Abstract
Fans of the HBO series The Wire will recall the episode in which several high-rise public housing apartment buildings in West Baltimore were demolished and the watching crowd was engulfed in a billowing, choking cloud of dust. During the 1990s and 2000s, this scene was replayed in city after city as HOPE VI funds were used to tear down more than 200,000 public housing units. Hope VI, a federal program that supported renovation or redevelopment of distressed public housing, brought visible changes to the built environment and social landscape of U.S. cities. Tidy New Urbanist villages replaced grimy modernist superblocks; impoverished neighborhoods began to gentrify. Less visible were the consequences of this wave of demolitions for the residents displaced from public housing.
Susan Popkin’s No Simple Solutions: Transforming Public Housing in Chicago examines this fraught topic. The book focuses on Chicago, site of what Popkin calls “the worst of public housing in the nation” (p. 2). The desperate conditions in Chicago’s public housing in the mid-1990s are familiar, the squalor, social disorder, and violence thoroughly chronicled by researchers and journalists. The agency managing this housing was itself deeply dysfunctional; by that time, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) did not regularly collect rent and even lacked a complete list of the addresses of its properties. Unsurprisingly, Chicago’s public housing went into federal receivership in 1995. The city did not regain local control until 1999, when Mayor Richard M. Daley negotiated the “Plan for Transformation,” an ambitious blueprint for demolishing the remaining high-rise public housing buildings and providing relocation and support services to displaced residents. The city pledged to build or renovate 25,000 units of housing, including mixed-income developments as well as scattered-site and traditional public housing.
Popkin was ideally situated to study the impacts of the Plan, having spent nearly her entire professional life engaged with the CHA. Her first job after graduate school was on a project evaluating the Gautreaux Desegregation Program, in which former CHA residents were given vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. She went on to study the effects of the CHA’s “Sweeps” program, a controversial crime-prevention initiative. As Daley’s Plan for Transformation began to unfold, Popkin and her colleagues quickly secured funding to study its outcomes among families in some of the targeted buildings. For the HOPE VI Panel Study, Popkin and colleagues conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with public housing residents in five cities, including Chicago; ultimately, the families in Chicago were followed for a decade. A few years later, Popkin launched the Chicago Family Case Management Demonstration to develop and evaluate services for “hard-to-house” families. This study, too, blended quantitative and qualitative data and followed families over time. No Simple Solutions synthesizes the results of these and other studies of Chicago’s public housing families between 1990 and the early 2010s.
In the early years, she found, implementation of the Plan for Transformation was slow and chaotic. The CHA was new to the complicated financing involved in renovation and redevelopment and was unprepared to provide relocation and social services. Residents forced out of one building became squatters in another; some even lived in stairwells or laundry rooms. (The CHA improved its services after it was sued by advocacy groups.) Although displaced residents had the option of returning to CHA housing, few qualified for the new mixed-income developments, which imposed work requirements, drug tests, and other criteria. In 2011, only 17 percent of the displaced residents in Popkin’s panel were living in mixed-income buildings.
Displaced residents could also accept a Section 8 voucher and seek housing in the private market, but many private landlords discriminated against Section 8 tenants, especially those moving out of the projects. Despite these difficulties, most relocated residents reported that their housing conditions were better and their neighborhoods safer. While the Plan for Transformation had its flaws, Popkin emphasizes that being able to “sleep through the night without fear is a huge and life-changing improvement in quality of life” (p. 50). Although some observers feared that displaced public housing residents would cause crime to spike in the neighborhoods where they moved, her analysis found no evidence for this.
Popkin has two key caveats to this generally positive story. First, many residents who had to move faced multiple barriers to self-sufficiency. Poor education, limited work experience, and in some cases criminal records made it difficult to land steady work. More difficult to address were physical and mental health problems and substance abuse; because exposure to violence was so pervasive, post-traumatic stress disorder—typically untreated—was common. Housing was not enough; the most troubled residents needed intensive social services. Popkin’s case management demonstration, which provided mental health and substance abuse treatment, transitional jobs, financial literacy workshops, and other supports, yielded positive results, and elements of it were incorporated into the CHA’s new resident services program.
Second, Popkin found little evidence that relocation improved outcomes for children and youth. Even after they moved, the children continued to struggle in school; many teenagers and young adults became caught up in the criminal justice system and had little success moving into the job market. Mental health problems such as anxiety or depression were widespread. As Popkin points out, most children still attended substandard schools and lived in contexts of deprivation and violence; the average poverty rate in the new neighborhoods was a startling 41 percent. Children’s surroundings had changed, but not enough.
Moreover, the process of moving—even to a slightly better neighborhood—could mean disruption and risk. Children changed schools and left friends behind. Boys, especially, had to watch their backs; even if they had avoided gangs in their old neighborhoods, the complex geography of gang rivalry could put them in danger in their new neighborhoods. Reflecting their growing’conviction that housing should be bundled’with social services, Popkin and colleagues launched another intervention, the Housing Opportunities and Services Together (HOST), to develop a two-generation model of service delivery for families with children in distressed communities.
Over the past two decades many cities have revitalized, attracting population and investment and defining an appealing new vision of sustainable urban life. HOPE VI was a key instrument of this transformation. Popkin’s careful case study illuminates the human consequences of this policy for public housing residents, many of whom were deeply wounded by the segregation and social engineering of an earlier day and who are now dispersed across the city. No Simple Solutions skillfully integrates quantitative and qualitative evidence with political and institutional detail. Vignettes of public housing residents are woven through the book, giving nuance and humanity to people who appear too often in public debate as stock figures.
Popkin’s own personal experience appears as well; she ruefully acknowledges her moments of naiveté in dealing with the press and politicians. That she could maintain access in such a contentious legal and political environment is a testament to her credibility and sound judgment. Her book will be instructive not only for specialists in housing and social policy but also for those concerned more broadly with inequality in the changing American city.