After the 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 New Orleans, Boston, Tucson, and San Francisco implemented the federal government's HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, while also providing a national picture of this program. 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. 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 Ford 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