What happened was Americans reverted to the values that dominated before FDR. These were the values of rugged individualism, Social Darwinism, and unregulated capitalism--anti-social and anti-government values with no commitment to maintaining a middle class. America is on track to resemble Mexico both demographically and economically, and there isn’t going to be any heroic generation that will magically come along and reestablish the quaint values of the New Deal. We're just a banana republic with nukes now." Glaucon X
My own views on these various topics differ markedly from both GX and DK.
Re housing:
'New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to “double-up.” The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, “A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization.” Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years—and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases—by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee, including Frank L. Sundstrom, Representative of New Jersey, created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, New Jersey spokespersons for tenants quoted the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner legislation and described housing conditions, while a number of tenants related their own difficult living situations.'
Wages, pretty damn sad story:
https://equitablegrowth.org/intellectual-history-minimum-wage-overtime/
Re housing:
'New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to “double-up.” The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, “A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization.” Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years—and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases—by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee, including Frank L. Sundstrom, Representative of New Jersey, created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, New Jersey spokespersons for tenants quoted the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner legislation and described housing conditions, while a number of tenants related their own difficult living situations.'
Wages, pretty damn sad story:
https://equitablegrowth.org/intellectual-history-minimum-wage-overtime/
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