Redeveloping Public Housing

Abstract

The debate surrounding recent substantial changes in U.S. public housing policies and the emergence of a consensus favoring broader income mixing overlooks important historic lessons. From the 1950s through the 1970s, frequently in response to local business-led political coalitions, urban renewal programs forcibly displaced poor minority people without allowing their meaningful participation in redevelopment planning, without allowing their adequate compensation, without sufficient replacement housing, and without the possibility of their returning to the redeveloped area. These projects simultaneously destroyed indigenous social communities as they frequently replaced existing residents with much higher income households. More recently during the 1990s, reconstruction of the 1,195-unit Tech-wood and Clark Howell public housing developments in Atlanta, Georgia, as the 900-unit Centennial Place mixed-income community, evolving federal housing policies and funding, and insufficient federal oversight contributed to the Atlanta political regime and the Atlanta Housing Authority producing markedly similar results. National research to measure the representativeness of this case is needed, as is legislation mandating asset retention, meaningful resident participation in redevelopment planning, and relocation and replacement housing.