Mapping Public Housing: The Case of New York City

In American popular discourse and policy debates, “public housing” conjures images of “the projects”—dysfunctional neighborhood imprints of a discredited welfare state. Yet this image, so important in justifying deconcentration, is a dangerous caricature of the diverse places where low–income public housing residents live, and it ignores a much larger public housing program—the $100 billion–plus annual mortgage interest tax concessions to (mostly) wealthy homeowners. in this article, we measure three spatial aspects of assisted housing, poverty, and wealth in New York City. First, local indicators of spatial association document a contingent link between assistance and poverty: vouchers are not consistently associated with poverty deconcentration. Second, spatial regressions confirm this result after controlling for racial segregation and spatial autocorrelation. Third, factor analyses and cluster classifications reveal a rich, complex neighborhood topography of poverty, wealth, and housing subsidy that defies the simplistic stereotypes of policy and popular discourse.

Download Full-text

The New Deal, the Deserving Poor, and the First Public Housing Residents in New York City

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/ssh.2019.41 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 91-115 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ryan Allen ◽

David Van Riper

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Public Housing ◽

York City ◽

Nuclear Family ◽

The United States ◽

Housing Program ◽

The Public ◽

Housing Developments ◽

Us Government

ABSTRACTBetween 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a “nuclear family” structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.

Download Full-text

Ethnic and Income Housing-Occupancy Patterns of Federal Moderate-Income Housing and Federal Public Housing in Low- and Moderate-Income Neighborhoods of New York City

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space ◽

10.1068/a080707 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 8 (6) ◽

pp. 707-714

Author(s):

E M S Forman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Public Housing ◽

Low Income ◽

York City ◽

Selection Process ◽

Housing Projects ◽

Occupancy Patterns ◽

Racial Ethnic

Economic and racial—ethnic housing patterns of FHA Section 236 moderate-income and federally aided low-income public housing projects were examined in order to determine the relationships between the tenant-selection process, neighborhood racial—ethnic mix, and housing-occupancy patterns. The overall results show that in moderate-income neighborhoods federal income-admissions and integration regulations were successfully implemented regardless of the economic type of the project. In low-income neighborhoods federal income admissions and integration regulations were unsuccessfully implemented for projects of both economic types.

Download Full-text