Public Housing, Redevelopment, and the Governance of Poverty

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-41
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Subsidized Housing ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Planning History ◽  
Federal Program ◽  
Concentrated Poverty ◽  
Policy Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Housing Redevelopment

This chapter provides a brief overview American public housing history, linked to the broader planning history of slum clearance and urban renewal. It steps back to consider the longer history of efforts to define the problem of poverty and its governance. It then traces the evolution of deeply subsidized housing programs, revealing decades of expansion, followed by a more recent contraction. It next introduces HOPE VI, the main federal program of public housing redevelopment, explaining its policy evolution, efforts to combat concentrated poverty, and links to gentrification. It provides a method for categorizing the significant variety of efforts to implement HOPE VI projects, showing that mixed-income housing can be pursued in many different ways, in accordance with divergent aims. By identifying the larger national pattern of HOPE VI deployment in an unprecedented way, it situates the book’s four detailed case examinations in a more holistic context.

The Rise and Fall of St. Thomas

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The State ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Slum Area ◽  
The 1960S

Chapters 3–5 focus on New Orleans to illustrate one dominant strand of HOPE VI practice—the confluence of a weak housing authority and a Big Developer governance constellation in a city without a robust tradition of coordinated tenant empowerment. Chapter 3 traces the rise and fall of the St. Thomas development, completed in 1941 and later extended in 1952. This replaced a mixed-race “slum” area with public housing for white tenants, an act entailing a substantial neighborhood purge. The fifteen-hundred-unit development shifted to primarily black occupancy following desegregation in the 1960s and subsequently underwent disinvestment that led to a protracted decline. Meanwhile, the Louisiana legislature rescinded the state enabling legislation for urban renewal, thereby limiting its impact on both slum clearance while also curtailing the rise of community organizing. White preservationists stopped the Riverfront Expressway, but no one stopped Interstate 10 from devastating a black neighborhood.

Reversing the Tide of Suburban Families? The Design, Marketing, and Occupancy of Urban Renewal’s High-rise Housing

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 228-255
Author(s):  
Francesca Russello Ammon
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Occupational History ◽  
High Rise ◽  
Apartment Buildings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Site Planning ◽  
Us Cities

During the postwar urban renewal era, many US cities constructed high-rise downtown apartment buildings to lure families back from the suburbs. These projects met demand for high-end downtown housing. They often remain occupied today—in stark contrast to the more rapid demise of many other redevelopment projects designed for shopping, entertainment, or public housing use. Yet, they also often fell short of their larger demographic goals. This occupational history of New Haven, Connecticut’s first downtown high-rises shows that the projects’ architecture, site planning, public realm, and rental structures never lived up to either suburban alternatives or their own marketing promises.

The Fall of Connie Chambers and the Rise of Posadas Sentinel

2018 ◽  
pp. 256-289
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Housing Market ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Community Services ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Revitalization Effort ◽  
The City ◽  
Housing Units ◽  
Low Income Households

Chapter 9 chronicles the demise of Tucson’s Connie Chambers project during the 1980s and its replacement by Posadas Sentinel. The city’s Community Services Department (CSD) used HOPE VI to redevelop the property as Posadas Sentinel, part of a wider revitalization effort in the surrounding barrio. Acutely conscious of neighborhood critics who feared further insensitive urban renewal, the city assiduously worked to maximize housing opportunities for residents of Connie Chambers. As with Orchard Gardens but unlike River Garden, Tucson’s city leaders premised the redevelopment on occupancy by very low-income households, while seeking other ways to diversify range of incomes. The CSD replaced all two hundred public housing units but, rather than put these all back into the original barrio site, took advantage of the city’s peculiar housing market and scattered much of the housing across the city by purchasing homes in a variety of new or vacant subdivisions.

The Rise of Orchard Park

2018 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Housing Conditions ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Highway Projects ◽  
Public Housing Project ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
The 1960S

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Boston’s version of community-centered HOPE VI practice. Chapter 6 narrates the rise and fall of the Orchard Park public housing project while also explaining the origins of Boston’s Plebs governance constellation that brought such deeply felt resident engagement to the cause of public housing preservation. Boston’s city leaders created Orchard Park in 1942 to house upwardly mobile workers. As in other cities, public housing conditions deteriorating after the 1960s, but in Boston—partly in response to overzealous urban renewal and highway projects surrounding Orchard Park—community-driven movements such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative emerged to protect low-income residents. The Boston Housing Authority’s board gained a “tenant-oriented majority” in 1970, and, in the 1980s, a receiver-led BHA completed major public housing redevelopment efforts that remained 100 percent public housing. Elected officials increasingly found it politically imperative to support residential neighborhoods rather than just downtown business interests.

SOCIO-CULTURAL AND REGULATORY DIMENSION OF THE HOUSING PROBLEM

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (72) (2) ◽  
pp. 134-141
Author(s):  
N. G. Krasavtseva
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Housing Construction ◽  
Housing Problem ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

The article examines the evolution of the population’s priorities in relation to housing, examines the legal regulation and socio-cultural aspects of public housing construction at various stages of the history of the USSR. The research reveals the impact of the developing industry on the country’s economy.

Privatizing the production of settler colonial landscapes: ‘Authenticity’ and imaginative geography in Wadi Al-Salib, Haifa

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442094675
Author(s):  
Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Property Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Geographical Study ◽  
Imaginative Geography ◽  
History Of

This article explores how urban settler-colonial landscapes are produced in the neoliberal era. Adopting an anti-colonial approach, the article addresses practices of landscape production through the history of Wadi Al-Salib in Haifa after the driving out of its inhabitants in 1948. A micro geographical study of three Palestinian refugees’ houses, sold by the state to private real estate companies during the last two decades, constitutes the empirical mainstay of the article. Located in Wadi Al-Salib where rapid neoliberal urban renewal schemes hope to raise property values and enact demographic change, these houses are often marketed to upper-class Israeli Jews as “authentic”. Such branding indicates that the privatization of the Palestinian refugees' houses may also signify privatization of the colonial imagination, and a broader shift of the landscape into a collage of marketable images, echoing an ‘aesthetic violence’ that evokes past colonial landscapes. Such references create several hyper-realities in the same place, thus canonizing colonial landscapes’ imaginaries.

The Politics of Urban Renewal

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-280
Author(s):  
P. J. Madgwick
Keyword(s):  
Title I ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Residential Development ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
High Income ◽  
American Family ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Slum Dwellers

The Housing Act of 1949 established in Title I the goal of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’. To achieve this goal the Federal Government was to support, by grants and by its legal powers to acquire land, a massive programme of public housing: ‘…it was the first and, until the Act of 1968, the only public housing measure that authorized action that bore some reasonable relation to need’. Nevertheless, the targets set by the 1949 Act for 1954 have still not been reached. Subsequent legislation shifted the emphasis of the programme from public housing to broader schemes of urban renewal, including non-residential development and middle- and high-income housing. The most serious aspect of this neglect of the needs of the poor has been the inadequate management of relocation for those displaced by renewal. For many slum-dwellers in the 1950s ‘urban renewal’ came to mean ‘Negro removal’.

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