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.

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 Tortuous Road from St. Thomas to River Garden

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-127
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
Tax Credit ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Market Conditions ◽  
Market Rate ◽  
Large Families ◽  
Mixed Income ◽  
Low Income Housing

Chapter 4 follows the tortuous course that led St. Thomas to its redevelopment, revealing the machinations of a governance constellation centered on the prerogatives of the Big Developer. Starting in the late 1980s, the struggling housing project had multiple suitors eager to launch a transformation. The redevelopment effort faced a long series of false starts and endured multiple lawsuits and setbacks. Eventually, championed by maverick developer Pres Kabacoff, this yielded the mixed-income community of River Garden, completed in phases between 2001 and 2009. Although the initial HOPE VI application had proposed a majority of low-income housing on the site, subsequent proposals shifted to plans emphasizing market-rate and tax-credit housing plus a Walmart supercenter, with additional scattered-site public housing for large families promised but never constructed. Eventually, however, market conditions soured and the actual development that got built has far less market-rate housing than this midcourse correction had sought to deliver.

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 Fall of Orchard Park, the Rise of Orchard Gardens

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-229
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Hope Vi ◽  
New School ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
New Community ◽  
Private Management ◽  
Community Facilities ◽  
Public Housing Residents

Chapter 7 describes the harrowing decline of Orchard Park during the late 1980s and early 1990s and then traces the resident-centered successful effort to transform Orchard Park into Orchard Gardens using the HOPE VI program. When HOPE VI funds became available in the 1990s, activist Boston citizens—prominently including Orchard Park Tenants Association chairwoman Edna Bynoe—had every reason to assume that public housing transformation would overwhelmingly serve those with the lowest incomes. HOPE VI, Boston-style, was co-led by a neighborhood-based not-for-profit developer and featured prominent resident input. Orchard Gardens allocated 85 percent of dwellings to public housing residents, while enabling 70 percent of former Orchard Park households to return. The new community, under well-regarded private management, also positively impacted the surrounding neighborhood by providing infill housing, as well as community facilities, including a new school. Boston continued to emphasize housing for very low-income households in subsequent HOPE VI initiatives.

scholarly journals Bringing Researchers And Community Developers Together To Revitalize A Public Housing Project And Improve Health

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (11) ◽  
pp. 2072-2078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas P. Jutte ◽  
Kaja Z. LeWinn ◽  
Malo A. Hutson ◽  
Ramie Dare ◽  
Janet Falk
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Public Housing Project ◽  
Improve Health

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.

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