HOPE VI
in San Francisco
by
Rachel Petersen
This
article first appeared in the March,
2005 SPUR Newsletter, p. 1.
The decline of the inner cities
from the 1970s to early 1990s precipitated
the descent of public housing into
physical decrepitude and social
chaos. But a dramatically successful
federal grants program begun in
1992 has reshaped the way that
America's public housing is conceived,
designed, built, and managed.
Initiated by Henry Cisneros, former
secretary of the Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD),
the Hope VI program has invested
$5.8 billion via 446 grants in
166 cities. Grants of up to $50
million allowed local housing authorities
to demolish and rebuild their most
severely deteriorated urban public
housing. San Francisco applied
for and received five Hope VI grants,
one per year, from 1994 to 1999.
The city won $118 million in Hope
VI funds, and used those to leverage
an additional $152 million from
multiple sources, including tax-credit
financing, state and local grants,
and state and local bonds. Four
Hope VI projects have been built
in neighborhoods across the city:
North Beach, the Western Addition,
Hayes Valley, and Bernal Heights.
The fifth and perhaps final project,
Valencia Gardens in the Mission
District, has seen its old buildings
demolished and construction has
just begun.
From
its inception, Hope VI intended
to fundamentally change America's
public housing. While its effects
are still unfolding-in some places,
construction has recently finished
or is still underway-the program
aimed for not merely a physical
makeover, but to have a social
impact on the lives of its residents
and the economic and social fabric
of the neighborhoods they live
in. For thousands of public housing
residents and managers, urban planners,
financing institutions, and developers,
the question remains: will Hope
VI reap what it originally promised-
San Francisco, with five projects,
may provide some of the answers.
Reconceiving Urban Public Housing
Cisneros
launched Hope VI at a dire moment.
Maintenance budgets were so low
that the number of "severely
distressed" units--HUD's term for
uninhabitable--had risen to an estimated
86,000, or six percent of the nation's
1.3 million publicly held units.
In 1996, San Francisco architect
Dan Solomon watched Cisneros sign
the Charter of the New Urbanism,
a document that decried the intertwined
trends of urban sprawl and racial
and economic segregation, and he
later participated in the early
meetings in which the Secretary
and other leaders floated the ideas
of "urbanist" design before an
audience of local housing authority
directors. In his office recently,
Solomon remembered the tense and
hostile atmosphere at a Harvard
conference with four hundred housing
officials. "This was a group of
people under duress, and they objected
to changes in public housing design
on several grounds: that housing
should be temporary and not lavish,
that it would cost more money for
fewer units, and that this would
mean the gentrification of the
safety net, the loss of housing
for the very poor."1
Was the design of the worst public
housing truly at fault for the
social problems that developed
there? Some experts disagree. The
ideals of Modernist architecture
clearly played a role in the isolated,
high-rise towers that became the
bane of so many cities, but factors
much broader than architectural
currents led to the failure of
large-scale public housing.
The Rise of Public Housing
Construction
of public housing in America
never amounted to a full scale
national effort. Instead, individual
projects--albeit federally
funded--slowly accumulated into
a national public housing stock.
In each case, a specific need drove
the housing's design. Responding
to dramatic Bay Area population
increases because of spikes in
war industry jobs, for example,
in 1917-1918 the federal government
built 6,000 single family homes
and 7,000 apartment units in 23
cities, including Oakland, Richmond,
and San Francisco, for workers
and their families. During the
Depression, federal funds supplied
loans for slum clearance, new low-cost
housing, and subsistence homesteads.
Soldiers returning from World War
II lived in single bedroom, barracks-style
buildings intended for short stays
while they transitioned back to
civilian life. Urban industrial
unions won federal grants to build
housing for their members, and
used a courtyard-facing apartment
building design and limited equity
ownership mechanisms to encourage
sociability and political interaction.2
From
the start, policymakers fiercely
debated the financing of public
housing. Should the federal government
build projects itself, or should
it utilize tools like low interest
homeownership loans to help people
enter the privately built market?
In the 1930s, housing advocate
Catherine Bauer decided that, left
to themselves, private housing
developers would naturally build
for the upper third, leaving the
bottom two-thirds with fewer affordable
housing choices. She advocated
government intervention to encourage
products--pre-fabricated homes,
or low-interest home loans--that
would serve the middle class, and
permanent federal responsibility--design,
construction, and management--for
housing for the poor.
The federal government shied away
from such large scale intervention,
however, and by the mid-1950s,
capital budgets shrank as public
housing grew less popular. Katharine
Bristol, an affordable housing
historian, found that at St. Louis's
infamous Pruitt-Igoe project, which
was completed in 1956 and demolished
in 1972, the architects took pains
to make the high-rise buildings
as livable as possible, but were
faced at every turn with a public
housing authority bent on reducing
costs. The original design incorporated
several types of structures, from
low- to high-rise, but that proposal
exceeded the per-unit budget allocated
by the federal government, and
so the housing authority intervened:
"A field officer of the federal
Public Housing Administration (PHA)-insisted
on a scheme using 33 identical
eleven-story elevator buildings.
These design changes took place
in the context of a strict economy
and efficiency drive within the
PHA. Political opposition to the
public housing program was particularly
intense in the conservative political
climate of the early 1950s. In
addition, the outbreak of the Korean
war had created inflation and materials
shortages, and the PHA found itself
in the position of having to justify
public housing expenditures to
an unsympathetic Congress."3
Pruitt Igoe's height, density,
and interior design, which within
a few years had become the symbol
of public housing's failure, embodied
less a Modernist ideal than a typical
budget compromise.
Everyday
practices of racial segregation
further affected the location and
design of public housing. Projects
were built for whites and blacks
separately-in some cases, projects
built on land from which black
neighborhoods had been cleared
were open to whites only. (Public
housing was only fully desegregated
after the 1965 Civil Rights Act.)
Further, in deciding where to locate
public housing, planners and housing
officials thought as carefully
about containing low-income areas
and making central city land available
for commercial development as about
providing housing for a needy population.
While clearing neighborhoods under
the rubric of urban renewal, city
planners had an incentive to contain
public housing's footprint, reserving
land for profitable redevelopment.
Still, Modernism undeniably impacted
public housing's design, particularly
where large parcels of land purged
of any other activity became available.
As is well-documented, the Modernists
had in mind some of the same ideals
of urban life that planners share
today. In a 1940 pamphlet entitled
A Citizen's Guide to Public Housing,
Bauer laid out a model of government-assisted
design:
"...[W]ith houses and gardens in
compact groups, laid out not on
a rigorous checker board of uniform
subdivided lots but with loving
care for topography, sun, prevailing
breezes, outlook and neighborhood
amenity, there can be playgrounds
for different age-groups and parks
and perhaps even a community center,
instead of dead chasms between
houses and acres of unnecessary
pavement in streets, sidewalks
and alleys. The whole neighborhood
may be just one super-block, which
means complete play safety for
the children and clean, quiet green
surroundings and outlook for all
the houses. For access to the houses
there may be small dead-end streets.
Garages and parking spaces are
conveniently located at the nearby
street-front. The house itself,
shallow and never more than two
rooms deep, has sun in every room
and far more real privacy than
an 'individual' house on a narrow
lot."4
Planners assess elements like
the impenetrable super-block and
bluntly designed plazas of grass
and concrete as anti-urban today,
but it is easy to forget that Modernist
design in part attempted to provide
every resident with access to light
and air, and to concentrate dwelling
units in one building in order
to free up more land for green
and open space.
The Maintenance Crisis
At the
heart of public housing's failure
lay something more banal. In
the basic financing scheme established
in housing legislation of 1937
and 1949, the federal government
pledged capital support, and mandated
that funds for maintaining the
units be drawn from the rent that
families paid to local housing
authorities. (A similar aversion
to maintenance and operations exists
today in federal funds for public
transit.) This scheme appeared
to make policy sense--the feds build,
while the locals control-but only
if tenants could afford to pay
sufficient amounts of rent. Rules
required residents to pay 30 percent
of their gross salary, which on
a minimum wage was hardly enough
to pay plumbers, electricians,
and other skilled workers needed
to keep the elevators running,
the windows repaired, locks in
working order, and graffiti off
the walls. Families living entirely
on public assistance paid little
or nothing in rent. "This strategy...proved
less and less appropriate during
the course of the 1950s and 1960s," Robert
Fishman, a professor of architecture
and urban planning at the University
of Michigan, wrote. "Increasingly,
public housing tenants were stranded
in the low-wage, intermittent-employment,
or welfare sectors of the economy."5
The
stranding of the poor in decrepit
buildings had more to do with socioeconomic
trends than the control of any
one agency. America's urban manufacturing
base began to decline as far back
as the 1970s, and with it the promise
of jobs for blue-collar workers.
Of the many consequences that rippled
outward from this trend, the separation
of black men from the economy,
the broader community, and, ultimately,
from the family was one of the
deepest and harshest. Public housing
came to be occupied by the group
facing the greatest economic disadvantages--unmarried,
African American mothers with children.
And if its residents couldn't pay
the rent, then public housing couldn't
fix the plumbing.
By 1971,
architect and urban planner Oscar
Newman had begun to catalogue
the ways in which design affected
different people's daily lives
in public housing. Even if the
elevators functioned and the windows
could open, poor design often prevented
people from establishing "perceived
zones of territorial influence"--areas
of public space with residents
close by and ostensibly responsible
for monitoring them-or left them
with few "surveillance opportunities," and
so sharpened the stigma and isolation
in which they existed. In fact,
Newman cites several features of
San Francisco's former North Beach
Place (built in 1953) for its defensible-space
arrangements: arranged in a horseshoe
pattern, the three-story apartment
buildings had windows facing each
other over an internal playground,
and ground-floor units that--unusually--opened
directly onto the street.6
People "might have adapted to
these design problems; indeed,
they might have discovered ways
to make even the high-rises work
socially," Fishman pointed out. "But
public-housing tenants could not
adapt to an environment of constant
breakdown caused by the inability
of the typical housing authority
to budget even the most minimal
standards of maintenance raised
from rents these tenants."7
The Beginning of Hope VI
The financial crisis within HUD,
interlaced with the social crises
occurring in inner-city neighborhoods
in the 1970s and 1980s, had ever-worsening
consequences. A system of triage
maintenance set in, and when tenants
vacated units or the level of disrepair
sank low enough, it became easier
for housing authorities to leave
the units vacant. Indeed, by the
early 1990s, barely two-thirds
of the most severely distressed
public housing was occupied.
The
introduction of the Hope VI program
into this environment was not
initially welcome. "They thought
that working with design was too
lavish," Dan Solomon said. "They
still had the idea that the housing
is supposed to be temporary, but
mostly, they just didn't have time
to deal with design."
Using the results of the National
Commission on Severely Distressed
Public Housing, which recommended
physical reconstruction and tenant
support services, and was bolstered
by support in 1993 from Senators
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Christopher
Bond (R-MO), Cisneros's program
went much further. Hope VI aimed
not merely at physical reconstruction,
but set out a multi-pronged agenda
of utilizing New Urbanist design
principles, deconcentrating poverty,
raising occupancy standards for
tenants, and restructuring the
management of public housing.
Design
Begun in 1993, the Chicago-based
nonprofit Congress for the New
Urbanism began arguing for a return
to the traditional, pre-suburban
patterns of designing neighborhoods
and downtowns, but influenced only
a tiny percentage of the development
market. The design guidelines written
for Hope VI brought the basic street
grid back into use, advocated a
housing stock that varied in size,
price, and style, and called for
a thoughtful blending of public
orientation and semiprivate spaces
for individual residences. Far
from being shelved and ignored,
the principles appear to have influenced
every Hope VI project built in
the past decade. In an interim
assessment, HUD found four design
concepts common to every site:
the properties were connected to
the surrounding area by street
grids and sidewalks, there were
private entrances that faced the
street and enhanced safety, there
were improved exteriors, and in
general, density had been reduced.8
Despite the initial resistance
by housing-authority managers that
Cisneros and the New Urbanists
encountered, it would be difficult
to find anyone ready to argue today
that the projects rebuilt under
Hope VI are anything less than
a major improvement over their
predecessors. One aspect of the
program's design freedom, however,
is a source of ongoing controversy:
the abandonment of the one-for-one
replacement rule (when the new
project does not have to have the
same number of units as the old),
and the attendant reduction in
density and net loss of public
housing units.
Prior to Hope VI, demolish-and-rebuild
programs that required one-for-one
replacement of all the project's
units had failed. Resource-poor
local housing authorities declined
reconstruction funds because they
could not finance construction
or maintenance of the same number
of units. Hope VI repealed the
requirement in order to broaden
the options of housing authorities
to design and finance projects
suited to their own needs and assets.
The
Urban Institute, a social policy
research nonprofit, reported
that without the one-for-one
replacement rule, many projects
rebuilt through the program lost
units. Further, the number of
housing units that receive a
permanent "deep" federal
subsidy, and thus are available
to families living at or below
the poverty line, has been cut
nearly in half.9
Combined
with erratic relocation and tracking
programs and rates of return
typically as low as 50 percent,
the overall loss of units has
many housing experts worried.
As the Urban Institute wrote, "questions
persist about whether the total
number of deeply subsidized replacement
units compensates fully for the
loss of public housing units under
Hope VI."10
Public Housing Finance and Management
Despite the historical impulses
that kept management of public
housing local, by 1990 the program
had grown into one in which federal
rules and regulations entirely
governed local administration.
While the rules ensured equal access
and fairness to tenants, they also
prevented any local housing authority
from innovative or entrepreneurial
management of its assets. In contrast,
Hope VI deregulated one branch
of public housing: grant recipients
were encouraged to build partnerships
with private for-profit and non-profit
developers, to find subcontractors
to manage rebuilt projects, and
generally engage in more market-directed
activity, such as finding business
tenants for retail and commercial
space within a mixed-use project.
As local
housing authorities began to
develop their Hope VI programs,
the program's philosophy took shape
in the guidelines set for who might
live in the rebuilt units. As it
happened, the program's rollout
coincided with the "Personal Responsibility
Act" welfare-reform legislation
enacted in 1994, which tightened
eligibility rules for public housing
and a number of federal-assistance
programs. Lawsuits and community
organizing efforts won the original
residents the right to return in
most cities, but critics point
out that demolition and building
schedules of as long as six years
contributed to many families' decisions
not to return. In the worst instances,
shoddy recordkeeping meant that
local authorities simply lost track
of families they once housed. "The
evidence from several studies indicates
that housing authorities generally
failed to plan adequately for relocation
or to provide sufficient support
to residents during the process," noted
the Urban Institute. "As a result,
many original residents now live
in other troubled public housing
developments-in some cases, as
bad as or worse than those they
left."11
In the
early 1990s, the Chicago Housing
Authority (CHA) managed the "largest gallery-style high-rise
public housing portfolio" in the
country, according to Director
of Development Carl Byrd. Its physical
condition had reached such a deteriorated
state that it had begun to empty
the buildings and give families
vouchers to find housing elsewhere.
Demolition and rebuilding only
began once CHA obtained the first
of its eight Hope VI grants, plus
an additional $1.65 billion pledge
from HUD to support the authority's
ten-year "Plan for Transformation." CHA
then launched one of the most ambitious
public-housing-reconstruction efforts
in the country. Under a contract
negotiated with residents of the
high-rises, residents who remained
compliant with their leases from
1999 through the opening of refurbished
buildings had a right to return
to one of CHA's 25,000 units. And
there was more: along with not
violating its rules, these new
residents faced assessments of
their credit history, criminal
background, drug history, employment
and economic self-sufficiency record,
and housekeeping habits. Once in
the unit, residents were expected
to perform annual community service.
It is
difficult to overstate the degree
to which such changes sought
to turn the ship of public housing. "The
first grants were large-up to fifty
million dollars," said Mirian Saez,
executive director of the Chester,
Pennsylvania Public Housing Authority,
which manages housing authorities
in receivership for legal and financial
troubles and has brought several
Hope VI projects to fruition. "This
was unusual, because many of the
authorities were struggling themselves.
In some cases it took them years
just to build up the capacity to
be able to undertake the redevelopment."
Deconcentrating Poverty
By being
located almost exclusively in
low-income neighborhoods, public
housing was linked with the worst
examples of urban poverty in the
public mind--and after decades of
decline, it scarcely mattered whether
the projects were a cause or a
symptom. "[L]ittle argument exists
about the results of this extreme
concentration of poverty," wrote
Edward Goetz of the University
of Minnesota, in his 2003 book
Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating
the Poor in Urban America, which
examines poverty deconcentration
policies and programs. "It produces
a range of social problems whose
whole is greater than the sum of
its parts. [S]chool delinquency,
school dropout, teenage pregnancy,
out-of-wedlock childbirth, violent
crime, and drug abuse rates are
all greater in these communities
than would be predicted by a linear
extrapolation of poverty effects."12
The
most recent generation of response
emerged in the 1990s, when a
movement of social scientists,
urban planners, housing specialists,
and mayors and city councilmembers
began to pursue strategies to deconcentrate
the poverty in America's cities.
Hope VI's collection of ideas-design
for neighborhood integration, density
reduction, eligibility standards,
management freedoms, and crime
reduction-embody several current
theories about deconcentrating
poverty. First, just as design
had imprisoned or isolated in the
past, now it could integrate and
uplift. Second, the integration
of the welfare-dependent with the
employed exposes young people and
children to aspirations they might
otherwise miss. And third, the
benefits of capitalism might work
in small and large ways to raise
expectations not only of residents
but of the public institution that
governs their lives.
In effect,
Hope VI granted cities a fundamentally
different tool-one
that is operating largely unknown
to many Americans, and through
which cities are pursuing goals
that Americans, left to themselves,
do not typically set out to achieve
when buying a home. Instead of
segregating by class, people with
vastly different economic characteristics
have become neighbors in the same
building. This works in part because
the fortunes of cities have changed,
drawing younger professionals back
to an urban life, and in part because
public housing authorities can
exercise full control in choosing
who can live in their units. Instead
of segregating by class, the neighborhoods
where Hope VI projects are located
may be growing more economically
and ethnically diverse than they
have ever been. In Chicago, Henry
Horner Homes, formerly seven high-rise
buildings, has been recently rebuilt
by CHA into 764 units of three-story
walk-ups and town-homes. In six-unit
buildings in this project, CHA
houses two welfare-dependent families,
two households whose earnings place
them at 80 percent of Chicago's
median, and two who rent at going
market rates. CHA will maintain
these ratios as tenants change,
but the units are interchangeable-the
finishes, size, layout, and amenities
are the same in each, no matter
who rents it.
San Francisco's Projects
From October through December
2004, 229 families moved into the
newly opened apartments at North
Beach Place. Through early 2005
the residents will be joined by
another 112 families who qualify
for tax-credit-funded affordable
housing. A Trader Joe's grocery
store is now open on one ground-floor
corner. Tourists wait for the cable
car on Taylor Street, where a pedestrian
walkway connects the car's turnaround
point to Bay Street and Fisherman's
Wharf.
North Beach Place is San Francisco's
fourth Hope VI site. The San Francisco
Housing Authority completed the
project in partnership with Bridge
Housing and the John Stewart Company,
which now manages the housing.
I walked
around the project recently with
Rosemary Dudley, an urban planner
and designer who studied early
Hope VI projects in Boston. "Early
on, the guidelines set for the
program seemed to result often
in overly cute, peppy projects," Dudley
said. "It seemed that projects
were saying, 'Hey, don't I look
neighborly?' but they didn't have
any connection to the actual place
where the project was rooted."
The
completed North Beach Place is
obviously a new building, but
other than lack of wear it shows
no signs of what was once a highly
stigmatized place to call home.
Along Francisco Street, mature
street trees stand next to the
four-story building. We found small
stoops leading to front doors,
and while blinds on the first floor
were closed for privacy, plants,
doormats, and house slippers had
already collected outside some
front doors. Dudley pointed out
the basic elements that make the
building pleasant to walk alongside:
the low fences and stoops, modest
but unmistakable signs of transition
from the public to the private
realm; a pattern to the recessed
and outcropping portions of the
building's face to the street;
the fact that it stood taller and
complemented the surrounding buildings.
While a portion of the units open
directly onto the public streets,
most of the front doors open into
the private open space within the
project, accessible only to residents
through gates to the streets--a
common feature of Hope VI projects.
Within the development, residents
can look out their windows at the
landscaped park, where a sidewalk
loops past built-in chessboards
and playgrounds.
The project does not perform quite
as well along Bay Street: perhaps
the heavy traffic there convinced
the designers to adopt a protectionist
stance. Along the sidewalk, one
can peer through smoked glass into
what might be community rooms,
but that seem more like an afterthought.
A lone mature tree marks the gate
on that side; only a few more had
been planted during construction,
it appears. The cable car turnaround
and the Trader Joe's offer two
orientation points, but the building
does not draw the eye or walk the
body along.
The housing for senior citizens
along Columbus Street is one of
North Beach Place's most interesting
features. Painted bright yellow,
it has lattice details that mirror
an unattractive office building
across the street, but in a surprisingly
appealing way. In contrast to the
individual front doors of the family
housing, the seniors here use a
common entrance, which appears
to grant them a measure of security
and privacy. I noticed a lobby
through the front window where
people might sit to watch passersby.
It's hard to argue with a program
that knocks down dilapidated public
housing and builds modern buildings
in their stead. Indeed, in researching
this article it was difficult to
find any resident of the new housing,
or planner, developer, architect,
or elected official who didn't
express unqualified support for
the program, simply by comparing
new projects to their predecessors.
But as the experiment of Hope VI
got underway, the impact of relocating
people from their homes and neighborhoods
was deeply felt, which for some
echoed back to the displacement
ordered by the urban renewal programs
four decades earlier. Added to
this was the uncertainty of who
would be allowed to return, and
how many units would be available.
Relocation itself turned out to
be an experiment in economic integration,
for residents were given vouchers
that they could use in any urban
or suburban market in the region.
In one study reported by the Urban
Institute, rates of return varied
considerably, and in general fell
below 50 percent. But while some
residents who wished to return
were unable to because of the heightened
eligibility standards and the reduction
in units, the low rate of return
does not signify broad dissatisfaction
with the program: another study
showed that families used their
housing vouchers to move into better
neighborhoods, and as many as 40
percent had managed to move into
more-affluent areas.
According
to James Tracy, training institute
coordinator at San Francisco's
Community Housing Partnership,
only by organizing did North Beach
residents win a guarantee from
the San Francisco Housing Authority
and Bridge Housing that all of
the units would be replaced. In
fact, North Beach Place actually
added units, from 229 units in
the original project to 341 units
today. (At Plaza East in the Western
Addition, 276 high-rise units were
replaced by 193 townhouses and
flats; Hayes Valley saw 294 units
demolished and 193 rebuilt; Bernal
Dwellings replaced 208 units with
160.) "The success of Hope VI depends
on your standard," Tracy said. "For
the housing authority and developer,
once a new building is up, that
defines success. But from a standpoint
of community preservation, losing
units in the San Francisco housing
market is not a successful project."
San
Francisco's political commitment
to affordable housing meant that
Hope VI developers would not attempt
the same range of economic integration
as Chicago has. Instead, the projects
have been repopulated with families
living at or below area median
income levels. This move also reflects
the reality of steadily dropping
subsidies for very-low-income families:
the sources of financing have grown
more complex, and as new local,
state, and private sources are
tapped, eligibility is opened to
a different set of possible tenants
than the neediest families traditionally
served by public housing (of North
Beach Place's $105 million cost,
$23 million was from the Hope VI
grant). "In view of where HUD is
heading, we clearly worry that
the funds for very low-income families
are simply disappearing," said
Lydia Tan, Bridge Housing vice
president, . "But we also learned
from experience that projects where
all of the residents have very
low incomes is not a long-term
sustainable model."
Has
Hope VI contributed to gentrification?
The result, particularly in a tightly
constrained housing market like
San Francisco, where property values
in all neighborhoods tend to climb
over time, is unclear. But housing-authority
representatives tend to shake their
heads when accused of gentrification. "We
haven't made any bones about what
we're trying to do," says Chicago
Housing Authority Director of Development
Carl Byrd. "Yes, critics see a
loss of affordability and displacement,
but homeowners are seeing the value
of their homes increase three-
and four-fold because of the new
development. And in a community
that was neglected for a long time,
the new retail and other commercial
investment that's taking place
now wasn't going to happen but
for our investment."
Edward
Goetz, at the University of Minnesota,
finds the deconcentration-of-poverty
model incomplete. In the face of
continuing economic segregation
in nearly every regional housing
market, Goetz asserts that "[a]
more comprehensive policy to address
urban poverty ...would extend beyond
the relocation of assisted households
to address zoning and other regulatory
barriers erected by exclusive and
exclusionary communities."13
Sharen
Hewitt worked as a liaison between
the San Francisco Housing Authority
and public housing residents
as the relocation efforts began
for San Francisco's first Hope
VI projects. "The theoretical model
of providing people with services
to help them move toward self-sufficiency
was strong," Hewitt says. "But
it didn't work because of simple
things, like databases being lacking.
How could you help improve people's
status if you lost track of them?" Hewitt
also points out that except for
child care, the program's economic
development goals-where the program
held out hope that residents would
start small businesses in the neighborhoods
around their rebuilt homes--generally
did not come to fruition.
The
arguments for deconcentrating
poverty tend to downplay the role
of race. But critics contend that
the program, which dispersed overwhelmingly
African American public housing
residents, and implemented a rebuilding
process at the end of which return
rates for the original families
hover at fifty percent, echoes
the urban renewal that invaded
and dispersed black communities
fifty years ago. Public housing's
intersection with race-first excluding
minorities, then segregating them
from whites, next equalizing access
to facilities that had begun to
fall apart, and finally concentrating
and isolating them-is an issue
perhaps even more alive today.
Public housing under Hope VI is
consciously marketing itself as
reborn, and its remaking coincided
with America's urban renaissance
of the late 1990s. Affordable housing
experts worry about where the new
variables will lead, in concert
with rising land values and home
prices in the private housing market,
and the fact that given a choice
of where to live, most Americans
still segregate ourselves. In this
context, some experts believe that
the public commitment to housing
the most vulnerable-never strong
in the first place-has now evaporated
entirely.
The Future
of Hope VI and Urban Neighborhoods
The
question that nobody can yet
answer is whether these ideas
will endure, and what impact
they will have on people's lives.
While cautioning that steep barriers
remain firmly in place for the
poorest Americans, housing advocates
are cautiously endorsing Hope VI's
first decade. "Thus
far, research indicates that mixed-income
public-housing developments can be
successful in creating well-managed
communities that attract higher-income
tenants," the Urban Institute reported.
Enumerating and assessing the broad
community impacts that the program
aims for is a complex task, but
among the studies examined by the
Urban Institute, it is already
clear that projects around the
country have leveraged the investment
to catalyze new parks, libraries,
and police stations, as well as
banks, restaurants, and supermarkets.
Other research reveals improvements
in the quality of life in neighborhoods
where Hope VI projects have been
built, including per-capita income
increases, drops in unemployment
and crime, and downward shifts
in the concentration of poverty.
Economic indicators, such as rates
of lending and mortgage originations,
have been shown to rise.14
"It's way too early to tell whether these changes will
be a success," said CHA's Byrd. "The proof won't
be seen until we know how kids do who are now growing
up in these communities."
In
San Francisco, Valencia Gardens is likely
the last Hope VI grant the City
will receive. Hope VI received $143 million
for the 2005-2006 fiscal year, down from
original annual appropriations of about $500 million,
and grant eligibility has been broadened to include
small- and medium-sized cities. The Bush Administration's
recently released budget proposes eliminating the program
altogether, as it did in 2003 and 2004. Greg Fortner,
executive director of the San Francisco Housing Authority,
wants to keep the program's ideas alive in other ways.
In 2003 the Housing Authority issued a request for
qualifications (RFQ) asking developers to examine the
feasibility of building on any of their remaining 18
properties. The RFQ was rooted in the notions now familiar
in Hope VI projects-they could contain public and non-public
housing, be built in partnership with for- or non-profit
developers, increase density, and be managed by third
parties-but he perhaps underestimated the hair-trigger
sensitivity of San Francisco's neighborhoods. A small
storm of accusations that he was seeking to gentrify
public housing ensued, and Fortner backed down. But
he still hopes to find ways to rebuild San Francisco's
last deteriorated projects. Fortner firmly believes
that Hope VI has wrought dramatic change: "You improve
the human condition when you improve the home that
people live in. You also improve the human condition
when you improve the surrounding neighborhood conditions.
It can't do anything but help."
Rachel Peterson is a law
student at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law,
and writes about urban planning issues. She
is the former executive director of Urban Ecology.
Notes:
1 Dan Solomon reenacts the story of the bumpy collaboration
between Congress for the New Urbanism and HUD in
Global City Blues, Island Press, 2003.
2 "Affordable Housing: Designing an American Asset" exhibit,
National Building Museum in Washington D.C, 2004.
Available at http://www.nbm.org/Exhibits/
current/Affordable_Housing.html.
3"The Pruitt-Igoe Myth." Katharine
G. Bristol, Journal of Architectural Education,
May 1991.
4 A Citizen's Guide to Public Housing. Catherine
Bauer. Vassar College, 1940.
5 "Rethinking Public Housing," Robert
Fishman, Places.
6 Defensible Space: Crime
Prevention Through Urban Design, pp. 131-135. Oscar
Newman, 1972.
7 Fishman, op. cit.
8 "Interim Assessment of the Hope VI Program Cross-Site
Report," HUD 2003. Cited in A Decade of Hope VI:
Research Findings and Policy Challenges, p. 20. Urban
Institute, 2004.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 21.
11 Ibid., p. 49.
12 Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in
Urban America. Edward J. Goetz, Island Press, 2003.
13 Ibid.
14 A range of studies
of the impact of Hope VI is cited in A Decade of
Hope VI, pp. 41-46. Urban Institute,
2004.
