Environmental Reviews and Case Studies: Heritage Dispatches from the American Approaches of Hell: Public Housing, Historic Preservation, and Environmental Impact Analysis

Abstract

In the late 20th century history of American historic preservation, public or social/council housing occupies a unique space. For over 20 years, American policy in this area, representing an investment of billions of taxpayer dollars, has been dominated by high-profile efforts to “transform” the downtowns of major American cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston by demolishing public housing projects that were located in the city outskirts when originally built. These efforts have engendered significant debates about historic preservation at every level of government and have produced federal policy decisions on the part of the United States (US) Departments of Housing and Urban Development and the Interior, which have facilitated the demolition of hundreds of thousands of units of public housing in America, which in most cases has not been replaced on a one-for-one basis and which is no longer affordable for the poor or near-poor. In the majority of cases, the National Park Service has supported extensive demolition of historic public housing projects, or at best, only token preservation of them. The role of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has never listed a public housing project in its annual list of “endangered” historic sites, has, at best, been to remain organizationally silent and, at worst, to partner with organizations such as the US Green Building Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism, organizations that would not exist in their present form without the use of public housing as a petri dish for their condescending neoliberal conceptions about how other people, particularly poor people, ought to live.