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作者

Rachel Garshick Kleit

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.42,Issue4,P.698-700

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Ohio State University

摘要

HOPE VI is not one program, as many think, but instead takes different forms in cities across America. Lawrence Vale’s After the Projects makes an argument that a complexity of forces creates quite varied redevelopment outcomes. These influences are rooted in each locale’s public housing history, its decades-long experience with urban renewal and development, and the relative power of tenants, private for- and nonprofit developers, and government. This book is an expert’s attempt after 20 years of observation and research to make sense of myriad local details to understand variations in a national phenomenon, i.e., public housing revitalization. Having previously written three books on public housing’s history and redevelopment, Vale creates a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the governance of the poor, a book which helps to explain variations in public housing redevelopment across the U.S. Vale argues that these differences in HOPE VI have to do with local variations in poverty governance. Vale evaluates the success of HOPE VI by attempting to answer two questions. First, does redevelopment expand housing options for very low-income households? Second, does redevelopment prioritize the return of original tenants to the new community? Vale spends much of Chapter 1 outlining the context for redevelopment, including American attitudes about poverty, the continuing lack of federal investment in affordable housing at a time of growing national need, the transition to neoliberal efforts at affordable housing provision (i.e., ones combining the public, private, and nonprofit sectors), and the incredible variation across 260 HOPE VI sites nationally in the percent of original tenants who have returned to post-redevelopment sites. The four cases in this book—Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Tucson—vary from as little as 12% of original households returning to as much as 70%. Vale stresses that HOPE VI is not one thing and that throughout the country the final developments have been the products of successive plans to address changing priorities, the complexity of mixed-finance, and the search for enough capital to implement plans for the project. The resulting developments also reveal local ideologies concerning poverty. To explain the moving target of the HOPE VI redevelopment plan, Vale creates a theory of poverty governance, embellished on the nifty metaphor of a “constellation” of actors involved in governance, complete with illustrations of star maps and galaxies. Building on political economic theories of urban redevelopment, Vale offers the constellation metaphor as a lens for a more “nuanced capacity to diagram relationships, convey hierarchies, and visualize the relative prominence of public, private, civil society, and community actors” (p. 57). Chapter 2 outlines the changing actors in governance throughout the history of public housing. Vale incorporates a variety of actors and interests beyond state actors into the political economy. While public housing may have started with the centralized power of “the authority” (p. 42), the increased visibility of the private sector, nonprofit-community-based organizations, the tenants, and others demonstrates the variations in power and influence on the redevelopment process. Even in the early period of the 1940s and 1950s, the interests in public housing construction were part of a locale’s concern with the revival of downtown economic growth. The challenge of participation has been present from that time as well. What is different now is the large number of “urban governance components” (p. 49)—15 in all—that could play a role in the “interactive plan making” (p. 70) in a HOPE VI deal. The constellation has grown in part because of how each city has experienced urban renewal, public housing construction and reinvestment, and the local grass-roots response to those experiences. The constellations have varied nodes depending on how fraught were the experiences of urban renewal, highway development, poverty management, and economic development. The four case studies that Vale presents in chapters 3–12 are nuanced and serve as ideal types to demonstrate the link between the variations in constellation and differences in HOPE VI urban redevelopment outcomes in situations of potential gentrification. New Orleans’ River Garden exemplifies what Vale calls the “Big Developer,” a constellation where the interests of the private, for-profit developer dominated the pre-development planning and post-development implementation. Boston’s Orchard Gardens demonstrates the “Plebs,” where the interests of the tenants and low-income households were primary. Tucson’s Posadas Sentinel demonstrates “Publica Major,” where the dominant role of the city government created increased affordable housing options and outcomes that respected residents in a locale whose political culture was anti-poor and anti-public housing. San Francisco’s North Beach Place illustrates “Nonprofitus,” where the not-for-profit developers and tenant advocacy groups dominate the redevelopment process. Vale’s point is that “Unless there are countervailing pressures from other parts of the city’s governance constellation—tenants, their advocates, or from government officials—HOPE VI projects will rarely be skewed to attract low-income majorities” (p. 113). Throughout the book, Vale highlights tendencies in neoliberal processes toward paternalism (that is, making decisions for low-income residents rather than with them), which pressure from tenants, their advocates, or government officials may outweigh. He outlines detailed histories of the four sites, calling them, “four tortuous sagas of public housing development and redevelopment” (p. 383). His eloquence and humorous observations help make the argument that contemporary HOPE VI outcomes are “deeply rooted in decades of past experience with development and redevelopment” (p. 185). In Chapter 13, Vale offers some pointed lessons. First, in terms of maximizing the return of original residents, phasing development to maximize retention and creating rules of return that are not exclusionary are key. Phasing allows residents to remain on a portion of the site while another part is redeveloped. Then, they move to the new housing and the place they lived is redeveloped. Phasing maintains the center of residents’ lives in the development, rather than their moving away and creating new place-dependent relationships that cause them to choose not to return. Rules that are not exclusionary can give a right of first refusal to original residents for housing in the redeveloped community. Second, property managers need to recognize that the original residents have a long history in that place and that the more respect they offer residents, the better the outcomes will be. Third, changes in management will inevitably involve greater scrutiny of residents—whether they return to the redeveloped site or relocate—but this needs to be carried out in a humane way. Fourth, one-for-one replacement can be implemented in an exclusionary way, so be wary. For example, if one-for-one replacement creates smaller units when families who need housing have many children, they are effectively excluded from the new development. Fifth, the case studies generally do not support some presumed benefits of income mixing via middle-class role models and enhanced social capital. However, the redeveloped communities do have to greater neighborhood social control and thus greater safety, as well as increased political interest and market investments. Sixth, while the outcomes in New Orleans’ River Garden may represent the worst in neoliberal outcomes for the poorest households, those in Boston, San Francisco, and Tucson offer some hope for neoliberalism benefitting low-income residents. After the Projects is a significant addition to the literature on both public housing and urban redevelopment. It demonstrates that negative outcomes are not inevitable under a neoliberal policy framework and that, through the influence of community-based nonprofits, tenant advocacy group's, or thoughtful public servant's, equitable outcomes can occur. Unanswered is whether community-minded private, for-profit developers might also play this role. While the detail of the case studies may be hard to digest for some, the distillation in the first two and last chapters pulls together the detail into a whole that explains what is necessary to obtain equitable outcomes. The audience for this book is broad and, because it is so well written, it is accessible to practitioners and academics (historians, political economists, and planners). The book is appropriate for graduate courses that focus on the history of public housing and the examination of urban redevelopment under the neoliberal policy. A deeply thoughtful book, Vale reminds us that local waitlists for assisted housing in some areas top 50,000 households and that affordable housing problems are increasing. While we might consider three of these four cases successful regarding outcomes for original residents, HOPE VI resulted in a net loss of units as the price for increased quality and continued the U.S.’s lack of commitment to housing its poorest households. Whether the more recent implementation of Choice Neighborhoods and Resident Assistance Demonstration continues in the same vein would be good fodder for Vale’s next work.