Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation

by Robert J. Chaskin, Mark L. Joseph

For many years Chicago’s looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment—via the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation—has been perhaps the most startling change in the city’s urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification?

In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph’s findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward.

Genres: Urban Planning, Nonfiction, Sociology

344 pages, Hardcover

First published November 16, 2015

Reviews

[Liz Hayes]

This is not a vacation read but this is a must read for anyone working in the field of affordable housing development/management/investment. If you are curious about mixed income housing and are coming from a background in housing finance or management or are a social service provider in a mixed income setting, or if you live in Chicago and want to know more about the CHA and their “plan for transformation,” you should read this book. I hope they do a follow up after the properties have aged another five or ten years. I hope they do a similar analysis of Cabrini since that is my neighborhood. Not an easy read (I am not an academic), but a must read.

[Jeramey]

A deep dive into the outcomes of Chicago's efforts to transform the site of former public housing high rises into mixed-income communities.

A very academic book that is probably best for those in the field.

[Charlie Rodberg]

Loved the case studies here, really was a big help in my housing research paper. Also greatly increased my knowledge of the subject. A bit long winded in some places, but a very in depth analysis of the Plan of Transformation in chicago.