The Imagined Self-Sufficient Communities of HOPE VI

Abstract

The physical redevelopment of Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) communities has been accompanied by efforts to remake the people who live in them. Through a variety of community and supportive services (CSS) programs, residents are offered job training, homeownership classes, and support to develop savings accounts with the goal of moving them toward fuller participation in the private housing market. By examining how CSS have been offered in Nashville and Atlanta, we make the claim that HOPE VI has had limited impacts in its people-based goals fundamentally because the overall CSS concept focuses on driving residents to participate more fully in labor and housing markets. Supportive services are insufficient in scope and resources to buffer the effects of the market on residents, except for a small number who come into the program already well positioned to succeed. As such, HOPE VI’s failures are not a problem of implementation but of design and conception.