6

EFFECTS AND PROSPECTS IN REVITALIZED COMMUNITIES

When HOPE VI was launched …the notion that public housing redevelopment could help turn around whole neighborhoods and strengthen cities’ fiscal health seemed naively optimistic. But in a significant number of cities, HOPE VI investments—imaginatively planned, well designed, and competently implemented—have coincided with positive market and demographic forces to accomplish just that.

—Margery Austin Turner, “HOPE VI, Neighborhood Recovery, and the Health of Cities”

August Wilson’s Radio Golf, the last of his plays set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, revolves around a pair of black real estate developers looking to build an upscale apartment building in the neighborhood who are confronted by the longtime residents whom their development will displace. The play is set in 1997 and takes as its subject the gentrification actually occurring in the neighborhood at the time. Wilson himself is one among many black artists who lived and worked in the neighborhood during its heyday when “the Hill” was the heart of the African American community in Pittsburgh and a vibrant cultural center—“the crossroads of the world,” according to Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay.1 But urban renewal projects displaced thousands of residents in the 1950s, and riots tore at the community in the 1960s. By the 1990s, the area was largely depopulated (only 30 percent of the peak level of 1950) and almost exclusively poor.

Set between downtown to the west and the Oakland neighborhood, home to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University to the east, the Hill did retain at least one important asset, its location. During the 1990s, more than $300 million in public and private investment poured into the neighbor- hood, including the Bedford Additions HOPE VI revitalization, the city’s third HOPE VI grant. A generation earlier, the residents of the Hill had organized to stop displacement from spreading beyond the urban renewal projects in the lower Hill area. During the 1990s they organized again to force the Pittsburgh Housing Authority to build replacement housing first, before demolishing the 460 units of Bedford Addition. It was well that they did, because the neighborhood has seen “a slow brewing residential shift” that is bringing in the black middle class and professionals to the neighborhood.2 As black professionals enter (or in some cases return to) the neighborhood and housing prices increase, tensions between long-term residents and the newcomers arise, just as depicted by Wilson in the last of his Pittsburgh decalogy.

A Community Intervention

In addition to being an intervention into the lives of very low income families, the dismantling of public housing is a community intervention, a place-based revitalization strategy that is meant to turn around the fortunes of declining or distressed communities. The revitalization approach rests on two strategies, the complete physical upgrading of the area and the introduction of market-rate housing through mixed-income development.

The physical changes produced by public housing transformation are often startling. The neglected buildings and grounds of older public housing developments with their expanses of patchy grass and dirt strewn with broken glass and debris, and their broken play areas that more often than not serve as the unpoliced territory of local gangs, are swept away. In their place are typically put two- and three-story townhomes, with siding unworn and paint fresh, each with a quaint-looking front porch and a small patch of thick grass connecting to the newly built sidewalk that runs the length of streets that have been redesigned to connect to the existing grid so that the new homes become a seamless part of the local environment. The design objective is to produce a completely different image of the space—to change its social meaning and to eliminate the stigma attached to it. The old visual associations with decline, concentrated poverty, and disadvantage are removed. For this purpose, full-scale demolition is often necessary to make way for the New Urbanist designs calculated to produce visions of middle class urbanity. The new visual prompts suggest personal safety, more accepted middle class values, and investment security.

The other element of public housing transformation is the mixed-income nature of the rebuilt communities. Affordable and public housing units are mixed with market-rate homes. The attraction of middle income households, who presumably have many options in the local housing market, is the real challenge and innovation in most public housing transformations. The locational attributes of the site and the physical upgrading of the site and the surrounding infrastructure—streets, parks, and public areas—are crucial in this respect. Proximity to downtowns or to cultural centers or to physical amenities helps attract investors and middle class residents. These factors have long been understood to underpin processes of gentrification in cities. The mixed-income model, of course, brings more affluent people into the neighborhood, but it also reduces the concentration of poor people in the area. The removal of such concentrations and the displacement of gangs are an equally important element of the transformation pursued by city officials in these cases. Indeed, where mixed-income developments are not part of the process, that is, where the demolition, sale, or conversion of public housing occurs without redevelopment, the community intervention is simply the removal of the stigmatized habitat and its low-income population.

Generating Spillover Effects

In many cases it is not just the public housing that gets a face-lift. To generate the secondary physical and social changes that will spread throughout the neighborhood surrounding the old public housing site, the demolition is often part of larger, publicly funded redevelopment efforts or, if not part of a larger plan, it is at least accompanied by secondary investments by the public sector. Many HOPE VI projects are part of larger redevelopment efforts that include new school buildings and commercial redevelopment. The Holly Park HOPE VI in Seattle, for example, featured public investments in a community center, library, and parks.3 In Memphis, the city plans a $77 million Hilton hotel as part of Triangle Noir, a ten-year, $1 billion redevelopment effort that will replace the Cleaborn Homes and Foote Homes public housing projects.4 Similarly, Memphis’s Lamar Terrace HOPE VI redevelopment was part of a larger redevelopment effort that also targeted nearby commercial and industrial structures.5 As Margery Austin Turner summarizes, public housing redevelopment in some cities “has engaged mayors, community development officials, state housing agencies, and private sector investors in sustained partnerships.”6

Although the experience of public housing transformation across the county has frequently borne out the expectations of spillover impacts, there are occasions when larger neighborhood transformation has not taken place. The Park Du Valle development in Louisville, Kentucky, replaced the Cotter and Lang Homes in the southwest part of the city. Home values increased in the neighborhood, crime went down significantly, but the project has been unsuccessful in attracting commercial investment and the neighborhood surrounding the development remains highly segregated.7 Ten years after the Lafayette Courts high-rises were demolished in Baltimore, residents of the new Pleasant View Gardens were worried about rising crime and deteriorating conditions in the new housing itself. Pleasant View Gardens has not triggered a more general turnaround in its East Baltimore neighborhood.8

The lack of spillover effects from public housing transformation may be due to a number of reasons. First, neighborhoods that are more remote or locationally disadvantaged may not be attractive to private investors. There may be little or no latent market value in such places, remote as they are from downtown or the center of metropolitan areas, or significantly isolated by industrial land uses or by barriers such as railways and highways. Just as important, however, such neighborhoods are much less likely to be the subject of more comprehensive redevelopment efforts that combine public housing demolition with other public sector revitalization initiatives. Without secondary investments and infrastructure improvements, neighborhoods surrounding transformed public housing may remain unattractive to investors and to homebuyers or renters with choice in the private market.

In those cases where larger neighborhood change does accompany public housing demolition it is frequently difficult to establish that the public housing transformation is responsible for the wider neighborhood changes. Sometimes the larger neighborhood change predates or anticipates the public housing transformation; in other cases it occurs as the result of concurrent public and private sector investment. Indeed both of these scenarios are likely. Elvin Wyly and Daniel Hammel’s study showed that many HOPE VI projects follow the path of revitalization that has already been established, with such projects often part of larger redevelopment efforts.9 In other cases, neighborhood changes are spillover effects generated by the public housing transformation, or represent increased investment and land use changes that would not have occurred but for the transformation of public housing.

Spillover and Displacement Effects

The impact of public housing transformation on the housing market is a frequently researched question. The findings of this research are generally supportive of the notion that public housing transformation enhances nearby property values. Edward Bair and John Fitzgerald, for example, found that for six public housing redevelopments completed during the 1990s, property values around the sites decreased 8 to 10 percent for each quarter mile in distance away from the redevelopment.10 Property values around a Tampa, Florida, HOPE VI redevelopment increased significantly faster than citywide values in the years during and after redevelopment.11 A study of three redevelopments in Baltimore, however, found a positive impact on property values in only one; no effects were found for two projects that were located in highly distressed neighborhoods and which were somewhat isolated within those neighborhoods.12 Another study of public housing redevelopment projects in Boston and Washington, D.C., showed positive property value effects in three of four cases.13 The U.S. General Accounting Office studied twenty HOPE VI sites that received grants in 1996; housing values increased in thirteen neighborhoods and housing costs in fifteen.14 One-half of the neighborhoods experienced an increase in mortgage lending, though significant decreases in lending were evident in seven of the neighborhoods. The authors of these studies suggest that the housing market impacts of public housing transformation on the surrounding neighborhood is dependent on a number of factors, including the degree to which the project is integrated into the community, the strength of the neighborhood housing market, and the degree of distress in the surrounding area.

Researchers have looked at other dimensions of neighborhood change as well. Sean Zielenbach, for example, found a great deal of neighborhood improvement taking place in the eight HOPE VI areas he investigated.15 Seven of the eight neighborhoods increased their education levels, five gained white population (and thus became more integrated), and six increased their per capita income relative to the city. Crime declined significantly at each site.16 Mindy Turbov and Valerie Piper found generally positive impacts on crime and nearby housing markets in the four neighborhoods they examined.17 Mary Joel Holin et al. found significant reductions in crime, poverty, and unemployment in HOPE VI neighborhoods relative to citywide changes.18 Other studies from cities across the country reinforce these findings.19 Survey results generally indicate that neighbors of the HOPE VI sites perceived their areas as improving, though the magnitude of the improvement varied from site to site. In the GAO study, average household income increased in fifteen of the twenty sites, and the percentage of the population with a high school diploma increased in eighteen of the sites.

Most of the community-level changes accompanying public housing transformation are associated with population turnover rather than upward mobility of original residents. This is certainly true in the short term. Poverty is reduced in these neighborhoods because poor households move out and are replaced by the nonpoor, not because poor residents have improved their incomes. Education levels rise in the neighborhood not because of greater educational progress by the incumbent residents, but through an influx of more highly educated people to the neighborhood. Private investment in the community is attracted by the prospect of a new set of consumers with the buying power to sustain businesses. Crime is reduced in part through the displacement of gangs and low-income residents upon whom criminals prey. Property values increase in response to more upscale housing, inhabited by those paying market-rate prices in the mixed-income communities that replace demolished public housing development. Thus, these generally impressive spillover effects are best understood as “displacement effects” in that the changes are measures of demographic turnover due to the replacement of one population with another.

Despite occasionally contrary evidence, there is, according to Urban Institute researchers, “little doubt that HOPE VI redevelopments have unleashed impressive market and other improvement in their broader communities.”20 Frequently, public housing transformation is credited with “unleashing the latent potential” of neighborhoods by removing the last or largest obstacle to private sector investment. HUD notes a number of projects in which redevelopment has spurred private investment, including Earle Village in Charlotte, Mission Main in Boston, Hillside Terrace in Milwaukee, and the Manchester Homes project in Pittsburgh.21 Manchester is called a “textbook example of how HOPE VI spurs private investment. People are coming back to the neighborhood, moving into rehabilitated 1840s row houses and stabilizing the market rate sector of the housing stock.”22 In Columbus, Ohio, the redevelopment of the Windsor Terrace project “convinced a paint manufacturer in an adjacent neighborhood to spend $32 million to upgrade its facility instead of moving to the suburbs.”23 In neighborhood after neighborhood the removal or redevelopment of public housing is generating investment in neighborhoods that otherwise have been shunned by private capital.

In Philadelphia the high-rise towers of the Martin Luther King public housing project were blown up in October 1999, a year after the city’s Housing Authority had received a $25.2 million HOPE VI grant. Since then, millions of dollars of public and private investment have spurred a fast revitalization of the area. The housing market, which for all intents and purposes used to end two blocks away from the high-rises, soon featured condominiums and townhouses that sold quickly. While units on the site of the old projects went for $300,000, the redevelopment created a bridge to other parts of the Center City District that had already gentrified. For-profit developers jumped in to take advantage of the new opportunities in the neighborhood. “I am not certain I would have had the vision to develop …if all the demolition had not been done, and if I hadn’t seen those homes going up a few blocks away,” said one developer who was selling condos for as much as $1.5 million in the area. “Razing the Martin Luther King towers ‘lifted a 400-pound weight from an entire region of the city,’ ” said another. “ ‘The result has been a transformation that no one really had anticipated.’ ”24

HOPE VI sites near downtowns have generally seen a swift improvement in nearby conditions and even significant gentrification. For example, the Earle Village project in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one in which the “public housing project has been a significant blighting influence, holding back an otherwise promising market environment in the surrounding area”.25 The Techwood and Clark-Howell projects in Atlanta were located on valuable land adjacent to downtown, Georgia Tech University, and Coca-Cola headquarters. Similarly, Allen Parkway Village in Houston, a project of over one thousand units originally built in the early 1940s, occupied a desirable location on the western edge of Houston’s central business district and was demolished in 1996.26 The St. Thomas project in New Orleans, over 1,350 units demolished in 2000, sat on land with “extraordinary latent market value” where the pressures to gentrify were intense.27 The Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., has also experienced gentrification both before and after the demolition of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings in 1995.28 Just east of downtown Louisville, the redevelopment of the Clarksdale public housing development has resulted in “an amazing number of developments going on there now.”29 Chicago’s public housing demolition, the largest effort in the country, has resulted in significant gentrification both on the North Side and in the city’s Bronzeville community on the South Side.30

Figure 8. City West near downtown Cincinnati, a HOPE VI redevelopment. Laurel Homes, the second oldest public housing project in the nation, stood on the site and was removed from the National Register of Historic Places in order to be demolished for the HOPE VI project.

The issue in these places is whether too much market activity has been unleashed. Harvey Newman found evidence of gentrification at the Techwood development in Atlanta.31 In Chicago, the transformation of the neighborhood surrounding the Cabrini HOPE VI project is often cited as an example of gentrification triggered by public housing redevelopment. The Cabrini area went from being one of the most notoriously dangerous places in Chicago to “a largely mixed-income community of well-maintained townhouses located next to a new shopping center with a Starbucks café.”32 In New Orleans, property values in the neighborhood around the St. Thomas HOPE VI redevelopment increased by over 80 percent in the twelve months following the project’s demolition, and the Earle Village project in Charlotte triggered a tenfold increase in property values in the First Ward Place neighborhood.33 This type of gentrification, also noted for the Knoxville neighborhood surrounding the College Hill Homes, is called “a troubling impact” of the program by HUD because of the degree to which it reduces housing affordability and forces the indirect displacement of lower-income households who cannot afford increasing housing costs.34

Such an impact may be “troubling,” but it is rarely unintentional. Leveraging private investment is one of the main objectives of HOPE VI redevelopments. In fact, over time HUD has put greater emphasis on the potential for additional investment and neighborhood change when evaluating HOPE VI proposals, looking for projects that could catalyze significant neighborhood transformation.35 The emphasis on leveraging private capital that HUD introduced in 1995 is in practice an incentive for projects located in neighborhoods ripe for private investment. By fiscal year 2002, local housing authorities were required to demonstrate how their proposed HOPE VI redevelopment would “result in outside investment in the surrounding community.”36 Part of the emphasis on the neighborhood impacts of HOPE VI is driven by the belief among HUD officials that the program must generate spillover effects to succeed: “If the HOPE VI process,” according to one HUD document, “does not help to solidify and revitalize the neighborhoods that surround each development, then the sustainability of these developments is thrown into question.”37 Thus, HUD attempted to choose projects that they felt had the greatest potential to spur additional public and private investment in the form of new or rehabilitated housing, commercial investment, new jobs, and improved public infrastructure. Calibrating the amount of that new investment so that it is sufficient to produce neighborhood improvement but modest enough to avoid triggering wholesale gentrification is difficult when the attempt is made. Wyly and Hammel document the ways in which HOPE VI redevelopment plans attempt to take advantage of local housing markets poised to take off, awaiting only the removal of worn-down public housing to set tremendous neighborhood changes in motion. In these locations, HOPE VI becomes one more element in a strategy of public and private investment that is aimed at removing “islands of decay in seas of renewal.”38 The direct displacement of public housing residents via demolition is in these cases supplemented by the indirect displacement of their neighbors via the market.

There is some evidence that HOPE VI projects selected between 2000 and 2005 were set in neighborhoods already experiencing declines in poverty since 1990. Thirty percent of the grants in those years went to projects that were located in areas that had dropped at least 10 percentage points in poverty during the 1990s.39 Nineteen percent of the grants went to projects in neighborhoods with increased poverty (by more than 3 percentage points) over the previous decade. Because some of the poverty reduction might be accounted for by secular trends in the city over the course of the 1990s, a measure of relative decline in poverty is more appropriate. Twenty-three percent of the HOPE VI grants made in the first years of the new century went to projects located in neighborhoods where poverty had declined by at least 10 percentage points more than it had declined citywide. This suggests a significant targeting of program grants to neighborhoods that were already experiencing large reductions in poverty.

These include the McDaniel Glen project in the Mechanicsburg neighborhood just south of downtown Atlanta, and Piedmont Courts, within a mile of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, both of which were beginning to feel development pressures and experience some demographic change prior to the demolition and redevelopment of public housing within the neighborhood. Often these neighborhoods are located near downtowns and thus have the locational advantage of being near amenity-rich areas or activity centers. In these and other cases it is likely that the neighborhood change led to public housing transformation, not the other way around.

In the Five Points neighborhood of Denver, situated just northeast of downtown, five public housing projects stood in the 1980s. As in most places where such a concentration of public housing occurred, the neighborhood suffered from disinvestment and high poverty rates. Things changed, however, during the 1990s. The construction of a baseball stadium just north of downtown helped breathe some life into the area and began a renaissance that included new commercial development and upscale housing. The neighborhood was well situated to ride the real estate wave of the 1990s that brought significant changes and upgrading to this neighborhood located so close to the city’s economic hub. Despite a “a steady trend of revitalization,” the public housing developments were the source of crime complaints and redevelopers declared “the long, blocky residential buildings” to be out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood. The availability of federal funds through the HOPE VI program, then only a couple of years old, provided the resources necessary to clear away two of the old projects, Curtis Park and Arapahoe Courts, and hasten the full renewal of the neighborhood.

Indirect Displacement

The process of neighborhood change involves considerable turnover in the population as lower-income families are displaced when property values rise and the market shifts to more upscale housing and commercial land uses. Redevelopment projects such as public housing transformation induce two types of displacement. The residents of public housing who are forced to move because their housing is being demolished or sold are directly displaced. Lower-income residents of the surrounding communities who are forced to move because of market changes in the neighborhood as the result of public housing transformation are indirectly displaced.

The extent of indirect displacement induced by public housing demolition depends on the degree of neighborhood change leveraged by redevelopment activities. In demolition-only projects where little or no additional investment takes place there is less likelihood of indirect displacement. This is especially true for public housing communities located in depressed land and housing markets, underserved by public services and by private enterprises. Improving neighborhood conditions beyond the borders of the redevelopment site requires inducing additional private and public sector investment. Redevelopment projects that go beyond demolition to transform public housing communities into attractive, mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhoods therefore have a much greater potential to generate the additional investment and thus induce indirect displacement.

The concentration of most public housing in heavily black neighborhoods means that indirect displacement, should it occur, will probably have a disproportionate impact on African Americans. Of the first 180 HOPE VI projects in cities with populations of more than one hundred thousand, 59 percent were located in neighborhoods that were predominantly (more than 50 percent) black. Sometimes the significant reduction in poverty that results from large-scale demolition of public housing is matched by racial turnover as neighborhood changes take on both racial and class dimensions. Indeed, for much of its relatively short history in American cities, gentrification has involved both racial and class turnover. More recent experience, however, indicates that the racial turnover is not inevitable. In an increasing number of cases, gentrification is being driven by the black middle class.40 The basic dynamics of black gentrification are no different than the generic case: the neighborhood is physically upgraded, property values increase, retail businesses that cater to a more upscale market open, and middle-class and affluent households displace and replace the incumbent low-income residents. Often a shift from rental to homeownership housing will also take place. Similarly, there can be, and often is, tension between the gentrifiers and the incumbents as they compete to claim the place. In cases of black gentrification, however, there is a deeper level of conflict shaped by the political economy of race in the United States. Specifically, because black gentrifiers typically have fewer investment choices, they are forced to make investments in neighborhoods that are higher risk, and thus they are relieved and supportive to see gentrifying patterns around them. Second, black gentrifiers often claim their own rightful place in the neighborhood; they do not see themselves as interlopers, poaching new territory for investment opportunities, but rather the inheritors of a historic identity that recalls a time when these neighborhoods were centers for African American culture in their respective cities.

Such communities are riven by class, claimed on the one hand by long-term residents with low-incomes who endured years of public and private neglect, and the physical and social deterioration of the community, and on the other by a black middle class working to revitalize the area and protective of the personal investments they have made.41 The black middle class, which “fiercely wants to ‘restore’ these communities to safe, prosperous, and tranquil places,” sees the concentration of subsidized low-income housing, including and especially public housing, as a manifestation of discriminatory practices from which they and their communities have suffered for years.42 They contend that their potential for wealth generation is limited by public policy decisions that concentrate subsidized housing in predominantly minority neighborhoods. They argue, with some justification, for a “fair share” approach to public and subsidized housing that would locate fewer such units in black neighborhoods and more in middle class white neighborhoods that are largely free of such housing. As a result, members of the black middle class support the demolition of public housing as a necessary step in creating livable communities. On the other hand, displacees see themselves as members of the same community that the black middle class is investing in. In many cases, black public housing residents have been in the community longer than members of the middle class who might be more recent residents. To public housing residents forced out of their neighborhoods, black gentrification is no better than white gentrification. Indeed, in many ways, black gentrification is seen as a greater betrayal.43

It is possible then to conceptualize the neighborhood change generated by public housing displacement as taking place along two dimensions defined by poverty and by race (see figure 9). In neighborhoods with little or no reduction in the poverty rate and in racial profile (the area near the intersection of the two axes), the neighborhood remains largely static despite the public housing demolition. Where racial turnover (black to white) has taken place, without a reduction in poverty (lower right quadrant), then the neighborhood has desegregated. When both racial turnover occurs and a significant reduction in poverty takes place (lower left), neighborhoods can be said to be experiencing white gentrification. When poverty is significantly reduced without racial change (upper left), black gentrification has occurred. Neighborhoods that continue to segregate and concentrate poverty are located in the upper right quadrant.

Figure 9. Potential neighborhood changes in race and poverty.

By looking at public housing redevelopments that began before 2000, one can estimate the degree of neighborhood change that has accompanied public housing transformation by looking at census data from 1990 and again from 2000. The difficulty in this approach is that very few HOPE VI projects were completed during the 1990s, limiting studies of completed projects to case studies or small-n comparative studies. By including projects that began during the 1990s and progressed to the point of relocation or demolition, we can expand the sample size and look at dozens of projects across the country. In the following section I look at HOPE VI projects that proceeded to demolition by 1999 (n = 64), and at projects that began relocating residents in 1999 or earlier (n = 100). It can be assumed that neighborhood change will be more extensive or further along for projects that have completed the redevelopment process, and thus the examination of projects that are only partially done in all likelihood underestimates the changes being induced by public housing transformation.

More than one-third of the HOPE VI projects in this sample are from cities in the South, while cities in the West only account for 15 percent of the projects. The rest are evenly divided between the Midwest and Northeast. The projects are generally in larger cities; half of the HOPE VI projects that went as far as demolition during the 1990s were in cities of five hundred thousand people or more. The larger sample of projects that progressed as far as relocation includes more projects in smaller cities. Most of this is the result of the early targeting objectives of the HOPE VI program, which limited grants to the most distressed and troubled public housing agencies, and these tended to be located in larger cities. Over the years, the bias toward larger cities declined as smaller agencies became more involved in the program, but this wider distribution is not fully represented in the samples analyzed here.

The average HOPE VI neighborhoods were 60 percent African American and 13 percent Hispanic. The HOPE VI neighborhoods were characterized by high poverty rates (45 percent), lower levels of owner-occupancy (less than 30 percent), and vacancy rates of close to 15 percent.

Poverty Reduction in HOPE VI Neighborhoods

The commonly accepted threshold for “concentrated poverty” is an area in which more than 40 percent of the population is below the poverty line.44 Twenty-five of the one hundred neighborhoods in the larger sample (25% of the total) met the threshold for concentrated poverty in 1990 and then saw a reduction in poverty to a level below the 40 percent threshold by 2000. Most of the neighborhoods (72%) either remained above the 40 percent threshold or began the decade below it and remained there. Three of the HOPE VI neighborhoods actually began the decade with less than a 40 percent poverty rate and climbed above that threshold by the time of the 2000 census.

On average, the one hundred HOPE VI neighborhoods that progressed as far as the relocation stage of redevelopment had poverty rates that stood around 44 percent when the decade began. By 2000, these same neighborhoods averaged 36.1 percent poverty, a reduction of more than 8 percentage points over the ten-year period. However, some of this change may reflect larger trends occurring in the each of the cities with HOPE VI projects. Thus, a more appropriate number to look at is the poverty rate change net of larger changes taking place citywide.45 The average decline in poverty, relative to changes taking place at the city level for the one hundred projects in which relocation took place, was 7.6 percentage points. That is, the average HOPE VI neighborhood saw a decline in poverty that was 7.6 percentage points greater than their respective citywide changes during the 1990s.

Some HOPE VI projects were associated with dramatic reductions in neighborhood poverty from 1990 to 2000. For example, the Ponce de Leon Courts project located in the College Hill neighborhood on the east side of Tampa received a HOPE VI grant of $32.5 million in 1997. The project resulted in the demolition of thirteen hundred units in two contiguous developments. Between 1990 and 2000 the neighborhood that included the project saw a reduction in poverty of 33.6 percentage points. Poverty in the city during this decade only declined a couple of percentage points. The difference between the citywide reduction in poverty and the neighborhood reduction is called the indirect displacement effect; it was a 32.29 percentage point reduction in poverty for the Ponce de Leon HOPE VI project. The neighborhood containing the Ida Barbour Homes HOPE VI project in Portsmouth, Virginia, saw a decline in poverty that was 44 percentage points greater than the citywide reduction. In all, nine HOPE VI projects that began before 2000 saw a drop in neighborhood poverty at least 25 percentage points more than their respective citywide changes, including Connie Chambers in Tucson, Holly Park in Seattle, Techwood in Atlanta, Vine Hill Homes in Nashville, Guinotte Manor in Kansas City, and Schuylkill Falls in Philadelphia.

Among the HOPE VI redevelopment projects in the two samples analyzed, most were located in neighborhoods that saw a decline in the poverty rate that was significantly greater than the secular trends taking place citywide (see table 6.1). Projects that moved to relocation during the 1990s are located in the middle column of the data table. In 46 percent of the cases, the HOPE VI neighborhoods saw a reduction in poverty that was at least 10 percentage points greater than what was happening citywide. In 13 percent the reduction in neighborhood poverty was between 5 and 10 percentage points more than what occurred citywide, and in 15 percent the neighborhood reduction in poverty was only slightly greater (less than 5 percentage points) than what was experienced citywide. Only one in four HOPE VI neighborhoods saw a reduction in poverty that did not exceed the citywide reduction. The pattern is even more extreme for neighborhoods in which the HOPE VI projects moved to the demolition stage, suggesting that as these projects moved toward completion during the 2000s, the impacts grew even larger.

Racial Turnover

Early HOPE VI projects were associated with less dramatic reductions in African American residents relative to citywide trends (see table 6.1). Only 23 percent of the HOPE VI neighborhoods saw a reduction in black population that was more than 10 percentage points greater than the citywide rate of change. At the other extreme, 25 percent of the HOPE VI neighborhoods that moved to the relocation stage during the 1990s saw a reduction in black population that was less than the citywide reduction. In some of these neighborhoods there were in fact increases in the black population. In comparison to poverty reduction, the impact of HOPE VI on the racial profile of neighborhoods is more moderate.

Table 6.1 Changes in poverty and African American population in HOPE VI neighborhoods relative to changes taking place citywide, 1990–2000 (%)

For the most part, HOPE VI redevelopment projects that received funding in the 1990s were located in cities that were experiencing a slight decline in their African American populations. Among the one hundred projects that completed relocation during the 1990s, 57 percent were located in cities that saw a reduction in the proportion of residents who were African American (the figure is 55 percent for the sixty-four projects that went to demolition during the 1990s). The mean reduction in percentage black was less than 1 percentage point, however.

The neighborhoods in which these projects were located saw a greater decline in black population, on average, than did their cities. For projects that proceeded as far as relocation by 1999, their neighborhoods were 61.1 percent black in 1990 and 56.1 percent black in 2000. The per project displacement effect is 217; that is, the average project displaced 217 more African Americans from the neighborhood than would have been expected given citywide trends. For projects in which demolition took place in the 1990s, the neighborhoods fell from 60.3 percent black to 55 percent black. Among both groups of projects, the reduction in black population in these neighborhoods was greater, on average, than what took place in the rest of the city.

Some portion of the neighborhood-wide reduction in black population is due directly to the relocation/demolition of the public housing site while the rest is the spillover, or indirect displacement, effect. The extent of the direct and indirect displacement effects is impossible to determine because some of those displaced from the demolished public housing project may have moved elsewhere within the neighborhood; indeed, the research reviewed in chapter 5 shows that HOPE VI displacees tend not to move very far. Thus, we can expect that a portion of the reduction in black population within HOPE VI neighborhood areas is due to the direct displacement of blacks from the demolished project. Based on best estimates, it appears that, on average, HOPE VI redevelopment projects have overall generated little indirect displacement of African Americans at the neighborhood level.

These national averages, however, obscure significant variation across cities and across projects. As with poverty, there are some examples of HOPE VI neighborhoods that saw a dramatic reduction in African American population during the 1990s (net of changes taking place citywide). The most extreme case is the Schuylkill Falls project in Philadelphia, a city that saw a 2 percentage point increase in the black population between 1990 and 2000. The neighborhood of the Schuylkill Falls project saw a 27.95 percentage point decrease in the proportion of its population that is African American. Thus, the citywide trend and the neighborhood trend diverged by 30 percentage points. In this and other cases, such as the Earle Village project in Charlotte and the Ponce de Leon project in Tampa, the displacement estimate was greater than the actual level of decline in the neighborhoods because overall city trends were moving in the opposite direction. These two neighborhoods saw a drop in black population that was at least 15 percentage points greater than the citywide reduction. In five cases, Schuylkill Falls in Philadelphia, Techwood in Atlanta, the Ida Barbour Homes in Portsmouth, Virginia, Ponce de Leon in Tampa, and Holly Park in Seattle, significant racial change and poverty deconcentration have gone hand in hand.

At the same time there are a number of HOPE VI projects that have produced opposite effects or no racial change at all. For example, the three HOPE VI projects in Albany, New York, a city that experienced a decline in the African American population of 6.25 percentage points between 1990 and 2000, all saw increases in the black population in the neighborhoods surrounding the project sites. The Fairfield Homes project in Baltimore saw an increase in the black population of 4.12 percentage points, while the black population declined in the city as a whole by 4.88 percentage points. Similar patterns were seen in Hartford, Connecticut, and in single projects in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee.

Taken together, the data suggests that while significant secondary or indirect displacement of African Americans occurs in some cases, there are offsetting examples where no such pattern has occurred or where African American populations have actually increased in the neighborhoods surrounding redeveloped public housing. HOPE VI projects seem to be generating a range of neighborhood racial changes that are not easily summarized.

HOPE VI Displacement in Predominantly Black Neighborhoods

Looking only at predominantly black neighborhoods allows a more direct focus on the issue of black displacement. Sixty-two percent of the HOPE VI neighborhoods in the overall sample were predominantly black in 1990. In these neighborhoods blacks constituted on average 84 percent of the population in 1990 (see table 6.2). For projects that relocated public housing residents before 2000, the black population in the neighborhood surrounding the projects declined 5.5 percentage points (84.2 to 78.7). For projects that went as far as demolition the decline was 6 percentage points (84.7 to 78.8). The analysis shows that the average reduction in black population over the decade was 1,175 persons for projects that completed relocation. For HOPE VI projects that went to relocation in the 1990s in predominantly black neighborhoods, the average reduction in the black population was 256 above what would be expected given citywide trends. For HOPE VI projects demolished during the 1990s the displacement effect was 322 persons.

Table 6.2 Indirect displacement of African Americans in predominantly black HOPE VI neighborhoods

Again, national averages on racial change hide a great deal of variation. Figure 10 provides a graphic look at all of the predominantly African American neighborhoods (in 1990) that were the location of HOPE VI projects and arrays them along two dimensions, change in poverty and change in African American population.46 There are a number of neighborhoods that cluster in the area showing a sizable reduction in poverty with little to no racial change. This area, outlined in the figure, shows neighborhoods that experienced black gentrification. Many of the HOPE VI projects in these neighborhoods were begun in the late 1990s and thus the reduction in poverty probably reflects only the displacement of public housing residents from the neighborhood. Whether these residents were ultimately replaced by more affluent residents and whether the racial makeup of the neighborhood remained predominantly black has played out since the 2000 Census and is not reflected in this figure. Thus, not all of the projects that cluster within the blue box have undergone black gentrification. Projects that fit into the black gentrification area include LeMoyne Gardens (renamed College Hill) in Memphis, the Bronzeville neighborhood surrounding the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side of Chicago (and the subject of three different books about black gentrification), and the Manchester public housing redevelopment in Pittsburgh. The data reveal that HOPE VI neighborhoods in Charlotte, Columbus, Louisville, and Wilmington (North Carolina) are also exhibiting these patterns.

Another set of neighborhoods appear in an area labeled “white gentrification.” These are neighborhoods with HOPE VI projects that saw both a sizable reduction in poverty and a sizable reduction in the black population during the 1990s. White gentrification has taken place around the Techwood project adjacent to downtown Atlanta, on Chicago’s Near North Side surrounding the old Cabrini-Green complex, and in Charlotte’s First Ward area that used to be the home of the Earle Village public housing development.

Neighborhoods that are near the intersection of the two axes have not experienced significant change in either poverty or racial profile. In these neighborhoods the HOPE VI project had not triggered any larger neighborhood change by the time of the 2000 census. Finally, the smallest number of neighborhoods sees a sizable decline in African American residents but no change in poverty (desegregating neighborhoods) or sees an increase in poverty with little racial change.

Figure 10. Changes in race and poverty in predominantly black HOPE VI neighborhoods.

Inconsistency of Neighborhood Change

The neighborhood change induced by or accompanying public housing redevelopment in the United States does not follow a single model. In some cases considerable population change has occurred along with public housing redevelopment; some neighborhoods have experienced racial transition, more have experienced a significant reduction in and deconcentration of poverty. The experience of HOPE VI neighborhoods is varied; some show strong patterns of black or white gentrification, while others show little change. Comparative case studies have shown a variety of other changes occurring around public housing transformation from increasing property values to reduced crime.

The dismantling of public housing in U.S. cities does not, of course, occur in a vacuum. The demolition of public housing is rarely the only change taking place in the neighborhoods where it once stood. Very early in the HOPE VI program, HUD made larger neighborhood change one of the objectives of the program, and the likelihood of such change one of the factors on which they rated competing HOPE VI applications. In general, the scale of public housing redevelopment is large enough that there is a reasonable expectation that it will trigger spillover neighborhood changes. Although the question of whether the demographic changes described here were induced by HOPE VI or merely accompanied HOPE VI is an open one, there is a sense in which the question is moot. In many cases, HOPE VI public housing demolition is part of a larger public/private neighborhood revitalization effort. We know that in some cities public housing redevelopment occurred in neighborhoods that were already experiencing demographic and economic changes, or that were the target of other, public redevelopment investments that were not related to HOPE VI. In other cases, the demolition of public housing was necessary for the private sector to step forward and make sizable investments in previously neglected neighborhoods. All of these factors provide ample explanation for the neighborhood changes seen in many HOPE VI neighborhoods.