The administration’s anti-immigrant housing policy reflects a long history of xenophobia in public housing

I have found that the same far-right groups that sought to defeat public housing construction and maintain racially restrictive agreements in post-World War II Los Angeles also advocated to ban immigrants from U.S. housing programs. Among the leaders of these efforts was the far-right politician and activist Gerald L.K. Smith. Described in 1976 by historian John Morton Blum as “the most infamous American fascist,” Smith helped bridge the American right’s 1940s conspiratorial and isolationist America First era and its 1960s anti-civil rights era.