Where are Poor People to Live?: Transforming Public Housing Communities

by Larry Bennett, Janet L. Smith, Patricia a Wright

This groundbreaking book shows how major shifts in federal policy are spurring local public housing authorities to demolish their high-rise, low-income developments, and replace them with affordable low-rise, mixed income communities. It focuses on Chicago, and that city's affordable housing crisis, but it provides analytical frameworks that can be applied to developments in every American city. "Where Are Poor People to Live?" provides valuable new empirical information on public housing, framed by a critical perspective that shows how shifts in national policy have devolved the U.S. welfare state to local government, while promoting market-based action as the preferred mode of public policy execution. The editors and chapter authors share a concern that proponents of public housing restructuring give little attention to the social, political, and economic risks involved in the current campaign to remake public housing. At the same time, the book examines the public housing redevelopment process in Chicago, with an eye to identifying opportunities for redeveloping projects and building new communities across America that will be truly hospitable to those most in need of assisted housing. While the focus is on affordable housing, the issues addressed here cut across the broad policy areas of housing and community development, and will impact the entire field of urban politics and planning.

340 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This edited volume is a great reference for scholars and students interested in U.S. housing policy. The authors describe and organize historical events relevant to public housing. Because of this historical analysis, the volume stands as a useful reference. However, whereas a historian would emphasize facts and events, the contributors to this volume focus more on the social and political context underlying U.S. housing policy.

Structurally, the book shifts from national to local emphasis. The first three chapters address federal housing legislation, with emphasis on the HOPE VI program. Much of the remainder of the book focuses on Chicago and, consistent with this, a number of the contributors are located in Chicago. Again, the Chicago chapters shift from broad to specific, starting with a chapter on the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, and proceeding to describe housing reform at specific Chicago developments.

The volume is not politically neutral. The contributors are uniformly critical of current U.S. housing policy that favors: (1) mixed income development to reduce geographic concentrations of poor persons, (2) private sector involvement in redeveloping public housing communities, (3) “Section 8” vouchers for the poor, and (4) “new urban” architectural styles. The authors argue that rhetoric does not match reality. Contemporary policies ostensibly designed improve the lot of poor citizens have maintained the status quo or, worse, worked to their disadvantage. Here are two examples cited by contributors: (1) poor citizens are provided vouchers to seek rental units in the private market, but end up in the same low income neighborhoods, absent social services embedded in public housing programs, and (2) areas that were already beginning to gentrify prior to public housing reforms could now use new public housing policy, with its emphasis on mixed income communities, to chip away at public housing stock without providing meaningful alternatives. In yet another interesting aspect of the volume, the authors describe organized efforts of public housing residents to resist public housing reform.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok, I am partial, this book has a chapter about the organization I used to work for. But it looks at the history of public housing and the political and ideological perspectives that have created the current public housing system.

Then, the book looks closely at the Chicago experience in what is a mostly a pretty critical way. The focus on the lack of tenant participation in the redevelopment process and the contradictions involved with moving people out of the projects to other poor, segregated neighborhoods right at the time when the areas around the public housing are gentrifiyng and offering tenants all kinds of opportunities.

Took me a few years to finish, but if you are interested in housing policy this is a good read.