Public ownership and private profit in housing

2020

City & Community

Proponents of gentrification often use some rendition of a “rising tide lifts all boats” justification when assessing the impact that gentrification has on original residents in a gentrifying area. One of the benefits that is widely accepted by proponents and opponents of gentrification is that homeowners experience an increase in property values that can easily be transferred to family wealth or cash. Yet, there is virtually no research that provides an evidence base to support this seemingly direct relationship. Through a case study of prominent historically black neighborhoods in North Nashville, we find that the process of potential home equity realization for original homeowners in a gentrifying area is complicated by a variety of factors. We theorize that, in addition to class and socioeconomic phenomena, home buying in the context of gentrification operates much like reverse or inverted “blockbusting” during the era of urban renewal. These processes involve the creation of value out of the racialization of space whereby black homeowners and residents are incentivized and often forced to leave as a precursor to predominantly white populations entering. We comment on how these findings fit into the history of discriminatory and exploitative housing practices in the United States.

Section: Producing Segregated Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Raced–Space of Gentrification: “Reverse Blockbusting,” Home Selling, and Neighborhood Remake in North Nashville

Hightower

2020

City & Community

“…Instead, we take as our starting point the premise that HOPE VI and other comparable government programs that are rolled out in the name of mixed-income development cannot be afforded the luxury of unconsciously being taken as strategies to ameliorate poverty. An analysis of relations between subsidized HOPE VI residents and their neighbors may be more usefully thought about as colonial because mixed-income development inherently operates in the context of preexisting sociocultural meanings that tend toward hierarchically organizing people by class and housing status (Fraser, Oakley, and Bazuin 2012). Although the actual policy goals of building similar housing types for both lower-and higher-income people may be designed to conceal these 4 Urban Affairs Review XX(X) differences, it is naïve to suggest that people are not aware of where the homeowners reside and which units house subsidized renters (see M. L. Joseph 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More affluent residents of these developments often see their rights as superseding those of their neighbors who are lower income (Duke 2009). In part, this is reinforced by site managers and public housing authorities who remind subsidized renters that they occupy a liminal status in these communities and need to be working to move up and out of the development into private-sector housing (Fraser, Oakley, and Bazuin 2012). Yet, focusing solely on the immediate interactions between actors whose lives intersect in place without attending to the broader urban politics that organize colonial territorial relations misses the point that HOPE VI is founded upon the 8 Urban Affairs Review XX(X) marginalization and eviction of those of who experience persistent poverty under the banner of neighborhood transformation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

HOPE VI, Colonization, and the Production of Difference

Burns

Bazuin

et al. 2012

Urban Affairs Review

Between 1993 and 2010, the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program sought to transform public housing by demolishing large spatially concentrated developments and replacing them with mixed-income housing. Drawing on postcolonial geographical thought, this article interrogates HOPE VI as a colonial project. Through the displacement of public housing residents, the razing of the development in which they lived, and the rebuilding of mixed-income housing, including new public housing units, HOPE VI projects seek to revitalize neighborhoods by attracting higher-income homeowners to relocate in these areas. Proponents of HOPE VI and other mixed-income housing strategies contend that socioeconomic mixing will provide a range of benefits for low-income residents in these environments. Yet, there is a growing body of research suggesting that income mixing itself can be a problem for public housing residents because the neighborhood social relations operate to marginalize them. Using a case study conducted in a midsized southern city, we build on this prior work by examining the sociospatial narratives that neighbors surrounding the HOPE VI site use to identify themselves. The article focuses on how new homeowners, residing at VANDERBILT UNIV LIBRARY on November 29, 2012 uar.sagepub.com Downloaded from 2 Urban Affairs Review XX(X) in a self-contained development right across the street from a HOPE VI site, construct themselves as a community by situating public housing residents as their other. We conclude that these sociospatial distinctions are integral to the broader, state-led effort to colonize and transform this low-income neighborhood situated next to the downtown business district.

“…The Housing Act of 1949 authorized building more public housing to revive the stalled program (Goetz 2003), but implementing the three Titles of the Act in tandem had contradictory effects (Oakley and Burchfield 2009). While the Federal Housing Administration's expanded mortgage-insurance program under Title I fueled flight to the suburbs, yielding rapid suburbanization and further divestment in the urban core (Fraser et al 2012), discriminatory lending practices meant Black and other minority inner-city households could not purchase a suburban home (Massey and Denton 1993). Urban renewal efforts led to razing entire neighborhoods, displacing minority families and shrinking the supply of affordable housing (Teaford 2000).…”

Section: Public Housing's Emergence Desertion and Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proposals to provide government-sponsored housing affordable for low-income households-particularly in cities-date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Fraser et al 2012). The Great Depression hastened the creation of traditional public housing.…”

Section: Public Housing's Emergence Desertion and Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

U.S. Public–Housing Transformations and the Housing Publics Lost in Transition

Oakley

2016

City & Community

For several decades now an era of dismantling traditional, place‐based public housing developments has emerged. Our essay draws upon sociological and geographical thought to argue for a more critical understanding of this process which welcomed in the expansion of government policies to build public–private mixed‐income housing developments as a way to improve the lives of impoverished public housing households. Yet, only a modest portion of the original residents forced to relocate have actually benefited from these redevelopments. We document how public housing in the United States has always been approached by the State and private market interests with apprehension. The primary purpose is to provide a diagnostic perspective focusing on the promise of mixed‐income policies to provide its stated opportunities and what got lost in transition. Urban scholars have critiqued the transformation of public housing developments as being constitutive of neoliberal urbanism and the privatization of the commons. However, equally important is a broader understanding of how the neoliberal project has been underwritten by mainstream social norms and assumptions about poverty and income mix, as well as the edict that the private market could adequately “fix” the social problems associated with traditional public housing.