After the Projects

America is in the midst of a rental housing affordability crisis. More than a quarter of those that rent their homes spend more than half of their income for housing, even as city leaders across the United States have been busily dismantling the nation's urban public housing projects.
In After the Projects, Lawrence Vale investigates the deeply-rooted spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment at a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with public housing residents, real estate developers, and community leaders, Vale analyzes the different ways in which four major American cities implemented the federal government's HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, while also providing a national picture of this program. Some cities attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, but other cities tried to serve as many low-income households as possible. Through examining the social, political, and economic forces that underlie housing displacement, Vale develops the novel concept of governance constellations. He shows how the stars align differently in each city, depending on community pressures that have evolved in response to each city's past struggles with urban renewal. This allows disparate key players to gain prominence when implementing HOPE VI redevelopment.
A much-needed comparative approach to the existing research on public housing, After the Projects shines a light on the broad variety of attitudes towards public housing redevelopment in American cities and identifies ways to achieve more equitable processes and outcomes for low-income Americans.

Lawrence J. Vale is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of MIT's Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI). Vale is the author or editor of ten previous books examining urban design, housing and planning, including four prize-winning volumes on American public housing, and the co-edited book The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster.

PART ONE: Developing, Redeveloping, and Governing Public Housing 1 Public Housing, Redevelopment, and the Governance of Poverty 2 After Urban Renewal: Building Governance Constellations
PART TWO: The Big Developer River Garden in New Orleans: Purging the Poorest and Satisfying the Developers 3 The Rise and Fall of St. Thomas 4 The Tortuous Road from St. Thomas to River Garden 5 Inhabiting and Inhibiting River Garden
PART THREE: Plebs Orchard Gardens in Boston: HOPE VI Without Hoping the Poor Will Leave 6 The Rise of Orchard Park 7 The Fall of Orchard Park, The Rise of Orchard Gardens
PART FOUR: Publica Major Tucson's Posadas Sentinel: Scattering the Barrio Without Purging the Poorest 8 The Rise of Urban Renewal and the Connie Chambers Project 9 The Fall of Connie Chambers and the Rise of Posadas Sentinel
PART FIVE: Nonprofitus San Francisco's North Beach Place: Resisting Gentrification by Replacing All Public Housing 10 The Rise and Fall of North Beach Place 11 Renewing North Beach Place 12 Life at North Beach Place: A Model for Other Places?
PART SIX: Cities of Stars 13 Housing the Poorest: Hoping for More
ENDNOTES INDEX