Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

“I am sure that you inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.”

“Not him.”

“What then?”

“The knees of his trousers.”

“ And what did you see?”

“What I expected to see.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League

 

When it comes to urban neighborhoods, do we see them as they are, or how we imagine them to be?

 

For at least a quarter-century, poverty deconcentration has been an organizing principle of affordable housing, whether in mixed-income properties, preservation, or most visibly in HOPE VI public housing redevelopment.  As Harvard doctoral candidate Laura Tach puts it:

 

The rationale for creating mixed income communities was directly influenced by social science research.  The growing literatures on concentrated poverty, neighborhood effects, and social disorganization provided empirical evidence that disadvantaged communities have adverse consequences for residents, above and beyond their own personal characteristics (see Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997 and Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002 for reviews).

 

Concentrating poverty rapidly produces crime-ridden publicly-owned high-rise ghettos and is economically unsustainable.  At the risk of seeming simple, why?

 

Is it too simple of me to ask why?

 

Several mechanisms have been proposed to describe the processes through which concentrated poverty leads to poorer outcomes for communities and for individuals. In particular, researchers have highlighted the role of culture, social networks, collective efficacy, and institutional connections as social processes that mediate the effect of concentrated poverty and result in negative community- and individual-level outcomes for residents.

 

Using these postulated behavioral forces, policymakers have concluded that dispersing the very poor, like aerating the fish tank, will lead them to better lives.

 

We need the oxygen of new ideas and new friends

 

Does it?  And if it does, why and how?  The latter question is explored, as the prospectus for Ms. Tach’s potentially very important dissertation in sociology:

 

Tach and the Nittany Lion

 

What she found — even if preliminarily — is pretty profound, as we shall see.

 

As she puts it early in the paper, we know that bad neighborhoods incubate troubled adults:

 

Neighborhood-level disadvantage is associated with a host of negative outcomes for individuals, including:

 

School drop-out and teenage childbearing (Crane 1991; Harding 2003, 2007)

Lower educational attainment (Ginther, Haveman, and Wolfe 2000; Cutler and Glaeser 1997)

Lower test scores (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993; Turley 2003)

Criminal activity (Anderson 1990; Case and Katz 1991), and

Poorer mental health (Wheaton and Clarke 2003). 

 

What makes you think this is a bad neighborhood?

 

Not only the residents but also their neighbors suffer:

 

At the community level, high poverty neighborhoods also have:

 

Higher crime rates and more observable public disorder (Sampson and Groves 1989; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999)

Higher unemployment rates (Wilson 1996), and

Weaker institutional and political connections to the rest of the city (Bursik and Gramsick 1993). 

 

If concentrating poverty creates bad neighborhoods and bad citizens, then urban planning should emphasize deconcentrating poverty:

 

This evidence, coupled with mounting evidence that concentrated poverty became more pervasive between 1970 and 1990 (Wilson 1987; Jargowsky 1997), provided convincing evidence to policymakers and academics that poverty should be “deconcentrated.” 

 

The most direct example of this in housing is HOPE VI, which is in general the demolition and rebuilding of highly dense, very deeply concentrated legacy public housing —

 

All the pink in the world doesn’t make this look good

 

–m in favor of New Urbanist low-rises and townhouses, with deliberately mixed incomes.  In general, HOPE VI has ‘worked,’ in the sense that the new communities are vast improvements over what they replaced. 

 

HOPE VI in Boston: Mission Main

 

The redevelopment process brought about many other changes besides altering the income mix of the neighborhood. The project, formerly managed by the city housing authority, came under the management of a private company, which has a financial incentive to maintain the property and eligibility requirements so that it continues to attract residents for the affordable and market rate apartments.   This, combined with the new layout of the apartments and the lack of vacant units, provided a safer living environment for the majority of residents. 

 

Better management makes better properties.  Better properties make better neighborhoods.  But do better neighbors make better residents?  Ms. Tach isn’t so sure:

 

Despite the benefits in terms of better quality housing and the success of creating a mixed-income community, there is mixed evidence about other personal- and community-level outcomes in HOPE VI neighborhoods.   No research has documented benefits to residents in terms of employment or wages, and no research has assessed the extent to which residents have access to the social service components of a HOPE-VI redevelopment. 

 

What did she do?  Why, cleverly enough, she asked the residents themselves!

 

What do you think about living in a national park?

 

To this end, I conducted in-depth interviews with a random sample of residents [in one HOPE-VI development in a large, Northeastern city], interviewed key actors in the community, conducted participant-observation during community events, and analyzed secondary data. 

 

I thought this was important stuff, so I emailed Ms. Tach and met with her.  She’s still in the exploratory stage of her research, and has produced a 12,000 word summary (for a copy, email her at the address you can find here).

 

Prior to redevelopment, this housing project was one of the most blighted and dangerous in the entire city.  It was home to the highest crime rates of all city housing projects and had serious problems with drugs and gangs.  In the 1980s, it was difficult to find families willing to move into the housing project.  The vacancy rate was over 50 percent, and the many abandoned and vacant apartments provided more space for the drug and prostitution trades that had taken hold of the area.  Applicants on the public housing wait lists routinely turned down offers to live in the project, preferring to be put back on the list than move there.

 

As I’ve documented in The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, this deplorable state of affairs is all too common, a byproduct of underfunding, continuous capital underinvestment, and a financial dependency schema that is so convoluted it cannot be undone in increments; instead it is a Gordian knot that requires a bold slice.

 

Public housing in Jamaica Plain: solidly built, under-maintained

 

HOPE VI is one such bold move — demolish the old dysfunctional buildings that need to go somewhere to die, de-densify the site, and build new market-comparable apartments.

 

Residents were notified of the upcoming redevelopment and were given the option to either remain during rebuilding or take a Section-8 housing voucher and relocate somewhere else. 

 

A critical plank in HOPE VI is the right of residents to retain housing in the new development, either relocating off-site during construction or remaining on-site throughout (if the property can be done as a rolling rehab).

 

The redevelopment process began in the early 1990s and was completed during the mid- 1990s, converted 774 housing units into 330 units.  Despite the reduction in units, the high vacancy rate at the time of redevelopment meant that, contrary to many other HOPE-VI experiences (see, for example, Pattillo 2007 in Chicago), all residents who met eligibility requirements had the opportunity to come back.  These requirements, however, were strict and precluded the return of many original families.

 

To remain, therefore, one had to have persevered through years of neglect and decay, and then meet normal good-residency lease compliance requirements.  This boiling down of the tenancy into a core group is a defining feature of many HOPE VI properties — to which we will return.

 

The change in streetscape and resident experience is thoroughly remarkable:

 

Today, the project contains housing units consisting of both brightly-painted, new-construction townhouses, which are easily identifiable when one is walking down the street, and small low-rise apartment buildings, referred to as “the bricks” which contain about 15 apartments each.  These apartment buildings were part of the original Hope Homes housing project, and while the outside facade and structure remain intact, the interior was completely gutted and renovated during redevelopment. 

 

 

HOPE VI, Denver

 

In identifying residents to interview, Ms. Tach eliminated selection bias by picking them herself, and then seeking out the shy ones, to make sure everybody was heard.

 

What did she find?  What do the residents perceive?  It turns out there’s a huge gap between incumbent holdovers and newcomers.

 

Gap?  What gap?

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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