Framing the Urban: Struggles Over HOPE VI and New Urbanism in a Historic City

Abstract

Recent debate over the federal HOPE VI program has focused primarily on whether local applications have met administrative pledges to provide adequate affordable housing to displaced residents of newly demolished public-housing developments. In this research we take a different direction, examining local processes of political mobilization and strategic framing around a specific type of HOPE VI redevelopmentone that includes construction of a big-box superstore as part of proposed urban renewal. We argue that the HOPE VI program's formal alignment with New Urbanism created a political opportunity for competing actors to adopt and espouse selective new urbanist themes and imagery to construct and advance divergent visions of what urban space ought to be. Through these framing strategies and struggles, the developer, displaced residents, and opposition groups produced "the City" as a rhetorical object that each then used to advocate specific redevelopment proposals while de-legitimating competing claims. In this way, the HOPE VI program constitutes more than a new federal housing policy; it offers a new vocabulary for framing and mobilizing collective action in contemporary urban centers.

The emotions of racialization: examining the intersection of emotion, race, and landscape through public housing in the United States

“…Geographers and urban scholars recognize the role of discourse in ''shaping how inner-city problems are conceptualized and what solutions get implemented'' (Crump 2002, 585) and the ways that discourse constructs public housing in people's minds (Breitbart and Pader 1995;Elliott et al 2004;Reichl 1999;Smith 1998Smith , 2000Vale 1993). Geographers and urban scholars are also not blind to the role of emotion in the racialization of public housing and public housing's larger context, the inner-city ghetto.…”

Buildings as History: The Place of Collective Memory in the Study of Historic Preservation

“…Roughly 40 percent of the overall housing stock in New Orleans is historic, while 65–80 percent of the housing in the historic districts is historic (GNOCDC 2003). Given the city's economic reliance on heritage tourism and its desire to attract other industries, political and economic battles are often framed through their perceived impact on preservation issues, with “preservationists” typically viewed by others as “opposing progress” (Elliott et al 2004). However, the New Orleans reflected in my examples and analysis stems from data collected before Hurricane Katrina's devastating hit on the Gulf Coast in late August 2005.…”

“…Opponents of preservationism often claim that preservationists care about “buildings, not people,” and that they privilege protection of historic structures over the needs and rights of community residents (Elliott, Gotham, and Milligan 2004). Based on my study of the preservation community of New Orleans, Louisiana, it is more accurate to say that preservationists care about “buildings, not history” or, more precisely, about the histories of buildings over the histories of events and people.…”

Can Mixed‐Income Housing Ameliorate Concentrated Poverty? The Significance of a Geographically Informed Sense of Community

“…This lack of clarity allows for a reprioritization of program goals depending on who is sitting at the decision maker's table. Not surprisingly, there have been many documented cases where impoverished public housing residents have been excluded from having any real power in the decision-making process (Elliot et al 2004;False HOPE 2002;J Smith 2000). Instead, city power brokers have been largely in control of the HOPE VI redevelopment process (Bayor 2003;Keating 2000).…”