Overview

America is in the midst of a rental housing affordability crisis. More than a quarter of those that rent their homes spend more than half of their income for housing, even as city leaders across the United States have been busily dismantling the nation's urban public housing projects. In After the Projects, Lawrence Vale investigates the deeply-rooted spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment at a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with public housing residents, real estate developers, and community leaders, Vale analyzes the different ways in which four major American cities implemented the federal government's HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, while also providing a national picture of this program. Some cities attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, but other cities tried to serve as many low-income households as possible. Through examining the social, political, and economic forces that underlie housing displacement, Vale develops the novel concept of governance constellations. He shows how the stars align differently in each city, depending on community pressures that have evolved in response to each city's past struggles with urban renewal. This allows disparate key players to gain prominence when implementing HOPE VI redevelopment. A much-needed comparative approach to the existing research on public housing, After the Projects shines a light on the broad variety of attitudes towards public housing redevelopment in American cities and identifies ways to achieve more equitable processes and outcomes for low-income Americans.

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9780190624361

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How we house the most needy is a clear barometer of our success and failure as a culture. Lawrence Vale has given us both the potential heaven and hell of this defining social nexus as well as a sense of the huge stakes at play. -Ken Burns, Filmmaker What happens to affordable housing in an era of market solutions, austerity, and anti-welfare politics? Lawrence Vale, a leading scholar of housing and urban development, provides the first full-scale account of the federal government's HOPE VI housing program. In four richly detailed case studies from big cities around the country, he offers an even-handed account of the successes and limitations of efforts to provide affordable housing in an era of growing housing insecurity. Urban scholars, policymakers, activists, and advocates alike will learn a lot from After the Projects. -Thomas J. Sugrue, New York University Over the last two decades no scholar has examined American public housing more thoughtfully or more comprehensively than Larry Vale. After the Projects continues Vale's examination of the origins, decline, and contemporary condition of public housing in the U.S., this time with four exhaustive case studies. Vale's close analysis of HOPE VI redevelopments in New Orleans, Boston, Tucson, and San Francisco situates them within the political and economic context of each city and highlights the importance of 'governance constellations' in explaining the wide variation in outcomes across HOPE VI projects. Vale has produced another invaluable resource for students and scholars of American housing policy, neoliberal welfare reform, and urban development. - Edward G. Goetz, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota Public housing has always been a problem area, and its latest version is no different. Vale surveys the situation today, focusing on the cities of Boston, New Orleans, Tucson, and San Francisco, and shows how those cities differ widely in how they provide housing for the poorest of their citizens... This is a valuable guide to today's public-private choices as well as to the complex pattern of choices that must be made and the equally intricate pattern of decision makers. Recommended. - Choice Vale offers a thorough, masterful, and scrupulously fair account of four public housing projects under the federal HOPE IV umbrella: St. Thomas (now River Garden) in New Orleans, Orchard Park (now Orchard Gardens) in Boston, Connie Chambers (now Posadas Sentinel) Tucson, Arizona, and North Beach Place in San Francisco. Planners and others with any public housing involvement will learn much from Vale's work. - Planning

Author Information

Lawrence J. Vale is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of MIT's Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI). Vale is the author or editor of ten previous books examining urban design, housing and planning, including four prize-winning volumes on American public housing, and the co-edited book The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster.

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