How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

by P.E. Moskowitz

In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.