Awards

• Winner of Winner, International Planning History Society Boo.

Overview

Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing. With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception. Contributors: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, New York Institute of Technology; Yonah Freemark, Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council; Alexander Gerould, San Francisco State University; Joseph Heathcott, The New School; D. Bradford Hunt, Roosevelt University; Nancy Kwak, University of California, San Diego; Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Fritz Umbach, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art; Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rhonda Y. Williams, Case Western Reserve University

Full Product Details

9780801478741

Table of Contents

Reviews

Public Housing Myths is a much-needed antidote to the prevailing understanding of public housing's role, its record, and its reputation. The authors in this volume interrogate the common (mis)perceptions about the program and by doing so provide a deeper and truer understanding of the program. -Edward G. Goetz, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, author of New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy Public Housing Myths is a valuable collection of essays on an important topic. It presents a strong case for a reassessment of the conventional wisdom on public housing by challenging a number of persistent myths. The issues raised here are timely indeed, as policymakers, planners, architects, and scholars in a variety of disciplines continue to grapple with the thorny problem of providing decent and affordable housing to people in all socioeconomic strata of society. -Roger Biles, Illinois State University, coeditor of From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America

Author Information

Nicholas Dagen Bloom is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York Institute of Technology. He is the author most recently of Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century. Fritz Umbach is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). He is the author of The Last Neighborhood Cops: The Rise and Fall of Community Policing In New York's Public Housing. Lawrence J. Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author most recently of Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities.

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