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From Public Housing to Regulated Public Environments: The Redevelopment of San Francisco’s Public Housing

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to concentrated poverty assume intractable ghettos and a dying urban core. In the meantime, welfare reform and gentrification have given rise to new systems of poverty management and new spatial arrangements of poverty within U.S. metropolitan areas. The public housing revitalization program known as HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) provides an opportunity to explore these developments. In the ideal, HOPE VI solves the problem of dense, isolated, crime-ridden projects that house only the most poor by replacing them with new communities that are more attractive, more integrated with their surroundings, and more mixed—both in terms of income and race. This paper argues that HOPE VI is a program of urban redevelopment and poverty management that is firmly rooted in the ideology and goals of welfare reform. Using San Francisco as a case study, it examines the institutional and spatial changes embedded in the city’s HOPE VI process. San Francisco offers a model of progressive HOPE VI, one which prioritizes resident participation, minimizes the loss of affordable housing units, and mediates public/private partnerships through the use of non-profit developers. Despite this progressive approach, the “transformation” of public housing promised by HOPE VI is not the transformation of a severely distressed property to a functional one or the transformation of an area characterized by concentrated poverty to one with a wider range of incomes. Rather, it is the transformation of public housing into a new post-welfare institution, what the author calls a regulated public environment.

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