Public Housing

Broadly defined, public or subsidized housing is a federally funded effort to provide basic shelter and amenities for disadvantaged members of the population. It is a direct form of state intervention in which government housing authorities maintain property ownership and lease dwelling units to tenants at rates lower than the local private housing market.

In the United States, public housing grew out of public works programs initiated during the Great Depression as a way to strengthen the economy. In 1937, the Housing Act was established to clear rapidly expanding slums and stimulate the construction industry. As part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legislation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was created in 1965 as a cabinet-level agency to execute housing policy. Public housing was “established to provide decent and safe rental housing for eligible low-income families, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.” Though ostensibly, this provision seems like an incontrovertible social good, historically, the geography of public housing has [Page 2303]been much more complex. Public housing has proved to be a contested space articulating a highly uneven human geography deeply informed by race and class struggles. In particular, the specific location of public housing projects has tended to be an issue pitting the interests of government agencies, low-income tenants, and local private owners against one another. Historically, economic constraints and resistance from local community groups have forced public housing officials to place projects in urban areas near industrial zones, railroad tracks, and areas with high rates of crime and drug abuse, creating racially segregated ghettoes, an involutionary process of de jure segregation.

The complex of white high-rise buildings in the center of the photo is the William Green homes, known as the “Whites.” Completed in 1962, they were among the last of the 51 buildings that constituted the Cabrini-Green project. Most of the Cabrini-Green buildings were demolished amid controversy concerning the inclusion of mixed-income housing as part of redevelopment.

Source: Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record, HAER ILL, 16-CHIG, 148.

Guste New Homes Public Housing community, New Orleans, for seniors and mixed-income families, which was under construction prior to Hurricane Katrina

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In addition to the specific location of such housing, cost restrictions have tended to foster the construction of architecturally monotonous modern, high-rise towers, often labeled “the projects.” Sociologists have pointed to the palpable stigmatism associated with living in these emblematically dysfunctional areas. Though now largely considered anathema, the design of high-rise public housing projects often takes undue blame for the problems endemic to public housing. One iconic example perpetuating this notion is St. Louis's infamous Pruitt-Igoe project. Designed by the architect Minoru Yamasaki in 1951, it was demolished in

the 1970s by the federal government after it fell to disrepair and vagrancy. Critics of those emphasizing the centrality of poor architectural design suggest that the reasons for the demise of Pruitt-Igoe and projects like it are much more complex and socioeconomically informed. Another image of the failure of U.S. housing policy is the Chicago Housing Authority's Cabrini-Green housing project, most of which has been demolished and is being redeveloped. Cabrini-Green was popularly displayed on the 1970s sitcom Good Times. While putting forth a progressive social message in an aestheticized and distortedly large space, Good Times was paradoxically premised on a metanarrative of public housing or “the projects” as malfunctioning and as an object of ridicule. The weekly show functioned to normalize the living conditions within public housing while marginalizing that space and popularizing the notion that public housing was, indeed, a failed endeavor. With the global liberalization of economies from the 1970s onward, federal funding for public housing in many countries has dramatically decreased. Emphasis instead has turned to the creation of lower-density, mixed-income “projects” by public-private partnerships.

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