In 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration initiated a dramatic policy shift towards a new housing voucher program, which simultaneously resulted in a near-halt in public and project-based assisted housing funding. When analyzing this historic policy shift, many affordable housing scholars have overemphasized race-absent narratives about fiscal austerity to explain the Reagan administration’s policy rejection of public housing and embrace of housing vouchers. To present a more comprehensive and intersectional history of the Reagan administration’s transition to housing vouchers, I employ an alternative methodological lens that I call Black feminist critical policy studies. This paper traces how the Office of Management and Budget and Housing and Urban Development officials relied on obscured racial and gender bias in their debate informing Reagan's alternative housing voucher program. By revealing the social bias endemic in the Reagan administration’s housing debate, this article illustrates that housing vouchers were not simply a neutral, cost-efficient policy tool but helped ensure low-income black mothers’ continued subjection to anti-welfare backlash, housing discrimination, and paternal supervision.

1982年，罗纳德·里根（Ronald Reagan）总统的政府开始了朝着新的住房券计划的重大政策转变，与此同时，公共和基于项目的住房补贴也几乎停滞了。在分析这种历史性的政策转变时，许多负担得起的住房学者过分强调了关于财政紧缩的缺乏种族的叙述，以解释里根政府拒绝公共住房和接受住房券的政策。为了呈现里根政府向住房券过渡的更全面和交叉的历史，我采用了另一种方法论视角，我称之为黑人女权主义批判政策研究。本文追踪了管理和预算办公室以及住房和城市发展官员在辩论时如何依靠模糊的种族和性别偏见，以告知里根的替代住房券计划。通过揭示里根政府住房辩论中普遍存在的社会偏见，本文说明了住房券不仅是一种中立的，具有成本效益的政策工具，而且还有助于确保低收入的黑人母亲继续遭受反福利的强烈反对，住房歧视，和父亲的监督。