ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1980s, public housing was widely viewed as a failure, with high-rise projects in many cities having become emblematic of what Rebecca Blank has termed “the most destructive kind of poverty.”1 These communities were characterized by high rates of problems including crime, unemployment, high school dropout, and teen parenthood. Under the new approach embodied in the HOPE VI program, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) intended to address the concentration of troubled lowincome households in public housing by moving away from its reliance on project-based assistance and instead promoting the construction of mixedincome housing and greater reliance on housing subsidies. There was little solid evidence that these new policies would bring about the desired changes2 but rather a sense that a new, radical approach was the only way to address the problems of severely distressed public housing.3 Only now is evidence emerging about the impact of the dramatic shift in housing policy on developments, on neighborhoods, and, especially, on residents.4
