1 Transforming Distressed Public Housing
Acknowledging the Relevance of Race
Over the past 15 years, the United States has taken dramatic steps to confront the problems of isolation, disorder, and distress in its most troubled public housing. Although the vast majority of public housing developments are safe and decent, a small but very important subset has become deeply troubled—physically decayed with rampant crime and violence, extreme poverty, joblessness, and social distress.
This situation is all the more troubling because federal and local housing policies were complicit in creating projects that were racially segregated, economically isolated, under-funded, poorly managed, and inadequately maintained. At the outset, the federal public housing program contributed to racial segregation and isolation through explicit policies and regulations. More recently, federal policies have exacerbated the concentration of minority poverty and distress in public housing developments by excluding all but the poorest families. These policies also allowed aging properties to fall into serious disrepair by failing to adequately fund capital and operating subsidies. The consequences of these past policy failures have been devastating—for public housing developments, for the mostly minority families they serve, and for the communities that surround them.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local public housing agencies launched new strategies designed to transform distressed public housing communities and create better opportunities for the families they serve. The vision for the ongoing public housing transformation encompasses three ambitious aspirations: First, healthy, mixed-income housing developments will replace distressed public housing projects. Second, public housing residents who do not return to the new developments will relocate to affordable housing in other healthy and opportunity-rich communities. Third, families that leave the distressed development, as well as those living in the new, replacement housing, will progress toward greater economic well-being and self-sufficiency. In other words, policymakers hoped that the transformation effort would undo the considerable damage caused by distressed public housing to both residents and the surrounding communities. What remains in question is whether this vision can be fully realized without explicitly addressing the racial segregation and discrimination that was so instrumental in creating America’s public housing ghettos.
The largest and best known of the policy initiatives designed to advance these goals is the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (or HOPE VI) program, launched in 1992. Under HOPE VI, local housing authorities are demolishing their worst public housing properties and replacing them with new, mixed-income developments. In addition to HOPE VI, federal housing policy began in the 1990s to emphasize dispersing very low income tenants throughout metropolitan areas using Housing Choice (Section 8) Vouchers, which allow recipients to rent in the private market. Also, in a significant departure from traditional housing policy, local housing agencies are increasingly expected to promote work and economic self-sufficiency among their residents.
These transformation efforts have achieved some substantial successes. Many revitalized HOPE VI developments are successfully attracting a mix of tenants and are dramatically improving the neighborhoods around them. Many former residents who relocated with vouchers are now living in higher-quality housing in safer neighborhoods, where their physical and mental health have improved significantly. However, the transformation effort has not yet fully achieved its vision to improve the lives of poor, minority families. Most former residents still live in predominantly minority communities with relatively high levels of poverty and limited access to economic opportunity. And thus far, there has been little evidence of gains in employment, earnings, or self-sufficiency for these families.
Sadly, the persistence of racial prejudice, discrimination, and segregation in both housing and labor markets today hinders efforts to create healthy, mixed-income communities, deconcentrate poverty, and promote economic well-being. Ongoing discrimination constrains residents’ choices for replacement housing in the private housing market. Racial prejudice undermines efforts to attract higher-income residents and resources to the revitalized communities. And many public housing residents continue to face serious barriers to employment and economic success.
Although racial discrimination and segregation indisputably played causal roles in the history of distressed public housing, discussion of these issues—and their ongoing effects—has been largely absent from the policy dialogue about how to transform public housing in the United States. This book asks whether the transformation of public housing can succeed in the face of daunting racial disparities, persistent discrimination in housing and employment markets, the stark segregation of urban neighborhoods, and the social and economic isolation of the minority poor. To date, debate about the impacts and effectiveness of the HOPE VI program and accompanying changes in public housing policies has given insufficient attention to issues of race. But the public housing transformation may fail—or fail to achieve its full potential—if policies do not explicitly recognize and tackle the special challenges posed by racial discrimination and segregation. Because public housing is so explicitly segregated on the basis of race and because most distressed public housing developments are predominantly African American, the focus here is on black-white issues.
Origins of Public Housing Isolation and Distress
Many policy critiques lay the blame for distressed public housing squarely at the feet of relatively recent policy decisions, notably policies put in place in the 1980s that made public housing less attractive to working families and gave priority to those at greatest risk for homelessness. However, as Hirsch has extensively documented (1998, 2000, 2003), the roots of these problems were set in place by housing policy decisions of decades long past and then exacerbated, ignored, or neglected by successive administrations. Reliance on huge, high-rise developments, cost-cutting design, shoddy construction, inadequate funding, and chronic mismanagement all contributed to the severe distress of public housing projects in many of America’s big cities (National Commission 1992).
Ironically, while policymakers now shy away from candid conversations about race, it was an explicit consideration in decades past. At its inception, federally subsidized housing was segregated by race as a matter of law. The racial segregation of public housing began immediately after World War II, when thousands of low-rent apartments were built to address the nation’s housing shortage. This shortage was particularly severe for blacks because of legally enforced limits on where they could live. Public housing developments built in black neighborhoods (and sometimes in undeveloped areas on the edge of town) were constructed exclusively for occupancy by blacks.
The Urban Renewal policies of the 1950s and ’60s, which were meant to revitalize downtown areas, further exacerbated the problem of racial concentration. The federal government allowed local control of urban renewal planning, ostensibly to address the unique needs of varied community conditions. This flexibility instead served as a tacit acceptance of the creation and perpetuation of segregated housing patterns (Orlebeke 2000). While Urban Renewal projects effectively removed urban slums and created new business districts, little of the private housing for blacks was restored. With the acquiescence of the federal government, local governments and private developers displaced former minority slum dwellers to public housing in already-segregated neighborhoods, further exacerbating patterns of racial segregation and creating pockets of severe poverty (Massey and Denton 1993).
Over this period, the Racial Relations Service (a minority policy and research branch of the Federal Housing Administration) repeatedly warned successive administrations of the dangers of these policies. It protested the use of federal funds to "crystallize patterns of racial separation . . . by allowing private developers to prohibit occupancy based on race." More ominously, the Racial Relations Service reported that numerous southern agencies were using urban renewal to foster school segregation in the wake of the Brown decision by moving minority families out of areas that were then integrated. But these objections were largely ignored. Despite the antidiscrimination executive orders and federal civil rights legislation adopted in the 1960s, federal authorities continued to turn a blind eye to blatant violations by local authorities (Hirsch 1998, 2000, 2003; Polikoff 2006).
Further Decline in the 1980s and the Push for Reform
At the advent of the 1980s, most central-city public housing was located in high-poverty neighborhoods and occupied primarily by blacks. The racial and economic isolation of these developments was exacerbated during this decade by tenant selection policies that targeted housing subsidies to those with the most severe housing problems (including homeless families), effectively making many public housing developments housing of last resort. By limiting occupancy to the poorest of the poor, these policies created even more severe concentrations of distress. By the end of the decade, the public housing populations in many big cities were characterized by chronic joblessness, welfare dependency, dropping out of school, single-parent families, and high levels of participation in the underground economy (Popkin, Buron, et al. 2000; Spence 1993).
In addition, public housing was consistently underfunded, and many developments were poorly maintained. Ineffective housing authority management and inadequate federal funding left these developments with huge backlogs of repairs, creating hazardous conditions that placed residents at risk for injury or disease (Landrigan and Todd 1994; Manjarrez, Popkin, and Guernsey 2007; Rosenstreich et al. 1997). Further exacerbating these problems was the lack of effective security or policing; violent criminals and drug dealers dominated many of these developments, and residents lived in constant fear (Popkin, Gwiasda, et al. 2000). These developments also suffered from abandonment and neglect by both public and private institutions. The neighborhoods that surrounded them generally had few resources—such as stores, financial institutions, or hospitals— and even fewer employment opportunities. Public services, particularly police, schools, and sanitation, were deficient and ineffective.
By the end of the 1980s, public housing was regarded as one of the biggest and most visible failures of social welfare policy (National Commission 1992), and researchers focused attention on the negative consequences of the increasing concentration of extremely poor, mostly black families in inner-city communities. Massey and Denton (1993) persuasively documented the causal link between racial segregation and concentrated poverty. And Wilson (1987) argued that the concentration of poor blacks in inner-city neighborhoods where jobs were disappearing was responsible for a range of social ills, including dropping out of high school, teen parenthood, delinquency, drug and alcohol use, and weak labor force attachment. He attributed the rise of what he called the "underclass culture" to the increasing economic isolation of the black poor in inner-city communities and the loss of middle- and working-class role models. Many other scholars have since argued that distressed, high-poverty neighborhoods profoundly affect residents’ life chances, although the mechanisms that bring about these effects are still not fully understood (Briggs 1998; Ellen and Turner 1997; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn 2000).
In response to growing alarm over the state of public housing projects, Congress established the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing in 1989 to assess what went wrong and develop a plan for addressing the problems. In its final report to Congress in 1992, the commission recommended systematic investments in severely distressed projects both to improve physical conditions and to deliver social services and economic development initiatives designed to reduce the isolation in these communities and help residents connect to mainstream opportunities (Spence 1993). Others argued that the best policy response to the problems of distressed public housing was to tear down these projects, revitalize the communities, and disperse assisted housing and families more widely in a strategy of "poverty deconcentration" (Popkin, Katz, et al. 2004).
High expectations for the potential benefits of poverty deconcentration were based largely on positive research findings from studies of Chicago’s Gautreaux Public Housing Desegregation Program. This program stemmed from a legal settlement in which the courts found that the Chicago Housing Authority and HUD had discriminated against African American tenants by concentrating them in large-scale developments located in poor, African American neighborhoods. The decision against the housing authority in 1969 called for the creation of new public housing at "scattered sites" in predominantly white communities. In addition, the court ordered the housing authority to provide Section 8 certificates that African American public housing residents (and families on the waiting list for public housing) could use to move to racially integrated suburban areas (Polikoff 2006; Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000).
Subsequent studies of the Gautreaux program suggested that adults who moved to low-poverty, white communities in the suburbs were more likely to be employed than those who remained in the city and that their children were doing better in school (Kaufman and Rosenbaum 1992; Popkin, Rosenbaum, and Meaden 1993; Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000). Although the Gautreaux research was limited by small sample sizes, retrospective data collection, and lack of a formal control group, its findings fueled a policy argument that the deconcentration of poverty might dramatically improve the life circumstances of poor minority families. Buoyed by the Gautreaux experience, the Clinton administration and then-HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros made addressing the problem of concentrated minority poverty a major focus of the effort to "reinvent" HUD by promoting innovative strategies such as public housing demolition and its replacement with mixed-income housing and by assisting housing mobility initiatives for voucher recipients (Popkin, Buron, et al. 2000; Popkin, Katz, et al. 2004).
Public Housing Transformation in the 1990s
The centerpiece of the public housing transformation was the HOPE VI program, enacted in 1992 just before Henry Cisneros became the HUD Secretary. Originally called the Urban Revitalization Demonstration Program, HOPE VI incorporated many of the recommendations of the Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing and was intended to comprehensively address the physical and social problems of severely distressed public housing communities. As of 2007, the HOPE VI program had invested over $6 billion in federal funds for the replacement or revitalization of public housing developments. These federal dollars leveraged billions more in other public, private, and philanthropic investments. More than 78,100 distressed public housing units were demolished under HOPE VI and another 10,400 are slated for demolition (Turner et al. 2007). The program explicitly intended to move beyond "bricks and mortar" to address the social and economic needs of residents and the health of the surrounding neighborhood. In addition to these explicit goals, the creators of the HOPE VI program believed that these revitalization efforts might benefit the surrounding neighborhoods, spurring broader reinvestment and development activities.
In conjunction with HOPE VI, housing authorities were given greater flexibility in setting resident selection preferences. Tenant occupancy rules were to be based on local housing needs and priorities—thus making possible a more diverse mix of incomes among public housing residents. The Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 allowed housing authorities to take measures to attract higher-income residents, particularly reinstituting "ceiling rents," which keep rents at a set level even as tenants’ income increases.
HUD also changed the Section 8 housing voucher program—including renaming it the Housing Choice Voucher Program. The fundamental goal of the voucher program reforms was to allow the poorest families to escape from high-poverty, predominantly black neighborhoods, while revitalized public housing developments might serve a wider range of low- and moderate-income residents. The Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act set aside 75 percent of all new and turnover vouchers for the very poorest participants, and HUD implemented regulatory changes intended to make vouchers more attractive to private landlords, allowed local housing authorities to set higher payment standards for desirable neighborhoods, and encouraged housing authorities to disperse voucher families across a wider range of neighborhoods. In order to help families overcome barriers to housing mobility and choice, HUD also provided some funding for nonprofit organizations to provide mobility counseling and housing search assistance to voucher recipients in a limited number of communities.
Policymakers had high hopes that mixing residents with different income levels—through a combination of mixed-income redevelopment and mobility strategies—would both expose very low income public housing residents to working-class and middle-class role models and provide them access to better services and amenities and wider economic opportunities. Proponents argued that a range of benefits could be gained from aggressively pursuing these strategies, including improved job and educational opportunities for low-income families, positive role models, safer neighborhoods, better public services, better management, and more private-sector investment in the surrounding neighborhood (Goetz 2003; Popkin, Buron, et al. 2000; Schwartz and Tajbakhsh 1997).
Although policymakers and researchers acknowledged the central role that racial segregation had played in creating the conditions in distressed public housing, they feared that implementing remedies that were explicitly race-based would generate political opposition and legal challenges. The only race-based remedies implemented during the 1990s involved court-ordered litigation settlements. Specifically, eight lawsuits, charging HUD with illegal discrimination and segregation of public housing, were settled during the 1990s, with most agreements modeled on the Gautreaux plan (Popkin et al. 2003). In contrast, the broader public housing and voucher reforms implemented during this period emphasized poverty deconcentration rather than racial desegregation. Because of the clear link between racial segregation and concentrated poverty, it seemed plausible that policies focused on income mixing and poverty deconcentration would naturally result in desegregation. It is this assumption that this book addresses, exploring how much of the damage caused by past segregation and discrimination can be undone without explicit attention to the persistence of these problems today.
Impacts of Public Housing Transformation Thus Far: What Remains Undone?
In the 15 years since the earliest of these reforms were put in place, considerable research has examined their effects on public housing developments, the surrounding neighborhoods, and public housing residents. In practice, the goal of providing housing in ways that would avoid or decrease the concentration of poor households has meant both replacing public housing with mixed-income developments and relying heavily on vouchers for replacement housing. While the results give cause for some optimism, it is also clear that not all the goals of public housing transformation are being fully achieved.
The success of the revitalized public housing developments completed to date varies considerably. The mixed-income strategy has generally made for more livable developments, but while some sites now offer a full range of market-rate, affordable, and public housing units, others still serve only low- and very low income residents. Some new housing designs have been truly innovative and have dramatically transformed their communities, replacing high-density, high-rise, and barracks-style housing with attractive town homes and apartment buildings that harmonize with the architecture of surrounding neighborhoods (Popkin, Katz, et al. 2004). In many sites, housing authorities have attracted market-rate tenants to the new development; and in a few cases, some of these higher-income tenants are white, creating modest racial integration (Holin et al. 2003).
Although only limited evidence is available on how public housing transformation has affected the neighborhoods around formerly distressed public housing developments, studies conducted to date suggest generally positive effects (Holin et al. 2003; Turbov and Piper 2005; Zielenbach 2003). In particular, there is no doubt that demolishing the high-density distressed public housing developments has reduced poverty and crime in the surrounding communities, and, when market conditions have been right, has helped stimulate new, private-sector development. However, while a few new HOPE VI developments have attracted some white residents, there is no evidence of any significant impact on racial segregation in the surrounding communities (Holin et al. 2003).
More research has focused on outcomes for the original residents of distressed public housing, providing powerful evidence that public housing transformation has significantly improved former residents’ quality of life. Two major studies—the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Demonstration Program (Orr et al. 2003) and the HOPE VI Panel Study (Popkin et al. 2002)—have tracked outcomes for former residents who relocated with vouchers. Both studies find that many families have ended up in considerably better (if still moderately poor) neighborhoods, and MTO finds significant improvements in physical and mental health among women and adolescent girls. Only a small number of HOPE VI Panel Study respondents have moved into revitalized developments; although the numbers are small, these former residents have experienced benefits similar to those experienced by voucher movers. In contrast, those who moved to other, traditional public housing projects have experienced no improvements in housing or neighborhood quality (Buron, Levy, and Gallagher 2007; Popkin and Cove 2007).
Despite the significant gains in well-being among voucher movers, many policymakers and researchers had higher hopes for the potential benefits of moving residents to neighborhoods that offered greater opportunity. In theory, these moves would provide former public housing residents with positive role models, give them access to new networks to gain information about job opportunities, improve their proximity to job opportunities, and let their children attend better, more effective schools. But, at least so far, neither MTO nor the HOPE VI Panel Study has found convincing evidence of significant gains in employment or income, or reductions in welfare use. Rates of employment increased dramatically among all very low income families because of welfare reform and the economic boom of the late 1990s, but there is no evidence of any independent benefits from moving to a lower-poverty community. Further, there have been no sustained effects on educational outcomes for youth.
It is possible that not enough time has elapsed for these changes to occur and that families will see more positive effects as they adjust to new neighborhoods and schools. However, it is also possible that the unwillingness of policymakers and practitioners to explicitly address the legacy of racial segregation directly may limit the impact of these ambitious reform efforts. One piece of evidence is particularly suggestive: unlike the Gautreaux families, MTO participants generally did not change school districts as a result of relocation (Briggs et al. 2008; Orr et al. 2003). In other words, they did not end up in the white, suburban, resource-rich environments that policymakers had envisioned. Perhaps moving to a safer, slightly better school in a moderate-income, minority neighborhood was simply not enough to bring about the transformative effects seen in the earlier research on Gautreaux participants. The chapters and commentaries in this volume explore the implications of racial segregation, discrimination, and inequality for ongoing efforts to transform public housing, and they suggest strategies for more fully realizing the vision of healthy, mixed-income communities, access to opportunity-rich neighborhoods, and progress toward economic self-sufficiency for public housing residents.
