Johnson signs a new cabinet department into being, and names it for the cities

By 1965, federal housing and urban programs were scattered across multiple agencies, with no single department responsible for coordinating them. On September 9, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Department of Housing and Urban Development Act, creating HUD as the federal government's eleventh cabinet department. The law gave the government sixty days to stand up the new agency, folding scattered housing programs under one roof for the first time. It was one more piece of Johnson's Great Society agenda, following years of housing proposals that had stalled in Congress…