Author talk, After the Projects: Public Housing Redevelopment and the Governance of the Poorest Americans: Saturday October 19th

From the Metropolitan Studies Center at American University in Washington, DC:

Saturday, October 19, 2019
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Mt. Pleasant Neighborhood Library
3160 16th Street Northwest
Washington, DC 20010

Professor Lawrence Vale will talk about his new book After the Projects: Public Housing Redevelopment and the Governance of the Poorest Americans this Saturday. The manuscript examines the deeply-rooted spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment at a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities.

This event is part of a series of author talks in connection with the Anacostia Community Museum's exhibition, A Right To The City. It was developed in partnership with American University's Metropolitan Policy Center and the D.C. Public Library.

Book Abstract:

At a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities, After the Projects investigates the contested spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment. Public housing practices differ markedly from city to city and, collectively, reveal deeply held American attitudes about poverty and how the poorest should be governed. The book exposes the range of outcomes from the US federal government’s HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, focused on nuanced accounts of four very different ways of implementing this same national initiative—in Boston, New Orleans, Tucson, and San Francisco. It draws upon more than two hundred interviews, analysis of internal documents about each project, and nearly fifteen years of visits to these neighborhoods. The central aim is to understand how and why some cities, when redeveloping public housing, have attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, while other cities have instead tried to serve the maximum number of extremely low-income households. The book shows that these socially and politically revealing decisions are rooted in distinctly different kinds of governance constellations—each yielding quite different sorts of community pressures. These have been forged over many decades in response to each city’s own struggle with previous efforts at urban renewal. In contrast to other books that have focused on housing in a single city, this volume offers comparative analysis and a national picture, while also discussing four emblematic communities with an unprecedented level of detail.