Policy, Planning, and People: Promoting Justice in Urban Development

Chapter 14. Public Housing in the United States: Neighborhood Renewal and the Poor

Chapter 14 Public Housing in the United States: Neighborhood Renewal and the Poor Lawrence J. Vale Overview: The Meanings of Public Housing The tortuous and tortured saga of public housing in the United States is a kind of double social experiment: first when it was built—under the high modernist hopes of the mid-twentieth century—and again, as the century closed, when it was redeveloped as a nostalgia-riddled effort that mimicked a pre-modernist urbanism. In both phases, planners and designers promised new and improved housing for low-income households, clearing slums the first time and, in the second iteration, clearing public housing itself. In both cases, planners and designers used physical design and development processes to substitute a new kind of community for one judged to be less desirable , leading to a kind of double gentrification. I situate my own work, which has mostly focused on Boston, in the context of those who have written extensively about public housing in other American cities, such as Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and New York. To do so is to examine the relationship between design ideals and larger sociopolitical processes, with a focus on understanding why it has been so difficult for planners and policy-makers in the United States to address the housing needs of the least advantaged. In what follows, I trace both the evolution of public housing as conceived, designed, and managed, and the corresponding ways scholars and practicing planners have responded to this housing. This means (1) coming to terms with the initial enthusiasm for public housing by dissecting the rationales 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 285 3/14/13 9:48 AM 286 Lawrence J. Vale of its proponents; (2) contending with the “rise and fall” critiques that soon followed; and (3) assessing more contemporary efforts to defend, reinvent, replace, or simply eliminate this form of deeply subsidized housing. The saga of public housing in the United States since the 1930s provides a window into not just the relationship between planning and people, but a much broader and deeper set of social relations. Public housing, as both a reflection of other trends and as a causal force in its own right, makes visible the strains of race and ethnic relations. It clarifies the struggles over class and how self-definitions of “poor” and “middle class” get constructed. Public housing decisions reveal distinctive choices about land use and zoning in the American city (and, by extension, show ways that Americans operate rather differently from those in many other countries). Ultimately, public housing forces contentious discussions about the role and limits of the state in providing shelter to the poorest citizens. In the context of the United States, public housing has demonstrated the power of private markets to influence even that which is explicitly termed “public.” Initial High Hopes: Public Housing as a Reward The struggle to produce and sustain public housing in the United States is rooted in multiple, shifting, and mixed motives for supplying low-rent dwellings in a country that has an ideological veneration for the owned singlefamily private house. Support for public housing has always been partial and reluctant, cloaked in ongoing suspicion about which of the poor are deserving of government subsidy and which are not. Housing subsidies have come more easily to the non-poor, especially those who own homes and who have received preferential tax treatment for more than a century (Vale 2000; Bratt, Stone, and Hartman 2006; Bauman, Biles, and Szylvian 2000). Even before that, the owned home gained national ideological support through such federal government mechanisms as the Homestead Act of 1862 (which gave tracts of western lands away as long as there was a commitment to build a home on them). By the 1920s, the federal government and local real estate interests worked in carefully orchestrated concert to enshrine expanded homeownership as both an ideological and a material reality. From the “Own Your Own Home” movement to the “Better Homes in America” initiatives, both public and private sectors worked assiduously to support the moral supremacy of the homeowner over the renter (Vale 2007). By contrast, even as 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 286 3/14/13 9:48 AM 287 Public Housing in the United States Western European democracies were embarking on extensive social housing building programs in the aftermath of the First World War (Bauer 1934), U...