Hope VI

Created by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and approved by the U.S. Congress on October 6, [Page 603]1992, as the Urban Revitalization and Demonstration Program, HOPE VI (Homeownership Opportunities for People Everywhere) sought to address the problem of the 86,000 units of big-city public housing deemed “severely distressed,” which in the 1990s threatened to drag many large urban housing authorities into bankruptcy. These distressed projects were huge high-rise and barracks-type complexes, notoriously class- and race-segregated behemoths such as Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe, and Boston's Columbia Point, often physically as well as socially isolated from the surrounding urban community.

The idea for HOPE VI sprang from the solution proposed for Boston's ailing housing authority and its notorious Columbia Point project, a housing project overlooking Boston Harbor in the shadow of the Kennedy Library. With the Boston Housing Authority in receivership in 1980, the private development firm of Corcoran, Mullins, Jennison, Inc., using special funding supplied by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for mixed-income projects, undertook to transform the giant Columbia Point into Harbor Point, a mixed-income development of subsidized lowincome units and moderate-income, market-rate units. Demolition of Columbia Point commenced in 1987.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, an increasingly politically conservative United States spurned conventional public housing. Between 1989 and 1991, Congressman Jack Kemp's National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing studied the nation's “severely distressed” public housing and the problems of high unemployment, social and physical isolation, and lack of opportunity plaguing those communities. Using the Columbia Point transformation as a model, the commission recommended a program that mixed subsidized, publicly owned housing and market-rate housing; increased funding for special services to spur tenant self-sufficiency; and used private and nonprofit partnerships to link the development with the broader urban community. The result was HOPE VI, which emphasized community building, wherein private developers, architects, tenants, and the larger urban neighborhood joined in turning once distressed public spaces into viable, opportunity-filled residential environments.

Approved by Congress in 1992, HUD's HOPE VI program had local housing authorities (LHAs) compete for grants that enabled them to demolish ill-maintained, barely livable projects (high rises in particular), reduce concentrations of poverty, and establish support services that enabled public housing residents to get and keep good jobs. Because HOPE VI involved private developers like Corcoran, Mullins, Jennison, it forged partnerships between LHAs and the private and nonprofit sector.

The administration of President Bill Clinton aggressively implemented HOPE VI. During the 1990s, HUD appropriated more than $500 million a year to HOPE VI projects; more than $600 million in fiscal year 1999. In time for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, HOPE VI transformed Atlanta's shabby New Deal-era Techwood Homes into a mixed-income showcase called Centennial Place. Baltimore's Lafayette Courts became Pleasant View Gardens; Seattle's Holly Park project became New Holly; and in Philadelphia, the Richard Allen Homes, 1930s red-and-yellow-brick superblocks, were reconfigured into mixed-income, mixed-tenure (that is, complexes that mix both renter- and owner-occupied units) row housing. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; El Paso, Texas; Gary, Indiana; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, all successfully competed for HOPE VI dollars.

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