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The History of American Public Housing Shows It Didn’t Have to Decline [1]

['Edward Goetz', 'Tyler Austin Harper', 'Jared Abbott', 'Fred Deveaux', 'Cori Bush', 'Shawn Fain', 'Dan Darrah', 'Dianne Enriquez', 'Galen Herz', 'Ryan Cooper']

Date: 2024-09

Edward Goetz

That happened in a number of different ways. The first has to do with the political and economic environment in the early 1990s. American cities were still reeling from a crack cocaine epidemic, which generated something akin to a moral panic in a lot of American cities about escalation of crime, about the dysfunctionality of neighborhoods, of concentrated poverty — really an idea that American cities as we knew them were being lost. And there was this other America that was being generated in these neighborhoods of high crime, high poverty, drug use, drug abuse, etc.

This moral panic dominated the day. Every new iteration of Congress tried to outdo the previous session in terms of being tough on crime. You saw the Clinton administration’s concern about reinventing welfare, about ending as we know it. This was a period when the prevailing notions of American cities were of a deeply problematic nature, that our cities were facing challenges that were simply qualitatively and quantitatively different than had ever been faced before.

This developed at the same time that the national commission was writing its report. The commission comes out with a pretty moderate piece of analysis and set of recommendations for a kind of rehab-based program of modernization — one that would also include a lot of social supports for residents. The commission explicitly says that the solution to public housing should not focus on the physical conditions and physical remaking of public housing, but that this is what in fact exactly happens.

The commission issues its report in 1992. Within months, Congress has created a demonstration program called the Urban Redevelopment Demonstration Program. This is what becomes Hope VI in another year or so. It’s a program that is primarily aimed at rehabilitation of the most severely distressed public housing. So it hews pretty closely to the recommendations of the commission. But keep in mind that background of moral panic. Then you have a new secretary of HUD, the former mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, who begins a tour of public housing across the country.

As most HUD directors do, he wasn’t taking a tour of the well-functioning public housing — he was taking a tour of the worst of public housing. And he begins to become convinced that the kind of moderate approach called for by the commission and embodied in that first piece of legislation is maybe inadequate to the task — that the problems he witnessed in cities like Baltimore and Chicago are just too great to be dealt with by a moderate form of of rehabilitation.

Then you have the midterm elections of 1994 and the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party’s Contract for America, which includes significant changes for HUD. The designs that the Republican majority in Congress had on HUD were that it might even be eliminated. So Cisneros sees himself at the head of an agency that is now endangered. He puts his staff through this exercise and creates what is called the HUD Reinvention Blueprint, which also comes out in 1994 as a result of these midterm elections.

The reinvention blueprint is a fairly radical vision for HUD moving forward. It includes a radical kind of redefinition of public housing, taking it away from the form that it had taken in the first forty years of its life, and thinking about the privatization of public housing, the switch of public housing subsidies into tenant-based forms of housing subsidies, in the form of vouchers.

So there’s this notion that big changes are needed in the way HUD does business, and public housing is chief among the problems facing HUD.

In 1995, HUD begins to emphasize the leveraging of private investment in all of the proposals it’s getting for Hope VI projects across the country. And this is a direct signal to local housing authorities that HUD wants to see significant neighborhood change taking place in any kind of Hope VI site.

The other things that are important here are that the 1990s was the first decade where we started to see some central cities actually rebounding in terms of population and economic activity. So there was this nascent market for private sector investment in a lot of central cities, most of it in the form of expanding downtowns and taking advantage of the amenities that exist in downtown areas in most American cities. What stood in the way in a lot of cities were older public housing developments. So they began to be seen as an obstacle to central city revitalization at this time.

All of these factors sort of converge around 1994–95, and they contribute to a fairly quick change in the approach of the Hope VI program from being a moderate or rehab approach to being one that emphasizes full-scale demolition, significant leveraging of private sector investment, and the replacement of monolithic public housing developments with mixed-income developments that will attract market-rate families and market-rate households. It’s an entirely new paradigm, and it was wholeheartedly adopted by Cisneros and HUD at that time.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/public-housing-us-history-destruction-neoliberalism-hope-iv

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