Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

Yesterday’s post started with the question of residents’ perceptions of a neighborhood change, particularly when it undergoes comprehensive redevelopment as in HOPE VI.  Do people see the changes?  How do they interpret what they see?

 

HOPE VI: Orchard Gardens, Boston, with the new home-style houses in the foreground

 

To begin with, it’s hard to attract newcomers, because HOPE VI properties are, by the resource award criteria, usually very troubled properties, in wretched physical condition, and hence notorious in the marketplace.  As Harvard doctoral candidate Laura Tach notes:

 

Other research on neighborhood reputation and stigma suggests that how people perceive a neighborhood helps explain their willingness to live there and their willingness to act on its behalf (Taub, Taylor, and Dunham 1984; Small 2002). If public housing projects have negative reputations or are highly stigmatized, this stigma may remain with the project after redevelopment, rendering it unattractive to the middle income residents it was designed to house. 

 

Ms. Tach put a conditional, but there’s no question, public housing properties do have a bad location reputation, which is part of the reason why their renovation via HOPE VI is so comprehensive.  It’s absolutely essential to make the community look dramatically, visibly better:

 

I find that there were marked improvements in the objective economic well-being of the community and declines in violent crime and drug activity that dramatically improved residents’ quality of life. However, residents’ perceptions of the community, and their subsequent investments in it, varied greatly. 

 

Incumbent holdovers, who had stayed at the property through its demise and redevelopment, view the same situation very differently from neighborhood newcomers. 

 

The major cleavage occurred between the long-term, low income residents who lived there before redevelopment and the mixed income newcomers who moved in after redevelopment.

 

As she describes it:

 

What I see depends on how I frame it

 

Neighborhood Interpretive Frames

 

Like other accounts of distressed public housing projects (Venkatesh 2000; Vale 2002; Rainwater 1970), the long-term residents in Hope Homes described in great detail the unsafe, unsanitary, and stigmatized project they resided in prior to redevelopment.  Betty’s [NB — she changed all the names — Ed.] recollection was typical:

 

“People were hanging out like in hallways, you were finding condoms … It was a lot of drug activities and prostitution and stuff down here at that time, a lot of fighting … There was a lot of gangs, a lot of shootings, a lot of theft. A lot of drug addicts and you know, they would piss and dump all over the floor and we were constantly calling to have the doors fixed and they would break in again. I know I was scared to walk certain areas and I just mind my business.…  It was real bad.  It was real bad.  You never know what was going to happen. You know, any bad element that you want to find, you found it right here.”  (Betty, age 37, African American long-term resident)

 

Public housing: Robert Taylor Homes, from the ground

 

With the changed physical condition — and the attendant security, privatized management, and commitment to resident service — the long-time residents saw their world getting better:

 

Like other long term residents, Eduardo felt that the physical transformation had a positive impact on the residents beyond simply having nicer apartments.

 

“They’re just trying to make it look better.  Make a better neighborhood instead of looking rundown all the time.  It looks good.  They keep it clean.  They do a very excellent job around here…. I think people feel better, that they can be proud of it.  They ain’t got to say, “Oh, look at all the trash there, and all the trash there.”  Every now and then, you might see something, but like I said, they keep it clean around here….  You can walk down the street and you ain’t got to worry about stepping on glass, or your child falling down and cutting himself.” (Eduardo, age 30, Latino long-term resident)

 

These incumbents, who have seen the changes, feel much better about the property than newcomers:

 

Despite the fact that all residents faced the same objective neighborhood conditions, they viewed their neighborhoods through very different interpretive frames.  Long term residents framed their neighborhood in terms of its improvement, describing current conditions relative to the prior conditions in which they lived.  They saw the existing crime and drug activity as significantly better than it used to be and had many positive things to say about the neighborhood in light of its transformation.  It made them “proud” to live there, as Eduardo noted. 

 

HOPE VI, Legends, on the site of Robert Taylor Homes

 

In contrast, newcomers framed the lingering crime and drug problems as evidence that reinforced the negative preconceptions they brought with them to the neighborhood. 

 

Striking too is that the skeptical and fearful newcomers are socio-economically little different from the incumbent holdovers.  They are roughly the same ages, races, incomes:

 

These differences occurred for all racial groups and ages.  It also occurred across income groups, with both higher and lower income newcomers equally likely to report negative perceptions of the community, and regardless of the type of neighborhood newcomers resided in prior to redevelopment.

 

In other words, incoming residents bring with them a mental image of the property and its neighborhood, and project that image out into what they see when they arrive:

 

In contrast, newcomers to the neighborhood described their neighborhood in largely negative terms.  This negative framing was based both on the stigma they associated with the development’s troubled past and how they interpreted the lingering struggles with crime and drugs. 

 

Why then do they move in?  Because the housing is a bargain — better quality at lower cost. 

 

New HOPE VI, Tulsa, Oklahoma

 

Their rational minds make a decision that their emotional selves constantly worry over:

 

LaToya, a newcomer, described how her preconceptions of the neighborhood influenced how she went about her daily life and monitored her children’s activities.

 

The newcomers keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

 

“But you know to be honest with you, I just sleep. I just sleep in here, but I don’t have no connection….  And my daughters whenever they have to go to the library for some reason, until they get back I’m at the window waiting for them.  I look because I know the neighborhood isn’t good, I’ve seen stuff happening, people being killed, and I know [the neighborhood] is tough…. 

 

Their children bring less mental baggage:

        

So to be honest with you, my daughters refuse to believe me, so whenever [they say] mom why you so chicken, you know nothing going to happen.  I say you don’t know what I know.  Because before I live here, you know, I know how they do it here.” (LaToya, age 29, African American newcomer)

 

Fear makes the newcomers timid and introverted:

 

Moving Day, by Norman Rockwell

 

In contrast, the newcomers had weak ties with their neighbors.  While this is unsurprising given their relatively recent relocation to the neighborhood (between one and ten years ago), most of them also actively resisted forming any new social ties within the neighborhood.  As Andrea, a newcomer, describes: 

 

“I mean the only thing I can say is places, communities like this that hi, good-bye, come in do what you gotta do, you know if you were a person that liked to be in everybody’s business, run your mouth, get out of my way, you know.  But I’m like all you should care about is like roof over your head, just do what you got to do, mind your business and hold off.”  (Andrea, age 27, African American newcomer)

 

Public housing, Mission Hill, Boston

 

Naturally, those residents stayed away from their new neighbors:

 

Residents who relocated to Hope Homes after redevelopment employed very different strategies for keeping safe than longer-term residents.  Rather than fostering social connections as a means through which to control their surroundings and protect themselves, these newer residents withdrew from the neighborhood and did not make connections with their neighbors.  They enacted this approach in different ways, from not letting their children play with other neighborhood children, actively avoiding their neighbors, or not calling security after witnessing a crime, but all of these specific approaches shared a common thread of avoidance as a strategy for safety and peace of mind.

 

When I asked about a recent violent incident in the neighborhood, Carmen responded:

 

“I don’t know if somebody got stabbed or somebody got shot… I haven’t seen none of that because I don’t be out there.  I go to the store, mind my business.  And stay at home.  Come up here and watch movies, and when I get tired, I go to sleep.”   (Carmen, age 26, Latina newcomer)

 

Public housing, West Palm Beach, FL

 

Ms. Tach’s research kept coming back to the mind set as the distinguishing factor:

 

There were three cases in which newcomers framed their neighborhoods positively, and two cases where long-term residents framed their neighborhoods negatively.  When examining the social ties and safety strategies of these negative cases, it was clear that the neighborhood interpretive frame, rather than tenure duration alone, was the main factor associated with the willingness of residents to develop social ties or adopt a strategy of engagement rather than avoidance in neighborhood problems. The two long term residents with negative interpretive frames adopted strategies of avoidance, while the three newcomers with positive interpretive frames mainly adopted strategies of engagement. Residents’ perceptions of the neighborhood therefore played a powerful role in encouraging or circumscribing their involvement in the community, a finding that is supported by other research on community involvement (Small 2004; Penny 2006).

 

Then she asks the next logical question:

 

Why were the long-term residents so much more willing to get involved?  Their neighborhood interpretive frames certainly played a strong role in shaping how much they were willing to invest in the community and the strategies they adopted to keep safe.   Long-term residents framed their neighborhoods in terms of improvement relative to the past and were overwhelmingly positive about current neighborhood conditions.

 

In fact, it was the long-time residents who drove the social programs and the network outreach:

 

There was also an extremely active resident association comprised mostly of long term residents that routinely mobilized to hold community events and initiate public safety campaigns.  Most recently, the task force has received funding to install street lights so it is safer to walk around at night.  The task force also holds community events, such as children’s festivals and basketball tournaments, but turnout at these events was often low.  One long-term resident on the taskforce describes the difficulty they have had in extending their membership to newer residents.

 

“So that’s what it has - it’s a very small group of dedicated residents that have been coming since we’ve been meeting.  Again, it’s had some difficulty in a way to getting a bigger group and I think people are still very cautious about speaking out because they don’t know if anybody’s going to find out.  So the group that has been coming, they’ve very protective of each other at this point….  You need folks that live here to be more involved with where they lay their head.”  (Angela, age 31, African American long-term resident)

 

Summarizing, instead of the newcomers becoming more active than the incumbents, it was the other way around.  Like oil and water, the incumbents and newcomers didn’t mix.

 

We of the olive oil are superior to you watery types

 

Instead of drawing role models from the newcomers, the existing residents who stuck it out were most invested:

 

Long-term residents got involved in community organizations, fostered ties with neighbors, and intervened on behalf of the community; newcomers did not.  In fact, newcomers often inhibited community-building efforts by failing to report criminal activity and deliberately resisting contact with their neighbors. Thus, low-income residents in the community benefitted from redevelopment, but not because the higher income newcomers served as role models, conduits of resources, or community leaders. 

 

If this theory is true — and Ms. Tach will spend the next two years trying to find out — what does this mean for affordable housing redevelopment and income mixing?

 

 

[Concluded tomorrow in Part 3.]

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