HOPE VI

Program History

In 1989, Congress created the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing to examine the significant social and physical problems in many U.S. public housing projects. The commission issued its report in 1992 and identified 86,000 units—6% of the public housing stock nationwide—as “severely distressed.”

This commission and its report led to congressional passage of the Urban Revitalization Demonstration (URD) program that later became HOPE VI. The program's main objectives, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are the improvement of living conditions for residents of public housing, physically transforming distressed public housing developments, and deconcentrating poverty. The program is a competitive grants program that targets the redevelopment of public housing projects characterized by one of the following: (a) families in distress (including low incomes and a low number with earned income), (b) high levels of crime, (c) management problems (including high vacancy and turnover rates), and (d) physical deterioration.

HOPE VI incorporates new urbanist design principles for all redevelopment projects. The attention to urban design is an attempt to create more inviting, walkable, and safe neighborhoods that would be more integrated into the surrounding communities, and it was a response to the widespread belief that some of the problems of U.S. public housing were a result of poor design.

Though the program emphasized modernization and rehabilitation when it was created, HOPE VI quickly evolved into a program that relied almost exclusively on demolition and complete redevelopment. Demolition efforts were constrained in the early years of the program by the requirement that public housing be replaced on a one-for-one basis. In 1995, Congress suspended the replacement requirement and permanently repealed it in 1998, allowing demolition to become the centerpiece of HOPE VI.

Another change in HOPE VI over time is the greater emphasis on generating spillover effects in the neighborhoods in which it operates. In 1995, HUD began to encourage the leveraging of private sector capital in HOPE VI projects. By fiscal year 2002, local housing authorities were required to demonstrate how their proposed HOPE VI redevelopment would spur additional public and private investment in the form of new or rehabilitated housing, commercial investment, new jobs, and improved public infrastructure. This led to more projects chosen in neighborhoods that were already experiencing improved conditions. Thirty percent of the grants in those years went to projects that were located in [Page 304]areas that had dropped at least ten percentage points in poverty during the 1990s.

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