Targeted Programs: Housing, Homelessness, and Youth Training

Abstract

My first encounter with affordable housing was in my first job as a social worker at Head Start (a national early childhood education program for poor children) in Seattle. A few months into my new job, I was informed that we were establishing a fourth center in a new affordable housing development. The first time we visited the site I was surprised how far out of the city the development was. Our other three centers were in the middle of the city. The new center was different. The project was not public housing per se, but rather a private development financed by a mixture of tax credits, city and state funding, and forprofit investors, managed by a nonprofit. Within the complex the individual units were targeted to different income groups. We drove up through a relatively poor area and approached a security gate, which I think was supposed to make one think of an exclusive, suburban, gated community. The development had winding roads, like in the suburbs, but on a much smaller scale, without the trees or space separating the houses. Instead of single houses, there were small units of apartment buildings with each one having plastic veneer siding mimicking a New England country home. At the center of the complex stood the community building where we would run our preschool. You could see that the complex was striving for a sort of suburban aesthetic, but instead it looked more like the temporary dormitories my college built when student enrollment unexpectedly shot up. The first visits to our new center left an indelible mark, I think because of the strong disconnect between what the development was theoretically supposed to be, and strived to be, compared to how it actually looked.