Integrating the Inner City : The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation

"For many years Chicago's looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment--via the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation--has been perhaps the most startling change in the city's urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph's findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward"-- Provided by publisher This book examines the intent, implementation, and emerging outcomes of Chicago’s Plan for Transformation, the largest and most extensive effort in the country to deconcentrate poverty by redeveloping public housing. We explore one particular component of the broader Transformation—the development of new, mixed-income communities on the footprint of former public housing complexes. We focus on public housing reform as a mechanism of community revitalization and integration—an intentional effort, driven by public policy but relying to a large extent on market processes and operating through public-private partnerships, to reclaim and rebuild neighborhoods. Drawing on seven years of research focused on three of the new mixed-income developments, we examine the motivating assumptions, arguments, and interests that drive these efforts, the nature of the new communities being built, the strategies, mechanisms, and social processes that shape community dynamics in them, and the apparent benefits and costs to public housing residents and to the city. We find that while some of the concrete goals of the Transformation are being met—including significant improvements to the housing units and neighborhood environments in which public housing residents and their new neighbors live—the broader integrationist goals of the policy have failed to take hold. Rather than effectively integrating public housing residents into these new mixed-income contexts, the community dynamics emerging and mechanisms of control put in place are leading to what we describe as incorporated exclusion , in which physical integration reproduces marginalization and leads more to withdrawal and alienation than engagement and inclusion For many years Chicago's looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment-via the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation-has been perhaps the most startling change in the city's urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met.0They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph's findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward For many years Chicago's looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment - via the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation - has been perhaps the most startling change in the city's urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification?