Special Report Contents

The Drive to End Chronic Homelessness Reconstructing the "Projects" Affordable Rental Housing: The Sometimes Unwanted Neighbor "Top Down" vs. "Bottom-Up" Community Revitalization Casualties in the Drive for Homeownership The Federal Housing and Community Development Budget Key Organizations

A significant shift in how the nation provides housing for its lowest-income families is also under way. It began in the early 1990s when the federal HOPE VI program was launched to address the terrible conditions and gang violence plaguing many big city public housing "projects." Research by University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson and others led to the common conclusion that concentrated poverty bred crime and locked people into generational poverty. Under HOPE VI, the public housing authorities that own and operate public housing began to tear down their high-rises and barracks-like complexes and build lower-density mixed-income communities. New neighborhoods were designed to look more like traditional urban villages with smaller scale housing, and to connect to the neighborhoods around them. From Despair to Hope: Hope VI and the Transformation of America's Public Housing, an upcoming book from the Brookings Institution, concludes that, to date, the program has invested $6.1 billion in federal grants into 235 neighborhoods to provide 107,800 new and renovated housing units, roughly half or more of them affordable to low-income families. Crime has gone down and new investment is coming into many of these neighborhoods. By eliminating the blight of distressed public housing, HOPE VI is credited with contributing to the comeback of central cities.

The program has not been without controversy. Creating lower-density mixed-income communities meant there was less housing on site for the very poor households that public housing mostly serves -- those making less than 30 percent of the area median income. Families were relocated to other public housing projects or received federal Section 8 rental vouchers to obtain housing in the private market. While Urban Institute researchers have found that most displaced families are in much better housing in much safer neighborhoods, they have not become appreciably more self-sufficient. And the most troubled families -- with multiple barriers to employment or stable housing, such as mental health problems or substance abuse -- are not better off.

Although funding for HOPE VI has dwindled in recent years, the shift away from traditional isolated public housing "projects" continues. Faced with declining federal funds for public housing upkeep, more housing authorities are tapping other funds to demolish their "family" public housing complexes (those that serve families rather than exclusively seniors).  The authorities are either building new mixed-income communities with private sector involvement and new financing tools such as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (see "Affordable Rental Housing" below) or giving Section 8 vouchers to former public housing residents. In cities such as Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Oakland, Calif., San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis, much of the public housing stock is being changed this way.

Most observers seem to agree that the old model of public housing wasn't working. But in places such as New Orleans, fears that housing for the poor is being permanently reduced are generating active opposition. The replacement of traditional public housing complexes is also raising concerns about what happens to poor families who move away and how well they are equipped to succeed in their new neighborhoods. To observers, the isolated but headline-grabbing stories of crime spreading to other neighborhoods in cities such as Memphis reinforces the need for more comprehensive approaches to helping poor urban families.

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