5

THE FATE OF DISPLACED PERSONS AND FAMILIES

We’re not fighting for the status quo to keep these raggedy buildings…. We’re fighting to be able to stay in the community…. We’ve stayed there during the hard times. Now we’re going to up and move now that they’re going to redevelop it?

—Wardell Yotaghan, Coalition to Protect Public Housing, Chicago

The controversy over the displacement of low-income families in the urban renewal projects of the 1950 and early 1960s ultimately led to changes in the way that program operated. From a heavy reliance on demolition and clearance, an approach that led to the displacement of tens of thousands of central city residents nationwide, urban renewal shifted to a rehabilitation strategy that was less disruptive and kept more people in their communities. Displacement in the urban renewal era was seen as a problem to be mitigated, a disruption to be endured for the sake of the community revitalization that might be achieved by thoroughgoing redevelopment.

In the era of public housing dismantling, according to HOPE VI program architects and advocates, displacement is not so much a problem as it is a solution. The public housing-as-disaster discourse suggests that public housing residents would be very anxious to leave their communities for something, anything, better. The model of public housing transformation embodied in HOPE VI leads, furthermore, to the expectation that residents relocate to “neighborhoods of opportunity” that bring them closer to the available jobs and bridging social capital necessary for upward mobility, and that just as importantly removes them from dangerous, crime-filled, resource-poor neighborhoods.1 Finally, the advocates of public housing transformation argue that because of these moves, families are better able to thrive, to become economically self-sufficient or at least more financially secure, and to benefit in a number of different ways from reduced stress, increased physical health, better educational experiences for children, and to enjoy a much greater sense of safety on a daily (and nightly) basis. Some residents are anxious to leave, some do move to better neighborhoods with real opportunities, and some do see real and personal benefits from displacement and relocation.

Were these outcomes to occur systematically and to a consistent majority of displaced persons, the disparate racial patterns of displacement described in the previous chapter would not constitute a public policy problem. If displacement were invariably, or even predominantly, a benefit to public housing residents, then the disparate impact of displacement could be interpreted as the targeting of a program benefit, and our perception of the information presented in the previous chapter would be quite different. But, in fact, the experience of very low income families displaced from public housing does not allow such a conclusion.

The Experience of Displacement

Alice and Ross Llewellyn, both in their sixties, had lived in the Harbor View public housing project in Duluth, Minnesota, since 1976 (all names of Duluth public housing residents and family members used in this chapter are pseudonyms). They had raised two children there. Ross drove a taxi for most of his working life but never made enough money at it to move the family out of Harbor View. The kids grew up and moved away; Billy, the oldest moved south and died of shotgun wounds in a hunting accident. Carly, the youngest, lives nearby in Duluth with her two kids. The Llewellyns have seen Harbor View go through a lot of changes, including a time during the 1980s when the development became what Alice called “party central.” Drug dealing, loud parties, and lots of strangers and outsiders walking through the development made them feel unsafe and bothered. With the help of the Duluth Housing Authority (DHA), the Llewellyns and other neighbors started a patrol in 1987. “The place up here changed like night and day,” said Alice in an interview in 2004.

When we first started the patrol, there was a party in every building—in fact, in every apartment almost. We used to have fun bothering people and calling and chasing kids that were running around at nighttime. And the police had fun because we helped them catch a bunch of kids. And now it’s quiet; I mean quiet. We’d walk around at nighttime on the patrol and it’s like walking around a senior citizens area…. It’s been getting boringer and boringer. We walk around and nothing is going on. It’s been that way for a few years now.2

When the Duluth Housing Authority sponsored tenant meetings to plan for a HOPE VI redevelopment project at Harbor View, the Llewellyns took a wait and see approach. Having lived at Harbor View for twenty-eight years they had the longest ties to the neighborhood of anyone involved. When DHA officials assured them that they would have first pick of the new units on-site they were hopeful. “I hope we’ll be more comfortable,” said Alice. “It’ll be nice to live in a building that looks nice, that’s brand new for once. Never lived in a new building. It would be nice once they get done; if it looks anything like what the architects drew, it’ll be beautiful. It’ll blend in with all the neighborhoods.”

The Harbor View public housing project was built in 1951, overlooking the picturesque Duluth harbor and Lake Superior. The twenty-acre site is located in a working class area in the hills north of downtown and consisted of forty-five barracks-style buildings containing a total of two hundred housing units. In 2003, the DHA received a $20 million HOPE VI grant to demolish and redevelop Harbor View. In some ways, the Harbor View HOPE VI was unusual and does not represent the typical public housing redevelopment. First, the project was to be a phased redevelopment in which some residents would remain at Harbor View while demolition and redevelopment took place elsewhere on-site. Upon completion of the first phase, the internally relocated families were to move directly into the newly built units. Such phasing minimizes displacement and the disruption to public housing families, but it is not a widely used technique in HOPE VI projects. With the most seniority of any residents at Harbor View, the Llewellyns had the option of staying at Harbor View while redevelopment began in order to move into the very first units completed.

Another unusual aspect of the Harbor View project is that the DHA pledged to replace all two hundred units of public housing. In fact, the project was to result in a net increase of subsidized low-cost housing in the city due to HOPE VI-funded development on three additional sites throughout Duluth. One-for-one replacement, of course, is not only not required of PHAs in HOPE VI projects, but its elimination as an obligation of PHAs is often regarded as one of the factors that has allowed the HOPE VI program to expand into the demolition-based approach that has been predominant over the history of the program. In most cities, HOPE VI leads to a significant reduction in the public housing stock. But not in Duluth, Minnesota.

In other respects, however, the Harbor View redevelopment was very typical of HOPE VI projects across the country. The redevelopment involved demolition of all of the old public housing units. The new site plan and the new units built on-site incorporate New Urbanist design ideas that reduce the institutional look of the architecture, bring units closer to the street, and individualize the space on-site. And, of course, the new site will be a mix of incomes that integrates market-rate units with public housing and other subsidized housing. The experience of the original families at Harbor View is also broadly representative of what happens to public housing residents when displaced from their homes.

Figure 6. Construction of Harborview in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2006. The Duluth Housing Authority replaced the demolished public housing units on a one-for-one basis.

John and Rochelle Quinn had lived in Harbor View for five years before being moved to a Section 8 home in the east Hillside neighborhood in March 2004. At the time of their move they had four children ranging in age from an infant to a thirteen-year old. Two of the children are from their marriage and the older two are from John’s life before Rochelle. Rochelle works for a nonprofit organization and John wants to start a business of his own. When asked what he thought about the HOPE VI project, he was skeptical. “Well, usually people like us don’t get a break,” he says, trying to account for his skepticism. But their relocation went smoothly, and they don’t miss living at Harbor View.

The move from Harbor View did not work so well for Cynthia Barker. Cynthia lived in Harbor View with her son and nephew, both teenagers. The three of them were relocated just a couple of blocks from the Quinns in the east Hillside neighborhood. Cynthia, too, was doubtful about the changes HOPE VI would bring. “To tell you the truth, I thought it was bullshit. Things that sound too good to be true usually are too good to be true,” she said in 2004, several months after being relocated. She likes her new apartment and neighborhood just fine, but she lost her job in the move when the community center at Harbor View where she worked, cut back on hours and staff. She has been unable to find another job in the two years since being displaced.

Deborah Stefanovich misses the Harbor View Community Center where her teenage daughters spent a lot of time. Deborah has become something of an advocate for the original residents of Harbor View, wondering out loud at public meetings whether they are being treated in the way they were promised. She too thought the plans for Harbor View were “too good to be true” when she first heard them. As families were moved out and as the structures began to come down, Deborah monitored the actions of the developer and DHA closely, pushing them on details that she felt were important to the residents of Harbor View. From her personal standpoint, the biggest negative effect of the project was the loss of community and the scattering of people who were friends and who had built relationships over the years.

The experiences of these and other families in being forcibly removed from their public housing homes defy easy generalizations, either positive or negative. The Duluth case, as all cases do, points up a variety of individual stories and outcomes that do not conform well to expectations of program advocates or to the blanket criticisms of opponents. Some families thrive as a result of moving out, some suffer. Some are able to finally escape a living environment they regard as dangerous and unhealthy. Others fight the move, not wanting to leave the community they have built for themselves and unsure of what awaits them in other neighborhoods. A few move back into the redeveloped areas and share in the benefits of the redevelopment. Others move into bad housing in nearby poor and segregated neighborhoods.

For thousands of families displaced by public housing demolition we simply do not know what happened. Studies tracking residents have been done on only a small percentage of HOPE VI projects. Families and households displaced by non-HOPE VI demolition or conversion are largely untracked, even though they may receive relocation assistance.3 In cases of de facto demolition, where residents are induced to leave by systematic neglect of management responsibilities, the displaced go entirely untracked and unassisted. Even tracking studies funded by the government do not follow all of the residents. Those who move early and who drop out of the assistance system or are forced out by eviction—their outcomes are unknown to us. The evidence we have is for a small number of residents in cities across the country. Finally, where surveys are used, we only know about those who answer the phone or fill in and mail back the questionnaires.

The Desire to Move

On December 20, 2007, public housing residents in New Orleans tried to force their way into a city council meeting to keep the city from tearing down several public housing projects in that city. Police used taser guns and pepper spray to keep the protesters from disrupting the meeting. In Chicago in 2007, one hundred public housing tenants marched on the local HUD office to protest the displacement of public housing residents. Residents of the Alice Griffith Homes in San Francisco protested that city’s plans to demolish the project. In Minneapolis in 1996, recent Southeast Asian immigrants and residents of the Sumner Field Homes also protested the demolition of that development and the loss of their community. In other cities, such as Miami, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Atlanta, residents have resorted to lawsuits in attempts to stop demolition. As these episodes suggest, demolition and displacement is not universally regarded by residents as the solution to the problems of living in declining and neglected public housing complexes.

On the other hand, some public housing residents look at demolition differently. In Duluth, when relocated families were asked what they missed about their old Harbor View community, 19 percent said “nothing.”4 Newspaper accounts of demolitions across the country almost invariably include a quote or two from an ex-resident such as Lorraine Ledbetter of Baltimore, who burst into tears at the sight of the Lexington Terrace high-rise being demolished in 1996. Though she was tearful when thinking of the good friends who had lived there with her, she was glad to see the towers go: “Good riddance. I won’t miss those buildings one bit.”5 They are more than ready to say good-bye to living environments that were hostile, dangerous, segregated, and devoid of economic opportunity. Some were convinced that demolition and displacement were necessary and that what replaced it would be a much better home for them and for their families.

In Duluth, less than a quarter of the residents said that prior to announcement of the HOPE VI project they had wanted to move out of Harbor View. Over half said that they did not want to move while the remaining quarter was uncertain.6 The desire to stay is typically a reflection of two different realities for residents. First, for many the public housing in which they lived provided real and tangible benefits to them that have been either misunderstood or discounted by the officials calling for demolition. Second, many fear the consequences of moving into other neighborhoods where they may not be welcome, or to other housing that will cost more and be more difficult for them to keep. Barbara McKinney, another ex-resident of the Lexington Terrace high-rises in Baltimore, said in the months before their demolition that “the people here are looking out for each other. Moving out of here scares me.”7

WHAT IS LEFT BEHIND

Very common among persons forcibly displaced from their housing is the feeling that they have been wrenched from their communities. Since the early 1960s, researchers and planners have been aware of the seriously disruptive nature of forced relocation for lower-income households. Marc Fried’s work on the psychological costs of relocation, published in 1963, described the grief experienced by families forcibly relocated through urban renewal.8 Forced relocation and the loss of a home and an entire neighborhood, according to Fried, shatters both a sense of spatial identity and a sense of group identity that are dependent on connection to a place and the stable social networks formed with neighbors:

On the one hand, the residential area is the region in which a vast and interlocking set of social networks is localized. And, on the other, the physical area has considerable meaning as an extension of home, in which various parts are delineated and structured on the basis of a sense of belonging. These two components provide the context in which the residential area may so easily be invested with considerable, multiply-determined meanings…. This view [among working class families] of an area as home and the significance of local people and local places are so profoundly at variance with typical middle-class orientations that it is difficult to appreciate the intensity of meaning, the basic sense of identity involved in living in the particular area.9

Although acknowledging that reactions to relocation can vary significantly and that grief reactions can be entirely absent among some, Fried notes that “grieving for a lost home is evidently a widespread and serious social phenomenon following in the wake of urban dislocation.”10 The grief can occur even when the home has problematic aspects. A reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, describing in 2009 the impending demolition of the last of the St. Clair Village public housing units, portrayed for readers a largely inhospitable and dangerous environment (in part induced by the previous demolition of several hundred units at the site). “And yet,” the article went on, “most residents of St. Clair are ‘devastated’ that the Pittsburgh Housing Authority is moving them out, said Cynthia Grace, president of the tenant council. One’s home is home, she said, no matter what it looks like to someone else.”11

Herbert Gans documented the urban slum of Boston’s West End before it was demolished in the late 1950s through urban renewal. Where middle class reformers saw dilapidated housing and physical blight, residents saw a functioning community that provided affordable housing and social supports that they valued highly. Gans argued that the advocates of demolition and redevelopment “failed to make a distinction between low rent and slum housing.”12 The residents of the West End, on the other hand, valued the neighborhood for its affordability and did not regard it as a slum. The proponents of urban renewal, in that case, either failed to recognize the positive elements of life in the West End as experienced by residents or ignored them.

In a much more recent analysis, Mindy Fullilove updates the work of Fried and Gans by advancing the concept of “root shock,” which she defines as the “traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem.”13 Beginning with the elementary observation that places are more than “simply bricks and mortar that provide us shelter,”14 Fullilove argues that we all establish routines for navigating the external environment in order to satisfy basic needs (finding food, maintaining shelter, and coexisting with others). For all people, these routines represent the result of trial-and-error experiences that produce the most efficient and effective patterns of getting along and getting by. For people of limited means, these routines are critical because of the slim to nonexistent margins on which they live. Access to the correct bus routes, to jobs, to services, and to supportive informal networks is most critical for people with limited means because of the relative costs and difficulties of reestablishing these strategies once they have been disrupted.

Connections to place, and the sense of spatial identity and group identity that they foster, are extant even in the worst public housing conditions.15 Researchers in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, have found that place attachment is strong among public housing residents and it affects their willingness to move some distance away from the projects from which they were displaced.16 Place attachment, these researchers found, is often connected with the material and psychological benefits that families receive and the support systems that they establish when negotiating work demands, family obligations, and child care.17

Though the design of public housing is frequently blamed for the deterioration of living conditions Alexandra Curley’s interviews with displaced families from Boston’s Maverick Gardens indicates that the arrangement of buildings and common spaces in that community encouraged the development of trust, interactions, and neighborhood ties. Common entryways and living spaces, and the superblock configuration with walkways and open space between buildings, fostered “dense, overlapping networks [that] enhanced residents’ support systems and contributed to their collective efficacy.”18 Danya Keene and Arline Geronimus find that close social ties are more common and stronger in public housing than in other forms of assisted housing.19 Not all of the social relationships left behind are, of course, positive ones. Curley’s Boston study also showed that women displaced from public housing sometimes welcome the fact that they can leave behind “draining” social ties—friends or family who constitute more of a burden than a resource.20

In Duluth, when asked what they would miss most about Harbor View, 36 percent of displaced residents referred to friends and neighbors, while another 14 percent said they would miss the community activities that took place at the community center on-site. As in all communities, some people were enmeshed in neighborhood life and others were not. Half of the residents reported having no close friends in Harbor View, and two-thirds had no close family members in the development. One-third had neither close friends nor family members nearby. But for the other two-thirds, displacement meant moving away from close friends or family, and moving away from what some of them regarded as a close-knit community. Equally important, displacement meant being taken out of an environment in which one felt at home or comfortable; an environment in which one comfortably carried out daily tasks. As one resident wrote, she missed “friends, the yard out front, the safe neighborhood, the community center, hanging laundry outside, the place to barbecue, having a porch to sit on, [and the] sense of community.”21

In the case of Harbor View in Duluth, 23 percent said they would miss the convenient location of the community. Harbor View is situated on the hillside above downtown Duluth. The HOPE VI application called the community isolated because it was separated from other residential communities on the east and south by a four-lane highway. To the north was a steep hill connecting to a high school, and to the west was undeveloped land. Residents saw it differently; they described it as being conveniently close to Central High School, to downtown Duluth, and accessible by bus. The residents found Harbor View convenient because they had built their routines around its location. Displacement to them meant greater difficulties and inconvenience in completing those tasks, or in the establishment of entirely new patterns of travel, shopping, and schooling. For example, for Cynthia Barker’s nephew, who had walked less than a quarter of a mile to high school every day, the move meant having to rise an hour earlier each day and take two buses to get to school. Deborah Stefanovich tenaciously held on to her Harbor View unit until her youngest daughter graduated from Central High so that she wouldn’t have to change schools or take multiple buses to get to class.

In addition to the community and the location, the third most commonly “missed” aspect of Harbor View was the housing unit itself. This is somewhat surprising since HOPE VI projects are supposed to target projects that are physically obsolete and dysfunctional. Indeed, the Harbor View HOPE VI application characterized the units as not meeting current minimum size and amenity standards.22 Yet, when asked what they would miss most about Harbor View, 20 percent of Duluth relocatees mentioned some aspect of their dwelling unit. Most often in this regard, respondents mentioned the size of the unit, though a small number of residents said they miss the low rents most of all. Larger low-income families, even those with Section 8 subsidies, typically have a difficult time finding large enough housing units in the private marketplace. The units at Harbor View were roomy enough in the living area, but also featured basements for storage that many residents highly valued. As one respondent wrote, “Harbor View may have had a bad rap, but you can’t find another apartment where you have an upstairs, main floor, and a basement. I really miss those apartments. They were very accommodating to a family.” Many residents were unable to duplicate those living arrangements in their postrelocation housing.

Harbor View was also blessed with a singular amenity that several former residents mentioned prominently among the things they missed. Located on the hillside above downtown Duluth, the community offers a view of the entire Duluth harbor to the south and southwest, and the great expanse of Lake Superior to the southeast. Displacement from Harbor View meant losing that view and the pleasure it provided. Much of the public housing demolished in U.S. cities over the past two decades has had some similar type of locational advantage, sometimes having to do with proximity to geographic amenities, sometimes simply based on proximity to downtown and to revitalizing neighborhoods. In fact, it is the very existence of these amenities that can in some cases generate the pressure for redevelopment in the first place.

MISTRUST OF HOUSING AUTHORITY MOTIVES

Harbor View’s advantages contributed to a significant sense of cynicism about the true motivations for the redevelopment. A number of residents felt that the HOPE VI project was simply a way to remove low-income people from a prime parcel of real estate. Some made reference to gentrification and what, from their point of view, was a barely disguised attempt to take this land from them and hand it over to wealthier residents. As one respondent said:

This whole HOPE VI project was and still is about money and the rich. Where myself and my neighbors lived was one of the most beautiful areas in Duluth—the top of the Hillside complete with beautiful grass, trees, and a stupendous view of Lake Superior, Aerial Lift Bridge, and the other two bridges. Some greedy people decided that it was a choice area and decided to get rid of low-income families.

Duluth is a city, however, without strong gentrification pressures. The Harbor View redevelopment has not triggered any large-scale real estate reaction in the surrounding blocks. Yet, even in the absence of development pressure, some residents were quick to question the Housing Authority’s motives. The suspicions voiced in Duluth are repeated in cities across the country. In Flint, Michigan, where the land market is very weak, all eight of the city’s public housing projects failed HUD inspections, leading the director of the Flint Housing Commission to suggest that some will have to be torn down. The feeling among some public housing residents in Flint is that the Housing Authority has allowed the developments to decline in order to get more federal dollars for the fix up. “It boils down to money,” said resident Ronnesha Holmes. “If you keep the appearance low then you can get more money” from the federal government for the demolition or rehabilitation.23 This type of distrust is fairly common among public housing residents facing displacement. Even in New York City where the public housing is well run and the PHA has demolished less than 1 percent of the stock, residents are quick to suspect the NYCHA of clearing land for more lucrative development options.24

In many cities, of course, the concerns about gentrification have been realized, as have the worries of the original residents that they would not be allowed back into the new development. Frequently there is a sense among residents that they are being pushed out of an area that is about to be redeveloped into something nice. As one resident of the Earle Village public housing complex in Charlotte, North Carolina, said to housing authority officials, “this is prime land. You’re just running a game on us to get us to agree and you’ll move the rich people into the community.”25 In Chicago, in the words of one resident, the concern is about both gentrification and racial turnover: “We feel like, man, they trying to like take over our neighborhood…. Y’all moving these white folks over here. We’ve been here for like twenty-five years and now you going to tell us we have to leave because you’re moving these white folks here?”26 In Duluth, where the PHA was pursuing a redevelopment strategy designed to be sensitive to tenants’ concerns by phasing the work to keep people on-site and to minimize displacement, replacing the public housing units on a one-for-one basis, even there residents dug in their heels, resisted the disruption to their lives, and questioned the motivations of the PHA.

Mistrust of the PHA can also be generated by the perception among residents that the agency allowed the public housing community to decline over time in order to pave the way for demolition and redevelopment. This is reflected in the number of de facto demolition lawsuits that have been and are still being filed across the country. The belief that PHAs willfully allow conditions to decline to the point where demolition is necessary is a common one among public housing residents. Watching Lexington Terrace come down in Baltimore in 1996, former resident Janice Dowdy said, “It didn’t have to come down. They just let it deteriorate. I believe it could have been saved.”27 Activists opposed the demolition of the Connie Chambers Homes in Tucson on the same principle.

THE DISRUPTION OF DISPLACEMENT

The desire to remain in public housing is not necessarily a signal that a resident is satisfied with the living conditions there. Cynthia Barker complained loudly and often about the conditions at Harbor View. She felt that the DHA was an unresponsive landlord. By comparison, her new unit is “very nice” and she likes her neighborhood. Her reluctance to move, however, derived from a fear that her financial situation and that of other displaced residents would suffer. Indeed, she is worried about paying her bills in the new unit she moved to from Harbor View. But her biggest concern is the troubles that she says other families are experiencing: “One woman had four or five kids [and] she had to move because they are tearing down her unit. That woman today is homeless because she couldn’t afford to live where they put her. The utilities cost too much. You have to pay more with Section 8 because you have to pay utilities. She was in scattered site housing. You have to pay utilities there, too. HOPE VI is a disaster for some people.”

In Chicago, much of the opposition to demolition was based on similar concerns for the economic security of displaced families, and the neighborhoods to which families would be relocated and rehoused.28 Many public housing residents in that city had little faith in the promises made to them by the CHA about either the adequate availability of replacement housing, or whether moving with a voucher would put them in a better situation.29 Some of the concern is that the first move may create financial hardships that may result in additional moves, setting off a prolonged period of residential instability. This potential is nowhere better illustrated than by what happened to Lucy Hollman, the lead plaintiff in a Minneapolis lawsuit that led to the demolition and redevelopment of 880 public housing units in that city. In the years after she left public housing she bounced from unit to unit, losing a section 8 subsidy, losing a home after becoming ill and falling behind on payments, and falling victim to a flipping scam in which she purchased a home for close to twice its appraised value and for more than ten times the amount paid by the speculator who had purchased it two years earlier.30

Figure 7. One of the last families leaving the Glenwood Townhomes on the North Side of Minneapolis. Most families from the project relocated elsewhere on the city’s North Side or in high-poverty neighborhoods on the South Side.

Though public housing residents are often told that being displaced is for their own good, they do not always concur with that assessment. They often see value in remaining in public housing where public officials cannot or do not. Even when they agree that conditions in the public housing project are subpar, they may not regard demolition and displacement as the best solution. They are acutely aware of the difficulties of finding adequate housing in the private market and worry that displacement will initiate significant disruption in their housing situation and in their lives. They worry about making ends meet while facing new and significant utility costs. In short, they worry about all of the challenges faced by very low income families in the search for decent, safe, and affordable housing.

The Move

In cases where the public housing authority simply demolishes a building or project, families are given relocation assistance and moved elsewhere. Typically a portion of the families move on to the Housing Choice Voucher program and lease a unit in the private market. Another segment of the displaced group moves to other public housing. The final group of tenants moves out of publicly assisted housing altogether, an outcome that can occur for several reasons. Some families do not wait for the formal relocation phase to begin and move away without any assistance. This is particularly the case when the local housing authority has moved over a period of months or years to empty the building through a process of de facto demolition. These families, of course, are not tracked by the PHA because their leaving is interpreted as a voluntary move out. They are typically not tracked by researchers in any way because their mobility often occurs prior to the commencement of research and their destination after leaving public housing is unknown. In some cases, with access to PHA data, the size of this early-mover group can be estimated. Thus, in the redevelopment of Techwood Homes and Clark-Howell in Atlanta, Larry Keating and Carol Flores concluded that only 44 percent of the original respondents received relocation assistance from the PHA.31 In Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, the CHA had allowed more than eight hundred units, half of the entire project, to empty through neglect and by failing to rerent apartments, before seeking approval to demolish. The eight hundred families received no relocation assistance, nor were their movements tracked by CHA or by researchers. Some families become ineligible for relocation assistance by violating the terms of their occupancy during the relocation period. A small number will receive relocation assistance but nevertheless move into market-rate housing, either in homeownership or to another rental accommodation. When demolition is followed by redevelopment, as in many HOPE VI projects, residents have an additional option—to move into the newly constructed mixed-income development that replaces their old public housing community.

MOVING BACK ON-SITE

The option to return to the rebuilt site is attractive because many families have an attachment to their public housing community and the neighborhood, and because they are encouraged in the belief that they will be able to return to the redeveloped community. The redevelopment process for most HOPE VI projects includes significant resident participation in the planning stage. Design teams are brought in who question residents about the qualities of their homes that they like, and about what features they would like to see in the new, redeveloped community. The residents are shown architectural and design renderings of what “their community” will look like after redevelopment. They are encouraged to imagine what it will be like to live in the new development. As Deborah Stefanovich said, “they asked us to ‘dream your biggest dream—your most perfect neighborhood.’ ” A Baltimore public housing resident reports that the public housing commissioner “told us to dream, dream about what this neighborhood could be, he didn’t tell us …that the dream meant we wouldn’t be included.”32 Residents are told about homeownership opportunities that may or may not be realistic for them or are told that they “are going to be able to move into affluent, upscale communities.”33 They are encouraged to be co-producers of the vision that will guide redevelopment. And while some, perhaps most, begin the process skeptical and remain so throughout, months of planning and design review, focus groups, and public meetings begin to implant the idea that the redevelopment is for and about them. Though PHA officials may inform residents that new screening requirements will apply after redevelopment, meaning that some of them will not be able to return and live in “their” newly constructed community, they are not told that if the nationwide experience holds true in their case, only two or three out of ten will return. They are not told that in some places it is fewer than that. They are not told that based on national averages it will be several years longer before the new units are built than what is set out in the plan. Nor are they told that the plan itself will almost certainly change over the period of redevelopment because of changes in the funding and financing environment, or to respond to unpredictable increases in the cost of materials or changes in the housing market. The number of assisted units is likely to fluctuate, the size of the units themselves may change, and important design features of the units and of the redevelopment are also likely to change. Most families make the mistake of thinking that the PHA and the developer, who together received millions of dollars from the federal government and who likely also announced millions of additional dollars in leveraged financing from the private sector or other public sector sources, can impose their will over the course of the entire development process. Most families make the mistake of thinking the redevelopment “plan” is more than just a plan.

In the end, however, for most families, displacement from their public housing home is the only program intervention they experience.34 Estimates from national studies indicate that the percentage of original residents who return to the redeveloped site ranges from 14 percent to 25 percent.35 In the Park Duvalle redevelopment in Louisville, fewer than 5 percent of the original residents returned to the site.36 In the Earle Village redevelopment in Charlotte, North Carolina, only 2 percent of original residents went through the process set up by the local PHA to qualify for resettlement in the new community. PHA officials expressed disappointment that so few residents “chose” to do so.37 But the rate of return is low for a number of reasons, few having to do with the choice of residents. The rate of return is low because the redeveloped sites typically have fewer public housing units than the projects they replace, the public housing units they do have are generally smaller than those they replaced, new management standards make it difficult for previous residents to pass tenant screening criteria, and the long time span between displacement and the completion of redevelopment means that many previous residents have resettled into new communities and wish to avoid the disruption of moving again.

Alice and Ross Llewellyn took advantage of the option to stay on-site during the redevelopment of Harbor View. Having more seniority than any other household, the Llewellyns were moved to a vacant unit on the site’s East Side in 2003 where they stayed through much of the demolition and redevelopment. There they witnessed the gradual emptying of the project as other families were relocated away from Harbor View. They lived there through the demolition of two-thirds of the development, and then through the construction of the new units going up on the westernmost portion of the site. Construction delays and cost increases, however, led the DHA and its developer to redesign most of the units and the site, which reduced the size of individual units and increased the number of duplexes and triplexes planned. Alice began to worry about whether the new units would work for them. Ross was connected to an oxygen machine at all times, his lung having been accidentally cut during a surgical procedure many years earlier. Their living room was full of the equipment that Ross needed to live.

When the couple previewed a completed unit just weeks before demolition of the final Harbor View units was to begin, they realized they would not fit into the unit. The demolition schedule gave the Llewellyns one month to find a new place in a housing market they had not negotiated in three decades. In their sixties, and with Ross’s significant mobility constraints and health problems, they started looking for housing. At this point they decided to merge their household with another, taking on as a roommate a young man, Kevin, who had lived alone in Harbor View and had been a friend of their son’s. With Kevin around to help shovel and clear snow, and to take the garbage out and bring groceries in, the Llewellyns felt more secure in moving. Fortunately, Duluth’s loose housing market worked in their favor and two months later they relocated to the city’s West Side with a section 8 voucher.

In other cases, the new management regime may make it difficult or impossible for families to move back into the redeveloped site. Sometimes residents face difficult choices between keeping their family intact or moving into the redeveloped site. Sheri Wade of Chicago split from her husband because he had a criminal record; given the screening criteria, that would have been enough to keep her out of the new, redeveloped community.38 In a similar case, the Chicago Tribune reported about Pam Stewart who had not decided whether she wanted to move back into the development that replaced Stateway Gardens in Chicago:

Stewart doesn’t know whether she wants to move into Park Boulevard, but she has made a difficult choice that many families face in this process. Because two of her sons have criminal records, she doesn’t allow them in her home, for fear that they might be considered residents, fail the criminal background check and ruin her shot at one of the new units. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my boys,” Stewart said. But “it was either them or me.”39

RELOCATION TO OTHER SITES

Most relocatees move into other public housing or receive housing vouchers to subsidize their rent payments in private-sector housing. Thus, the neighborhood to which a family moves is often determined by where other public housing exists, where rental units exist that qualify for the voucher program, or where landlords are willing to accept such vouchers. Most relocatees are therefore limited to other lower- and lower-middle-income neighborhoods. These constraints can be reinforced by the relocation assistance residents are offered, and/or by resident preferences for familiar areas and neighborhoods with the supportive infrastructure, including transportation, upon which they rely.40 Indeed, the evidence on HOPE VI and other instances of forced displacement from public housing suggests that displaced residents typically move nearby.41 Studies in Chicago, Portland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Durham, Newark, the District of Columbia, and Richmond, Virginia, show that displaced residents typically do not even make it out of the central city.42 In Chicago, less than 2 percent of the first three thousand families displaced by public housing redevelopment left the city.43 In Minneapolis, 87 percent of families displaced by a HOPE VI-like demolition remained in the central city, over half within a three-mile radius of their original homes.44 Nearly all of the households who were moved out of public housing in Buffalo as a result of the Comer v. Cisneros deconcentration plan remained in the city, moving an average of 1.5 miles from their previous residence.45 In the Harbor View HOPE VI project in Duluth, 23 percent of the families moved out of Duluth. This is a bit higher than national averages, but among displaced families in Duluth 7 percent relocated to the central cities of Minneapolis or St. Paul. Thus, overall, only 16 percent of the displaced families left central city environments, closer to the national norm. Nationally, HOPE VI displacees moved a median distance of 2.9 miles.46 Though the distance is longer in some places,47 families tend to remain within communities with which they are familiar, and in which they maintain social or historical ties. Research from Seattle suggests that the social networks of residents and the complex set of trade-offs residents face when moving work to restrict the spatial dispersion of displacees. Rachel Kleit and Martha Galvez argue that “a combination of wanting to foster personal community stability, depending on information from relatives …and perceptions of which neighborhoods will accept them” is responsible for the mostly short-distance moves made by displacees.48

Sometimes the mobility options available to public housing residents are constrained by the active opposition of those living in neighborhoods to which they might move. In Huntsville, Alabama, residents of south Huntsville protested city plans to demolish public housing concentrations in that city and move some residents into south Huntsville.49 In Cincinnati, residents of neighborhoods surrounding the English Woods public housing development organized in opposition to the Housing Authority’s plan to demolish it and provide Section 8 vouchers to the residents. “We’re not saying we don’t want low-income people, we’re just saying that we have enough. We’re already overburdened,” said one neighborhood leader.50 Displaced public housing residents in Chicago have faced opposition in several South Side neighborhoods.51 In Baltimore, suburban officials opposed the movement of Baltimore public housing residents to the suburbs after a proposed court settlement was announced that would help move 1,342 families from public housing in the city to “better neighborhoods” in the city and surrounding suburbs. The county executive leading the opposition was careful to explain that “this is not a racial issue.”52

Despite the prevalence of moves to nearby neighborhoods, receiving neighborhoods for HOPE VI and other public housing displacees tend to have much lower poverty rates than original neighborhoods.53 In fact, in the Urban Institute’s study of five HOPE VI locations across the country, the subset of residents who received vouchers moved from neighborhoods that averaged a poverty rate of 61 percent to neighborhoods with 27 percent poverty.54 The neighborhoods to which displaced families move also tend to have lower rates of unemployment and public assistance participation.55 But while the changes in neighborhood characteristics are real, there is some question as to whether they are significant enough to trigger the beneficial outcomes envisioned by policy makers. For example, though poverty rates are lower than in originating neighborhoods, poverty in the new neighborhoods remains higher than the city average in virtually all cases.56 The HOPE VI Panel Study found that 40 percent of displaced residents who did not return to the redeveloped HOPE VI sites lived in high-poverty census tracts (those with poverty rates over 30%), and that for all HOPE VI relocatees in five cities, the average poverty level in their new neighborhoods was greater than 20 percent.57 Furthermore, in many receiving neighborhoods poverty is increasing over time, meaning that reductions in neighborhood poverty experienced by displaced families might be transitory.58

John and Rochelle Quinn were relocated away from Harbor View in 2004. They moved into a spacious house on the eastern edge of the Hillside neighborhood of Duluth and received a Section 8 voucher to help pay the rent. They like the home and the neighborhood. The area they relocated to had a poverty rate of 35 percent, lower than the 45 percent poverty rate at Harbor View but more than two times the rate for the city of Duluth as a whole (15.9%). The median income of the neighborhood they moved to was $22,592 compared to $17,500 at Harbor View, an improvement but still only two-thirds the median of the entire city ($33,766). Unemployment among residents of their new neighborhood was 9 percent, better than Harbor View (11.7%) but worse than citywide (7.5%). The Quinns found themselves in a typical situation for families displaced from public housing. The statistics said that their new neighborhood was “better” than the old one, but it was still a relatively poor, disadvantaged neighborhood compared to the rest of the city of Duluth—and Duluth is a city that on the whole had pretty high poverty and unemployment numbers in 2000.

The subsequent mobility choices of displaced families must also be considered, though here the evidence is inconclusive. The experience in some cities has been that families tend to make further moves to neighborhoods that resemble their original neighborhoods. Families that are relocated to the suburbs, for example, will return to the central city and those that moved to substantially different (low-poverty, predominantly white) neighborhoods, will over time move back to higher poverty, more racially segregated neighborhoods.59 On the other hand, there is also evidence in some cases that once families are removed from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, they will continue to make mobility choices toward less segregated and more middle class areas.60

Although displaced families make some, albeit limited improvements in the poverty profile of their neighborhoods, the evidence suggests that their moves do not frequently involve crossing the color lines in local housing markets. Families typically do not escape neighborhoods that are racially segregated when they are displaced from public housing. In Chicago, for example, families displaced from public housing “are not distributed throughout the City of Chicago, but instead are concentrated in poor black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city.”61 In a national sample of displaced families who used Housing Choice Vouchers and thus had the best chance to move to more diverse neighborhoods, the average neighborhood to which they moved was 68 percent African American. Families who were displaced to other public housing presumably moved to even more racially segregated neighborhoods.62

In general, our knowledge of how displaced families fare after being moved out of public housing depends on “tracking” studies that follow the families relocated by PHAs. Most of these studies focus on HOPE VI projects and most report the outcomes for displaced families who receive relocation assistance—either financial assistance or help with the housing search, or both. In fact, this gives us an incomplete picture of the displacement process. Families who leave without assistance, who vacate their units and therefore forfeit their relocation assistance, or those who leave their units while the PHA is slowly emptying the building through a process of de facto demolition are not tracked by our studies. If these families who move without assistance do so because they have more resources than others and do not require support in moving, then the outcomes for displaced families overall might be better than the picture that emerges from the research. If on the other hand families who slip through the cracks do so because they are more troubled, or perhaps have language barriers that interfered with their understanding of their relocation rights, then they are less likely to relocate to “neighborhoods of opportunity” than are those who receive PHA assistance, and the overall picture of displaced public housing residents is likely to be worse than we know.

In the end, the fact that most displaced public housing residents do not significantly upgrade or change their neighborhood environments is not surprising. Low-income minority families may voluntarily restrict their housing search to other racially segregated neighborhoods because they anticipate opposition and a negative reaction from neighbors should they relocate to predominantly white areas, or because they simply wish to avoid standing out in their new neighborhoods.63 Researchers from Memphis, on the other hand, found that Memphis residents did choose their new housing “based on potential neighborhood improvements.”64 For those who do want to upgrade, the barriers to their upward mobility in neighborhood terms are many. The spatial distribution of resources upon which low-income families depend, most notably affordable housing, public transportation, affordable childcare, and other services, focuses and limits housing searches to certain neighborhoods. This is especially the case if the family moves to another public housing development or receives a Housing Choice Voucher—housing units with rents that meet the program eligibility requirements, and that have landlords willing to accept HCVs, are clustered in low-income neighborhoods.65 Middle class suburban neighborhoods may often lack the infrastructure utilized by low-income families.66 In some cases, neighborhood characteristics may be of secondary importance to families who are most interested in finding a unit large enough and one that is well maintained, especially if they have experienced poor maintenance and management in their public housing units.67 Attachment to place and the desire to preserve informal support networks upon which they rely may also limit housing searches to nearby neighborhoods. Relocation choices, furthermore, can be affected by the quality of the relocation assistance that families receive and whether they are made aware of housing opportunities in unfamiliar neighborhoods.68 The demolition of public housing in one neighborhood does nothing to increase the availability or quality of housing for very low income families in another neighborhood, so the housing market itself and the spatial distribution of affordable housing will also constrain mobility choices.

The prospect of finding adequate housing for low-income families in many U.S. cities is daunting. Facing significant income constraints, needing to balance transportation, childcare, and other considerations, and searching in local housing markets that steer them toward existing concentrations of low-cost units, real economic or racial deconcentration becomes a relatively rare outcome for families displaced from public housing. The difficulties of relocation are magnified for “hard to house” families who may have many children, physical or mental disabilities, or criminal backgrounds.69

Resident Reactions

Two years after they were displaced, the former residents of Harbor View were asked to provide a summary judgment of whether the move was good for them or bad. Thirty-seven percent had a positive view of the move, and 17 percent a negative one. The most common response, however, was a mixed one in which residents could identify both positive and negative outcomes associated with their forced relocation.70 Cynthia Barker, for her part, is bitter about what happened to her as a result of the demolition of Harbor View. For her, displacement has been a major life disruption. Though she had her issues with the DHA about conditions at Harbor View, displacement and demolition were not the solutions to the problems she saw. In fact, she thinks displacement has brought her down. Cynthia had been employed at the community center located in the heart of the Harbor View complex. After the HOPE VI grant was announced and families began to move out in 2004, Cynthia and others lost their jobs as the center downsized. Though the HOPE VI office offered to pay for school, Cynthia said, “I got to find a job. School won’t pay the bills. What I need is a job. I won’t go on welfare again. I have been off welfare since 1998 when I got this job, and I won’t do it again.” She complains that the HOPE VI project ignores the fact that people at Harbor View have families, they have bills to pay, and that all of that is disrupted by displacement. She named the DHA HOPE VI coordinator and said, “he’s getting paid to put us out. He’s getting paid every day and he’s getting paid to put us out, and I’m not happy about that at all.”

“That move put me through a bunch of changes,” she said. She kept coming back to the job she lost: “I’m unemployed because of HOPE VI.” Cynthia also feels lonely in her new community one year into it. Of her old friends and acquaintances from Harbor View she says, “We don’t hang out like we used to. They all on the west side, so far away now. I don’t really have friends around here, just my children. I feel like I went from ‘something’ to ‘nothing.’ I went from helping my kids out to them helping me. That is not a good feeling,” she says quietly.

John and Rochelle Quinn love the space they have in a large five-bedroom home on the city’s near-east side: “it’s beautiful here, ceilings are high, oak stairs, nice basement.” They also love the neighborhood, which they feel is quiet and safe. Their children on the other hand are not so happy because they miss the community center at Harbor View and all the friends they used to play with there. But John did not like Harbor View for his kids; he felt that there were too many bad influences and that he had to worry too much about his kids’ safety and behavior. John also felt that things were getting worse at Harbor View and he was glad to leave. “I like this neighborhood—not for the fact that it’s secluded, but for the fact that it gives them more opportunity, more leeway to make a better decision. Over there [Harbor View], there’s a very thin line…. Around here at least I can monitor our kids, see what’s going on and where they’re at, and keep them in line, keep them out of trouble.” Their children changed schools as a result of the move and John reports that they are doing “fine” in the new one.

Neither he nor Rochelle misses Harbor View much. They only see a couple of people they used to know there, “but we didn’t have a lot of close friends there, anyway,” he adds. They both think that the move has been largely good for them. Despite a generally positive experience with relocation, and despite not reporting much disruption in their lives, neither John nor Rochelle thinks much of the redevelopment process in general. They do not want to move back to the completed site because they need a larger unit than the homes going up at Harbor View. They are also suspicious of how well Harbor View will serve the needs of any of the original residents. When asked what she thinks of the new development, Rochelle says, “I think it’s crap. Because I don’t think they’re going to make it affordable for low income people to go back there, and I really don’t think they’re going by their word. They’re not making it accessible for lower income people to go back there. There was a single lady who wanted to go back up there, but she can’t because they aren’t making any single units.” They regard themselves as having ended up better than most. “For the most part everyone that we know didn’t make it out as well as we did,” says Rochelle. “We worked to get a place that suited our family. Everybody else just wanted the [relocation] money. Then they just [moved to] a hole in the wall.” The Quinns’ view of being displaced is informed by a sense of injustice. Though the family has not experienced anything negative in the move, Rochelle questioned being made to move and the presumption that the redevelopment was supposed to be for her benefit. The entire experience seemed to her like some kind of experiment: “I think that’s the true reason they call them the ‘projects.’—it’s a project to see how people act. It was like we were lab rats…. I think that I’m being put in a maze to run around and find the cheese.”

Deborah Stefanovich was fleeing an abusive husband when she moved to Harbor View from Michigan with her three daughters in 1998. Without an income, Deborah and the girls lived with relatives for a few months before getting into Harbor View. She lived there only four years before the DHA received the HOPE VI grant and began moving people out. Although Deborah moved into a scattered site public housing unit that she likes perfectly well, she is critical of the redevelopment. Her worst fear from the redevelopment is ending up homeless again. She is participating in a self-sufficiency program in which a portion of her rent goes into an escrow account that she can use for a home purchase after five years. But she must remain in public housing the entire time in order to receive the benefits, so she worries that if she is made to relocate she will forfeit her savings.

She is also worried about the girls’ school: “We moved a lot since they were little. They’ve been to a lot of different elementary schools. I think Angie was in like five different schools. Donna [the eldest] has probably gone through three or four…. I think this is probably the longest we’ve lived in one place since they were babies. So, you know, that’s why I didn’t want to disrupt the school. I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t do that again, we’ve been through that so many times.’ ”

Deborah’s main misgivings about HOPE VI, however, are not about what will happen to her; it is about what has happened to the community she used to be a part of. Her girls used to socialize at the community center, and they return there even now after they have moved. But the girls feel disconnected in their new neighborhood: “My kids said once you move out of here, you come back up and it’s almost painful. It’s kind of nice, but it’s almost painful…. They took away a community. I saw a lot of old neighbors at the grand opening [of Phase I at Harbor View]. I got lots of hugs, a lot of cheers, a lot of tears. People who have lived here were really sad. Most of the ones who were sad were those that never got out of this neighborhood. Now they’re lonely. They’re not adjusting to the new neighborhood.”

The Llewellyns story is different. Elderly and with Ross significantly disabled, the couple faced moving away from Harbor View for the first time in thirty years. Because of the lateness of their decision they had little time to move or to search. They went from being protected in this process, by being allowed to move directly into one of the first newly completed units, to having only a couple of weeks at most to try their hand in a housing market they had not engaged in for three decades, and with the constraints of their income, age, and Ross’s disability. The stress of the situation was clear on Alice’s face and demeanor. They had not counted on this. If anyone had a right to complain about displacement it might have been the Llewellyns.

But with their new roommate the couple found a unit in the bottom floor of a duplex on the city’s West Side and moved in. In one week they went from near panic and uncertainty to a new place they love: “Here I have a basement and can use my own stove. I have a sun porch…. I like old houses. We can put our knickknacks around the dining room there. It’s just the way I like it.” The landlords are a young couple who live in the unit upstairs and so the Llewellyns expect that they will be responsive and careful with the building. As for the neighborhood, Alice says, “we haven’t gone through a summer [with kids out of school and more of everyday life occurring outside], so we don’t know yet.” When asked about how they are adjusting, Alice worries about how they will fit into the neighborhood. But the concerns she expresses are practical ones: “The lady next door, she says that she gets over one hundred kids for Halloween, so I’m going to have to get candy to be ready for that.”

THE TRACKING STUDIES

Studies of families displaced by public housing demolition typically involve interviews or surveys to compare their experiences in the new neighborhood with life in the old public housing project. Residents are asked about their health, their economic situation, their children, and various other dimensions of life. The researchers are interested in how these things have changed in their new neighborhoods compared to life in the old public housing project. There is, of course, no way to compare the hypothetical third possibility—life in a renovated and upgraded public housing project. But if the hopes and theories of public housing transformers are correct, one would expect the families relocated from public housing to report improvements on a range of items from employment and economic self-sufficiency to physical and mental health. The evidence, unfortunately, tells a largely different story.

The biggest disappointment in the experience of displaced families is the fact that they do not seem to benefit with better employment or increased economic security. The research evidence is clear and consistent that displacement from public housing has no demonstrable positive effect on the employment, earnings, or income of individuals.71 Even where public housing families voluntarily move out and are obliged to move to low-poverty neighborhoods as in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) and Gautreaux programs, there have been no employment benefits.72 First, a forced relocation can be disruptive to families, interrupting established routines and presenting new challenges in terms of child care and transportation.73 The sudden inability to cover child care needs or to get to and from places where there are jobs may actually impede efforts to find or maintain employment. Health problems, too, are a significant obstacle for a large percentage of public housing residents, and moving from one place to another does nothing to reduce that barrier.74 Racial and ethnic discrimination in the job market may disadvantage job seekers, too, regardless of where they live.75 Whatever the reasons, mere mobility is not the answer to problems of chronic joblessness and poverty. Urban Institute researchers, summarizing the findings from a national study of HOPE VI residents, conclude that “relocation and voluntary supportive services are unlikely to affect employment or address the many factors that keep disadvantaged residents out of the labor force.”76 In fact, there is evidence that forced displacement is disruptive and may actually increase economic insecurity. Studies from several cities have found that a significant percentage of displaced families report difficulties paying rent and utilities in their new accommodations.77

In contrast to the outcomes related to economic self-sufficiency, the best results have been in residents’ sense of safety for themselves and their children. The research findings here are consistent and positive; families that have been relocated from public housing typically report feeling safer in their new environments. The effect is strong in some places where public housing communities were notoriously crime-ridden and weaker in places where residents felt less threatened, such as the Columbia Villa project in Portland, Oregon.78 Families feel safer because they typically see less drug- and gang-related activity, and fewer outward signs of social disorder in their new neighborhoods. Displacees’ new sense of safety, of course, is partially dependent on what kind of neighborhood they find themselves in after relocation. Families that are displaced into other public housing projects report fewer benefits than others who move with Section 8 assistance.79 Young people moved out of public housing in one neighborhood may move from one gang territory to another, putting them at some risk in their new communities.80 Susan Clampet-Lundquist finds that displacement may increase the sense of vulnerability for young people who are displaced because they face a “different threat environment” in their new neighborhoods without the security and predictability provided by their familiar social ties.81 Despite these exceptions, displaced families in general report a greater sense of safety in their new neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, according to the largest national tracking study, the greater sense of safety felt by relocatees is not linked to any secondary benefits such as improved mental or physical health, or greater economic security.82 Nevertheless, the peace of mind and the reduction of fear associated with relocation is a consistent and significant benefit in itself for families displaced from public housing.

Facilitating the movement of low-income families out of high-poverty neighborhoods is also expected to produce health benefits, both physical and psychological. Relocation from distressed public housing projects may reduce exposure to harmful environments and reduce the stress of living in unsafe and disadvantaged neighborhoods. Relatively few studies have explored the issue, however, for families involuntarily displaced by public housing.83 The main evidence comes from the Urban Institute’s five-city Panel Study. Residents at those sites had many health problems prior to relocation; more than one-third of adults reported having a chronic illness or health condition, asthma was reported by over 20 percent of adults, and the rate of children’s asthma was over three times the national average. Mental health problems, including depression, stress, fear, and anxiety, were also common, and occurred at a rate nearly 50 percent higher than the national average.84

Unfortunately, these poor health conditions did not improve as a result of HOPE VI relocation. Three-fourths of the Panel Study subjects reported no change or a decline in their health over time. In fact, the percentage of those reporting a need for ongoing care rose steadily over the study period. Similarly, children of HOPE VI families also showed no health improvements over a five-year period.85 In some cases, the stress of moving to new environments can actually contribute to health problems, especially where residents are stigmatized or isolated in their new communities.86

Similarly, there is no evidence that children of displaced public housing families show improvements in school outcomes as a result of their relocation.87 In many cases, families forced to move because of public housing demolition or transformation move to other schools “within the same, underperforming urban school systems.”88

When asked to evaluate their new living conditions, residents displaced from public housing generally report high levels of satisfaction with their new housing and neighborhood conditions.89 Some report less crime, better housing conditions, and neighborhood improvement.90 But better housing conditions do not always translate into greater neighborhood satisfaction among displaced residents. Factors such as proximity to bus lines, or places to buy necessities, or proximity to family and friends may be more problematic in the new neighborhood. This leads to situations in which families can identify their new neighborhoods as safer, their new homes as better, they can report fewer signs of neighborhood problems and social disorder, and yet not report greater satisfaction in their new neighborhoods.91 In fact, one study of displaced families in Seattle found that most felt that their former public housing residence was a better place to live than their new neighborhoods.92

Though transportation and convenience play a role, much of the ambivalence that displaced families show toward their new neighborhoods is based on their social experiences and the degree to which they miss social networks from their old communities. To date, the research has shown little in the way of successful social integration of displaced families. In most cases, residents report fewer neighboring behaviors and less-supportive social relationships in their new neighborhoods.93 Very few adults report that they have rebuilt social ties in their new neighborhoods, regardless of neighborhood poverty levels.94 There is some evidence that youth among these families were more likely to rebuild friendship networks than the adults.95

The hope of mixed-income communities is that social mix will lead to the adoption of more middle-class behaviors and attitudes among the chronically poor.96 But the studies of displaced public housing families echo earlier studies of other mixed-income communities that show little social interaction between higher and lower-income residents.97 Youth in particular were unlikely to look at their new neighbors as role models, or to interact with other adults in their new neighborhoods.98

Many involuntarily displaced families are not ready or entirely willing to move out of their existing public housing communities. Those who have lived in public housing the longest are the least willing to move because most regarded their particular development as home, they had put down roots, and they were attached to the community.99 In one study of the Columbia Villa HOPE VI project in Portland, many residents reminisced about the community; they mourned the loss of their neighbors, the open space, and the level of comfort they felt, and thought their new neighborhoods did not measure up to the community that they felt and benefited from at Columbia Villa. Only one-third felt their new neighborhood had a better sense of community than their original public housing site.100 Public housing residents’ attachment to place is especially important because there is evidence that families with the greatest place attachment show fewer beneficial outcomes from displacement and relocation.101

The Complexity of Resident Outcomes

Those who advocate the demolition of public housing and the displacement of its residents make a number of simplifying assumptions about how the move will affect low-income people. The displaced residents are assumed to have negative feelings about their public housing units, to welcome the chance to move out and into different and “better” neighborhoods, and to benefit from these moves. First, as we have seen, none of these assumptions apply across the board, and in fact none of them apply even to a majority of public housing residents. At the same time, critics of public housing demolition are incorrect when they assume the opposite, that all residents oppose displacement, that none welcome the move away from public housing, and than none report benefits from the move. What the evidence shows is a much more complex picture in which all assumptions apply in varying degrees across sites and to varying degrees across residents within a site.

Second, it should be noted that the summary judgments of displaced families regarding their condition and experience may be at odds with their thoughts about their previous homes and their subsequent homes. Negative feelings about one’s public housing home do not inevitably lead to eager acceptance of displacement. The desire to stay in or leave public housing, as we have seen, is not perfectly correlated with a sense of prior well-being in public housing. Residents can simultaneously be highly critical of the public housing in which they live, have elevated concerns for their safety and for the safety of their children, and identify specific and sometimes numerous problems with the conditions of their housing and environment, while still wishing to remain in public housing. In the postdisplacement period, residents who are relocated to new housing and different neighborhoods can be quite satisfied with the housing (indeed even more satisfied with it than they were with their previous public housing accommodations) and with the neighborhood, and still regard themselves as worse off for having been removed from their previous community or housing unit. Neither does a positive evaluation of one’s new, postrelocation home invariably lead to a positive assessment of the displacement event. As John and Rochelle Quinn and Deborah Stefanovich illustrate, one’s assessment of displacement is sometimes unrelated to one’s own experience but is instead based on what has happened to friends and acquaintances.

Third, the positive or negative outcomes associated with displacement are not cumulative.102 Residents are likely to experience and feel a range of different outcomes. That is, residents who report being more satisfied with their housing postdisplacement are not more likely than others to report greater satisfaction with their neighborhoods. Those who report neighborhood benefits are no more likely than others to report benefits to their children’s education or to their own economic security. Those who report feeling safer do not report being healthier or more economically self-sufficient. Benefitting in one area is not correlated with benefits in other areas. Because of their limited means, people of very low incomes are forced to make trade-offs in their housing and mobility decisions. Displacement from public housing does not eliminate this basic fact of life for such families. Housing accommodations may provide advantages in some respects while presenting significant challenges and disadvantages on other dimensions. For low-income families with very little purchasing power in the marketplace and sometimes with additional and significant constraints, housing accommodations are frequently a mix of good and bad.103 Displacement from public housing simply imposes a new set of trade-offs to low-income families. The record of displacement is not, however, a record in which the predominant impact on families has been beneficial.

Making Sense of the Record

The demolition of public housing has for the most part not produced significant or consistent benefits for the very low income families displaced. The argument behind public housing demolition is that conditions were so desperate there that any move away would benefit the families. In fact, the evidence to date suggests that while some of the intended outcomes have been produced, others have not. In some areas, residents are as a whole arguably worse off than before. Families feel safer and in most places they report greater satisfaction with their new housing. But there are conspicuously no benefits in employment, income, welfare dependency, or physical health. Further, many of the families suffer significant disruptions in the systems of social supports they construct to get by on very limited incomes.

There seems then to be a fundamental contradiction to the existing efforts to help public housing families by displacing them from presumably harmful environments: concentrations of poverty are detrimental to their residents, but dispersal has not been an effective solution.104 The lack of benefits from such moves is problematic at best, and it is even more profound and more consistent for the most disadvantaged families living in public housing.105 The most vulnerable populations, those with significant human capital deficiencies or significant health challenges, are the least likely to see any benefits from being displaced from public housing.

Some of the reasons for this pattern are apparent enough. Perhaps foremost among them is that the record of displacement and relocation in the current period of public housing demolition has mirrored the patterns seen in previous episodes of mass urban displacement. Among the involuntarily displaced, there seems to be little appetite overall for moves to socially and geographically distant neighborhoods. The dispersal pattern in HOPE VI and other examples of forced relocation indicate that residents typically move from public housing to other segregated, higher-poverty neighborhoods. This is a pattern that urban planners have known about for decades, at least since the large-scale displacement of residents during urban renewal and the construction of the interstate highway system.106 In the HOPE VI program and others like it in which families are involuntarily displaced due to government action, residents are entitled to assistance in moving but they are not obligated to move to any particular neighborhood.107 The result is that the degree of geographic dispersal is not very great. The extent to which displaced families disperse throughout an area is limited both by the preferences of families and by the workings of local housing markets.108 Although studies have shown that HOPE VI families and other public housing displacees do, in fact, move to neighborhoods with less poverty and fewer signs of distress,109 the degree of neighborhood improvement, at least according to more objective indicators from the census, is not very great. Moving from a concentrated poverty neighborhood (more than 40% of the population below the poverty line) to a high-poverty neighborhood (more than 30% below poverty) does not significantly alter the microlevel processes shaping poverty, either exogenous to the neighborhood (such as the quality of public services) or endogenous (such as social support and stigmatization).

Even were families to successfully relocate to more distant, middle-class neighborhoods, relocation alone may not be sufficient to induce significant changes in economic self-sufficiency. Most observers now feel that dispersal needs to be accompanied by social service supports for families.110 These service supports could range from those that would aid in the development of human capital resources to those that might ameliorate some of the financial hardship associated with being relocated out of public housing. Even so, there are no comprehensive studies of whether social service delivery to displacees provides an increment in benefits above the provision of social services without the forced mobility.

The displacement and relocation model of poverty amelioration also seriously underestimates the complexity of poverty. A focus on neighborhood conditions and their role in conditioning the life chances of the poor is a simplification if it excludes a range of other potentially determinative factors. The macro- and meso-level processes that operate on neighborhoods, that mediate job availability, structural economic shifts, the accumulation of human capital, and migration and mobility patterns, suggest that it is possible to overestimate the role of neighborhood, and to consequently overestimate the importance of changing neighborhood environments for the poor.111 The overestimation of the impact of neighborhood is compounded by an incomplete understanding of the neighborhood dynamics themselves. The expectations of benefits are based on the argument that high concentrations of poverty result in community decline and poor socioeconomic outcomes for individuals, yet the exact nature of the link between environment and poverty remains unspecified. Though there is a compelling body of evidence that neighborhood context affects poverty, it is less clear which factors matter most and which, if addressed, will improve community and individual outcomes most effectively.112

Similarly, there is no certainty that “better” neighborhoods, as we generally have operationalized the term, produce the types of benefits expected. The uncertainty here is twofold. First, our statistical studies measure neighborhood deprivation in terms of poverty, the degree of racial segregation, rate of welfare dependency, or some other indicator of economic or social marginality. But we are not certain that the types of neighborhood benefits pursued in the HOPE VI program are produced by or correlated with reductions in such conditions. In fact, recent studies suggest little to no correlation between census indicators of neighborhood quality and the subjective ratings of neighborhoods offered by subsidized household members.113 Further, we don’t really even know what the important thresholds are that would trigger the changes we seek.114 Voluntary mobility programs, for example, are set to specific metrics of poverty rate or rate of racial/ethnic segregation. MTO directs the relocation of low-income families into neighborhoods with less than a 10 percent poverty rate. The Gautreaux program directed families into neighborhoods with less than 30 percent African American population. Quite apart from the question as to whether such measures are appropriate indicators, it is not clear that the thresholds that drive our programs are the critical ones necessary to generate benefits. This issue is even more germane in the case of public housing demolition where neighborhood improvements in terms of poverty rate reduction and decreased rates of racial/ethnic segregation experienced by displaced families are much more modest than what is seen in voluntary programs.

An equally important factor in all of this is the way in which planners and policy advocates have underestimated the importance of supportive social networks and attachment to place for the low-income residents of public housing. Attachment to place goes well beyond mere nostalgia for buildings or people. Very low income people are obliged to create often complex informal systems of support to compensate for their lack of economic resources.115 These systems are frequently, by necessity, grounded in particular places or neighborhoods. From the development of informal work, to the establishment of reciprocal arrangements for child care and transportation, very low income persons improvise a variety of means for paying rent, feeding children, buying clothes, and acquiring the necessary services that middle-class people acquire by purchase. The development of intricate survival systems is based on social and everyday connections.116 Because daily activity patterns for the poor occur mostly within a local area, social networks based in place may help the disadvantaged access “spur of the moment” job opportunities.117 Forced displacement from public housing directly disrupts if not completely destroys these social networks. Displacees are forced to reconstruct the networks in their new environments, but in the meantime carefully constructed and negotiated means of making ends meet are shattered. Movers thus understandably miss their old social contacts and acutely feel isolated in their new communities.118

The Contingency of Benefits

It is no accident or mystery why a sense of safety and satisfaction with the quality of the housing are the only consistent benefits reported by displaced public housing residents. These factors vary considerably between neighborhoods, and reflect environmental conditions most directly. The benefits of greater safety and reduced social disorder, for example, are enjoyed passively. Residents need not take any action nor engage institutions or social structures in order to feel safer or to notice the lack of broken windows or to enjoy a newer and better-maintained apartment. Thus, we would expect displaced families to be more likely to identify these particular benefits resulting from relocation; they are universally accessible and passively enjoyed. And this pattern is exactly what the studies of HOPE VI (and even the studies of voluntary mobility) reveal.119

Other expected neighborhood advantages of relocation (rates of employment and self-sufficiency, better schools and educational experiences, better health, and higher levels of social capital) are not experienced passively. For these benefits to be manifest to new residents, relocatees must take active steps, and must engage public and private institutions and social structures that may remain biased in ways that make it difficult for residents to realize benefits. To take but one example, dispersal, according to one study,

will improve education outcomes for the children …provided families successfully relocate, children accompany their parents to the new neighborhoods, the educational opportunities experienced by children are higher in their new environments, and …parents and children react to these changes in ways that translate into improved educational outcomes.120

One might add to that the caution that any unforeseen crisis in health or family stability, conditioned by the child’s (or family’s) previous residence in a high-poverty neighborhood, could also prevent the expected positive outcomes from materializing. Employment is another good example. Displacement from distressed public housing may well eliminate problems of spatial mismatch and put residents into closer proximity to a greater number of job opportunities. For that to benefit the resident, however, a series of additional preconditions must be met. The job openings that exist must match or be appropriate to the training, education, or experience of the resident. The resident must become aware of the appropriate job openings. The hiring process must be free of discrimination so that the resident is not unfairly treated due to skin color or ethnicity. The resident must be healthy enough to be able to pursue the employment, must have the necessary child care in place, and the means to get to and from the interview and the job site. Many of the expected benefits of relocation could be extended in a similar manner to expose fairly lengthy chains of events that need to occur for each of the individual benefits anticipated by policy makers. In general, the more contingent and indirect the benefit, the less likely it is to occur for displaced public housing families.