Public Housing and the Rescaling of Regulation in the USA

Abstract

The simultaneous upward and downward rescaling of regulation has dramatically altered welfare provisioning systems in very different national contexts during the past thirty years. Frequently lost in the literature on rescaling, though, is the notion that localities have not been ‘given’ power in the same way that international institutions have. Though local institutional variation accounts for more difference in welfare provision than before, there are clear policy boundaries that are policed by market regulators of various sorts. This paper explores the impact of rescaling on public housing provision in the United States to illustrate better this point. I demonstrate that basic demographic, housing stock, and federal funding differences are now less important determinants of uneven public housing production than was the case during the Keynesian era, and that local institutional differences are now playing a greater role in the production and management of public housing. With such institutional differences unleashed, enormous variation in the quantity, quality, and management of public housing is now emerging.