Public Housing Myths

Perception, Reality, and Social Policy

Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach, Lawrence J. Vale

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780801456251
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing.With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception. Contributors: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, New York Institute of Technology; Yonah Freemark, Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council; Alexander Gerould, San Francisco State University; Joseph Heathcott, The New School; D. Bradford Hunt, Roosevelt University; Nancy Kwak, University of California, San Diego; Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Fritz Umbach, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art; Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rhonda Y. Williams, Case Western Reserve University

NOTES

Introduction

1. Broadly, the literature on European social housing takes one of two approaches: the convergence school (emphasizing similarities in response to continent-wide developments) and the divergence school (emphasizing differences in welfare systems grounded in social and cultural heritages, particularly between the continental and Anglo-Saxon countries). For convergence, see Michael Harloe, The People’s Home?: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America, Studies in Urban and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995); Bill Edgar, Joe Doherty, and Henk Meert, Access to Housing: Homelessness and Vulnerability in Europe (Bristol: Policy Press, 2002); and Christine M. E. Whitehead and Kathleen Scanlon, Social Housing in Europe (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007). For divergence, see Jim Kemeny, The Myth of Home-Ownership: Private versus Public Choices in Housing Tenure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Jim Kemeny, From Public Housing to the Social Market: Rental Policy Strategies in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 1995).

2. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970); Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (May 1991); D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); William Peterman, “Public Housing Resident Management: A Good Idea Gone Wrong?,” Shelterforce, November/December 1993.

3. Monica Davey, “In a Soaring Homicide Rate, a Divide in Chicago,” New York Times, 2 January 2013; Susan J. Popkin, Michael J. Rich, Leah Hendey, Chris Hayes, and Joe Parilla, Public Housing Transformation and Crime: Making the Case for Responsible Relocation (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2012).

4. Chad Freidrichs, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, State Historical Society of Missouri/First Run Features, 2011.

5. Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934); H. Warren Dunham and Nathan D. Grundstein, “The Impact of a Confusion of Social Objectives on Public Housing: A Preliminary Analysis,” Marriage and Family Living 17, no. 2 (1955); Catherine Bauer, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” originally published 1957, repr. in Federal Housing Policy and Programs: Past and Present, ed. J. Paul Mitchell (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1985); John P. Catt, “Experts Critical of Public Housing,” New York Times, 20 July 1958; William Moore, Jr., The Vertical Ghetto: Everyday Life in an Urban Project (New York: Random House, 1969); David K. Shipler, “Troubles Beset Public Housing across Nation,” New York Times, 12 October 1969; Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls; George S. Sternlieb and Bernard P. Indik, The Ecology of Welfare: Housing and the Welfare Crisis in New York City (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1973); Rachel G. Bratt, “Public Housing: The Controversy and Contribution,” in Critical Perspectives on Housing, ed. Rachel G. Bratt, Chester W. Hartman, and Ann Meyerson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); William E. Schmidt, “Public Housing: For Workers or the Needy?,” New York Times, 17 April 1990; Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Michael H. Schill, “Distressed Public Housing: Where Do We Go from Here?,” University of Chicago Law Review 60, no. 2 (1993); A. Scott Henderson, “ ‘Tarred with the Exceptional Image’: Public Housing and Popular Discourse, 1950–1990,” American Studies 36, no. 1 (1995); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Bradford McKee, “Public Housing’s Last Hope,” Architecture 86, no. 8 (1997); Lewis H. Spence, “Rethinking the Social Role of Public Housing,” Housing Policy Debate 4, no. 3 (1998); John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Howard Husock, America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of American Housing Policy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

6. D. Bradford Hunt, “How Did Public Housing Survive the 1950s?,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 2 (2005); Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster; Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”; Edward G. Goetz, New Deal Ruins: The Dismantling of Public Housing in the U.S. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

7. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). For a discussion of Jacobs’s earlier writings, see Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch, Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009); and Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009); Bauer, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.”

8. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Collier Books, 1973); Oscar Newman, Community of Interest (New York: Doubleday, 1980); Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Karen A. Franck and Michael Mostoller, “From Courts to Open Space to Streets: Changes in the Site Design of U.S. Public Housing,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 12, no. 3 (1995).

9. Goetz, New Deal Ruins; Larry Keating, “Redeveloping Public Housing: Relearning Urban Renewal’s Immutable...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• I. Places
• II. Policy
• III. People
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Contributor Biographies
• Index