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 Meanwhile, the Louisiana legislature rescinded the state enabling legislation for urban renewal, thereby limiting its impact on both slum clearance while also curtailing the rise of community organizing.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.

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.

The Rise of Urban Renewal and the Connie Chambers Project

2018 ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Public Housing Project ◽  
Housing Growth

Chapters 8 and 9 consider the case of Tucson, which reveals a third possible approach to public housing governance and redevelopment, typifying the Publica Major constellation. This shows what can happen when responsibility for public housing remains more wholly vested in a well-functioning public sector, subject neither to the whims of private developers, as in New Orleans, nor to the sway of empowered low-income tenants, as in Boston. Chapter 8 narrates the complex and reluctant emergence of Tucson’s two-hundred-unit Connie Chambers public housing project, completed in 1967 as a supplement to an earlier project known as La Reforma. Public housing growth remained inseparable from the deeply contested process of urban renewal that decimated eighty acres of the Mexican American downtown barrio and purged its residents. Those contemplating redevelopment of Connie Chambers, which was forged in lingering controversy, knew that they could not repeat the earlier ethnically motivated displacement.

After the Projects

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Rental Housing ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
National Initiative

At a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities, After the Projects investigates the contested spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment. Public housing practices differ markedly from city to city and, collectively, reveal deeply held American attitudes about poverty and how the poorest should be governed. The book exposes the range of outcomes from the US federal government’s HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, focused on nuanced accounts of four very different ways of implementing this same national initiative—in Boston, New Orleans, Tucson, and San Francisco. It draws upon more than two hundred interviews, analysis of internal documents about each project, and nearly fifteen years of visits to these neighborhoods. The central aim is to understand how and why some cities, when redeveloping public housing, have attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, while other cities have instead tried to serve the maximum number of extremely low-income households. The book shows that these socially and politically revealing decisions are rooted in distinctly different kinds of governance constellations—each yielding quite different sorts of community pressures. These have been forged over many decades in response to each city’s own struggle with previous efforts at urban renewal. In contrast to other books that have focused on housing in a single city, this volume offers comparative analysis and a national picture, while also discussing four emblematic communities with an unprecedented level of detail.

The Decorative Ornamental Ironwork of New Orleans: Connections to Geometry and Haiti

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 430-436
Author(s):  
Yvelyne Germain-McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The State ◽  
Wrought Iron ◽  
French Quarter ◽  
To Come ◽  
Slave Revolts

Think about new orleans. images of the wrought-iron balconies and doors of the French Quarter probably come to mind. Wrought iron was first brought to New Orleans from Spain in 1790. During the next twenty years, a number of free, mixed-race Haitians fled the Haitian slave revolts and entered the southern ports of Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans. The Haitian refugees who came to Louisiana between 1791 and 1809 were better trained and better educated than were the inhabitants of the Louisiana territory, and “their influence insured that the state would have a Creole flair for years to come” (Hunt 1988, 58).

The Possibility of a Housing Authority

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-356
Author(s):  
Nicholas Bauroth
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Civic Center

This study uses urban regime theory to understand the events surrounding Fargo urban renewal during the 1950s. Specifically, it focuses upon the struggle between realtors, banking officers, government officials, and other local actors, as they established a plan for relocating Fargo residents displaced by urban renewal. With a downtown Civic Center as their ultimate goal, coalition partners set aside their differences and produced an unprecedented plan: to avoid any reliance on public housing, relocation would be handled via the private sector, specifically the Fargo Board of Realtors. The study demonstrates that this relocation plan and its subsequent revisions reflected the interests of the individual regime members.

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 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.

Inhabiting and Inhibiting River Garden

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-155
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Housing Market ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Phase 1 ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Community Governance ◽  
Housing Developments ◽  
Deconcentration Of Poverty

Chapter 5 reveals the challenges of inhabiting and managing River Garden. Phase 1 opened in November 2004. The devastation wrought by the Katrina disaster in August 2005—coupled with ensuing challenges to the housing market—caused subsequent phases to be delayed, altered, or cancelled. Rather than an investment that would create a “win-win” combination of a revitalized neighborhood and genuine opportunity for the former neighborhood’s least-advantaged residents, the redevelopment process, slowly but surely, shunted public housing tenants to the margins—both literally and figuratively—and also failed to construct the market-dominated community that the developer wanted. Framed by policymakers as a deconcentration of poverty, this strand of HOPE VI instead purged the poorest and yielded many ongoing tensions in community governance. Still, St. Thomas became a precedent for the post-Katrina transformation of many of the remaining large public housing developments in New Orleans.

scholarly journals From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public Housing Community

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-96
Author(s):  
Nicola Mann
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Support Networks ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Chicago Housing Authority ◽  
Late Stages ◽  
Mixed Income

The Chicago Housing Authority is currently in the late stages of a controversial ten-year urban renewal initiative that will see the city’s public housing projects replaced with mixed-income accommodations. Ordered to pack up and leave not only their homes but also lifelong friends and support networks, many project residents have, quite literally, had their roots yanked from beneath their feet. In this essay I employ the iconographic uses of natural imagery present in Kerry James Marshall’s Garden Project paintings (1993-1994) and Daniel Roth’s installation Cabrini Green Forest (2004) to, first, explore the “rooted” attachment of public housing dwellers to their living environment and, second, to consider the desire of many residents to safeguard community landmarks against the threat of demolition.

Rewriting the Narrative

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.

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