Describes the final plans for the complete transformation of HUD. Chapters on HUD's values, priorities and working principles; HUD's reinvention achievements over the last 3 years; as well as what still lies ahead, especially the 3 performance funds: community development, affordable housing, and homeless. Also: the organization of community action; beyond FHA reinvention: a national commitment to homeownership; ensuring fair housing in all that HUD does; and beyond public housing: transforming all Federal affordable housing.
Leading housing scholars and practitioners provide a comprehensive, up-to-date description and analysis of housing and community development policy as they examine one of America's largest and most important cities. Throughout the nation's history, New York City has been at the forefront of housing policy creativity and innovation. As the federal government's role in social policy continues to shrink and authority devolves to local governments, the focus in urban policy turns to America's cities. New York City's experience provides useful lessons for other municipalities on both the opportunities and pitfalls for government intervention in the housing market. Housing and Community Development in New York City comprehensively explores a full range of policy issues including the analysis of current housing problems and demographics; examination of federally supported housing assistance programs such as public housing and Section 8; scrutiny of the City's response to homelessness and the abandonment of private sector housing; and a look at New York's innovative program to rebuild neighborhoods with public-private partnerships. [Contributors include Victor Bach, Frank P. Braconi, Dennis Culhane, Paula Galowitz, Steve Metraux, Peter D. Salins, Benjamin P. Scafidi, Michael H. Schill, Alex Schwartz, Philip Thompson, Avis Vidal, Susan Wachter, and Kathryn Wylde.]
This groundbreaking book shows how major shifts in federal policy are spurring local public housing authorities to demolish their high-rise, low-income developments, and replace them with affordable low-rise, mixed income communities. It focuses on Chicago, and that city's affordable housing crisis, but it provides analytical frameworks that can be applied to developments in every American city. "Where Are Poor People to Live?" provides valuable new empirical information on public housing, framed by a critical perspective that shows how shifts in national policy have devolved the U.S. welfare state to local government, while promoting market-based action as the preferred mode of public policy execution. The editors and chapter authors share a concern that proponents of public housing restructuring give little attention to the social, political, and economic risks involved in the current campaign to remake public housing. At the same time, the book examines the public housing redevelopment process in Chicago, with an eye to identifying opportunities for redeveloping projects and building new communities across America that will be truly hospitable to those most in need of assisted housing. While the focus is on affordable housing, the issues addressed here cut across the broad policy areas of housing and community development, and will impact the entire field of urban politics and planning.
Regent Park Redux evaluates one of the biggest experiments in public housing redevelopment from the tenant perspective. Built in the 1940s, Toronto’s Regent Park has experienced common large-scale public housing problems. Instead of simply tearing down old buildings and scattering inhabitants, the city’s housing authority came up with a plan for radical transformation. In partnership with a private developer, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation organized a twenty-year, billion-dollar makeover. The reconstituted neighbourhood, one of the most diverse in the world, will offer a new mix of amenities and social services intended to "reknit the urban fabric." Regent Park Redux, based on a ten-year study of 52 households as they moved through stages of displacement and resettlement, examines the dreams and hopes residents have for their community and their future. Urban planners and designers across the world, in cities facing some of the same challenges as Toronto, will want to pay attention to this story.
Public housing is at a crossroads, buffeted by demographic, economic, and political winds. Privatization, rehabilitation, demolition, rent certificates and vouchers, tenant management, tenant ownership, resident empowerment: these are just some of the current and proposed policy initiatives that could change the face of urban public housing.In this book the nation's foremost housing policy experts explore the problems and identify solutions that will define the future of this essential housing sector. The contributors review the origins of public housing policy, probe the current policy climate, and anticipate new directions. Chapters are illustrated with case studies from Boston, Chicago, Decatur, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as the United Kingdom.The book contains sections addressing: historical perspectives, social issues, design issues, comprehensive approaches to public housing revitalization, and future directions. The contributors include: Alexander von Hoffman, Peter Marcuse, William Petersen, Leonard F. Heumann, Karen A. Franck, David M. Schnee, Gayle Epp, Lawrence J. Vale, Richard Best, Mary K. Nenno, Irving Welfeld, and James G. Stockard, Jr. This book should be read by all city planners, housing officials, and government personnel.
An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives. Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations is recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socioeconomic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged—and at the limit enforced—as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Bill Clinton's welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
Little-known, and hidden between skyscrapers and wide avenues, some 650 community gardens dot New York City. Set within one of the densest and most expensive real estate markets, these gardens are attended by some of the least advantaged residents of the city. Urban residents use these spaces for horticulture, recreation, social gatherings, and artistic and cultural events. They manage the gardens collectively and with relative independence from top-down control. Despite continuous threats from market forces the gardens have been able to thrive as significant community spaces since the 1970s. This book shows how, in the process of attempting to protect these highly contested spaces, residents developed as community leaders and urban activists. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to follow the political development of urban residents, the book examines how everyday spatial practices, social interactions, the production of alternative urban space, and the generation of new urban knowledge render community gardeners into important social actors in the urban scene. The book argues that with this process of production of space a new type of ’organic resident’ evolves. These urbanites constantly engage with their urban environment, find ways to make the city more supportive for their collective needs, and produce the city in their own image. Community gardeners as organic residents claim their right to the city, act to materialize their vision of the city, and utilize the special potential of the locale to constitute themselves as powerful social actors on the urban scene.
