Abstract
Public housing redevelopment in the United States is virtually synonymous with the HOPE VI program, through which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has transformed over 250 housing projects into mixed-income communities. However, the overall the extent of public housing redevelopment has far exceeded the original mandate of HOPE VI due to the expansion of Demolition/Disposition activities facilitated by the program. The permissiveness of such activities has resulted in the replacement of housing projects with luxury condominiums, shopping and convention centers, and other land uses unrelated to affordable housing. In the process, over 210,000 housing units guaranteed to be affordable to low-income households have been removed from the country’s public housing inventory. This article investigates the foundations, the overall scope, and the characteristics of Demolition/Disposition activities beyond the purview of HOPE VI, and discusses their implications for the uncertain future of public housing in the U.S.
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Notes
The figure for the number of units slated for demolition derives from my analysis later in the article, and includes only those units associated with the HOPE VI revitalization grant program. HUD administered a separate HOPE VI demolition grant program from 1996 to 2003 (USDHUD 2007). These much smaller awards (averaging $1.37 million each) were for demolition purposes only, and did not by themselves finance the public housing redevelopment efforts for which HOPE VI is known, although some revitalization grant recipients also received demolition grants. All references in this article to HOPE VI refer specifically to the revitalization program.
As then HUD Secretary Cabrera (2007, p. 8) wrote in a statement to Congress on the continuation of HOPE VI in 2007, the program’s mission “was to bring down 100,000 non-viable public housing units and replace them with less dense, well constructed mixed-income units. That mission has been completed, at least in terms of funding, in FY 2003.” In spite of this, Congress has continued to fund the HOPE VI program through FY 2011. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has proposed replacing HOPE VI with a program called the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI). Modeled on HOPE VI, CNI expands grant eligibility beyond PHAs to include local governments and non-profit entities, funds revitalization activities in entire neighborhoods rather than just public housing sites, and focuses on education, transportation, and employment in addition to housing (USDHUD 2011e). Congress appropriated a combined $130 million for CNI in FY 2010 and FY 2011, and the Obama Administration has requested $250 million for FY 2012 (NLIHC 2011b). The HOPE VI program, on the other hand, will likely be terminated as of FY 2012, since funding for it has neither been requested by the President nor proposed by either branch of Congress.
The two most recent estimates of the current size of HUD’s public housing inventory suggest that the reduction may be as large as 250,000 units (Sard and Fischer 2008; USDHUD 2010). Due to ongoing removals and additions (mainly through the HOPE VI program), as well as incomplete reporting of both, it is not possible to arrive at a precise figure. In this article, I rely solely on verifiable inventory removals, and I take into account the estimated 56,800 new units added through HOPE VI, which includes units not yet built (USDHUD 2009). Thus, my calculation of HUD’s inventory reduction is more conservative than estimates derived from the two sources referred to above. Given unreported and pending Demolition/Disposition approvals, all figures I present regarding inventory reductions unrelated to HOPE VI are almost certainly underestimates.
For overviews of the existing HOPE VI literature, which is too extensive to enumerate here, see Abravanel et al. (2009), Goetz (2010), and Popkin et al. (2004). To date only one other study, by Sard and Fischer (2008), has utilized the HUD dataset on inventory removals that I analyze in this article. They do so in order to estimate the number of units HUD’s inventory, but they do not specifically investigate the expansion of Demolition/Disposition activities, nor do they attempt to distinguish between HOPE VI and non-HOPE VI public housing redevelopment. Similarly, while Goetz (2011) has given the most thorough scholarly treatment to date of the topic of Demolition/Disposition, this study also makes no distinction between it and HOPE VI redevelopment.
Both the steady erosion of affordable housing availability (due to a variety of factors including subsidy contract expirations), and the persistent shortage of federal housing assistance (as illustrated by extensive waiting lists) are well documented. See, for example, JCHS (2011), Rice and Sard (2009), and Schwartz (2010).
Although PHA application dates for inventory removal requests were indicated on reports through 2008, a single housing project may be associated with multiple applications if, as frequently happens, it is demolished in stages. It is likely for this reason that HUD no longer includes application dates in its inventory removal reports. Furthermore, the purpose of the report is to allow the more than 3,000 PHAs across the country that administer public housing to verify that HUD has an accurate summation of each PHA’s inventory removals. Thus, it is regularly updated not only with newly approved removals but also with older, already approved removals that were not included in previous reports.
Scattered-site housing refers to public housing that usually consists of 15 or fewer units (although some scattered sites may contain several dozen units) and, as the name implies, is “scattered” throughout a city. The construction or acquisition of such housing was fairly common in the 1970s and 1980s, as PHAs sought to provide housing options for its tenants in less impoverished neighborhoods (Hogan 1996).
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Hanlon, J. Beyond HOPE VI: Demolition/Disposition and the uncertain future of public housing in the U.S.. J Hous and the Built Environ 27, 373–388 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-011-9258-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-011-9258-1