Preservation Planning: Redeveloping Public and Affordable Housing

Urban planners face an affordable housing crisis compounded by federal programs that eliminated subsidized housing. Prior work indicates profit-making motivations and race influenced housing removal but overlooks planning efforts to rebuild affordable housing. This paper explores the neighborhood factors affecting the redevelopment of subsidized housing under the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program, using multivariate regression analysis of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Census data. Findings show housing market indicators, racial composition, and poverty rates do not predict the mix of rebuilt units, which suggests opportunities for planning to promote affordable housing goals in public–private development projects.

“Let’s Get Ready to Crumble”: Black Municipal Leadership and Public Housing Transformation in the United States

U.S. cities transform public housing. Black municipal leadership (BML) may influence the scale and character of public housing removal and redevelopment. Informed by the “Black urban regime” literature, this study assesses whether presence and duration of BML, coupled with other factors, explains variation in public housing transformation for a sample of large cities. Its findings suggest that, controlling for other factors, BML is associated with moderately greater scales of public housing removal in the 1990s and 2000s, but BML is not associated with the “rate of return” by former public housing residents or new residence by public housing eligible households in Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) communities as of 2016. The findings invite further research on the intraracial dynamics and policy consequences of BML. They build, too, on public housing transformation scholarship, raising new questions about how municipal politics shape public housing and other sites of subsidized residence for low-income denizens of cities.

The Fall of Orchard Park, the Rise of Orchard Gardens

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.