Public housing and the American dream: Residents’ views on buying into “the projects”

Abstract

This article examines residents’ attitudes toward homeownership in five large inner‐city public housing projects composed of multifamily apartment buildings. Based on 267 interviews with public housing residents in Boston, it contrasts their broad support for homeownership as a concept with their wholly mixed reaction to the idea of owning a public housing apartment. Interest in homeownership in public housing is shown to be independent of residents’ current employment status and closely tied to residents’ social investment in specific housing developments and to their perceptions about the quality of that development's management, maintenance, and security. The findings cast renewed doubt on policies that would make public housing sales a centerpiece of national policy, but they provide qualified support for more modest efforts to increase homeownership in public housing developments and in low‐income neighborhoods around them.