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LARRY VALE: When it comes to public housing,
current concept of mixed income housing
really appear very late in the game
even though public housing proponents were very focused
on incomes right from the start.
Public housing was not always for the poorest
and has had a complex relationship
with ideas about neighborhoods and neighborhood renewal.
It's really too simplistic to think of US public housing
as a single failed experiment and as something
that's now been replaced by mixed income housing.
I like to think of it as really a three faced
social experiment.
There's a first phase that lasted I think from about 1935,
when the program started, up until 1960 or so.
And it was not about finding the poorest people from the worst
slums and re-housing them.
It was more about finding the worst slums
and tearing them down but not really re-housing
large numbers of the displaced.
Rather, it was a chance to seek out
large numbers of the barely poor and to build public housing
communities selectively from those people.
We don't call them low income because they probably
had incomes between 50% and 80% of the area of median,
but they're not very low income and they're not
extremely low income the way that we
would talk about it today.
But by 1960 or so, and lasting until 1990 at least,
public housing really took a different attitude
towards those who ought to be housed.
By the mid and late 1960s, public housing
was predominantly serving a very low income constituency.
And by the 1980s, an extremely low income
constituency, meaning that it went from 50% or 60%
of the area median into between 30% and 50%
and then all the way down to about 15% or 20%
of the median income by the 1990s or so.
And so that's the phase of welfare housing
that we think about as a second phase.
And since 1990 or so, there's really
been a third face, a series of initiatives
to return more of public housing to that first phase
of selectivity to really try and find again the people who
have less extremely low incomes to give work preferences
and things like that and to engage in mixed income housing.
And that's really had a lot of demolition,
new communities that are built with different income
structures, and rule structures.
The images that you see show three phases
using Chicago's Cabrini Green as an example.
I'm not going to talk much here about Cabrini,
but when we get to class, it'll be one of the key case studies,
especially since I've recently completed a book that
features this place.
But you can see it's a slum.
The blueprint's to build high rise public housing
that you see in the middle.
And more recently, the demolition that that
has occurred.
A lot of people have had different responses
to public housing.
And I think it's worth looking at three of them.
First is that journalists and scholars
did have some initial enthusiasm for the program
and then a lot of controversy, leading to a second phase
that one might call the design in decline and fall literature,
where everybody seemed to be telling a story about failures
of one kind or another, whether it's
a failure of design or management or something else.
But since the late '90s, 2000 or so, there's
been a series of revisionist efforts,
to really rethink the complexity of public housing
and the values of what has taken place.
And not see everything as a complete disaster.
I tend to go really far back in thinking about it.
And you don't have to do it entirely to the 1600s
to make sense of this.
But I think it's important to talk
about ideology and institutional origins of public housing
and not treat this as simply something that emerges
in the 1930s out of nowhere.
You may not want to go all the way back to the 1630s
as I tried to do in my book.
And you certainly don't need to do that if you come from places
that are very distant for many Puritans,
but I see a long continuity in housing
over questions of really moral judgment.
On the one hand, there's a reward tradition,
a sense that the government can help low income
people in ways that reward them for certain kinds of behaviors.
So in the upper right, you can see an African American family
taking advantage of the Homestead
Act in the mid 19th century.
The system that enabled you to get entire plots of land
if you would promise to work and live on it
and then it would become yours after a certain number
of years.
So there's a tradition that goes with pensions
for veterans and other kinds of reward that tie housing
to good behavior and particularly
good working behavior.
And then there's another tradition
that I might call the coping tradition.
If you look at the bottom right, there's
a picture of one of the [INAUDIBLE] houses in Boston.
This one's from about 1800, designed
by Charles [INAUDIBLE], the same guy that did the State
House just a few years earlier.
And it had a wing for men and a wing for women and a chapel
in between.
And this was the place where people
went if they really couldn't afford to live on the town.
They didn't have friends or family that could support them.
So the state built a grand edifice
and built a lot of them.
So you have on the one hand, certain housing
that is given as a reward for certain behavior
and then another tradition that's
really about coping with a set of people that
are not behaving as needed.
By the end of the 19th century, you
get one of my favorite books.
This is called Civilizations Inferno-- Studies
in the Social Cellar by a man named Benjamin Orange Flower.
It's the equivalent of the Jacob Riis book about New York, How
the Other Half Lives.
But this one's about Boston.
And if you look at it, it's a kind
for the society, the frontispiece piece of the book
here.
It shows the happy, wealthy people
in the top dancing in their town home
while increasingly levels dire circumstances
of poverty lurking below them.
The immediate next lower level are the well intentioned men
that are out of work.
The Depression of 1893 was happening.
And they were people for whom no fault of their own,
they were out of work, in trouble,
and poor for that reason.
And then there's a second deserving poor.
The widows and orphans that you can
see in the third lower level.
And those two were a piece of the poor of a city like Boston.
But then there was the social cellar.
They the undeserving poor.
The criminals, the misbehaving masses tht
couldn't quite be trusted.
And this is the kind of thing that
made it very complicated to decide
what is the role of the government when
it comes to housing.
So when you get housing authorities,
and here's a picture of the men who
formed the five person Boston Housing Authority,
meaning the board of the authority in the 1940s,
you had a sense of judging poverty in a different sense.
They wanted to make sure that the people who
came into public housing were from that second and third tier
and not from the fourth tier.
And even better, they wanted to find
people that were ready to move up into the top.
That were not going to be employed very long
and were not just deserving poor, but actually
ready to move onward into the middle class
and wouldn't need public housing very long.
So you can see if you look at a variety of graphic imagery
from all over the country, the different housing reports
and other city agency reports were setting
a contrast between public housing and slums
that was really very important.
The 1930s and '40s were a time when
people focused on sub clearance and employment
in the building trades.
And so when you got to the Housing Act of 1937,
it linked all new low rent housing to slum clearance.
It mandated an equivalent elimination agreement.
In other words, public housing construction
had to be accompanied by what they called elimination
by demolition or condemnation or effective closing
or the compulsory repair and improvement
of unsafe or insanitary dwelling situated
in the locality or metropolitan area.
And that that was going to be substantially equal the number
to the number of newly constructed dwellings
provided by the project.
So in other words, public housing
was intended not to compete with anything in the private sector
because it wasn't going to make any gains in the low rent
housing stock.
Even if elimination was achieved by rehabilitation rather than
demolition, the improved properties
were probably going to cost a lot more and demand
substantially higher monthly rentals.
So what this did was to require or at least encourage
public housing construction in inner city neighborhoods
rather than the more affluent peripheral areas.
So it was almost a form of neighborhood renewal
in the form of replacement housing
even though many other neighborhoods
were cleared for other purposes that
included more private purposes rather than public ones.
So the Newark example, the green one
near towards the bottom right, is a pretty good one.
It's a booklet that shows the changes between people
in the slum in the upper left side of it
and the public housing in the bottom right side.
It's almost a environmental determinism
from badly behaved people that need the police
and sit on stoops and don't do the things they're supposed
to do to the Boy Scouts and the happy woman
at her sink and the people playing
in their yard and the sunshine and the lighter colors
that predominate.
It's almost implying that the new appliances
are leading to new behavior.
But it's really in practice more changing of people
rather than changing in them.
At least it's worth thinking about.
It may be just a different set of people.
I was struck by that constantly when I looked at this.
So slum clearance had multiple forms of justification,
mostly having to do with issues of crime and health.
Chicago, in this brochure, depicted itself,
meaning the housing authority, depicted itself
as having what they called a dirty backyard.
And it is a very revealing evidence
for how one thinks about the relationship between the haves
and the have nots and the sense that the dirty backyard had
to be cleaned up for the benefit of those that were valuing it.
The goal was to deal with what were called
streets of dreariness and the dangerous people that
lived in them.
It's a sense that these were a menace to themselves.
So they did charts like once that compared
the prevalence of fires and tuberculosis
and violence and juvenile delinquency between slum areas
and non slum areas.
And there's a picture on the left
of a family that has a caption and another place that
makes clear that this is supposed to be telling you
about the evils of broken families in the slums
because the husband has run off and abandoned these women
and girls in that place.
So these attitudes towards the slums of people and places
to get rid of were implied largely
to do with things like disease.
The health risks of bad housing were promoted constantly
in all the brochures and annual reports
and report-- and other documents that came out
during the '30s and '40s.
The health risks were paramount.
But there was also a set of rewards that were still
part of the tradition.
The public housing had really inherited
from both sides of that reward and the coping mechanism.
For the most part, in the '40s, it
was still part of the reward tradition.
It was used to reward returning veterans,
like you can see in the upper left in Los Angeles.
It's an effort to, as the middle one says,
make juvenile gangsters take a back seat.
And it's still that 19th century sense
of public housing as a reward for good behavior
and an accompanying mistrust for many of the poor.
It really is constant across the country.
Here's one of my favorite examples.
In Boston, the Boston Housing Authority
used dramatic photographs in their annual report.
This is from the 1940s or so.
And these binary juxtapositions.
Out of the shadows, into the sun.
It says, if you can't quite read it,
after they built the first eight of these projects,
the housing authority wanted to take stock in the 1940s.
And they said it beheld eight, clean shining developments
rising fresh to the sun where once, in dreary dirt filled
dilapidation, slum dwellings had shambled
in contaminating hopelessness against a gray and somber sky.
So even the weather was going to get better from public housing.
But something's really missing here,
or at least it's very misleading.
The implication of the text and the image
is that the children from the shadowy alleys
are being rescued by transporting them
into the sunshine and the openness of public housing.
But I guarantee you none of those kids
in the left picture ended up being the happy kids
in the sunshine in the right.
Or at least it's very unlikely.
When I looked at the records, I saw that of the first four
public housing developments in Boston, between 50% and 80%
of the people actually sought entry
into them that were the ones completed
under the Housing Act of 1937.
But when I actually examined the lists of tenants
in these places, I found that only between 2% and 12%
of the projects had actually gained
a place-- the people gained a place in the project.
And this is not atypical.
I've seen statistics for New York that
showed that all the way up to 1957, only about 18%
of the former residents of public housing sites
were re housed in the new public housing.
If the patterns were consistent around the country
as I think they may have been, it's more evidence then
that the goals of public housing were not really centered
on serving the people who were displaced to create it.
There was just intense scrutiny about who
was wanted in public housing.
You had to have a head of the household that
was a US citizen, it was segregated by race,
it had family sizes that had to be between two
and nine persons so you couldn't be a single person.
You couldn't have a large family or an extended family.
You certainly couldn't be a gay or lesbian couple.
There were no rooming houses available,
no living with friends, nobody without a stable employment
to pay the rent.
It was a very selective effort to find a public citizen.
And I like this image in the upper left of the young child
and his picket fence in the new Norfolk,
Virginia public housing called a citizen
of Norfolk's Merrimack Park.
They were very pleased with the people
that they got, whether it was toddlers or teens.
In the upper right, the caption says
boy meets girl in a Brentwood Park home.
All three look nice.
That's the thing that was going on.
But if you look at the bottom chart also from Norfolk,
it's an analysis of who really is intended
to receive public housing.
They said they've got 47,000 dwellings
and only 17,000 of them are substandard.
But of those 17,000 that are substandard,
which would seem to be the good place
to look for public housing residence,
they found that 4,000 earn too much for public housing,
meaning they really weren't all that poor.
But 7,000 earned too little.
In other words, only 6,000 of 17,000
were the target audience.
What does it really mean to earn too little for public housing?
It means that they were targeting
not the lowest of the incomes, but a near poor group
of people.
And not worrying so much about the people at the bottom.
They were more interested in seeing public housing
as a social progression.
In many cases, all the way from a slum by way of public
housing up to home ownership.
This thing appears repeatedly, whether in text or in graphics.
The upwardly mobile working class were intended.
Built in a mixed income community,
if you want to call it that.
It's just that nobody was very rich and nobody was very poor.
The assumptions were there about upward mobility
towards home ownership.
Race is undergirding all of this, of course.
This is a Miami example of the situation prevailing
in what they inelegantly called the central negro district, not
the central business district, but you can see that off
to just the right of that.
But actually an area that was seen as a district
defined by race.
And really vilified by race.
If you look at the bottom right the section of the Coconut
Grove negro area as they called it,
the blocks are classified by what
was called the block median penalty
score, with red and black being-- red and brown
being the worst cases.
And so you could see a lot of it was there.
And that had to do with lending and the things that
were going on and a way of self-fulfilling a prophecy
of disinvestment in the place.
So this kind of a situation where white and race were tied
into it were really important.
And there certainly were efforts going on into the '40s and '50s
to cope with white racism and deal
with the extent to which public housing still
needed to be seen as entering into a segregated city.
The right side is the Baltimore urban league's effort
to try and downplay the fears of a changing neighborhood.
But those things were very much a part of it.
And so public housing gets built.
And after a short while where many people were very positive
about it, you enter into decline and fall literature,
where a lot of the scholarship from the 1970s and '80s
was just relentlessly negative about public housing.
Lee Rainwater's book Behind Ghetto Walls from 1970
about Pruitt-Igoe, written just before the demolition of it.
Or the book by Arnold Hirsch, Making
the Second Ghetto in the 1980s.
And then by the 1990s, Alex Kotlowitz's book,
There Are No Children Here, about the impossibility
of childhood in the Henry Horner Homes of Chicago.
Those things were happening.
But what I find really interesting
is that there have been revisionist lenses that
really do matter.
Since about 2000, new ways of looking.
Thinking about what success has been or could be,
taking the role of tenants much more seriously.
And also really thinking about the role of design.
So if we say a little bit about each of those.
In 2008 and 2009, I was fascinated
to see two books with almost diametrically opposed titles
come out.
Brad Hunt wrote about Chicago with the title Blueprint
for Disaster-- The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing.
At almost the same time, Nick Bloom
is writing a book called Public Housing That Worked-- New
York in the 20th Century.
Now, one could think it's just the time period.
The middle volume here, When Public Housing Was Paradise
is a book about Chicago in its first 20
years of public housing.
But Bloom's book says public housing
worked in the 20th century, meaning all the way up
until pretty recently.
Since 2000, I think there's been a lot more publicity for New
York and [INAUDIBLE] problems.
And it suggests that some places, including the city that
has the most public housing, is very far
from the worst case situation.
But Chicago was probably the worst for the longest.
Though several other cities had lawsuits and receiverships
and HUD takeovers and all sorts of things like that.
In Boston, for instance, there was a receiver, really
the first of this who took over in 1980, Harry Spence.
And the court put him in charge and told him to try and fix
a very broken system.
The Boston Globe magazine cover here
says that, I think, in some really interesting ways.
Think about what you're seeing here.
What is this suggesting about how
positive change comes about?
Can this man save public housing?
Is that the right question?
What is it actually asking?
I want to return to this image when we get to class
and talk about it and try to deconstruct
it a little bit more.
So think about it.
Think what you're seeing here.
I think that picture and that sentence
is encoding the whole history of American housing very neatly
in a single composite image.
So think about what you're seeing here.
It's not the only picture like, that strangely.
A decade later, another housing authority in crisis,
another newspaper, Sunday Magazine,
is asking a similar question.
Can this man save the CHA, the Chicago Housing Authority.
This time, the man is the head of the CHA, Vincent Lane,
a former developer.
And at least he gets to pose on top of the buildings,
it's Cabrini Green.
I'm not sure that's an advantage, though.
Is he dwarfed by the challenge or is he on top of his world?
You can make your own guess.
He didn't last very long despite making some very highly
publicized interventions of the mixed income
housing at Lake park place.
The anti-drug sweeps that brought him national
and international attention.
And by 1995, the CHA was taken over by HUD from '95
until 1998.
And then they launched the famous Plan for Transformation
in 2000, which we'll talk about a bit in class.
So there's a very mixed record of achievement
from the successes to the failures to the ambitious plans
to try and turn failure back into success.
But one of the things that I find so striking
in recent years is that there's a latter day revaluation
and revaluing the activism of the tenants, the residents.
It's really a change in the scholarship
about public housing.
More of it has become tenant centered.
It's not just about public politicians and housing
authority leaders.
But it's about the coping mechanisms
of tenants who've had to endure terrible conditions.
It puts people like Thelma Smith, who's
in the middle picture, a tenant leader at Boston's Franklin
Field development, it puts them at the center of the picture
and not shunted to the margins.
Rhonda Williams's book about Baltimore,
The Politics of Public Housing, is one.
Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall's
book, The Dignity of Resistance, about women tenant activists
at Chicago's Wentworth Gardens.
Sudhir Venkatesh's complex view of the complexities of gang
culture and politics and economics at Robert Taylor
Homes in Chicago, American Project, a project that is now
demolished and we'll talk about what's
happened to that as well.
My own reclaiming public housing book about the 50 year
struggles of three communities in Boston
to try and get past dire conditions
and return to desirable communities.
And I think a lot of people have started
asking the question that's posed in the title of the book
by Larry Bennett, Janet Smith, and Patricia Wright,
Where Are Poor People To Live?
It's not so obvious as public housing
itself has come to change.
The last of the real changes that I
think is starting to take place is a more complex view
about the role of design.
More of the thinking and the writing
has emphasized the importance of design.
There was always a long history emphasizing
the negative consequences and design was always
a key part of that.
The fact that it was initially built
to emphasize the distinctiveness of public housing,
not to just be bare and austere and off putting,
but to appear as a security and safe and modern alternative
to the wooden fire traps of the aging slums.
You can see in the middle of the picture of the Orchard Park
development built in 1942 in Boston, although the pictures
from 2000 and then a picture just a few years later of Hope
Six redevelopment of Orchard Gardens.
Pretty much the same spot in the place.
But there have been other aspects to the conversation.
When I see the design centered revisionism that's taking place
has often taken, again, a environmental determinist
stance.
There was a book that is little remembered now by [INAUDIBLE]
and the better known Christopher Alexander,
called Community and Privacy, that's 1965.
But it also had the attack on project centric mentalities
that was much more wildly and widely influential
by Jane Jacobs in 1961.
And then by 1972, there was Oscar Newman's work,
Defensible Space-- Crime Prevention Through Urban Design
that really was trying to suggest
that it was possible to use design and urban design
to shape behavior.
It was about crime reduction and showed early cases
of how public housing projects could be retrofitted
and redesigned to make them safer through residence
by encouraging a territoriality.
And it was fascinating to me in the mid 1990s the way
HUD embraced Oscar Newman's defensible space ideas
and had him author an entire manual in the 1990s.
And soon after that, HUD embraced the new urbanist wing.
You can see a co-authored publication,
Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design
at the left.
And particularly emphasizing the neo traditional development
side of new urbanism and was really
trying to rethink the whole overall image of public housing
developments.
So rather than public housing being this deliberately
different looking modernist alternative
to decrepit and ill provisioned rows of wooden or brick
townhouse that that seem to signify mid century blight
and slum conditions, the new urbanist paradigm wanted
to sanitize an update the reputation
of the pre modern urban models and make future public housing
look much more like private sector neighbors.
Not standing implacably, in part from the [INAUDIBLE],
the colors in the Orchard Garden look
pretty different than anything you'd
find in that part of the neighborhood.
It still stands out, but it stands out in a different way.
The goal if you take defensible space and new urbanism
together is a tableau of middle class Americana, that
normalizes the appearance of public housing
to a point where it really could be accepted again
into the fabric of existing, market friendly neighborhoods.
And that's pretty necessary if you
want to start thinking about mixed income.
But it raises a question.
Does Hope Six and HUD's program with its picket fences
and pastel facades, it's a new look for public housing
and it's buried within a larger concept of mixed income
housing, it's managed by private firms rather
than the public sector, but is it actually
displacing the poorest again just like they were displaced
from the slums to build public housing back
in the '30s and '40s?
There's a book by Edward Goetz that's
coming out in 2013 called New Deal Ruins-- Race, Economic
Justice, and Public Housing Policy.
And I had a chance to look at an advance copy of it.
And it's an entire book about public housing demolition.
And it really strongly critiques the extent of displacement
caused by Hope Six and suggests that displacement
has been disproportionately born and has
had a disproportionately negative impact on African
Americans.
My own book, which is also due out in 2013,
is called Purging the Poorest-- Public Housing and the Design
Politics of Twice Cleared Communities.
And despite its title, it's probably
a little more evenhanded than the Goetz book,
but it's attempting to understand
why the leadership of some cities,
particularly Atlanta and Chicago,
has been so intent on introducing mixed income
communities to replace the public housing
projects of the past.
So really, what I've wanted to do here
is to frame some of the current challenges of mixed income
housing.
I hope you're going to keep in mind some
of these deeper cultural issues that I've been discussing here.
It's not just public housing about our attitudes
towards the housing that is important.
It also matters what we mean by the public in public housing
and which parts of that public are expected
to benefit from housing redevelopment
and what form those benefits ought to take.
And those are the things that I hope
you'll think about in the days up to class
and we'll get a chance to talk in person very soon.
Thanks.