PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE UNITED STATES.

• Author: Vale, Lawrence

Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. He has taught in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning since 1988 and serves as the director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI). The Journal of International Affairs spoke to Dr. Vale about his work, the U.S. public housing story and outlook, and the lessons policymakers, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions, can learn.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): So, just to begin with, for any of our readers who are unfamiliar with you and your research, we would love for you to just give a debrief on what your area of study is at this point, and what led you to be passionate about this subject.

Lawrence Vale (LV): Well, the first thing I might say, and I don't know whether this will take us too far astray, but this is probably one of the stranger areas of work for someone with a doctorate in international relations to actually study because, well, a lot of my work has been focused on international comparative aspects of politics and the built environment. The most sustained part of my work has been on the history, politics, and design of public housing in the United States, both the long process of getting to the point of emphasizing public housing and the long struggle to build it, and then redevelop it when there are problems.

I can tell you how I got into this if that's perhaps most relevant. And the short answer to how someone with a doctorate in international relations got interested in public housing is that the public housing interest was there first. I grew up on the 11th floor of an apartment building in Chicago that was about a 15-minute walk from a lot of other high-rise buildings. These buildings happened to be the high-rise towers of Cabrini Green in Chicago that, at the time, and for decades thereafter, were among the most infamous places to live in the country. The contrasts were really stark and the question for me as a kid was, why is the apartment building where I'm growing up entirely safe, and the ones at Cabrini were places I was told I should never walk or drive by?

So, what specifically did it mean for me as a privileged white male that I had the option not to share some parts of a profoundly unequal neighborhood that was largely occupied by low-income black women and their families? And so how could one not be drawn to ponder that? Even when I was in high school, I was interested in both architecture and social science, and eventually, studied both separately in graduate school, following a degree in American Studies. My undergraduate thesis was about Chicago public housing, and essentially, I kept rewriting better versions of that for the next 40 years.

JIA: I know a lot of your research has been looking at what are essentially factors for success or failure in public housing. Before we even get into that, I want to frame this within a discussion of what does successful public housing look like? What purposes should it serve? And what role does it play within the broader urban environment?

LV: Well, I would say that the first thing that matters for success in public housing is that it becomes a source of stability and community for its residents. And stability means that the cost of one's housing which can be an overwhelmingly problematic challenge in many American cities. Stability enables people in precarious situations to focus on other aspects such as health, well-being, education, and work. So the first thing I would say is that public housing matters as an extension of the safety net and as an extension of what it can afford for people to do. I like to say that one should be asking what should affordable housing afford? And if public housing is to be valuable, whether in this country or really anywhere in the world, I think it has to afford not only the economic stability, but also environmental safety access to livelihoods, meaning where it's located, and what it's possible to do from their security--both physical security from violence and security of tenure, the sense that eviction is going to be unlikely.

Finally I would say public housing and other affordable housing ought to have some contribution to governance, self-governance. I mean some control over the management of one's lives and neighborhood, the sense that it is not something simply imposed upon you from outside. If it's affordable, if it supports livelihoods, if it's a conducive environment, if it's secure, and if it enables by sharing governance, then I think it can be successful.

JIA: And so what is stopping it from doing so? We can do this in the context of Reclaiming Public Housing, your book or just at large.

LV: I have looked at this over time from multiple angles. The Reclaiming Public Housing book was one of the first pair of books now 20 years ago that focused on Boston. I think it's important to step back and say what I was trying to do then, and then what I tried to do in the second pair of books that's more recent and more beyond Boston because they get at I think what you're getting at, which are why does this sometimes work? And why has it been so difficult? And I guess the first thing is that I thought I could answer that question by starting closer to the present time, and discovered in the first book called From the Puritans to the Projects that I actually needed a long prehistory to understand the struggle of what the role is for the government in supporting the needs of the least economically advantaged. That's not something that invented itself with public housing in the 1930s. You could in a city like Boston, go back to the 1630s and see that this was a struggle at a much more basic one for that. And to me, that really was what made the subject so interesting and so relevant for understanding American culture and American politics.

It had to do with which of the poor should the government support and for what reasons and how do we judge that? Who is the we that should be doing that judging? I looked at a long history of attempts to cope with the poorest of the poor, going back to the tradition of almshouses and workhouses. I also looked at the long history of reward systems for the upwardly mobile working class, the rewards that could be the Homestead Act in the 19th century or the provisions given to support home ownership in the 20th century in the tax code, and things like that. If you think of public housing as inheriting from both sides of that, the long arc for me was seeing that it was initially part of the reward system for figuring out who are the most deserving among the poor, the worthiest among the neediest. And then the struggle once it became clear that many more people needed this assistance and it had to become much more of a coping mechanism, an extension of the welfare state.

To get at the question of, what do you do about it? What happens next? This had a lot of people saying, oh, well, all you've done now is concentrate poverty, and so what's the solution to that? And what does it mean to accuse a community of being concentrated in poverty? How does that feel like from the community standpoint? What does it mean from a public policy standpoint? The books that I've done have come from both perspectives. The first one was an institutional look at what were people thinking when they put these kinds of programs into place? And the second was, what does it feel like from the...