Conclusion

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC HOUSING

When they’re gone, we’re gone.

—Wardell Yotaghan of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, pointing to a drawing of the Cabrini-Green buildings

The record of public housing redevelopment in delivering benefits to the original residents is a critical context for any summary judgment of transformation policy since 1990. The demolition of public housing projects has significantly altered the urban landscape in cities across the United States, whether or not the teardown was accompanied by a HOPE VI-like redevelopment. High concentrations of poverty have been eliminated when residents are forced to move, and research shows the changes have frequently spilled over into the surrounding communities; property values have increased and crime has declined. In this respect the program has succeeded in the ways HUD and the Congress desired. The program has activated nascent land markets or swept away the last remaining obstacles to gentrification in many neighborhoods. Community-level benefits of an enhanced tax base and reduced service demands have been realized. In some places, the redevelopment promise of public housing transformation is so great that it has been made the foundation for large-scale urban redevelopment efforts. Its architects have, from the beginning, recognized that public housing transformation can be the foundation of much larger redevelopment outcomes. It is in many respects the equivalent of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, providing the basis for a fundamental reconfiguration of the urban landscape.

At the same time, however, the outcomes for the residents of public housing have been more disappointing. Most simply move to other high-poverty and racially segregated neighborhoods that are unlikely to provide them with significantly greater opportunities than those from which they came.1 The research to date shows that the benefits for original residents are limited and inconsistent. Their moves to marginally better neighborhoods leave them feeling safer on average, and they reduce the acute levels of fear and anxiety associated with crime and social disorder. But other hoped-for benefits, such as health improvements, enhanced economic self-sufficiency, or educational improvements among children, have not been seen. Expectations of economic benefits from relocation, or improved health, rest on an often complicated and extensive chain of events and circumstances. The mere act of relocating to a new neighborhood does little, if anything, to address the basic conditions that affect employability and health. Not only is there an absence of some expected benefits, but most research indicates that forced relocation upsets carefully constructed support networks and survival strategies employed by the very low income residents of public housing.

Whether relocated families are able to re-create social networks over time and overcome the short-term disruption of displacement remains to be seen. The question suggests changes that might be made to the program of transformation to minimize the disruption to public housing families and to connect them more directly to the community-level benefits produced by redevelopment. Phased redevelopment approaches that allow residents to stay on-site while work is done would avoid displacement and relocation, as would more tolerance for renovation over demolition. Ironically, a return to urban renewal era concerns about the adverse impacts of displacement seems a precondition for such changes.

Assessing Public Housing Transformation

One can summarize the dismantling of public housing by noting that place-based benefits are typical, but individual-level benefits for residents are not. There is a point, of course, at which these two patterns of outcomes converge. Very few residents find their way back to the redeveloped and improved sites. Most do not share in the place-based benefits because they have been removed, largely to other disadvantaged communities to carry on much as they have in the past. Although in some cases residents will “choose” not to move back to the redeveloped site, that choice can be induced by the long lead time between their initial displacement and the completion of redevelopment, which can easily be three to five years and in a significant number of cases is longer than that. For others, however, there is in fact no opportunity to return. The number of public housing units in most redevelopment projects is a fraction of the number demolished, and even if there were capacity to bring back all who wanted to return, new tenant screening criteria freeze out many. Since 1995 the community-level benefits of public housing transformation have been privileged over individual benefits. Demolition is the standard means of proceeding in HOPE VI even in the face of significant resident opposition. Only in rare cases (and often as the result of legal action) do residents prevail in their efforts to minimize displacement by phasing in construction. In the early years, relocation services were haphazard and hundreds of residents were lost in the redevelopment processes taking place.2

The dismantling of public housing makes little sense as housing policy. The policy constitutes a retrenchment in housing assistance that most directly affects very low income families. The loss of public housing and its deep subsidies is occurring at a time when the need for such subsidies is increasing. In 2010 Congress received a report from HUD on “Worst Case Housing Needs” in the country. Worst case needs are defined as households who have very low incomes (defined as below 50 percent of the area median income adjusted for household size), do not receive any form of housing assistance, and either pay more than 50 percent of their incomes on housing or live in “severely inadequate housing conditions” (defined by any of a range of physical deficiencies in the housing related to “heating, plumbing, electric, or maintenance”).3 Three findings from that report are especially important for the current rollback of public housing policy. First, the report indicates that there are close to six million families with worst case housing needs in the United States, an 18 percent increase since 2000. Second, “there is an insufficient supply of affordable and available rental housing for the lowest income groups,” a deficit that grows with each additional unit demolished.4 Interestingly, the report finds a surplus of units in the United States affordable to people at 60 percent and 80 percent of area median incomes (the market targeted by shallow-subsidy programs such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit), though not all of those units are actually occupied by people with those incomes. In contrast, the income stratum served by public housing faces an absolute shortage of units. Third, households with worst case needs living in urban areas are concentrated in high poverty neighborhoods, the types of neighborhoods in which most public housing is located, and the types of neighborhoods where it is being torn down or converted. A reduction in the number of public housing units in the face of growing need and in the very places where the need is greatest is difficult to justify in housing policy terms.

Chicago will demolish more than twenty thousand units of public housing over a fifteen-year period. Yet, in September 2010 the waiting list was opened and more than two hundred thousand families applied for Chicago public housing. That is roughly the number of family households in the entire city of Milwaukee, and more than in St. Louis, or Minneapolis, or Kansas City. Minneapolis, for its own part, recently received eight thousand applications for its public housing. The Minneapolis public housing authority reports that roughly 120 openings occur each year in its housing; thus the current waiting list provides roughly 66 years’ worth of names. Since 1995 the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority has demolished one thousand units of public housing. In Waterbury, Connecticut, the housing authority has 2,394 people on its waiting list but plans to demolish fifty-two units of public housing in the near future.5 On August 11, 2010, thirty thousand people showed up in East Point, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, simply to get applications for the Section 8 voucher waiting list. Police dressed in riot gear attempted to control the crowd. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “people collapsed in the heat. Emergency personnel drove up in a pickup truck and handed out bottled water. People were carried off on stretchers. A baby went into a seizure and was taken to a hospital.”6 In all, sixty-two people were injured and twenty were taken to a nearby hospital, some injured in the chaos that resulted when the door opened to take applications. In July 2011, five thousand applicants rushed to apply for housing assistance with Dallas County in what officials characterized as a “stampede.” Months earlier the city of Dallas had accepted twenty-one thousand applications for their waiting list, and the city of Plano, Texas, received eight thousand applicants for one hundred available slots.7 The systematic dismantling of the public housing system in the United States bears no relation to the scope of the need for very low cost housing in the country which is as acute as it has ever been.

Other evidence presented in earlier pages suggests an intentional rollback of social welfare policy in service to neoliberal policy initiatives to reduce government, privatize, and facilitate investment growth in cities. The pattern of demolition further suggests a race-based strategy for reclaiming central city space. Though nominally a policy aimed at the deconcentration of poverty, HOPE VI has proceeded in a manner that has disproportionately displaced African Americans. The analysis presented in the previous pages shows that demolition has targeted projects with disproportionately high percentages of African American residents. It has also shown that since 2000 public housing demolition has been more aggressive in cities in which the overall resident profile of public housing is disproportionately African American in comparison to the rest of the city.

The disparate impacts of demolitions, and its prevalence in cities where public housing is most identified with blacks, suggests a number of possible dynamics. There could be the conscious targeting of black residents, a greater tolerance of demolition if the victims are black, that blacks are living in the worst public housing, or that blacks are disproportionately represented within the family public housing that is being lost at greater rates than senior public housing. The statistical analysis discounts the latter two explanations, because race is a significant predictor even controlling for the age distribution of public housing residents and for the quality of the housing. This leaves the fact that in cities where public housing is most associated with black tenants, it is most likely to be demolished. Whether this is a surprise, given the racial history of public housing, the continued problems of residential segregation and housing discrimination in the United States, is beside the point. Our efforts to dismantle public housing seem to be proceeding in the same discriminatory manner in which the program has been operated for most of its existence. It is, of course, the fact that the constituents for public housing, its residents, are very low income and mostly of color, that the program enjoys little political support in the first place. It is an added injury that its dismantling should proceed in a way that has the effect of targeting blacks specifically.

The Commission’s Recommendations

In 1992 the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing was clear in its suggestions about how to deal with the nation’s worst public housing. The public housing program, the Commission said, “continues to provide an important rental housing resource for many low-income families and others.”8 Therefore, the Commission recommended an approach that would preserve public housing assets. According to the Commission, the effort should be large enough to meet the existing need for improving the public housing stock, a need estimated at eighty-six thousand units, and it should reflect the preferences of the residents of public housing. The Commission envisioned an approach that would combine physical upgrading with resources to address the human needs of residents. “Traditional approaches to revitalizing seriously distressed public housing,” noted the Commission, “have too often emphasized the physical condition of the developments without addressing the human condition of the residents.”9 As the research evidence has shown, this type of “traditional response” is exactly what we have gotten with the HOPE VI program.

The Commission was equally clear in its focus on modernizing and improving the existing stock. The recommendations focus on the rehabilitation of units wherever possible and the replacement of units lost to demolition or disposition. In fact, the commitment to the public housing stock was so strong that the Commission noted:

In planning to replace units to be demolished or disposed of as a part of a comprehensive treatment program for severely distressed public housing, the Commission believes that PHAs must be exempted from impact restrictions in neighborhoods. That is, PHAs should be allowed to construct or rehabilitate the replacement units in the same neighborhood that contained the original units, even if there are “anti-impaction” restrictions.10

In the Commission’s view, maintenance of the public housing stock was more important than the deconcentration or dispersal of subsidized units and poor households. A short four years later, HUD and PHAs across the country were devising plans to demolish public housing projects altogether, replacing them on a limited basis with fewer units mixed in with other subsidized and market-rate units in entirely new communities to be privately managed, and public housing residents were being displaced on a massive scale. The effort to reform public housing that had begun with the Commission’s report had been transformed rapidly into an effort to dismantle the program. One might ask why the original estimate of eighty-six thousand units has been ignored and demolition extended to more than three times that number. Or why the Commission’s preference for rehabilitation has given way to an almost universal reliance on demolition. Or why the Commission’s preference for preserving the public housing stock over the deconcentration of poverty has given way to a reverse formula in which the deconcentration of poverty is pursued through the demolition of public housing and the dispersal of its residents.

The nature and the scale of the problem had not changed in those four years between the Commission’s report in 1992 and the evolution of the HOPE VI program by 1996. What had changed were the national political environment and the economic conditions in many U.S. cities. The election of Bill Clinton and his administration’s orientation toward redefining social welfare policy signaled a new willingness to consider radical changes in public housing policy. One year into his term, Henry Cisneros, Clinton’s choice for secretary of HUD, was beginning to consider demolition as a solution to the worst problems of public housing. He was speaking openly about demolition by 1994.

Figure 11. Mt. Airy Homes public housing complex in Saint Paul, Minnesota, which was rehabilitated in 1997.

The 1994 midterm elections ushered in a new Republican majority in Congress, and HUD became one of its targets. Public housing, never strongly supported by Republicans, was one of the first sacrificial lambs offered up by the Clinton administration to congressional Republicans. Cisneros, attempting to save the agency, proposed a complete remaking of the program to include the demolition of obsolete public housing projects. Cisneros’s proposal mollified the Republicans and cleared the way for fundamental changes that would introduce new public/private partnerships and mixed financing and ownership to public housing.

On the economic front, coming out of the 1990–91 recession, urban areas were beginning to experience significant development pressure and investment interest that fueled a so-called third wave of gentrification. By the end of the decade a prolonged period of prosperity would lead to significant repopulation of many American downtowns. In the postrecession 1990s, local officials in many cities recognized the redevelopment potential of removing large public housing estates from critical parts of the urban landscape. Public housing demolition offered city officials the classic benefits of slum clearance (the elimination of blight and the fiscal burdens associated with it), and the preparation of strategic parcels of land to capitalize on private-sector development interest.

The belief that public housing was an albatross in too many urban land markets was widespread. As Renee Glover has written about her city, Atlanta, “the public housing projects were going downhill fast and dragging everything else in the city along with them.”11 Even in some of the toughest public housing communities there was the sense that a latent market demand existed, one that could be activated once the public housing buildings and residents were removed. Thus it was that the Commission’s recommendations, which amounted to a call for improving the living conditions of very low income public housing residents, was in a short period of time hijacked to serve a development agenda that had a different set of objectives, objectives focused on the dispersal of low-income residents, the elimination of public housing communities, and the facilitation of private-sector reinvestment in urban areas that had been in that respect neglected for decades. Public housing demolition in the 1990s was greatest in cities that were experiencing the greatest development pressures.

The program shifted in the way it did because it became an effort to remake the landscape of American cities. The development agenda that focused on attracting private-sector investment, dispersing poverty, and facilitating the gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods necessitated the large-scale demolition of public housing estates. If the objectives of transformation had been different, and had been focused primarily on improving the lives of very low income residents, then the effort would have taken a different form than it has. For one, the shift to demolition would not have had to occur. From the standpoint of fixing the physical and design problems with public housing, rehabilitation would have sufficed in most cases. Physical upgrading and architectural and design enhancements could have created defensible space and reintegrated projects into their surroundings. The rehabilitation of the Commonwealth public housing development in Boston, for example, was a demonstration that, in fact, a careful rehabilitation could produce startling improvements in living conditions and achieve a significant redesign of the public housing environment.12 The difference between the experience of Commonwealth and the way in which HOPE VI evolved is the community redevelopment component of HOPE VI. Rehabilitation, which might produce a much more tolerable living condition for public housing residents, would not have had the same redevelopment impact that total demolition has had. By making these communities, many of which were advantageously sited near downtowns and in the path of revitalization pressures, ready for private investment, HOPE VI expands the policy target and creates constituencies that would not have existed for a rehabilitation-based program. By contrast, a program of public housing rehabilitation would have been in many respects simply another welfare and antipoverty program. HOPE VI-style redevelopment could be sold as that and much more. The evolution of HOPE VI into a dispersal and demolition program created a constituency for the antipoverty element of public housing transformation.

The difference between the MTO and HOPE VI programs is instructive on this point. Poverty programs by themselves are chronically neglected and sometimes quickly abandoned. MTO was designed to facilitate the mobility of very low income families who wanted to move into low-poverty neighborhoods. No other benefits were forecast as a result of the program other than the improvements to the lives of the public housing families who participated. As a result, there was no constituency for the program other than the very low income families themselves. The MTO program was defunded in only its second year, abandoned by its liberal supporters in Congress because of the opposition of middle income communities who felt that they might be harmed by it. HOPE VI, on the other hand, was critically different than MTO in two important ways. First, public housing residents displaced by the program were not guaranteed a move to a low-poverty neighborhood. Indeed, as the research shows, just the opposite has occurred—most families have moved to other segregated and poor neighborhoods. Thus, HOPE VI avoided generating the same backlash from middle income communities that MTO produced. Second, HOPE VI incorporated physical redevelopment of public housing communities, generating a supportive constituency for the program by spreading benefits to nearby property owners, investors, place-based entrepreneurs, large developers, and local officials. Property owners and investors could capitalize on the latent land value that had been suppressed by the existence of public housing, and local officials appreciated the increased property values and decreased service needs in the community postredevelopment. A more limited program of public housing rehabilitation similar to the one recommended by the Commission, a program that avoided displacement whenever possible and resulted in merely an improved public housing environment, would not have generated the same core constituency.

Figure 12. Lauderdale Courts public housing in Memphis, which was built in 1938 by the WPA, was rehabilitated in 2003 and reopened as a mixed-income community called Uptown Square.

In some cases, the disinvestment in public housing over the years had progressed to the point that rehabilitation was not feasible. Similarly, in some cases the massive high-rise model required more extensive changes than rehabilitation would offer. Yet, even in those situations in which demolition, for one reason or another, could not be avoided, a program that focused on the benefits to residents would have looked different than what has ultimately transpired. As envisioned by the Commission, demolition, when unavoidable, would have been accompanied by full replacement of lost units, quickly and in the same neighborhoods where original units had stood.

What gives the lie most directly to the proposition that public housing transformation is about improving the lives of public housing residents is that it has been used only to downsize the public housing program. If, as the advocates for HOPE VI argue, we as a nation have found a way of producing public housing in mixed-income communities, well designed in ways that will foster the development of social capital and provide safe environments, then the model could be employed to rehouse all public housing residents who have been displaced. In fact, the model could also be used to expand public housing in the United States in a way that, in the words of HOPE VI advocates, ensures that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. This has not been done, of course. Nor has it ever been advocated by those pushing the transformation of public housing. Instead, the new model of public housing is in almost all cases employed in the service of retrenchment, and in shrinking the stock of public housing in the United States.

False Choices

It is impossible to overstate the dysfunctional state of some public housing communities in the late 1980s and 1990s. The worst projects in our largest cities were, as Susan Popkin and her colleagues aver, humanitarian disasters.13 In these conditions public housing tenants coped as well as they could, creating internal economic exchange systems even as they were systematically marginalized from mainstream economy.14 They fought with their PHA landlords, trying to bring accountability to property management. They attempted to police themselves when no one else would provide them with security. In short, they attempted to change as much as they could about the environments in which they were living. The advocates of displacement, demolition, and dispersal often confuse criticism of demolition with defense of the status quo in public housing circa 1995. To resist displacement, to them, must be an acceptance of concentrated poverty or complacency about the conditions in the nation’s worst public housing. Again, Renee Glover of Atlanta provides the paradigmatic example:

Rather than address the real issues, many would prefer to debate whether the projects are really communities and these “incapable” poor people would be better off in the project because as bad and destructive as they are, these are their “communities.” …I find it incredible that so many people don’t comprehend the awful, corrosive impact of intensely concentrated poverty and de-humanizing low standards and expectations…. We can do better than allow the horrible conditions at housing projects to go unchallenged.15

The straw-man approach of this particular quote is of course a common rhetorical device used frequently to put one set of ideas in the best relief. But as a means of dealing with the complex issues of poverty and community among public housing residents, it is not of much use. The status quo is not the only alternative to displacement, demolition, and dispersal. The Commission’s recommendations highlight an alternative—rehabilitation and replacement—that has been so neglected since 1995 that it is no longer even acknowledged by those in the transformation movement.

One might also be tempted to give a pass to the dismantling of public housing based only on the impressive neighborhood changes that frequently accompany HOPE VI redevelopments. The eyesores of neglected public housing estates are replaced with new streets and infrastructure, new schools and community centers flanking brand-new housing, built in a style that is for the most part aesthetically pleasant. Crime and criminals are chased away to other parts of the city, and private investment returns to the neighborhood. The advocates point to these successes as proof of the superiority of the mixed-income, HOPE VI model. This, too, implies that we face but two choices: on the one hand we could have public housing, underfunded by Congress, poorly run by HUD, at times utterly mismanaged by local housing authorities, in neighborhoods abandoned by the local government and by private investment, and ceded to gangs. Or we can displace thousands of very low income families and insert new occupants into mixed-income communities with new schools, better property management, collaboration with wider redevelopment efforts, and better public services.16 Off the table altogether, it seems, is the possibility of public housing with excellent property management, good schools nearby, high quality public services, engaged and informed public-sector supervision of housing authorities, and private-sector investment providing jobs and retail opportunities for residents. A mix of incomes is not the critical element in these scenarios. The critical elements are the quality of public services, the management of the properties, the collaboration with private and public investors to build a community that is attractive to a range of households, and the public-sector commitment to support the community through important infrastructure investments. There is very little inherent in the public housing model that precludes these outcomes; it is how our public and private institutions respond to public housing that has produced the negative outcomes we have seen in American public housing.

The advocates of HOPE VI and the dismantling of public housing have thus presented us with a pair of false choices. First, we can accept displacement and demolition or we can accept public housing as it was at its worst. Second, we can accept mixed-income developments supported by hundreds of millions of dollars of public and private investment, or we can continue to have public housing with crumbling public infrastructure, isolated from private reinvestment efforts and with poor to nonexistent public services. Choices like these are easy when the options are so limited. In fact, of course, our options should not be so constrained.

Alternative Options

The current solution being applied to public housing in communities across the country is disproportionate to the problem in two ways. First, we are demolishing more public housing than is necessary, and second, demolition itself is more than is required to address the issues of public housing. There are opportunities for a more measured approach. Architecturally distinctive and structurally sound projects, such as Iberville in New Orleans,17 presented distinctive landscapes that already incorporated most of the New Urbanist prescriptions that HUD and local PHAs have been imposing on redeveloped sites. Successful models of rehabilitation, such as Commonwealth in Boston, provide a template for how to turn around public housing short of total demolition and redevelopment.18 Yet, in city after city HUD and local PHAs have adopted a one-size-fits-all strategy of mass displacement, demolition, and redevelopment. In some cases they settle simply for the mass displacement and demolition.

A number of reasonable policy options are available and could and should be initiated immediately. The new direction for public housing policy should be to put resident concerns at the forefront. This would mean protecting the remaining units of public housing from demolition, eliminating or strictly minimizing the forced displacement of very low income residents, expanding the size of the public housing stock through new construction using the development model created through HOPE VI, and ensuring the mobility of those who wish to move out of public housing.

End the Demolition of Public Housing

The first step is to end the demolition of public housing. Given that HOPE VI has already far exceeded its mandate in terms of the number of units affected, and given that PHAs have demolished almost two hundred thousand other units on their own, outside of HOPE VI, we can be reasonably sure that the worst public housing projects have already been “dealt with.” The number of units affected so far is roughly three times the number estimated by the Commission, and unless the Commission was incompetent in making its estimation, the job is done. Although there may be cases in which demolition is made necessary by the physical deterioration of the structure in the future, decisions about upgrading resident environments should return to the pre-HOPE VI presumption that the housing should be preserved.

Phase In the Redevelopment

Where demolition is absolutely necessary (and only after more rigorous oversight and review from HUD), then it should be done in phases so that residents can stay in the community and so that the disruption of displacement is minimized. Phased redevelopment through HOPE VI has been accomplished in a few places. The courts mandated it in the case of the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago. In Pittsburgh, the PHA managed a phased redevelopment of Bedford Additions that allowed people to stay in the community. Phased redevelopment should be a mandatory element of any future limited program of public housing redevelopment.

The “Right to Remain”

Provisions should be made to honor the desire of some residents to remain in their communities. Attorneys for the residents of the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago negotiated such a right for their clients. All residents who wished to move into the redeveloped site could do so, provided they met basic requirements that the tenants themselves devised. Tenant would be screened for criminal behavior and rental history, but “importantly, residents are screened only on their behavior on or after …the date that the consent decree was entered…. Accordingly, all Horner families were aware that they themselves controlled whether they would be eligible for a replacement unit. Knowing the eligibility requirements, each family knew what it had to do or not do to remain eligible.”19 A similar effort has been initiated in San Francisco by the Housing Rights Committee.20

One-for-One Replacement

The provision for one-for-one replacement of lost public housing units should be reinstated and enforced. Given the nationwide need for housing affordable to very low income families, estimated at close to six million units by HUD, all units that are lost to demolition should be replaced. The Obama administration’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) reinstates one-for-one replacement. HUD should enforce this provision strictly.

Preserve Affordable Housing in Redevelopment Areas

HOPE VI has generated significant neighborhood turnover in many cities, and the Obama administration’s CNI has been designed to spread these changes to the neighborhoods surrounding other forms of federally subsidized housing. These efforts should incorporate the preservation of affordable housing within the neighborhood. In this way, a greater mix of incomes can be achieved and the incumbent low-income residents have the opportunity to benefit from the neighborhood upgrading that takes place.

Build More

The proponents of public housing redevelopment are excited about the neighborhood improvements that have been associated with the development of new mixed-income communities. Supporters claim that mixed-income developments will attract private-sector investment in the form of new residential and commercial development. They argue that public housing developed in this way—as part of a larger mixed-income community—will have a better chance to persist over time, will avoid stigmatization, and will provide benefits to the residents. Proponents of the traditional neighborhood design utilized in HOPE VI projects claim that the new communities fit better into the neighborhoods in which they are placed, provide “eyes on the streets” and “defensible space” that will make the communities safer, and will enhance the creation of social capital. If these claims are correct, the HOPE VI program should be expanded with one important change: it should move from being a redevelopment program to a development program. If, as Henry Cisneros and Renee Glover and Richard Baron and Andrew Cuomo and President Obama’s HUD secretary, Shaun Donovan, contend, the HOPE VI model of public housing solves the problems associated with public housing, then the program should begin to build new public housing immediately. Long waiting lists exist in virtually every major city and most midsized cities. The amount of housing affordable to very low income families is inadequate everywhere. To date, HOPE VI has been enlisted only in the cause of diminishing the stock of public housing; it is time to use the HOPE VI development model to expand public housing.

Monitor the Racial Impact of Public Housing Policies

Given the consistent and sizable disproportionate impact on African American families that the demolition of public housing has produced, HUD should summarize the demographics of displaced households pursuant to any public housing redevelopment that takes place. The summary should include, but not be limited to, an analysis of the possible disparate impact on people of color.

Expand Voluntary Mobility Programs

Ebony Thomas, who lives in the Fort Hill public housing complex in Marietta, Georgia, says of her time in public housing, “I have been trying to move out since I moved in …life kept me here.”21 Ebony Thomas and others like her should be given the chance to move out of public housing. As the Poverty and Race Research Action Council notes, “advocates and policymakers must also recognize that the interests of residents are not ‘monolithic.’ In any given development, some residents may wish to return to the original site, while others may wish to leave.”22 The advocates of dispersal are right to the extent that they argue that too many public housing residents have been trapped in communities that they do not like, and that they would leave if they could. A voluntary program that helps people to move away from public housing neighborhoods if they want to should be a central part of public housing policy moving forward. In 1993, Congress created such a program—the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program. MTO, however, was cut by Congress when it generated controversy in working class suburban areas that erroneously thought they would receive an influx of low-income black, former public housing residents. The ready retreat of liberal Democrats on this issue, and their willingness to kill MTO, is an especially disappointing aspect of this history. Giving people who want to leave the means of doing so should be a policy goal in and of itself. Careful, controlled experimental studies have been carried out on the effects of MTO, and they have shown quite modest program outcomes. But, the fact is, the studies should be irrelevant in this case. The benefits of MTO are the ability of residents to exercise greater choice about where to live and the ability to move to a neighborhood that they perceive is safer and more accommodating. There is no need to demonstrate that it improves health, self-sufficiency, education levels, or social integration. These outcomes are only important when the dispersal is forced upon residents and only as a means of justifying the disruption to lives, the breaking up of community, and the remarkable government intrusion represented by forced eviction. It is in this context that the limited benefits of displacement are so important. MTO needs to be restored and made a nationwide program. Residents who desire to move out of public housing should be supported in doing so. This would make room for the thousands of others who clog the waiting lists for public housing in city after city.

A New Legacy

The legacy of public housing in the United States is a complex one. Its failures have been terrible and widely heralded; its successes, which are much more the norm, are mostly overlooked. First enacted to serve multiple agendas that included economic recovery and slum clearance, public housing’s dismantling now serves the cause of urban economic revitalization and, again, slum clearance.

Often lost in these dynamics are the struggles of very low income families living in public housing. Their experiences in the dismantling of public housing should have more bearing on events and on the course of policy than has been the case. The proponents of public housing transformation persist in the face of consistent evidence that resident benefits are quite limited and in any case balanced by measurable harm. Proponents also maintain their argument even in the face of resident opposition to displacement and demolition. It is the discourse of disaster, and the widespread understanding of public housing as a social intervention gone awry, that allows advocates to assert that any move away from public housing is almost by definition a benefit to a resident. It is the belief that public housing is irredeemable that leads public officials to dismiss resident opposition as ill-informed or shortsighted. Thus, former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros acknowledges tenant dissatisfaction but concludes that in the end he and the other architects of transformation knew better:

Although even residents living in horrible conditions had mixed feelings about leaving neighborhoods where they had developed bonds of friendship and mutual support, it was our judgment that conditions in the most distressed public housing developments were so bad that replacement was the only reasonable course.23

Resident opposition, though vocal in some places, has been for the most part uneven. Though residents filed lawsuits to stop the demolitions, crowded city council meetings, met the bulldozers with pickets, and organized themselves to tell stories of communities being torn apart, there was in every city a portion of the public housing population that wanted to leave and that supported demolition. The support of these residents, whose concerns for their own well-being and desire for different living accommodations are as strong as the opinions of those who opposed demolition, undercut the political cause of their neighbors and reinforced the belief among officials that demolition was appropriate. As long as local housing authorities, HUD officials, and policy analysts could point to residents who wanted to leave and who welcomed demolition and relocation, the opposition of other residents could be set aside. In fact, of course, it should have been the other way around: as long as a sizable number of residents wished to remain and expressed concern about the loss of informal support networks upon which they relied, then the desire to demolish and set off universal displacement should have been set aside. Those who wanted to leave should have had their moves facilitated, but not at the expense of those who wished to remain.