HOPE VI’s changing mission

HOPE VI began with a simple mission: razing public housing that was so rundown and unsafe that nobody could fathom restoring it to livability. Incorporating ideas from Henry Cisneros, Bruce Katz, Richard Baron, Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ray Gindroz, and others, a much more ambitious program gradually came into being. It combines these elements: • The housing mixes public housing tenants, moderately subsidized tenants, and market-rate residents. • Financing is drawn from a variety of sources (principally HUD funds, tax credits for low-income housing, and private investment), so that a range of prices and types of housing, including owner-occupied units, can be offered. • Traditional architecture and urbanism emphasize a network of streets, private yards that individual households can control, and porches and other elements that put “eyes on the street.” • Counseling, job preparation, improved schooling, and other services help poor families function better. Consultant Peter Smirniotopoulos argues that an approach of this sort, which engages the private sector and includes market-rate housing, ought to appeal even to a national administration run by conservative Republicans. It doesn’t seem to. In the winter 2003 issue of City Journal, conservative scholar Howard Husock, director of case studies at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, argues that public housing, even in its HOPE VI incarnation, remains mostly bad for cities because it freezes much urban real estate into a permanently low-valued form that is an economic drag. “Even in a Hope VI project widely regarded as successful—Chicago’s North Town Village—missed opportunities abound,” Husock writes. He argues that “by mandating that 79 of North Town Village’s 261 apartments rent to Housing Authority tenants and that another 39 rent for below-market rates, the city has greatly diminished the prices of other units in the buildings, and the property tax that the buildings generate.” Peter Holsten, who developed North Town on part of the site of the Cabrini-Green public housing project, is quoted by Husock as saying that “we could be selling condos here for $800,000” instead of the $425,000 that is now the highest price at the site northwest of the Loop. Rather than generating $2 million in property taxes, Holsten says the development could be paying over $4 million. It’s hard to dispute Husock’s argument that cities need revenue and new housing that appeals to the economy’s movers and shakers (unless you believe that central cities can subsist on aid from metropolitan, state, and federal governments—a strategy that many big-city officials pursued from the 1960s into the 1990s with disastrous results). Husock argues that cities would be stronger, and dysfunctional behavior would decrease, if public housing systems were gradually dismantled. His essay, “How Public Housing Harms Cities,” can be found at www.city-journal.org. On the moderate to liberal part of the political spectrum, HOPE VI has been seen as a pragmatic way of converting hellholes into decent environments. “This is not a consistent story,” says Bruce Katz of Brookings Institution, but “in general, you’ve got to say that this is one of the more successful reforms of the past decade.”