The Strange Career of Public Housing

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Efforts to account for the history of public housing in America are fraught with competing narratives. Many scholars, policy analysts, architects, and planners seek explanations for the successes and failures of housing projects from within the program itself. Some argue that projects rise and fall based on the management performance of housing authorities, while others look to racism, concentrated poverty, crime, and other social conditions. For many, the challenges faced by public housing result from the alienating and dehumanizing qualities of modernist architecture. Still, others argue that the Housing Act of 1937 was compromised from the beginning and, thus, produced compromised results. This article acknowledges all of these factors as important yet insufficient to account for overall public housing performance; it reframes the narrative of public housing within broader urban conditions, suggesting that the fate of public housing is intimately tied to the fate of the cities that surround them. Takeaway for practice: Current accounts of the fate of public housing tend to reflect narrow managerial, planning, and architectural concerns. As a result, the literature on public housing insufficiently informs long-term policy decisions and planning practices. Solutions will only emerge when policymakers and planners take into account the impact of capital flight, social disinvestment, and the weak powers of cities to overcome such obstacles. After all, these urban conditions apply as much to recently created HOPE VI neighborhoods as to the high-rise public housing neighborhoods they replaced. Research support: None.