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Issue #104, March/April 1999
New Hope for Public Housing?
Hope VI promises to rebuild lives and revitalize communities. But the specter of displacement looms large in its future.
By Winton Pitcoff
America's hulking public housing towers have provided a shifting symbol through the years. When built, they symbolized a generous system, giving comfort to Americans who needed help finding shelter. They gradually transformed into the symbol of urban decay, and President Reagan stood in front of abandoned towers declaring that somehow the buildings themselves were responsible for crime, poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. Massive demolition projects followed, with images of the towers disappearing into clouds of dust, along with – it was promised – the ills of the urban poor.For 2.8 million people, of course, these buildings are more than a symbol – they're home. The federal government's latest renewal effort, HUD's HOPE VI program, has spurred debate anew about how best to meet the needs of those who rely on housing subsidies to keep roofs over their heads. This multi-billion dollar program attempts to look at the problems of public housing communities holistically, to change the very structure – physical, social, and economic – of public housing.
Public Housing in "Severe Distress"
Congress appointed the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing in 1989 to plumb the depth of the challenges facing the nation's public housing stock. The commission reported that 86,000 of the nation's 1.2 million public housing units were severely distressed, "because of their physical deterioration and uninhabitable living conditions, increasing levels of poverty, inadequate and fragmented services reaching only a portion of the residents, institutional abandonment, and location in neighborhoods often as blighted as the sites themselves." The report didn't indicate specific developments exhibiting these conditions, but the commission urged congressional action to remedy the situation.
The response came in the form of the Urban Revitalization Demonstration Program, legislation that sought to combine capital improvements with community and support services to transform the housing, communities, and families suffering from the conditions outlined in the commission's report. The program, which became HOPE VI, has been HUD's flagship public housing initiative since 1992. Touting HOPE VI as "more than bricks and mortar," HUD lays out five objectives for the program:
- Changing the physical shape of public housing by replacing the worst public housing developments with apartments or townhouses that become part of their surrounding communities.
- Reducing concentrations of poverty by encouraging a greater income mix among public housing residents and by encouraging working families to move into public housing and into new market-rate housing being built as part of the neighborhoods where public housing is located.
- Establishing support services to help public housing residents get and keep jobs.
- Establishing and enforcing high standards of personal and community responsibility.
- Forging broad-based partnerships in planning and implementing improvements in public housing.
