Abstract
Ed Goetz has produced a vitally important commentary on the state of public housing in the United States. Through detailed examination of data, interviews with residents, and analysis of policy history, Goetz explains how public housing has, for the most part, succeeded in providing housing for the most needy and vulnerable households for nearly a century.
That wasn’t a typo. Public Housing in the United States was a successful program in most cases.
Goetz argues that the perception that most people have that it was a colossal failure is the result of a few, large, disastrous projects in a select few cities: the Pruitt Igoes and Cabrini Greens. These are “the projects” that most people think about when they consider the legacy of public housing. Goetz argues that this is a wholly mistaken way of portraying public housing, and has served as the foundation for policies designed to disperse the poor, dismantle public housing, and minimize governmental involvement in the real estate industry.
So why have we been so wrong for so long? It hasn’t been an accident.
Goetz argues that the “public-housing-as-disaster-narrative” that pervades the housing debate among academics, policy makers, and the media has drowned out the fact that most public housing in most cities for most of the history of the program has been largely successful.
How did this happen? Goetz presents a reasoned and well-documented history of housing in which he argues the following:
Public housing has never been particularly popular in the public mind or among policy makers due to Americans’ deep uneasiness regarding government involvement over what has traditionally been a privately controlled and profit-driven economic sector. US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) policies allowed excessive local control over the management (and mismanagement) of individual developments and did not provide adequate guidance regarding how and when housing should be rehabilitated. This led to what Goetz refers to as de facto demolition, as local Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) allowed units to fall into disrepair in order to qualify for redevelopment funding for HOPE VI and similar programs, and that HUD was complicit with this approach in many cases. Place-based policies such as HOPE VI emphasized the needs of the community in terms of “revitalization” and “community development” over the needs of individual residents when pursuing redevelopment of public housing. Before, during, and after the inception of Public Housing in 1937, opponents of the program have worked to destroy it.
Throughout the book, Goetz focuses on the “exaggerated discourse of disaster” that has pervaded all discussions of public housing for the last half century. He explains that public housing has been enshrined forever, “as the Titanic of American social policy (p. 1); that for neoliberals, public housing represents, “the quintessential example of public intervention gone awry, and further evidence of the inefficiencies of welfare state policies” (p. 46) that local public housing administrators commonly saw public housing as “a necessary evil” (p. 90).
Goetz also delves into the fact that—like nearly every other top-down urban policy—the dismantling of public housing has not been color blind. In cities where the dismantling of public housing has been aggressive and nearly complete (Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans), Goetz argues that, “the full-scale attack on public housing was employed as a means of eliminating entire communities of poor, black residents” (p. 110). Like urban renewal before it, dispersal programs like HOPE VI have promised better neighborhoods, safer housing, and greater economic opportunities to the existing residents of its target communities. Like urban renewal before it, they have not delivered. There has been no one-for-one replacement, and the redevelopment of public housing has been, in many ways, as destructive as urban renewal for poor, minority communities.
What about the individuals and households who have benefited from the dismantling of public housing? Isn’t the dispersal of the poor supposed to result in greater access to opportunity for those moving out of public housing? Goetz says no. While some studies have shown modest improvements for some residents, many others show no improvements at all. As Goetz states in his conclusion, “Most simply move to other high-poverty and racially-segregated neighborhoods that are unlikely to provide them with significantly greater opportunities than from which they came” (p. 175).
The assumptions of HOPE VI - that people would move to better neighborhoods; that they would be given the choice to stay; that the revitalization of their neighborhood would improve their lives - proved to be faulty in most cases. Even the well-documented property value and crime improvements in neighborhoods where HOPE VI redevelopments have taken place should be called into question. Goetz argues that these improvements were not merely the result of the dismantling of public housing, but of significant investment alongside the demolition. Would these improvements have occurred if, instead of dismantling public housing, we invested in it and its surrounding neighborhoods? We will never know.
The history of public housing is one of poor planning, insufficient funding, and experimentation. How did we experiment with modernist theories of design? Public Housing? When that failed, how did we choose to redevelop? We used Howard’s Garden cities model as a guide. The Brooke Amendment; Nixon’s moratorium; de facto demolition; scattered-site housing; HOPE VI; vouchers. When one effort didn’t work, another was tried. But never was housing designed with the needs of the residents as a central tenet of its design, location, or financing.
In the tightly written 200 pages of this book, Goetz presents a challenge: Think again about dispersal and demolition. Think again about how you talk about the projects. Think again about place-based policies. Think again about whose “successes” and whose “failures” we celebrate. Think again about public housing.