Suburbanization was promoted and enabled by federal loan programs which encouraged greenfield development, in distinction to urban housing development. The earl

Suburbanization was promoted and enabled by federal loan programs which encouraged greenfield development, in distinction to urban housing development. The earliest of the federal housing loan programs were started in the 1930s, to remedy the failure of the banking system to provide stable long-term housing loans. Note that the 1930s federal loan programs evaluated neighborhoods with racial delineations and evaluations. The federal "Home Owners Loan Corporation" initiated these neighborhood evaluations, and the policies were used by the later "Federal Housing Authority". In 1938, Congress established the "Federal National Mortgage Association". In 1944, Congress passed the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944" also known as the GI Bill, authorizing the Veterans' Administration to make low cost housing loans. All of these housing loan programs enabled the financing of suburban house building. Quotation from the linked article: "During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt had launched a federal agency called the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), meant to protect struggling homeowners from losing their homes. The HOLC later implemented a system of rating neighborhoods with letter grades to help more systematically discern property values. Later, the Federal Housing Authority continued to use those HOLC standards when issuing mortgages. As historian Jackson has written, “For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace. Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy.”