The Rise of Urban Renewal and the Connie Chambers Project

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 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.

The Rise and Fall of St. Thomas

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

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.

Life at North Beach Place

Chapter 12 investigates the post–HOPE VI version of North Beach Place, while discussing how San Francisco’s leaders sought to make this a model for public housing transformation citywide. In addition to increasing the number of on-site affordable housing units, the new North Beach Place added a supermarket, substantial below-grade parking, and new street-level retail. At the same time, however, the struggle to rehouse former residents proved contentious and protracted. Ultimately, only 36 percent of the original households chose (or were able) to return to the new development. Most of the initial tenant leaders did not come back, and many current residents—while grateful for their housing—lament the strictures of life under the close surveillance of private management. The chapter concludes with discussion of San Francisco’s HOPE SF initiative, a post–HOPE VI effort to use the North Beach Place experience to implement mixed-income housing elsewhere in the city.

Public Housing, Redevelopment, and the Governance of Poverty

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 North Beach Place

Chapters 10, 11, and 12 describe a fourth form of HOPE VI poverty governance—one centered on the role of not-for-profit housing developers and community organizations in San Francisco. Chapter 10 charts the rise and fall of North Beach Place, demonstrating how the city’s Nonprofitus constellation burst forth from the cataclysm of urban renewal. Completed in 1952, the 229-unit development near Fisherman’s Wharf initially housed whites but gradually gained substantial African American and Chinese populations. With urban renewal, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA)—under the heavy-handed direction of Justin Herman from 1959 to 1971—displaced thousands of San Francisco’s blacks from the razed Fillmore District. Coupled with antihighway protests and other neighborhood backlash, San Francisco developed a broad constellation of neighborhood-based organizations determined to help low-income households remain. As a dysfunctional San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) staggered, North Beach Place declined, becoming a dangerous eyesore in a high-visibility tourist mecca.

The Fall of Connie Chambers and the Rise of Posadas Sentinel

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

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.

Inhabiting and Inhibiting River Garden

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.