Public Housing Demolition Research Articles

Moved to Vote: The Long-Run Effects of Neighborhoods on Political Participation

Abstract How does one's childhood neighborhood shape political engagement later in life? We study voting rates of children who were displaced by public housing demolitions and moved to higher opportunity areas using housing vouchers. Those displaced during childhood had 11% (2 pp) higher participation in the 2016 Presidential election and were 10% (2.9 pp) more likely to vote in any general election. We argue that the results are unlikely to be driven by changes in incarceration or parental outcomes but rather by political socialization or improvements in education and earnings. These results suggest that housing assistance programs may reduce inequality in political participation.

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago's Public Housing Demolitions

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago's Public Housing Demolitions

Pecuniary effects of public housing demolitions: Evidence from Chicago

This paper studies the effects of public housing on private house prices. I examine the impact of a large and negative housing supply shock caused by the demolition of public housing developments in Chicago in the 1990s and 2000s. By comparing census tracts near demolitions to a synthetic control composed of tracts in distant parts of the city, I estimate that house prices increased by up to 20 percent over a ten-year period in census tracts near the demolitions. I provide evidence of similar long-run rent increases and show that households living in these areas after demolitions are higher-income and less likely to be black than previous residents. A calibration exercise indicates that reduced housing supply can fully explain the observed price changes under some assumptions, although the wide range of estimates and the demographic effects of demolitions suggest that demand factors may have also contributed to price increases.

Parental involvement and neighborhood quality: evidence from public housing demolitions in Chicago

Parental involvement and neighborhood quality: evidence from public housing demolitions in Chicago

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago’s Public Housing Demolitions

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago’s Public Housing Demolitions

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago's Public Housing Demolitions

Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago's Public Housing Demolitions

Competition in the Black Market: Estimating the Causal Effect of Gangs in Chicago

I study criminal street gangs using new data that describes the geospatial distribution of gang territory in Chicago and its evolution over a 15-year period. Using an event study design, I show that city blocks entered by gangs experience sharp increases in the number of reported batteries (6%), narcotics violations (18.5%), weapons violations (9.8%), incidents of prostitution (51.9%), and criminal trespassing (19.6%). I also find a sharp reduction in the number of reported robberies (-8%). The findings cannot be explained by pre-existing trends in crime, changes in police surveillance, crime displacement, exposure to public housing demolitions, reporting effects, or demographic trends. Taken together, the evidence suggests that gangs cause small increases in violence in highly localized areas as a result of conflict over illegal markets. I also find evidence that gangs cause reductions in median property values (-$8,436.9) and household income (-$1,866.8). Motivated by these findings, I explore the relationship between the industrial organization of the black market and the supply of criminal activity. I find that gangs that are more internally fractured or operate in more competitive environments tend to generate more crime. This finding is inconsistent with simple, market-based models of criminal behavior, suggesting an important role for behavioral factors and social interactions in the production of gang violence.

Making the third ghetto

ABSTRACT Chicago’s third ghetto is a cluster of “thinned out,” outlying neighborhoods that resulted from the demolition of public housing in “second ghetto” neighborhoods surrounding the central business district. The third ghetto shares some of the characteristics of the first and second ghettos—namely, the racial and economic segregation of the resident population. However, it also reveals notable, contemporary features. While the second ghetto was not deprived of public investment such as CHA developments, schools, police stations, and other public works, the third ghetto, in contrast, is a vacuum of private and public investment. It is also increasingly separated, spatially, from neighborhoods of rising prosperity. This disinvestment has created the underlying conditions for poor and working-class Black residents to feel either heavily policed or abandoned. This article traces the national and local sources of the neoliberal urban reforms of the 1990s and 2000s that ushered in a third ghetto in Chicago.

The returned

Amid a globalised crisis in secure housing provision, this article zooms in on the specific experiences of older working-class people coping with public housing demolition and forced neighbourhood transition in London. London’s new-build mixed tenure housing developments provide varying proportions of social rental housing, some of it made available to tenants of the council estate it replaced. This article examines the experiences of older people who have taken up the ‘opportunity’ of ‘return’ and explores the multi-faceted work they are forced to undertake as they move into unfamiliar and capricious social, physical and political landscapes superimposed on the collapsed infrastructure of their old estate. The article brings themes of ‘un-homing’, ageing in place and everyday ‘repair’ work into encounter and calls for greater qualitative understanding of the ‘return’ experience as a dimension of forced relocation by housing restructuring and tenurial mixing projects.

Painted Bullet Holes and Broken Promises: Understanding and Challenging Municipal Dispossession in London's Public Housing ‘Decanting’

AbstractLow‐income municipal housing and its inhabitants have increasingly been construed as disposable within wider global dynamics of real estate speculation, leading to heightened housing insecurity, displacement and forced evictions. In Western cities urban regeneration programmes have long provided the framework for partial or wholesale demolition of public housing, drawing new frontiers of gentrification and accumulation by dispossession. Before and beyond the material loss of home, the dispossession of low‐income housing involves a deeper unmaking of the relations that constitute residents’ emplacement and political legitimacy. In this article, I present a thick ethnographic account of multiple registers of dispossession and their implications for resistance through a situated reflection on the process of ‘decanting’—as resident rehousing is colloquially known—in a South London council estate, The Heygate. Drawing on participation in an anti‐gentrification archive as a scholar‐activist, I move beyond issues of displacement and grief to analyse three key mechanisms that make becoming dispossessed possible: disowning, disavowal and the administration of differential disposability. Within a resurgent interest in municipal solutions to housing crises, there is an urgent need for understanding municipal dispossession and the role of residents and engaged scholarship in resisting and expanding imaginaries of housing justice.

Measuring Housing Stability With Consumer Reference Data.

Housing instability for low-income renters has drawn greater attention recently, but measurement has limited research on policies to stabilize housing. Address histories from consumer reference data can be used to increase the quantity and quality of research on low-income renters. Consumer data track housing moves throughout the entire United States for most of the adult population. In this article, I show that such data can measure housing stability for groups with very low income and extreme instability. For example, the data can track housing moves during natural disasters, at demolition of public housing, for households at high risk of homelessness, and during gentrification. Consumer data can track housing instability outcomes that are more common than shelter entry and less expensive to collect than surveys. Relative to existing administrative address histories, consumer data allow researchers to track housing moves to exact addresses and across jurisdictions.

Resilience through transition: the effect of specific support systems on maternal well-being amidst root shock

Purpose: Federal public housing policy since the 1990s has aimed to decentralize poverty, including funding the demolition of high-density public housing in favor of low-density, mixed income housing. Meanwhile, research has shown that high-density public housing communities provide a network of instrumental and emotional support for residents. Thus, dismemberment of high-density public housing separates former residents from their social supports. The stress resulting from disruption of social infrastructure …

Moved to Vote: The Long-Run Effects of Neighborhoods on Political Participation

How does one's childhood neighborhood shape political engagement later in life? We leverage a natural experiment that moved children out of disadvantaged neighborhoods to study effects on their voting behavior more than a decade later. Using linked administrative data, we find that children who were displaced by public housing demolitions and moved using housing vouchers are 12 percent (3.3 percentage points) more likely to vote in adulthood, relative to their non-displaced peers. We argue that this result is unlikely to be driven by changes in incarceration or in their parents' outcomes, but rather by improvements in education and labor market outcomes, and perhaps by socialization. These results suggest that, in addition to reducing economic inequality, housing assistance programs that improve one's childhood neighborhood may be a useful tool in reducing inequality in political participation.

Where the Other 1 Percent Live: An Examination of Changes in the Spatial Concentration of the Formerly Incarcerated

Traditionally, prisoner reentry has been regarded as an urban phenomenon, with most returning prisoners concentrating into a select few disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. However, metropolitan-area changes—including the demolition of public housing, the suburbanization of poverty, and desegregation—may have altered the prevailing spatial distribution of returning prisoners, thereby spreading the challenges of prisoner reintegration to new geographic domains. Accordingly, I examine the extent to which the geographic distribution of formerly incarcerated individuals in Chicago and Illinois has changed since the late 1990s, including both the causes and consequences of changes, drawing on sixteen years of prisoner release data from the Illinois Department of Corrections, combined with data from the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, the Chicago Police Department, and the Chicago Housing Authority.

Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effects of Public Housing Demolition on Children.

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods on the long-run outcomes of children. I study public housing demolitions in Chicago, which forced low-income households to relocate to less disadvantaged neighborhoods using housing vouchers. Specifically, I compare young adult outcomes of displaced children to their peers who lived in nearby public housing that was not demolished. Displaced children are more likely to be employed and earn more in young adulthood. I also find that displaced children have fewer violent crime arrests. Children displaced at young ages have lower high school dropout rates.

Negotiating the (legal) right to the city: Public housing demolition and the federal courts in two postindustrial U.S. cities

ABSTRACTPublic housing reform has fostered widespread revitalization in American cities. Courts have been critical to this process, but so far urban scholars have not yet closely analyzed this role. This article illuminates how courts participated in reform, sometimes empowering and at other times disempowering tenants. Looking at litigation filed by tenants to fight demolition, I examine how courts framed disputes in legal terms and how the judicial stance on demolition coevolved with national policy debate. In particular, I emphasize how tenants tapped into the ideological power of rights in American society and show that courts never explicitly rejected the notion that tenants held rights against demolition but instead gradually adopted urban planning sensibilities that implicitly denied rights to tenants. Thus, this article reveals the complicated and paradoxical nature of legal rights in the Right to the City struggles.

Externalities of public housing: The effect of public housing demolitions on local crime

This paper evaluates the potential for negative externalities from public housing by examining crime rates before and after demolition of public housing projects in Chicago between 1995 and 2010. Using data on block-level crimes by type of crime merged to detailed geographic data on individual public housing demolitions, I find evidence that Chicago's public housing imposed significant externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. Using a difference in difference approach comparing neighborhoods around public housing projects to nearby neighborhoods I find that crime decreases by 8.8% after a demolition. This decrease is concentrated in violent crime. I use an event study to show that the decrease occurs at the approximate date of the eviction of the residents and persists for at least 5 years after the demolition. Neighborhoods with large demolitions and demolitions of public housing that had been poorly maintained display the largest crime decreases.

Externalities of Public Housing: The Effect of Public Housing Demolitions on Local Crime

This paper evaluates the potential for negative externalities from public housing by examining crime rates before and after demolition of public housing projects in Chicago between 1995 and 2010. Using data on block-level crimes by type of crime merged to detailed geographic data on individual public housing demolitions, I find evidence that Chicago's public housing imposed significant externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. Using a difference in difference approach comparing neighborhoods around public housing projects to nearby neighborhoods I find that crime decreases by 8.8% after a demolition. This decrease is concentrated in violent crime. I use an event study to show that the decrease occurs at the approximate date of the eviction of the residents and persists for at least 5 years after the demolition. Neighborhoods with large demolitions and demolitions of public housing that had been poorly maintained display the largest crime decreases.

Welfare as Wrecking Ball: Constructing Public Responsibility in Legal Encounters Over Public Housing Demolition

Scholarship on welfare privatization illustrates how the process often curtails and undermines public responsibility for the poor. In this article, I examine how recipients, policy makers, and judges participate in the legal process as a means of challenging and defending privatization. I look at cases of litigation initiated by public housing tenants between 1985 and 2012 to fight the demolition of their homes to explore the changing meaning of public responsibility within a shrinking public sector. My findings show that as legislative and administrative reforms steered courts toward a more flexible understanding of public responsibility, courts gave increasing attention to the economic hardships experienced by the state itself, while downplaying the plight of low-income tenants.

Disrupting the order of things: Public housing tenant organizing for material, political and epistemological justice

Since the advent of public housing in the U.S., tenants have played an integral role in both fostering environments where they can flourish, and, when needed, organizing to hold public housing authorities and government officials accountable for providing the material resources necessary to maintain and enhance residents' quality of life. In the current era of public housing demolition and redevelopment as mixed-income communities, these organizing efforts have not only centered on minimizing forced displacement, but also for the right to participate as meaningful stakeholders in governing the transformation of the places they call home. While these material and political dimensions of tenant organizing have been the focus of many studies, relatively little research has focused on the epistemological work that organizing performs in challenging and disrupting abstract representations commonly deployed in spatial policy discourse that marginalizes public housing residents as being both victims and causal agents of concentrated and intergenerational poverty. We examine these themes through an analysis of tenant organizing in Nashville, Tennessee's largest public housing development that is slated for demolition and redevelopment. Our study finds that the material and political achievements of tenant organizing were predicated on the epistemological work that residents engaged.