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249 ronald d. utt The Conservative Critique of HOPE VI By reviving the project-based assistance that many believed had ended in 1974, HOPE VI offered a comparatively expensive form of housing assistance for the needy and an incomplete solution to the ills that plague the inner-city poor and the environments in which they live. While it has had some beneficial effects, HOPE VI was perhaps overly broad in scope. With philosophical roots stretching back as far as the New Deal but operating in a far different environment , it aimed for multiple objectives but, by relying on the direct government provision of services, appears to have failed to deliver the value warranted by its expenditures. In that respect, HOPE VI shares many of the same shortcomings as the public housing construction programs preceding it. A New Deal Heritage When the first public housing program arose under the New Deal, it represented one of the federal government’s first attempts to assume some measure of responsibility for the urban environment and to use project-based housing programs to improve it. While most central cities today are an increasingly insignificant component of the commercial, political, and cultural fabric of American life, in the 1930s and up through the early 1950s, major cities attracted a significant portion of the nation’s population and much of the commerce that was not related to agriculture or extractive industries. But those central cities also housed the oldest housing stock, and the economic deprivation caused by the Great Depression left some of it in deplorable condition. The government’s response, launched under the Public Works Administration in 1933 and codified in the U.S. Housing Act of 1937, was a program that aimed to create jobs in the beleaguered construction market, provide housing for the displaced, clear slums, improve the urban environment, and, in the process, generate rent revenue to service the debt incurred to build the projects.1 14 Historically, project-based housing assistance has proved incapable of addressing the issue of the limited opportunities provided by inadequate education in many cities. chapter 250 ronald d. utt In that respect, the program shared the same philosophical underpinning as many other New Deal policies developed during the Great Depression. Despite the massive increase in government spending that it created—which tripled the federal share of GDP between 1929 and 1939—the New Deal produced many programs with a decided element of old-fashioned fiscal rectitude .2 That fiscal attitude manifested itself chiefly in an implicit benefit-cost criterion that encouraged reliance on programs designed to meet several goals for each dollar spent and, if possible, to be self-funding. For example, the Rural Electrification Administration was established in 1935 to lend money at near market rates to rural co-ops to bring electricity to farms and, in the process, raise farm productivity and income; provide work for installers, linemen, and generator manufacturers; and, in the end, create enough rural prosperity to service the debt used to build the system. What to Do about Cities Despite its earlier attempts to improve the urban environment, the federal government in the post–World War II era was swimming upstream against some pretty powerful forces. Material and labor shortages during the war led to further declines in the urban housing stock. And aside from its deterioration , much of the stock was also functionally obsolete in terms of the amenities (square footage and plumbing, heating, and electrical systems) that it could offer under the best of circumstances. As a consequence, the newly prosperous postwar households often opted to live in the newer and more modern houses being constructed in the suburbs.3 Thus, over the postwar years, most U.S. cities began to experience the loss of their middle-class population and employment base to the surrounding suburbs or to the suburbs of cities elsewhere in the United States. (And the exodus has continued to this day, producing substantial declines in city populations . Philadelphia, which peaked at 2.1 million in 1950, had fallen to 1.5 million in 2000. Over the same period Minneapolis went from 522,000 to 383,000, while Washington, D.C., dropped from 802,000 to 572,000. With rare exceptions, this pattern was repeated in cities throughout the nation.)4 European cities also were losing population in the postwar years, but the racial compositionofthecities(atleastuntilrecently)remainedlargelythesame.5 While both U.S. and European central city population declines were concentrated in the middle class, the phenomenon...

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