[4] The Act was designed to stop the tide of bank foreclosures on family homes during the Great Depression.

Both the FHA and the FSLIC worked to create the backbone of the mortgage and home building industries, until the 1980s.

[5] (See Savings and loan crisis and Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 that ended the FSLIC, whose activities were moved to the FDIC.)

The government's efforts were "primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families," he says.

African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.