Description
Book SynopsisPublic housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impa
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"New Deal Ruinsprovides an extensivley researched accounting of how the public housing program has arrived at this point, and a necessary primer for understanding the program's current circumstances and rather dim prospects... And as with his previous books, Goetz's latest work belongs on the bookshelves of any scholar of U.S. low-income housing policy." — James Hanlon, J Hous and the Built Environ
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Public Housing and Urban Planning Orthodoxy
1. The Quiet Successes and Loud Failures of Public Housing
2. Dismantling Public Housing
3. Demolition in Chicago, New Orleans, and Atlanta
4. "Negro Removal" Revisited
5. The Fate of Displaced Persons and Families
6. Effects and Prospects in Revitalized Communities
Conclusion: The Future of Public Housing
Appendix
Notes
References
Index
