Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from Part 1 and Part 2 ]
 
In our examination of Harvard doctoral candidate Laura Tach’s remarkable findings that in HOPE VI properties, incumbent holdovers do not mix with newcomers, largely because the newcomers see things as improved from the past whereas newcomers see the same things as the past continuing into the present.
 

“The future becomes […]

[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 […]

 
“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 […]

The violence appears to be subsiding:

The first thing everyone mentions is the helicopters: the relentless throbbing of blades cutting through the skies above and the probing searchlights that have kept the residents awake over the last four nights.
 

Helicopter flying over VIlliers
 
The gunfire that echoed off the walls of the tower blocks in a violent […]

Truth, Plato posited, is perfection: ideas are more real than things, and the world we see is but a dim and watery reflection of the perfect, crystalline reality.  Every object has its Platonic ideal, the one true form from which all its earthly expressions take their nature, and of which every earthy object is merely […]