Letter to the Recipient of the First Home Improvement Grant Under the New Housing Act.
Dear Mrs. Whelan:
You are the first in the Nation to receive one of the new housing rehabilitation grants, authorized for urban renewal areas only a month ago when I signed the landmark Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965.
While your city is arranging a special ceremony to award this grant to you, I want to add the congratulations of your President on this signal occasion.
Our urban renewal program is a cooperative effort by the city and the national government, and by the citizen and the private enterprise contractor, to renew and rehabilitate our urban environment. Because of the new law, the Congress has made it possible for many more residents of urban renewal areas to pay for necessary home improvements without having to move.
I hope you will soon be seeing and enjoying the results of the rehabilitation work that now gets underway on your home. And I hope that those of your fellow citizens in the "West End" area, in other parts of St. Louis, and across the United States, who could not previously participate in urban renewal in this direct way, will follow your example.
Sincerely,
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
[Mrs. Annie Laurie Whelan, 944 Laurel Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri 63112]
Note: The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 was approved by the President on August 10, 1965 (see Item 415).
Lyndon B. Johnson, Letter to the Recipient of the First Home Improvement Grant Under the New Housing Act. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/240556