2

DISMANTLING PUBLIC HOUSING

I am very much opposed to the proliferation of public housing in Waterbury. It’s just another form of welfare to attract the poor to places where there are no jobs. It hurts everybody, them and us.

—David Corbett, chairman of the Waterbury Housing Authority

Jon Gutzman, executive director of the Saint Paul Public Housing Authority in Minnesota maintained in 2004 that public housing in that city has helped “literally thousands of families and individuals [find] a home to stabilize their lives while they perhaps emigrated to this country, or connected with needed support services, or obtained an education or a job, or regained their health, or dealt with a disability.”1 Rick White, the spokesman for the Atlanta Housing Authority, remarked in 2008 that “his agency determined in the 1990s that ‘public housing is a failed policy, and in many ways an immoral policy.’ ”2 The commitment to public housing on the part of PHA officials, it is fair to say, varies from city to city. The movement to dismantle the New Deal legacy of public housing is an uneven one. In cities such as Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans, housing authorities and local officials are eradicating all or most of the public housing stock, while in other places, such as New York City, Phoenix, and Saint Paul, little or no public housing is being lost.

The movement to dismantle public housing began with attempts by some PHAs during the 1980s to rid themselves of their most troubled projects. In some cases this took the form of allowing projects to deteriorate and depopulate, resulting in what resident advocates called de facto demolition. Since the 1990s, the effort to dismantle became more widespread. Though demolition accounts for most of the units removed, the sale and disposition of public housing has also contributed to the reduction of units nationwide. The patterns of removal across the nation’s largest cities suggest that race and gentrification pressures are important in determining the aggressiveness with which cities pursue the transformation of public housing.

Early Demolition of Public Housing

Significant expansion of the public housing stock essentially ended in the 1970s. President Richard Nixon put a moratorium on new federal housing efforts in 1973, halting the expansion of older programs such as public housing. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis in 1972 was a stunning visual symbol of the problems that many high-rise public housing projects were facing. Congress passed Section 8 of the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, creating a program of household-based housing allowances, and HUD began shifting its emphasis away from subsidizing “hard units” to subsidizing families directly and allowing them to shop their Section 8 certificates throughout the local housing market.

By the 1980s, the public housing program was generating only a few thousand new units each year and had been eclipsed by the Section 8 program as the lead effort of the federal government in affordable housing. Local governments and the federal government began to look to nonprofit development corporations for the bulk of the new affordable housing units built. There was little innovation in public housing. Most PHAs simply continued to manage and operate their housing; some tried unsuccessfully to cope with the increased pressures of extreme poverty among their own residents and in the communities surrounding public housing projects.

Noticeable efforts by HUD and local housing authorities to disinvest in their public housing stock began during the 1980s.3 Concentrated poverty was on the increase in American cities. Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1985, adding an additional element of chaos to the lives of America’s poorest ghettos and increasing the stakes for gangs vying to control illicit drug markets in the forgotten corners of U.S. cities. It was in this environment that PHAs first began to shed public housing units. It began as a dribble of units demolished or sold, usually a few units here or there, rarely an entire development. Very few of the units taken out, initially, were in high-rise developments. There was no announced program of disinvestment, nor any coordinated effort on the part of HUD to subsidize or incentivize the removal of units. Congress, while not expanding public housing, was still interested in protecting and preserving it. In most cases, the initiative for removing units came from local housing authorities looking for ways to rid themselves of the most troublesome of their housing stock, and they found HUD willing to allow it.

Demolition or sale of public housing units by local housing authorities requires the approval of HUD. The rules and procedures for the demolition of public housing are laid out in Section 18 of the 1937 Housing Act.4 The Act stipulates that the secretary of HUD can approve an application for demolition of public housing only if (a) the project or a section of the project is obsolete, and (b) the local PHA has consulted with residents in developing the proposal to demolish it. Furthermore, the Act requires that, should demolition occur, all tenants displaced would be “given relocation assistance to other decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing.” In 1969, Congress amended the 1937 Housing Act to require a one-for-one replacement of public units that were demolished or sold. The one-for-one requirement was first inserted as a legislative amendment to the public housing program because Congress was concerned about the loss of low-cost units due to urban renewal. In fact, the journey from “equivalent elimination” (a requirement in the original public housing program that required one unit of slum housing to be taken down for every unit of public housing constructed) to one-for-one replacement was testament to how the fortunes of public housing and slum clearance had changed over the years. In 1937 the concern among policy makers had been that public housing would create a glut of low-cost housing and that congressional action was needed to ensure that clearance would keep up with public housing production. As a result, Congress demanded that a substandard house be eliminated for every unit of public housing built. By 1969, urban renewal was so widely used and demolition of low-cost housing so common, that Congress felt the need to ensure that public housing development would keep up with the removals.

One-for-one replacement remained a requirement until 1983 when the Reagan administration succeeded in removing it from the program in the midst of a larger policy shift away from subsidizing “hard units” and toward the use of household-based vouchers. Congress reinstated the requirement four years later in response to a growing lack of low-cost housing in the nation. HUD was given authority to waive the one-for-one requirement if there was evidence that the local housing market within which a petitioning PHA operated had a surplus of low-cost housing. Otherwise, PHAs were given six years to construct the replacement units for those they had been given approval to demolish. Even when the replacement requirement was not in effect, however, the other provisions of Section 18 applied, requiring the PHA to demonstrate that the units to be removed were obsolete. A portion of a project could be demolished if the PHA demonstrated that the removal of those units was necessary to preserve the rest of the project—the equivalent of amputating a gangrened limb to save the body.

Prior to the 1980s, very few public housing demolitions took place and there was not much pressure from PHAs to demolish or sell public housing units. Nationwide, new units were still coming online each year, and congressional intent during this period was to preserve public housing whenever possible. Of course, the notable and very significant exception to all of this was the implosion of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis in 1972. The skyrocketing vacancy rates at Pruitt-Igoe, the rapid physical decline of the buildings, and the dysfunctional social and living conditions that prevailed at the development presaged what would happen to many large developments during the 1980s. When these conditions emerged, PHAs began to press more frequently for demolition and HUD became more accommodating. Thus, the 1980s saw an almost imperceptible shift in the trajectory of the public housing program. Though there was no stated course reversal, and despite a continued trickle of new units coming online, PHAs across the country began to embrace the idea of demolition for projects that presented the greatest management or financial challenges. HUD largely acquiesced to this shift, frequently approving the demolition applications it received.

A report published in 1990 by the National Housing Law Project (NHLP) sheds light on this otherwise unknown and unannounced policy shift.5 Surveying local housing authorities and reviewing HUD documents related to the disposition of public housing units, NHLP revealed that local housing authorities sold or demolished 14,990 units of public housing between 1978 and 1989. Another thirty thousand units were scheduled for demolition or sale by local authorities (the removal of eight thousand of which had already been approved by HUD) at the time of the publication of their report. In addition, NHLP identified another twenty thousand units in projects with very high vacancy rates that put them in jeopardy for future disposition.

Though this trend started out modestly (fewer than one thousand units were lost in 1980), the rate of loss was several thousand per year by the end of the 1980s. Although NHLP did not foresee the massive policy changes that would emerge in the 1990s, it nevertheless estimated that the rate of demolition and sale would pick up during the decade. In all, they identified around sixty-five thousand units of public housing that had either been lost or were in danger of being removed from the stock by housing authorities nationwide. This was roughly equivalent to the total production of new public housing units nationwide during the 1980s—an average of 7,149 units was being added annually nationwide during the last half of the 1980s.6 Furthermore, NHLP documented an accelerating rate of demolition and sale by the end of the decade.

NHLP’s numbers were likely an undercount. Though they were able to secure the cooperation of most of the housing authorities they surveyed, their study was not a complete review of PHAs across the country. Though their sample was heavily weighted toward the largest PHAs, and their findings showed that the largest PHAs were the most active in removing units, their study did not cover the actions of all local housing authorities. But several of the trends they reported foreshadowed the great explosion of demolitions that occurred in the ’90s.

Most of the demolitions and sales they reported occurred in large family-housing projects. Senior public housing was, for the most part, not endangered in this first round of removal. In three-quarters of the removals they identified, local housing authorities removed only a portion of a project, a practice NHLP called “thinning.” For example, in Kansas City the housing authority demolished the high-rise portion of the Wayne Miner project, but left the low-rise housing intact. In many cases, a thinning strategy indicated that the PHA was attempting to protect the rest of the housing stock by removing the worst. The relative emphasis on thinning versus complete abandonment shifted over the course of the decade, with the removal of entire projects becoming more common over time.

PHAs with more than 1,250 units (categorized as “large” PHAs by HUD) removed 84 percent of the units lost in the 1980s. Another 12 percent were removed by medium-sized PHAs (those with 500 and 1,250 units). PHAs on HUD’s “troubled” list were also more likely than other PHAs to demolish or sell public housing units. A troubled PHA is one that has been judged by HUD to have significant deficiencies in its management capacities, achieving a very low score on the department’s Public Housing Management Assessment Program (PHMAP). In most cases, the projects that lost units were severely distressed projects suffering from significant problems.7 The removal of units from these projects, or the removal of the entire project, was thus an attempt to eliminate problem properties from the public housing stock.

Although gentrification became a major driver of public housing removal during the 1990s, this was not the case in the 1980s. In and around most public housing communities during the 1980s, housing markets were depressed and the communities themselves were immersed in problems associated with poverty and gang violence. Gentrification and a rebounding housing market did not seem viable scenarios in most cases. In fact, in only five of the thirty-four developments that were lost entirely during the decade did the public housing projects sit on highly valued real estate.8 These five were all redeveloped as higher-income residential properties. The NHLP report indicated that race seemed to be a factor in determining which units would be removed from the public housing stock, because all of the projects slated for removal at the time of their report were majority nonwhite.

“De Facto Demolition”

The three-hundred-unit Fort Dupont public housing project in Washington, D.C., was situated in the city’s far southeastern corner, a section with a predominantly black population and characterized by high levels of poverty and problems of crime and disinvestment. In 1977 the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) in Washington, D.C., made an application to HUD for modernization funds to fix up twenty-eight units at the development that were deemed uninhabitable. HUD approved almost a half million dollars for the project. The funds, however, were not spent immediately and by 1981 rising costs convinced the DCHA to pursue demolition instead. As a result the agency made an application to HUD to demolish the twenty-eight units. HUD did not immediately rule on the application and two years later DCHA increased the number of units it wanted to demolish to 112. In the interim, according to the tenants of Fort Dupont, the DCHA, anticipating demolition, had begun to systematically disinvest in Fort Dupont. The agency allowed the project to fall deeper into disrepair and made no attempt to rent out vacant units. By 1984, seventy-four of the 112 units designated by DCHA for demolition were vacant and DCHA was moving to empty the remaining thirty-eight units. Tenants who resisted moving out were threatened with eviction.9 DCHA’s interest in maintaining Fort Dupont continued to wane, and by 1985 more than half of the units in the entire project were vacant At that point, residents filed suit in federal court (Edwards v. District of Columbia) alleging that HUD’s inaction, combined with the DCHA’s neglect of maintenance at the project, constituted a de facto demolition of the project that reduced the stock of public housing units without going through the formal process of approval mandated by Congress in Section 18 of the original Public Housing Act of 1937.10

The argument in Edwards would become the foundation for similar cases across the country alleging de facto demolition. In essence, the claim is that the local PHA, having decided internally to demolish the units (but prior to receiving or in some cases even requesting approval from HUD to do so), discontinues normal maintenance at the site, deliberately engaging “in a systematic practice of vacating units and refusing to maintain [the development] so as to create a fait accompli and thereafter to obtain HUD’s approval to demolish an abandoned and uninhabitable project.”11 Thus, de facto demolition is simultaneously the unauthorized removal of units from the active stock through abandonment and the creation of the very conditions of disrepair and obsolescence required for HUD approval of demolition.

De facto demolition was a strategy pursued by some PHAs in an environment where approval by HUD was necessary, and the demonstration of the specific need for and desirability of demolition was required. In the 1980s, prior to the nation’s massive policy shift toward dispersal and deconcentration, the burden of proof for the need to demolish rested with the PHAs. De facto demolition emerged as a way of generating the proof necessary for HUD approval and of generating support for demolition among residents. During this time it was the typical process by which public housing units were lost in cities across the country. According to NHLP:

Usually, the PHA’s decision to apply for demolition and the filing of the formal application—not to mention HUD’s review and approval process—is merely the last of a very protracted series of decisions and actions, all of which move inexorably toward that ultimate destruction.12

In a case of de facto demolition, a PHA in effect induces the physical obsolescence that is required for demolition approval through willful neglect of the public housing project, allowing physical problems at the site to go uncorrected, creating the conditions for vandalism by keeping large numbers of units vacant, and allowing major building systems to decline significantly to the point that repairs become prohibitively expensive. Thus, another term used for these cases was “constructive demolition.” The assumption is that without this deliberate neglect on the part of the PHA, the project would have continued to be viable, inhabitable, and therefore continue to be a source of affordable housing for very low income families.

The second argument in the de facto demolition claim focuses on the immediate loss of units. The plaintiffs in Edwards claimed that by allowing the units to decline to the point where they were uninhabitable, and by keeping them vacant, the DCHA had in effect demolished them without HUD approval, without consultation of the tenants, and without providing any relocation assistance to the displaced families. In this way the tenant-protection requirements of the federal statute had been circumvented. Here the claim suggests that the effect of PHA neglect is the same as actual demolition; units of public housing are taken out of the stock and very low income families lose affordable housing opportunities. In contrast to actual demolition, however, residents are not consulted or provided with relocation assistance. Such action, when tacitly sanctioned by HUD and allowed by the courts, rendered the Section 18 requirements meaningless.

In a perfect application of catch-22, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in Edwards that since the DCHA’s demolition application had not been approved, the law did not apply, and that “nothing in the statute prevents the District from seeking such demolition in the allegedly insensitive way it has chosen.”13 Without ruling on the factual merits of the case, the court dismissed it. The Edwards decision meant that as long as HUD did not rule on a PHA’s demolition application, or as long as the PHA does not make a formal application to HUD for demolition, PHAs could take units out of the stock by allowing them to go unrented, and could take whole projects out of circulation by allowing conditions to deteriorate.

Congress, still interested in preserving public housing in the late 1980s, immediately responded to the decision in Edwards with an amendment—Section 18(d)—that prohibits a PHA from taking “any action” to demolish a public housing project unless approval has been obtained from HUD. Members of the House Committee that approved the amendment were clear about its intent, noting specifically that it was meant “to correct an erroneous interpretation of the existing statute …in Edwards v. District of Columbia.”14

This new congressional amendment was soon invoked by the U.S. District Court in Connecticut in Concerned Tenants Association of Father Panik Village v. Pierce. In this case the tenants’ de facto demolition claim was allowed.15 Father Panik Village was a seven-hundred-unit public housing development in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The plaintiffs alleged that the Bridgeport Housing Authority had

failed to repair broken windows, doors, electrical fixtures, appliances, radiators, pipes, showers, stairway railings, floors, walls, and ceilings; that defendants have failed to provide adequate security, including door locks, hallway lighting, and smoke alarms, which have resulted in frequent robberies of the tenants and use of vacant apartments by drug addicts and drug sellers; and that the hallways and stairs are filled with garbage and refuse and the apartments are infested with rodents and insects.16

In the case of the Newark Housing Authority (NHA) in New Jersey, de facto demolition seemed to be its central strategy during the 1980s. In 1978 NHA owned and operated over thirteen thousand units of public housing, only 587 of which were vacant (a 4.5% vacancy rate). Nine years later, NHA had 5,547 vacant units, a 42.7 percent vacancy rate. The number of vacant public housing units in Newark exceeded the entire stock of public housing in most cities. Tenants claimed that the agency deliberately created vacancies through lack of maintenance. According to NHLP, the vacancies occurred as the result of “a combination of intentional neglect and gross mismanagement on the part of NHA, and an absence of oversight on the part of HUD.”17 Newark had been granted modernization funds that it did not spend; instead, the NHA allowed vacant units to sit unrented for years. In the Scudder Homes project, two buildings were entirely vacant and the bottom floor of another building had been gutted two years before NHA even applied to HUD for demolition approval. Ultimately, the Newark Low Income Housing Coalition sued the NHA to stop demolition of two projects, alleging violation of the 1937 Housing Act provisions for approval of demolition.

In Kansas City, Missouri, the story was similar. The Housing Authority of Kansas City (HAKC) also engaged in the systematic practice of de facto demolition. In the Wayne Miner project, HAKC allowed two high-rise towers to empty completely, and it vacated the highest floors of the other three buildings in that project before applying to HUD for demolition approval. In the Theron B. Watkins project (a project ultimately demolished through HOPE VI), vacancies were allowed to skyrocket in the 1980s.

Other cases emerged across the country. Residents of public housing in Pittsburgh challenged demolition on the grounds that they were not consulted by the housing authority.18 Residents of Allen Parkway Village in Houston alleged that the housing authority, despite receiving $10 million in modernization funds from HUD, spent less than $50,000 of that and instead let the project slide while first requesting approval for demolition and then for sale of the property. Allen Parkway would later be demolished in a HOPE VI project funded by HUD in the first year of the program.

Since the congressional amendment in 1987, the courts have, with one exception,19 interpreted Section 18 of the Housing Act of 1937 as allowing a right of private action by tenants who claim de facto demolition. In Tinsley v. Kemp, tenants were successful in bringing a suit against HUD and the Housing Authority of Kansas City for the systematic neglect of the Theron B. Watkins Homes.20 In this case, faced with a viable lawsuit against them, HAKC moved to settle the case, promising to renovate and maintain the project. After signing the consent decree, however, HAKC, a “troubled” PHA in HUD’s parlance, reneged on its promises and was successfully sued for contempt of court by the tenants who were still attempting to force the agency to maintain the property.

Meanwhile, HAKC was allowing conditions at other developments to deteriorate. In 1992 the HAKC was confronted with a second de facto demolition suit, Boles v. Kemp, for its neglect of Riverview Gardens where vacancy rates had risen to 55 percent and abandoned apartments were left to deteriorate, not even properly boarded up by HAKC.21 Boles was settled in 1993 with HAKC agreeing to fully modernize the development. When tenants had to go to court a third time in the Tinsley case (with a second contempt-of-court motion) to force HAKC to make the improvements committed to in the original consent decree, they asked the court to appoint a receiver. The court agreed and HAKC was put in receivership in 1993 and stayed there for more than fifteen years.22

From Edwards through Tinsley the courts had considered only whether Section 18 allowed tenants to bring a suit on the basis of a de facto demolition claim. None of these cases went to a final decision on the merits of the claim because settlements were reached in each. The first full adjudication of a de facto demolition case came in 1992 in Gomez v. El Paso Housing Authority.23 In this case, the plaintiffs were on the waiting list for public housing and alleged that they had been harmed by the El Paso Housing Authority’s failure to maintain hundreds of units that had become uninhabitable, therefore reducing the number of public housing units in the city. The court required the tenants to demonstrate that the El Paso Housing Authority intended to engage in de facto demolition. This was a major setback for tenants and for the strategy of bringing de facto demolition suits. Requiring a demonstration of intent, rather than merely the effect of demolition, was a high bar for plaintiffs to meet. HUD attempted to institutionalize the Gomez ruling on intent by proposing a final rule to implement Congress’s 1987 revision of Section 18 that would require demonstration of intent. Affordable housing advocates responded strongly and forced HUD to withdraw that proposal.24

Other courts did not follow the lead of Gomez, however. In both Velez v. Chester Housing Authority and Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development the courts reversed Gomez and did not require proof of intent.25 The Velez case went to full adjudication, while the parties reached a settlement in Horner. By 1994, then, the courts had generally determined that public housing residents could, in fact, sue local housing authorities and HUD for neglectful property management that led to severe deterioration of units and high vacancy rates. Furthermore, case law was converging on a second conclusion, also in the tenants’ favor, that proof of intent on the part of the PHA in question was not required to show de facto demolition.

HUD’s efforts to preserve the public housing stock and enforce adherence to congressional intent related to demolition were questionable through most of the 1980s. The agency routinely approved demolition applications, often merely accepting the assertion by PHAs that the projects (or units) in question were in fact obsolete—sometimes even without independent verification of the condition of units.26 HUD waived the one-for-one replacement requirement on occasion, sometimes without bothering to establish whether conditions within the local housing market merited it.27 Even when the requirement was not waived, it was unevenly and ineffectively enforced. In its assessment of demolitions in the 1980s, the National Housing Law Project found that in addition to being waived, the one-for-one requirement was “sometimes directly violated, sometimes evaded, or occasionally remained unfulfilled.”28

In cases of de facto demolition, HUD’s lax oversight allowed PHAs to cut off maintenance and generate skyrocketing vacancy rates. HUD, for its part, claimed that it could not prevent these actions among PHAs. But the process of de facto demolition rendered HUD preservation oversight meaningless, since by the time most PHAs filed for formal approval, the projects had been made uninhabitable by the concerted neglect of the local authority and the indifference of HUD. In the case of New Orleans, HUD was actually out ahead of the PHA in terms of recommending removal of public housing units from the stock. In 1983, citing HANO’s overall lack of a maintenance plan, and the deteriorated conditions at two large projects in the city, HUD recommended the removal of 2,118 units.29 Almost two decades before Katrina, however, HANO opted to hold on to all of its units. HUD’s willingness to facilitate demolition during the 1980s was illustrated by the fact that the department approved several demolition applications in the days and hours before Congress reinstated the one-for-one replacement requirement in 1987.30 The agency clearly did not want these demolitions inhibited by a requirement to replace the lost units on a one-for-one basis.

By the 1990s, the desire on the part of local PHAs to remove public housing from the stock was strong and within HUD it was growing, even though public policy changes were lagging. Although de facto demolition suits often forced PHAs into more responsible behavior regarding the maintenance of units in the short term, the policy environment in which demolition was considered only as an unavoidable last resort was about to change. In 1992 the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing issued its report, and a year later Congress created the Urban Revitalization Demonstration (URD) program—the program that would become HOPE VI. The first set of de facto demolition cases (through Velez) occurred in an environment in which the value of demolition was strongly contested not only by residents but by housing and community advocates. These cases were also decided prior to the emergence of the mixed-income model of public housing communities. Thus, in most cases, the objective of the plaintiffs was to force PHAs to modernize the buildings and improve maintenance.

The Horner case, for example, emerged in Chicago, the first city to experiment with a mixed-income public housing model, and the case was settled at a time when Congress was actively considering elimination of the one-for-one replacement requirement that attached to public housing demolition. In fact, some argued that the one-for-one rule was actually causing de facto demolition because the statutory requirement for replacing all demolished units was too onerous for PHAs to meet. At the time the Horner settlement was being negotiated the HOPE VI demolition and redevelopment model was emerging. Thus, the consent decree in Horner focused not on forcing the CHA to modernize and upgrade the existing structures (mostly sixteen-story high-rises) but to proceed with demolition and redevelopment in a manner that protected tenants’ rights, allowed them to stay on-site during a phased redevelopment, and to move into newly completed units as they were finished.

The complaint of the Horner tenants was similar to other de facto demolition cases. The vacancy rate at the development had skyrocketed in a short period of time from 2 percent in 1991 to 49 percent in 1993. Furthermore, CHA had not spent any of the $4 million in modernization funding it had received from HUD for the Horner project. CHA allowed extremely poor conditions to prevail at the site, failed to invest in the property compared to other CHA properties, and thus effectively abandoned the project to (not so) gradual ruin. The parties agreed to demolition of most of the site, to be completed in phases, and the decree mandated one-for-one replacement of the units demolished in Phase I. The parties further agreed that should Congress repeal the one-for-one requirement (as it was considering at the time), they would negotiate the degree of replacement housing that would apply to the rest of the phases of redevelopment.

The emergence of the HOPE VI demolition approach and the repeal of one-for-one replacement in 1995 altered the landscape for PHAs that were looking to demolish portions of their public housing stock. HOPE VI gave them the resources to accomplish the task, a model by which to do so, and in some cases the funding for large-scale redevelopment of the old public housing sites. The repeal of one-for-one eliminated the financial obstacle associated with actual demolition of public housing units. These policy developments of the 1990s have not eliminated de facto demolition. Residents continue to have to force local housing authorities to abide by the requirements of Section 18 of the Housing Act. In 2008, residents of Arroyo Vista, the only public housing complex in the city of Dublin, California, filed suit alleging that the housing authority had begun steps to demolish the project without notifying tenants or getting permission from HUD. Indeed, according to the tenants’ claim, a developer had already been chosen and the PHA was asking tenants to move, “urging them to take Section 8 vouchers immediately, or to risk not being granted one later.”31 In 2007, tenants of Jane Addams Village in Rockford, Illinois, filed suit against the Rockford Housing Authority challenging the demolition of that eighty-four unit townhome project. The tenants alleged that the project was not obsolete as the RHA had asserted in its demolition application. HUD conducted its own engineering study and agreed with the tenants. RHA made a second demolition application on separate grounds and the parties negotiated a settlement that allowed demolition but required the replacement of seventy-seven units.32 Residents in post-Katrina New Orleans also filed suit to force the Housing Authority of New Orleans to reopen structurally sound public housing units that had been boarded up and allowed to sit vacant for years after the hurricane hit.33

Desegregation Suits and Dispersal

Whereas the evolving legal doctrine related to de facto demolition served to check the hand of PHAs in dismantling public housing, a number of desegregation lawsuits were having an opposite effect. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a series of lawsuits were settled in cities across the country that called for the demolition of public housing, the relocation of residents, and the expansion of so-called mobility programs to achieve a wider geographic dispersal of subsidized households. The genesis of these suits was a case in Chicago in which public housing residents alleged that the Chicago Housing Authority and HUD had illegally discriminated in the siting of public housing and in tenant selection policies.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ordered an end to racial discrimination in federally assisted housing. Using this leverage, a group of public housing residents in Chicago sued the Chicago Housing Authority and HUD for discriminating along racial lines in tenant selection and placement, and when making decisions about where to put public housing. The Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court where, in April 1976, the Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered HUD and the Chicago Housing Authority to initiate a metropolitan-wide plan of relief that would decentralize public housing assistance. The resulting Gautreaux demonstration program involved an agreement by HUD to make Section 8 housing certificates available to African American tenants of the Chicago Housing Authority to be used throughout the metropolitan area. The program included counseling and outreach to ease the transition of these residents to suburban areas.

The initial significance of Gautreaux was its reversal of public housing policy that had overtly served the cause of segregation for several decades. The program had been run under rules that explicitly sustained patterns of racial segregation. The so-called neighborhood composition rule, first applied by the Interior Department in the 1930s, required that the racial composition of public housing buildings had to match that of the neighborhoods in which the projects were located. This ensured that public housing would not integrate neighborhoods, and it led to a high level of segregation within public housing, as projects came to reflect the extreme racial segregation found in most U.S. neighborhoods.34 In Gautreaux, the courts said that public housing would henceforth operate under different rules. Litigation across the country attempted to extend the thrust of Gautreaux.

By the mid-1980s efforts to desegregate public housing were being made nationwide. In 1983, federal courts required that twenty-five white and black families swap apartments in Clarksville, Texas. In 1984, HUD ordered Texas public housing authorities to stop their racially dual public housing systems. Efforts to desegregate public housing accelerated during the Clinton administration. The greater attention to desegregation was a policy objective of HUD under Secretary Henry Cisneros, and the result of a coordinated campaign by Legal Aid and NAACP lawyers that led to lawsuits in over twenty cities alleging segregation in public housing. HUD decided not to contest most of these suits, and instead negotiated settlements that provided for decentralization and desegregation of public housing units.35

In a case brought by public housing tenants in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, HUD settled with the plaintiffs in 1994, agreeing to provide one hundred units of replacement public housing in areas of low racial concentration, to provide 450 new Section 8 certificates to be used in areas of low racial concentration, and various other efforts to upgrade the existing stock of public housing and pro- vide tenants with the opportunity to escape segregated housing conditions. A similar consent decree in Minneapolis provided for the demolition of seven hundred units of public housing (built in 1939) and the provision of seven hundred replacement units to be scattered throughout the city and suburban areas, eight hundred new Section 8 certificates and vouchers for use metropolitan-wide, and counseling services for public housing tenants relocating to suburban areas. Thompson v. HUD in Baltimore, Walker v. HUD in Dallas, Hawkins v. Cisneros in Omaha, and others incorporated similar elements in their settlements. According to Roberta Achtenberg, HUD assistant secretary for fair housing from 1992 to 1995, these elements provided the framework for legal settlements of suits across the country.36

HOPE VI

Movement was occurring legislatively as well. After operating for more than a decade on its own and with little outside scrutiny, the Gautreaux program in Chicago was beginning to produce results that some reformers felt could be replicated in other places. Using the experience of the Gautreaux program as a framework, HUD officials began creating a national model in 1990 that became known as the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program.37 MTO provided residents of public and HUD-assisted housing with Section 8 vouchers and certificates that were to be used in low-poverty areas. Unlike the Gautreaux program, participants are identified by their income, not their race, and the areas to which they are relocated are defined by a low concentration of poverty, rather than racial composition. Although MTO was aimed at achieving dispersal for public housing residents who wished to leave, it did not address the problems that existed within public housing communities. Thus, parallel to the efforts to accomplish the desegregation of public housing, Congress established the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing (NCSDPH) in 1989. The Commission was tasked with assessing conditions at the nation’s most troubled public housing and making recommendations for addressing them.

The Commission took eighteen months to visit public housing developments and interview residents, local housing officials, and other experts. The commission’s report led to congressional passage of the Urban Revitalization Demonstration (URD) program, which later became known as HOPE VI.38 The Commission’s report was issued in August 1992 and URD was enacted in October of the same year.

The Commission’s Report on Distressed Public Housing

Given the evolution of HOPE VI and the expansion of efforts outside of HOPE VI to demolish public housing, there were several things notable about the report. First, the Commission’s study of public housing suggested that “only 6 percent of the public housing stock is estimated to be severely distressed.” Although the conditions in that 6 percent of the stock were “almost unimaginably” bad, and “that in human terms, only 6 percent is 6 percent too many,” the Commission clearly saw their work relating to a small minority of public housing in the nation.39 Though a small percentage, the degree of distress in those projects was, according to the commission, so advanced and deplorable that the commission called public housing “a national problem—a national disgrace.”40 As the report stated, “it is important to note that if 6 percent of the units are severely distressed, approximately 94 percent of the units are not in such a state; thus, the public housing program continues to provide an important rental housing resource for many low-income families and others.”41 The Commission thus offered a set of recommendations aimed at addressing the needs of roughly eighty-six thousand units out of a stock, at that time, of 1.4 million units of public housing. The HOPE VI program alone has demolished more than twice as many units, and when other demolition and disposal of public housing units is considered, three to four times that amount have been eliminated. Some will maintain, with some justification, that the Commission’s numerical estimate was not precise, and that the problem might have been worse. But even doubling the number (and thereby suggesting that the commission’s estimate was off by 100 percent) produces a number of units (172,000) that has been far exceeded by the 250,000 demolitions that have occurred.

Second, the Commission’s recommendations focused on fixing the problems of severely distressed public housing. They began by noting that “traditional approaches to revitalizing seriously distressed public housing have too often emphasized the physical condition of the developments” and that “clearly, severely distressed public housing is not simply a problem of ‘bricks and mortar.’ ”42 Thus, the Commission called for attention to the needs of residents and recommended a series of resident support service changes and a more comprehensive and holistic approach to delivering human services in public housing.43 The commission was particularly supportive of resident initiatives and resident-owned businesses. The report also included a smaller number of recommendations for improving the management of distressed public housing and for supporting PHAs by revising archaic accounting and funding systems to allow greater financial creativity in generating the resources necessary to manage the buildings effectively. Yet, in most respects, the HOPE VI program and the more general push for the demolition of public housing is exactly what the Commission criticizes—a solution that privileges physical change over meeting the human services needs of public housing residents.

Third, the Commission’s recommendations related to capital improvement and upgrading the physical conditions of distressed public housing are especially noteworthy. Their first recommendation was to expand the Major Reconstruction of Obsolete Public Housing (MROP) program to include a program aimed specifically at severely distressed projects. “The program,” argued the Commission, “should be limited to the rehabilitation and replacement of that portion of the public housing stock that meets the criteria of severe distress as defined by the Commission.”44 The Commission clearly envisioned a program of rehabilitation and renovation, one that did not diminish the size of the public housing stock nationwide. Indeed, the report did not recommend amending the one-for-one replacement requirement that was then in effect for public housing. In fact, the Commission suggested that “HUD should revise its policy on impaction rules and limitations to allow replacement units on the same site or in the surrounding neighborhood.”45 The HUD impaction rule was an attempt to ensure that new units of federally assisted housing be dispersed more widely throughout local housing markets and not be concentrated in neighborhoods that already had such units or that were predominantly poor. This recommendation by the Commission implicitly acknowledged that the replacement of public housing units had been hindered by the requirement that the units be placed in “non-impacted” neighborhoods. The replacement of any units lost or demolished in the rehabilitation effort was of such importance to the Commission that they specifically recommended that HUD sacrifice its dispersal objective in order to get the units replaced. The commitment to maintain the stock of public housing was strong. In fact, the Commission was even concerned that an expanded MROP not substitute for the further expansion of public housing. The report specifically stated that this program “must not detract from the development of new public housing but instead be promoted in addition to it.”46 HOPE VI and other efforts to improve public housing, however, have generally not been based on rehabilitation but on demolition—the one-for-one replacement requirement gave way almost immediately. In the end, the formula recommended by the Commission has been reversed; the dispersion and deconcentration objectives of public housing transformation are now in most cases achieved by reducing the stock of public housing.

The Evolution of HOPE VI

The main program objectives of HOPE VI were the improvement of living conditions for residents of public housing, physically transforming distressed public housing developments, and deconcentrating poverty.47 The program operated as a competitive grants program that required applicants to demonstrate that the public housing projects proposed for redevelopment met at least one of the following definitions of “severe distress”: (1) families in distress (including those with low incomes and a low number with earned income); (2) high levels of crime; (3) management problems (including high vacancy and turnover rates); and (4) physical deterioration of the project.48 HUD reviewed grant applications using four criteria: (1) need for the redevelopment project; (2) the capacity of the local housing authority to carry out the proposed project; (3) the quality of the revitalization plan; and (4) the potential of the project to leverage other capital.

Several dimensions of the program evolved over time, including the relative importance of rehabilitation and demolition in redevelopment strategies, the relative emphasis on leveraging private-sector investment, and the allowable scope of the projects.49 The program as originally established was limited to the forty largest public housing authorities and an additional twelve that were on HUD’s list of “troubled” housing authorities. Subsequent changes opened up the program to all PHAs, though individual projects still had to meet the threshold of distress.

The most important part of the evolution of the HOPE VI program was how it moved from an orientation toward rehabilitation to a program that relies on demolition. HUD acknowledges that when the program was created it was “an embellished modernization program” for public housing, little different than the existing MROP program.50 Although PHAs had been demolishing public housing on a small scale throughout the 1980s, the official HUD and congressional policy until the mid-1990s was to preserve public housing and demolish only under extreme circumstances. Demolition efforts were constrained in the early years of the program by the requirement that public housing be replaced on a one-for-one basis. This made demolition financially challenging, and diluted the deconcentration objectives of the program. In a relatively short period of time, however, the program became more oriented toward demolition of existing public housing projects.

Coming out of the recession of the early 1990s, central cities were seeing a resurgence of investment in real estate and in some cases significant growth in population. Downtown housing markets especially were reviving in many cities. Housing prices in most cities were rising outside of downtown as well—the housing bubble expanded for another decade before bursting in 2007. Meanwhile, the midterm elections in 1994 posed a significant political threat to HUD as the Republican takeover of Congress led to talk of possible elimination of the agency. Henry Cisneros, the secretary of HUD at the time, moved to radically reinvent many of the agency’s programs. HUD’s “Reinvention Blueprint,” issued in December 1994 as a response to the Republican threats, was a plan for the complete reshaping of the agency and its programs. A central element of the Reinvention Blueprint was reform of the public housing program and a dramatic shift in the form of housing assistance away from project-based to household-based subsidies. If adopted, the Reinvention Blueprint would have converted all public housing tenants to certificate holders, halted federal subsidies to local PHAs and deregulated them. Public housing residents would have been given the choice to stay in their apartments or move to units in the private market, using their certificates as a subsidy. This would have been coupled with an aggressive campaign to demolish uninhabitable and nonviable public housing projects. These changes would have brought an immediate end to the public housing program and replaced it with a system of “portable” housing certificates that residents could use in the private housing market.

For some, the overriding concern in fixing the most troubled public housing in the nation was to not repeat old mistakes. Developer Richard Baron, who was a member of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, argued that a new paradigm for public housing was necessary and possible. As early as 1993, Baron attempted to convince HUD that for the full effect of transformation to occur, PHAs would have to go beyond the original objectives of the National Commission and the URD legislation. Specifically, Baron argued that physical upgrading and resident programs were insufficient to catalyze the change that was needed. He suggested that two additional objectives should be added to efforts to transform public housing—changing the demographic profile of projects and integrating sites into their surrounding neighborhoods.51 To accomplish this, demolition and not rehabilitation was necessary, and a mixed-income model of redevelopment was needed. Baron’s firm had completed some mixed-income communities by 1993 and was working with the Atlanta Housing Authority on plans to redevelop Techwood Homes.

HUD Secretary Cisneros was coming to his own conclusions about public housing. Touring public housing in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities throughout 1993, Cisneros concluded

that public housing in the form it took in many big cities was an unacceptable way to house the nation’s most needy residents. It seemed, if anything, that the analysis of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing had understated the severity of the problem.52

By 1994, Cisneros was openly talking about the demolition of high-rises and dispersal of residents, and a year later he was advocating “revolutionary change in public housing” in testimony to Congress in order to “infuse market discipline into Washington’s relationship with PHAs.”53 Faced with a hostile Republican majority in Congress that was ready to do significant and lasting harm to the department and its programs, Cisneros and his staff ultimately adopted the idea that URD as originally envisioned was not thoroughgoing enough to bring about a true transformation of public housing. Calls for greater leeway to demolish public housing fell on receptive ears in Congress, which seemed eager to drastically reduce the federal government’s presence in the assisted-housing area. In 1995, Congress suspended the one-for-one replacement requirement and then permanently repealed it in 1998. This allowed demolition to become the centerpiece of the HOPE VI program, and allowed local housing authorities the latitude of tearing down units and replacing them with vouchers.54 The HOPE VI program, born out of a national commission’s recommendation for a strengthened rehabilitation program aimed at severely distressed public housing, soon became a program of demolition leading to large-scale displacement of public housing residents and the transformation of the communities into mixed-income neighborhoods. HUD adopted New Urbanist design principles that were aimed at creating more inviting, walkable, and safe neighborhoods that would be more integrated into the surrounding communities.

The acceptance of demolition quickly spread beyond the context of HOPE VI. In 1996, Congress directed local public housing authorities to impose a “viability test” on all public housing developments with three hundred or more units and a 10 percent or higher vacancy rate. The crux of the test was an assessment of the relative cost of repairing and rehabilitating the projects or demolishing the building and providing tenants with vouchers for twenty years.

Figure 4. Demolition of Capitol View Plaza II in Washington, D.C., adjacent to the Capital Gateway HOPE VI redevelopment.

In a similar fashion, the HOPE VI program has evolved into one that is meant to generate significant spillover effects in the neighborhoods in which it operates. In 1995, HUD began to emphasize the leveraging of private-sector capital in HOPE VI projects. One year later, in 1996, the program began to allow mixed financing, allowing public housing authorities to use other public and private funds to build public housing, or to channel public housing funds to third parties to develop public housing units. HUD additionally encouraged local housing authorities during this time to be entrepreneurial and innovative, to “incorporate boldness and creativity” in their HOPE VI applications, fundamentally rethinking the public housing model that had prevailed for close to sixty years.55 The emphasis on leveraging private capital that was incorporated into HOPE VI in the late 1990s has become, 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.”56

The Dismantling of Public Housing Post-1990

The public policy changes of the 1990s greatly accelerated the rate at which public housing units were sold off or demolished by PHAs. The best estimate of the loss of public housing in the 1980s puts the number for the entire decade at less than fifteen thousand units. By the latter half of the 1990s that figure was being nearly matched on an annual basis, over 47,000 units were removed from 1996 through 1999. The removal of public housing units from the stock became the accepted and preferred means of dealing with the property management and financial challenges for many PHAs.

Selling Public Housing

The sale of public housing to residents has been a minor part of local housing authority programs for decades. For the most part, PHAs have not been anxious to participate in such programs because the units typically chosen for purchase and the families wishing to participate in the program are both the cream of the crop for local authorities. Significant sales of public housing would mean the loss of the PHAs’ best housing stock and the loss of their best, most stable families. Thus, only a small number of sales have occurred. In 1998, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) revised the means by which PHAs could sell their units and did not limit the purchasers to existing public housing residents. These efforts to sell to residents, however, have never accounted for a large reduction in the public housing stock.

Starting in 2008, however, local public housing authorities, feeling a fiscal pinch because of budget cutbacks at HUD, have looked at the option of selling off part of their public housing stock in order to address budgetary problems. Local housing authorities receive funds each year to cover the gap between rent revenues and the full operating costs of public housing. The amount is determined by a federal formula, but the funds are not guaranteed. If Congress does not appropriate sufficient funds for the program, local housing authorities get only a percentage of the formula amount. For the two decades prior to 2003, PHAs received an average of more than 98 percent of the formula amount.57 Beginning in 2003 funding dropped significantly, first to 95 percent of the formula amount, then to 89 percent in 2005, 86 percent in 2006, and 78 percent in 2007. Although funding levels are set by Congress, HUD’s budget requests for the program during the last years of the Bush II administration did not even match what would be necessary to fully meet the formula obligations.58 Local housing authorities also point to changes in the formula itself and HUD’s requirement that PHAs shift to an “asset management” model as additional reasons for significant budget shortfalls in recent years.59

The Wilmington, Delaware, housing authority, for example, saw a $1.8 million drop in operating subsidies in two years. In St. Paul, Minnesota, the housing authority sold sixteen houses to raise $2 million to help pay for other units it operates. Other cities such as Salt Lake City and New York City have considered the same, only on a larger scale. In St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2008 the housing authority sold its largest development, a 486-unit project, to a private developer for conversion to condominiums. In September 2008 the Oakland Housing Authority moved ahead with a plan to sell more than a thousand units of public housing, converting the units to Section 8 in order to bring greater subsidies to the agency. The San Diego Housing Commission has divested itself of its entire public housing stock by transferring all of its public housing to nonprofit ownership.60 In Fort Worth, Texas, the housing authority sold the 268-unit Ripley Arnold Homes to Radio Shack for $20 million. In places such as Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and Rochester, New York, scattered site units have been sold off to generate savings because of the relatively high operating costs of scattered units.61

Demolition

The most significant policy event in the dismantling of public housing was, of course, the creation of the HOPE VI program and its evolution into a demolition and redevelopment program. HOPE VI embodied the larger shift in public policy away from the objective of preserving public housing to one that directly financed large-scale removals in cities across the country. The evolution of HOPE VI in this direction was the result of the emergence of the mixed-income model and the belief among HUD officials that the design of older public housing was one of the core reasons for its decline. Since 1994, HOPE VI has financed the demolition of more than 110,000 units of public housing in cities across the nation. Only sixty thousand of the units have been or will be replaced in mixed-income projects subsidized by the program. The shift to large-scale demolition and replacement was aided by the suspension and then repeal of the one-for-one replacement rule. Though the rule was not so diligently enforced by HUD, it nevertheless stood as an obstacle to routine demolition. In 1996 Congress further encouraged demolition by requiring local housing authorities to prove that larger housing projects with high vacancy rates were worth saving. Failing the so-called viability test led to the demolition or disposition of the public housing units. In some cases, the local PHA moved more quickly than even HUD wanted. Woonsocket, Rhode Island, which had sold fifty-one units of scattered site public housing earlier in the decade, was told by HUD that it could not demolish another 180 units because they were still in decent shape.62

By 2010, the demolition of public housing had become routine. It is the dominant approach in several major cities but it is also being pursued in smaller communities. In Clarksville, Tennessee, the city’s Smart Growth 2030 Master Plan calls for the demolition of the 210-unit Lincoln Homes public housing complex. In Rome, Georgia, the 150-unit Hight Homes was torn down in 2010; in its place will be a shopping center featuring a Publix grocery store. Danville, Illinois, put the demolition of the 326-unit Fair Oaks public housing in its 2010 Consolidated Plan.

Variations in the Rate of Removal

As of 2008, it was estimated that over 220,000 units of public housing had been demolished; thousands more had been sold off or converted to other uses. In this section I analyze data from HUD on public housing units lost between 1990 and 2007.63 The rate of public housing demolition grew rapidly in 1995 when Congress suspended the one-for-one rule and HOPE VI converted to a demolition program. In 1995 four thousand units of public housing were removed nationwide, but from 1996 through 2005, removals topped ten thousand per year eight times, with the peak years of 2000 and 2001 seeing more than eighteen thousand units lost each year.

Within this national trend, however, there is a great deal of variation from one city to the next. The largest 150 cities in the U.S. together operated 642,873 units of public housing in 1996, or 48.5 percent of the national total that year. Among these 150 cities are thirteen large suburbs, generally located in the Southwest, that have no public housing. Only 102 of the 137 central cities (74 percent) have removed (demolished or disposed of) public housing between 1990 and 2007.64 The average city in this group removed 880 units of public housing. Of the cities that removed any public housing, the average city has taken 1,190 units out of service through sale or demolition. The range of removal efforts, however, is wide, from two units sold off in Salt Lake City to Chicago’s elimination of more than sixteen thousand public housing units, most by demolition. Across the board the scale of removal through demolition was many times larger than the loss of units through sale. Of the eighty-eight cities that demolished public housing over this period of time, the average number of units torn down was 2,131. For the sixty-nine cities that sold off public housing units, the average city took 169 units out of service in that manner. Just over one-quarter of the cities did not remove any public housing units, while another 10 percent removed between one and fifty units.

The scale of removal is greater in some cities simply because these cities had more public housing units to begin with. The three top cities in terms of units lost, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, had very large inventories of public housing. At the same time, however, some cities with large public housing inventories took relatively few units out of service over this period. New York City, the largest PHA in the country, removed just over five hundred units, or less than 1 percent of its total public housing stock. Table 2.1 ranks cities that removed public housing by the absolute number of units and by the percentage of the cities’ stock. Chicago far outstrips other cities in absolute numbers, having removed twice as many units as the second-place city (Philadelphia), and more units than the next two cities (Philadelphia and Atlanta) combined. However, Chicago does not appear among the top ten when percentage of the public housing stock is considered.

The right-hand column ranks cities by the percentage of public housing stock removed. Hartford, Connecticut, tops this list, having removed 56 percent of their public housing units between 1990 and 2007. Memphis, St. Petersburg, and Detroit have also removed more than half of their stock over this time period. The table reveals, however, that the absolute number of units removed and the percentage of a city’s public housing removed produce two substantially different lists; only three cities—Atlanta, Detroit, and Memphis—make the top ten on both lists; that is, they have removed a large number of units both in absolute terms and as a percentage of their total public housing stocks.

Table 2.1 Cities with most public housing units removed, 1990–2007

There is a variation in the degree to which cities removed public housing units that defies easy explanation. Though many older Rust Belt cities were very aggressive in dismantling their public housing system, other cities in that region were much more constrained. Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City removed less than 1 percent of their public housing stock, Cleveland just 12 percent, and Milwaukee only 16 percent. Two Florida Sunbelt cities, Tampa and St. Petersburg, are among the leaders in disposing of public housing, while two others, Miami and Orlando, removed only 5 percent and 18 percent of their public housing stock, respectively. In Arizona, Tucson removed 48 percent of its public housing while Phoenix disposed of only 2 percent.

In order to better understand why some cities have been more aggressive than others in dismantling their public housing, a multivariate regression technique was used (details of this analysis are contained in the appendix). We wish to examine the impact of a range of factors that might plausibly explain the variation in public housing removal. Specifically, we tested whether the following characteristics of cities were associated with the number of public housing units removed: the extent of concentrated poverty in the city, the violent crime rate, the condition of the housing market, the strength of progressive political movements and the union movement, the degree of racial segregation, the size of the black middle class, the degree to which public housing in the city is racially identified, and the strength of gentrification pressures within the city. Two different Poisson regression equations were estimated, one for the time period 1990–99, and the second for 2001–07.65

Crime, Gentrification, and Race

The analysis (data table shown in appendix) indicates that rates of violent crime were significantly related to public housing demolition in both decades. Where violent crime rates were higher, the rate of public housing demolition and disposition was greater. In cities with more acute crime problems, city officials and residents alike may have associated those problems with public housing and as a result moved more aggressively to demolish. Beyond the constant of crime, however, the story of public housing transformation in the two decades was importantly different. During the 1990s, gentrification pressures were also significant predictors of more aggressive dismantling of public housing systems. After 2000, however, gentrification recedes as an explanation and is replaced by race and by politics. Since 2000, more public housing units have been lost in cities in which blacks are disproportionately represented among public housing residents. Furthermore, political variables that measure union membership and the existence of progressive policy initiatives are both statistically significant and negative; where unions and progressive political strength are greater, fewer public housing units have been lost. Finally, the record of public housing removal since 2000 seems to be a continuation of the approaches used by cities during the 1990s, in that there is a positive statistical association between the percentage of the public housing stock removed in the 1990s and the removal of stock since 2000. City characteristics not associated with efforts to demolish and remove public housing in either decade include the quality of public housing management, the degree of concentrated poverty within cities, and the extent of racial segregation.

Thus, the story of public housing demolition has changed over time. During the 1990s, a time when central cities made a dramatic rebound in population and development, pressures for gentrification and redevelopment drove the removal of public housing from city to city. As many observers have noted, expanding central city real estate profit opportunities in the 1990s encouraged both private- and public-sector actors in the direction of radical transformation of public housing communities.66 Gentrification of inner city neighborhoods led to conditions in which public housing projects were islands of poverty and distress in the midst of areas of wealth and renewal. In Chicago, for example, much of the notorious Cabrini-Green complex, long regarded as occupying potentially profitable space on the city’s Near North Side, was demolished in the late 1990s as part of a large-scale redevelopment initiative that ushered in luxury housing and upscale commercial transformation. Similarly, on the edge of Houston’s downtown, the Allen Parkway Village, home to nearly half of the city’s public housing families, gave way to the wrecking ball and luxury condominiums.67 In New Orleans, even before Hurricane Katrina provided local officials the opportunity to eliminate thousands of public housing units, the St. Thomas development, a community of impoverished, black public housing residents surrounded by more affluent white residents where housing costs were relatively high, was identified as a crucial missing link in a chain of revitalizing neighborhoods near the city’s downtown.68

The fact that public housing demolition tracked gentrification pressures is not surprising given that the HOPE VI program emphasized redevelopment of areas that were most poised for higher income redevelopment.69 Public housing demolition seems to have been an important element in local government efforts to reactivate or capitalize on a real estate resurgence in or around low-income neighborhoods.70

Thus, the rapid expansion of demolition that occurred in the 1990s was in large part a response to economic reinvestment opportunities in central city neighborhoods. These opportunities were great enough, and the problems of crime associated with public housing alarming enough, that a decades-long reluctance on the part of federal officials to sanction demolition was swept away. Once the policy environment had changed, however, the story of public housing demolition at the city scale became more racialized and political. Though crime remains a significant predictor of unit loss, public housing demolition and sale after 2000 becomes less a matter of gentrification and is more dependent on race and politics.

Since 2000, the greater the disparity in racial profile between public housing and the city’s population at large, the greater the public housing demolition effort. To the extent that some cities have joined the bandwagon of public housing removal since 2000, or have taken greater prominence in the effort, they generally have been cities in which the racial profile of public housing residents is more distinctly African American in comparison to the city as a whole. This pattern is illustrated by the cities of Tampa, Nashville, and Portland, Oregon, where the representation of African Americans within public housing is three times or more greater than within the city population as a whole. Portland did not remove any public housing units during the 1990s and took out 456 after 2000. Tampa removed 273 through 2000 and 1,948 units afterward. Nashville’s numbers were 280 and 1,528, respectively.

In addition to shifting somewhat to a racial strategy after the 1990s, the removal of public housing since 2000 has mirrored political conditions within cities more closely. The dismantling of public housing in recent years has been more aggressively pursued in cities where union strength is weaker and in cities with a less extensive history of successful progressive policy efforts. This suggests that after the first wave of demolitions in the ’90s, the issue of public housing demolition has become more politically determined, and that constituencies supportive of public housing have been able to limit its dismantling, or that the pursuit of public housing demolition in the first place is more limited to cities in which those constituencies are weaker. The evidence presented here also suggests that the negative manifestations of concentrated poverty are more influential in leading to public housing removal than the mere existence of pockets of poverty. For example, crime was significantly related to changes in the public housing stock while the extent of concentrated poverty in cities was not. This is true for both decades analyzed.

The ways in which the dynamics of gentrification or crime play out in a city, or the ways in which racial politics affect public housing, depends a great deal on the historical context or the unique social and political characteristics of any given city. In the next chapter, we examine in greater detail three cities that have been at the forefront of efforts to dismantle public housing: Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Brief case studies of each are presented to illustrate how the dynamics of race and redevelopment are transforming public housing.