Overview

Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impact of policy changes in three cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.Goetz shows how this transformation is related to pressures of gentrification and the enduring influence of race in American cities. African Americans have been disproportionately affected by this policy shift; it is the cities in which public housing is most closely identified with minorities that have been the most aggressive in removing units. Goetz convincingly refutes myths about the supposed failure of public housing. He offers an evidence-based argument for renewed investment in public housing to accompany housing choice initiatives as a model for innovative and equitable housing policy.

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9781322503592

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Edward G. Goetz's clear-eyed, data-driven book shows that public housing destruction and redevelopment, despite its excellent press, is failing to help most public housing residents upgrade their lives and communities. New Deal Ruins documents the disturbing parallels between contemporary public housing redevelopment and the disgraced urban renewal policies of the 1950s. The benefits of redevelopment, such as gentrification, accrue to elites, while the social costs, including dislocation, are borne by poor minorities. This powerful indictment of prevailing urban social policy is essential reading for activists, academics, and government officials. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, New York Institute of Technology, author of Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century

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