Ethnographic research has shown that public housing residents tend to develop important networks of solidarity and mutual aid that they want to maintain, not abandon. Surveys consistently show that most residents of public housing developments (many reject the word 'project' as stigmatizing) are satisfied overall with their homes, even as they demand solutions to pressing problems with maintenance and management. New York City's public housing has a 1 percent vacancy rate and more than 270,000 families waiting for a spot. Nearly all of the nation's more than 3,000 public housing authorities have waiting lists. Public housing residents want to escape it.įrom the nearly universally negative coverage of public housing, you'd never know that far more people are trying to get into it than leave it.

Let’s look at some of the major myths that stand in the way.ġ. And it has prevented a serious discussion of the real challenges public housing faces, while blocking any acknowledgment of its contribution to urban life. This has resulted in an oppressive stigma felt by some residents. Yet as scholars such as Lawrence Vale and Edward Goetz have shown, ever since public housing was created, there have been efforts to delegitimize it. And far from a relic, dependable and affordable public housing is more important now than ever if you work full time for the minimum wage in America, the number of states where you can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment on the private market is exactly zero. Researchers have consistently shown that the vast majority of the more than 2 million people who actually live in publicly owned rental housing don’t see it as a failure. Conservatives have always seen public housing as it was described in 1991 by Jack Kemp, then secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): as a “relic” that is “one of the world’s last socialistic schemes.”īut these are views from people who don’t live in public housing, and they fail to capture its diverse reality.

Liberals think it concentrates poverty and epitomizes top-down, bland urban planning. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

In Defense of Housing by David Madden