Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Statement by the President Following Passage of the Housing Bill by the House of Representatives.

June 30, 1965

THE House of Representatives today took a historic step toward assuring every American a decent place to live.

The passage of the housing bill--with its path-breaking provision for rent supplements-gives us new and expanded weapons for meeting the housing needs of all our people.

The rent supplements will provide new homes for hundreds of thousands of our people now condemned to slums and substandard homes.

It will give private industry an opportunity and an incentive to build for our future needs and to overcome our present failures.

It will help toward eliminating the arbitrary and unhealthy division of families and communities by income and age--an inevitable consequence of many present programs.

With the new tools of this bill, and with others yet to come, we can move toward the construction of communities and neighborhoods rather than housing units and isolated projects. For the city we aspire to is not just a collection of homes, but a community in which men and their families can live the good life.

Note: The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 was approved by the President on August 10, 1965 (see Item 4:15).

Lyndon B. Johnson, Statement by the President Following Passage of the Housing Bill by the House of Representatives. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241649

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