From the Puritans to the Projects : Public Housing and Public Neighbors

From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years. First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects. Contents ......Page 10 Illustrations ......Page 12 Tables......Page 15 Introduction: The “Public” in Public Housing......Page 18 Public Housing as an American Problem......Page 23 Housing the Public Neighbor......Page 25 Public Housing in Boston......Page 26 I. The Prehistory of Public Housing......Page 34 1 Coping with the Poor: Techniques and Institutions......Page 36 The Moral Geography of Puritan Space......Page 38 New Institutions for Indoor Relief......Page 49 Tenement Reform......Page 72 Settlement Houses......Page 89 Ideal Tenement Districts......Page 106 2 Rewarding Upward Mobility: Public Lands, Private Houses, and New Communities......Page 109 Frontier Individualism on Public Lands......Page 110 Homesteads in the Boston Suburbs......Page 122 Residential Districts......Page 133 Communities by Design......Page 145 Public Neighborhoods without Public Neighbors......Page 174 II. Public Housing in Boston......Page 176 3 Building Selective Collectives, 1934–1954......Page 178 Boston’s Selective Collectives......Page 182 Public Works and Private Markets......Page 185 Public Housing as Slum Reform......Page 199 Public Housing as War Production (1940–1945)......Page 247 Public Housing as Veterans’ Assistance (1946–1954)......Page 253 The Authority Is Watching......Page 273 The Geopolitics of Public Housing......Page 284 Urban Renewal......Page 288 Rewarding the Elderly......Page 302 The Mechanisms of Patronage......Page 307 Racial Discrimination and the BHA......Page 318 Battles within the Bureaucracy......Page 342 The Decline and Fall of the BHA ......Page 349 The Receivership......Page 364 Four Redevelopment Efforts in the 1980s......Page 370 The Politics of Public Housing Preferences......Page 378 Getting Beyond Receivership......Page 382 Boston Public Housing in the 1990s......Page 386 Ideological Retrenchment......Page 398 From the Puritans to the Projects......Page 403 Notes......Page 412 Credits......Page 464 Index......Page 466 This title is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years. From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years. First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects Lawrence J. Vale. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [395]-448) And Index.