Reclaiming Public Housing

Reclaiming Public Housing
Author: Lawrence J. Vale
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674008984

Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.

Purging the Poorest

Purging the Poorest
Author: Lawrence J. Vale
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 022601231X

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.” In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

Reclaiming Your Community

Reclaiming Your Community
Author: Majora Carter
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1523000309

Majora Carter shows how brain drain cripples low-status communities and maps out a development strategy focused on talent retention to help them break out of economic stagnation. "My musical, In the Heights, explores issues of community, gentrification, identity and home, and the question: Are happy endings only ones that involve getting out of your neighborhood to achieve your dreams? In her refreshing new book, Majora Carter writes about these issues with great insight and clarity, asking us to re-examine our notions of what community development is and how we invest in the futures of our hometowns. This is an exciting conversation worth joining.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda How can we solve the problem of persistent poverty in low-status communities? Majora Carter argues that these areas need a talent-retention strategy, just like the ones companies have. Retaining homegrown talent is a critical part of creating a strong local economy that can resist gentrification. But too many people born in low-status communities measure their success by how far away from them they can get. Carter, who could have been one of them, returned to the South Bronx and devised a development strategy rooted in the conviction that these communities have the resources within themselves to succeed. She advocates measures such as • Building mixed-income instead of exclusively low-income housing to create a diverse and robust economic ecosystem • Showing homeowners how to maximize the long-term value of their property so they won't succumb to quick-cash offers from speculators • Keeping people and dollars in the community by developing vibrant “third spaces”—restaurants, bookstores, and places like Carter's own Boogie Down Grind Cafe This is a profoundly personal book. Carter writes about her brother's murder, how turning a local dumping ground into an award-winning park opened her eyes to the hidden potential in her community, her struggles as a woman of color confronting the “male and pale” real estate and nonprofit establishments, and much more. It is a powerful rethinking of poverty, economic development, and the meaning of success.

Reclaiming the University for the Public Good

Reclaiming the University for the Public Good
Author: Malcolm Noble
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2019-12-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 303021625X

This book asks how we can reclaim the university for the public good. The editors and contributors argue that the sector is in crisis, accelerated by the passing of the UK Higher Education Research Act in 2017 and made visible during the University and College Union strikes in April 2018. In response to this, there are widespread demands to reclaim the university and protect education as a public good, using co-operative structures. Taking an interdisciplinary and social justice perspective, the editors and contributors offer concrete examples of alternative higher education: in doing so, analysing how the future of the university can be recovered. This intersectional volume discusses a broad range of approaches to higher education while disseminating new ideas. It will be of interest and value to those disenchanted with the current state of higher education in the UK and beyond, as well as activists and policy makers.

Where We Want to Live

Where We Want to Live
Author: Ryan Gravel
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1466890533

**Winner, Phillip D. Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment** **A Planetizen Top Planning Book for 2017** After decades of sprawl, many American city and suburban residents struggle with issues related to traffic (and its accompanying challenges for our health and productivity), divided neighborhoods, and a non-walkable life. Urban designer Ryan Gravel makes a case for how we can change this. Cities have the capacity to create a healthier, more satisfying way of life by remodeling and augmenting their infrastructure in ways that connect neighborhoods and communities. Gravel came up with a way to do just that in his hometown with the Atlanta Beltline project. It connects 40 diverse Atlanta neighborhoods to city schools, shopping districts, and public parks, and has already seen a huge payoff in real estate development and local business revenue. Similar projects are in the works around the country, from the Los Angeles River Revitalization and the Buffalo Bayou in Houston to the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis and the Underline in Miami. In Where We Want to Live, Gravel presents an exciting blueprint for revitalizing cities to make them places where we truly want to live.

Public Housing Myths

Public Housing Myths
Author: Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801456258

Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing. With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception.

Public Housing That Worked

Public Housing That Worked
Author: Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2014-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812201329

When it comes to large-scale public housing in the United States, the consensus for the past decades has been to let the wrecking balls fly. The demolition of infamous projects, such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and the towers of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, represents to most Americans the fate of all public housing. Yet one notable exception to this national tragedy remains. The New York City Housing Authority, America's largest public housing manager, still maintains over 400,000 tenants in its vast and well-run high-rise projects. While by no means utopian, New York City's public housing remains an acceptable and affordable option. The story of New York's success where so many other housing authorities faltered has been ignored for too long. Public Housing That Worked shows how New York's administrators, beginning in the 1930s, developed a rigorous system of public housing management that weathered a variety of social and political challenges. A key element in the long-term viability of New York's public housing has been the constant search for better methods in fields such as tenant selection, policing, renovation, community affairs, and landscape design. Nicholas Dagen Bloom presents the achievements that contradict the common wisdom that public housing projects are inherently unmanageable. By focusing on what worked, rather than on the conventional history of failure and blame, Bloom provides useful models for addressing the current crisis in affordable urban housing. Public Housing That Worked is essential reading for practitioners and scholars in the areas of public policy, urban history, planning, criminal justice, affordable housing management, social work, and urban affairs.

Reclaiming American Cities

Reclaiming American Cities
Author: Rutherford H. Platt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: City planning
ISBN: 9781625340498

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: A Train Journey into the Past and Future -- Part I: The Patrician Decades, 1900-1940 -- 1. American Cities in 1900: A Patchwork of Silk and Rags -- 2. Competing Visions in the Progressive Era -- Part II: The Technocrat Decades, 1945-1990 -- 3. The Central City Renewal Engine -- 4. The Suburban Sprawl Engine -- 5. Battling the Bulldozer: The Indiana Dunes and Other Sacred Places -- 6. Legacies of Sprawl: A Witch's Brew -- Part III: The (More) Humane Decades, 1990-Present -- 7. Replanting Urbanism in the 1990s: A Garden of Acronyms -- 8. New Age "Central Parks": Two Grand Slams and a Single -- 9. Reclaiming Urban Waterways: One Stream at a Time -- 10. Humane Urbanism at Ground Level -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Further Reading -- Index -- Back Cover

Housing in Developing Cities

Housing in Developing Cities
Author: Patrick Wakely
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351212370

Universally, the production, maintenance and management of housing have been, and continue to be, market-based activities. Nevertheless, since the mid-twentieth century virtually all governments, socialist and liberal alike, have perceived the need to intervene in urban housing markets in support of low-income households who are denied access to the established (private sector) housing market by their lack of financial resources. Housing in Developing Cities examines the range of strategic policy alternatives that have been employed by state housing agencies to this end. They range from public sector entry into the urban housing market through the direct construction of (‘conventional’) ‘public housing’ that is let or transferred to low-income beneficiaries at sub-market rates, to the provision of financial supports (subsidies) and non-financial incentives to private sector producers and consumers of urban housing, and to the administration of (‘non-conventional’) programmes of social, technical and legislative supports that enable the production, maintenance and management of socially acceptable housing at prices and costs that are affordable to low-income urban households and communities. It concludes with a brief review of the direction that public housing policies have been taking at the start of the 21st century and reflects on 'where next', making a distinction between ‘public housing’ and ‘social housing’ strategies and how they can be combined in a ‘partnership’ paradigm for the 21st century.