Toward a Just City? Progression and Theory of Modern U.S. Urban Redevelopment

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This discourse evolved to encapsulate the ideals of Burnham’s City Beautiful and LeCorbusier’s Radiant City, the convergence of which engendered emphases toward formal architecture, business-centered environment, and use of eminent domain. These measures left few remedies for the impoverished – they were left to the variegations of the market. (Hall, 2002).

In fact, Bickford and Massey (1991) suggest the pairing of public housing construction with slum clearance and urban renewal created a new, federally sponsored "second ghetto," one "solidly institutionalized and frozen in concrete," where "government took an active hand not merely in reinforcing prevailing patterns of segregation, but in lending them a permanence never seen before (p. 1013). These programs manifested in the construction of large, LeCorbusien-style high-rises meant to house residents formerly living in the very slums that existed where the newly developed projects now stood.

Among the largest problems with urban renewal programs was the problem of resident displacement. Urban renewal projects uprooted entire families and demolished entire neighborhoods but failed to construct sufficient numbers of new dwellings. And Gans (1965) has commented that a mere .5% of all federal urban renewal funding was allocated for displacement services and that in New York and San Francisco, 43% of residents relocated to unknown addresses.

But displacement was not the only problem. The shortcomings of the urban renewal movement had broad repercussions: industry fled the inner-city, manufacturing jobs were lost, and the social implications of high unemployment were pervasive (Vale, 1995). The resulting disproportionate concentration of the nation’s poorest residents further exacerbated these social problems (Wilson, 1987) and policy makers began looking to alternative ideas.

HOPE VI and the Eradication of Urban Renewal

In response to beleaguered public housing projects – considered one of the largest failures of American social welfare policy – the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development embarked on an ambitious new community revitalization program known as HOPE VI. The product of Congressionally mandated National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, the Commission identified more than 85,000 of the nation’s 1.3 million public housing units as “severely distressed” and formulated the HOPE VI program as a response (National Commission, 1992).

HOPE VI was not only intended to correct the physical blight of public housing but also sought to address the larger issue of residents’ attainment of self-sufficiency (Levy, Buron, & Popkin, 2009). According to the United States Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998, HOPE VI’s objectives included:

• to improve the living environment for residents of severely distressed public housing through the demolition, rehabilitation, reconfiguration, or replacement of obsolete projects (or portions thereof);

• to revitalize sites on which such public housing projects are located and contribute to the improvement of the surrounding neighborhood;

• to provide housing that will avoid or decrease the concentration of very-low-income families; and

• to build sustainable communities

To that end, HOPE VI targeted the most distressed public housing developments in the nation which included not only those which were physically deteriorating but also those most affected by “…isolation, inadequate services, crime, chronic unemployment, welfare dependency, and high concentrations of minorities, extremely poor residents, and single-parent homes” (Curley, 2005, p. 107).

Similar to urban renewal programs, part of the HOPE VI model necessitated the demolition of deteriorated housing –public housing projects, in this case– and replacement with newly constructed, mixed-income housing designed to blend with the broader community at large. Then, higher income residents were brought in to dissipate the high concentration of poverty and create a mixed-income community (Curley, 2005).

Instead of adhering to modern-rationality based planning models however, HOPE VI planning sought to consider not only the built environment but also the social infrastructure inherently required of a low-income populace (Levy, Buron, & Popkin, 2009). According the U.S. General Accounting Office, between 1992 and 2001, H.U.D. allocated $714 million for community and support services programs (2003). Further, participants were not only offered residence in their rebuilt or renovated public housing projects, they were also afforded opportunities to accept vouchers for private housing located in less distressed neighborhoods (National Commission, 1992) – another attempt at dissipating poverty concentrations.

The built environment of new HOPE VI projects also differed from the traditional, Le Corbusier-influenced high-rises. Instead, planners embraced the neoliberal, new urbanism paradigm (Hanlon, 2010). This model is characterized by integration of various building types, mixed-use properties, and residential income levels to promote a heterogeneous community; “the new urbanism stresses the substance of the plans rather than the method of achieving them” (Fainstein, 2008, p. 181).

HOPE VI was similar to urban renewal programs in another way; the program faced harsh criticism for its displacement of public housing residents. Curley (2005) reported that the eighty-one approved HOPE VI sites in 1998 called for the demolition of 37,449 units and only 27,526 newly constructed units, a net loss of 9,923 units. Further, Keating (2000) has criticized the program as another urban renewal process whereby low-income, black communities are removed in order to yield valuable urban space to higher-income, white residents.

Despite the critics, U.S. policy makers contended that the HOPE VI program would improve residents’ chances for life improvement by “…altering the social and economic composition of their communities” (Curley, p. 109). So raises the question, has HOPE VI met its objectives and have residents of the program’s developments fared better than residents of conventional public housing? That is, has the economic mobility of HOPE VI residents improved?

Economic Mobility as a Measure of HOPE VI

To illustrate the issue of racial and socioeconomic segregation in urban communities, consider Sharkey’s (2009) finding that for children whose family income is in the top three quintiles, being raised in a high-poverty neighborhood (i.e., 25% or higher) increases the risk of downward