Between the Idea and the Reality: Public Housing Reform and the Further Marginalization of the Poor

In “US Public Housing Transformations and the Housing Publics Lost in Transition,” Deirdre Oakley and James Fraser argue for a critical rethinking of contemporary housing policy and its reliance on the dominant sociological arguments that undergird it. The focus on addressing concentrated urban poverty, which has been the principal stated rationale driving public housing reform policies for the past two decades, Oakley and Fraser maintain, has contributed to a broader neoliberal project of urban reclamation and regeneration. This “state-led gentrification” has provided a rationale for the large-scale demolition of public housing and the turn to the market to address both the need for affordable housing and the redevelopment of inner-city, high-poverty neighborhoods. Lost in this transition is a focus on the urban poor themselves, except to the extent that reigning assumptions about them as “other”—detached from, and often in opposition to, mainstream society and its values, norms, and expectations—are reinforced. This orientation draws on enduring notions of a “culture of poverty” and the role local environments characterized by severe deprivation play in generating and reproducing it. This is a caricature of the poor that masks their humanity and minimizes their voice, experience, and agency in the service of urban regeneration driven by profit motives and benefiting capital and the middle class at the expense of the poor.

Publication Date: 
2017
Volume: 
15
Issue: 
4
Journal Name: 
City and Community