Numbers don’t lie: HOPE VI has worked wonders

In Global City Blues, architect Daniel Solomon describes the federal HOPE VI program as a great achievement in housing policy. It reversed 50 years of warehousing the poor in squalor, in favor of “sensible, straightforward, sometimes even beautiful neighborhoods, the kind that used to be the basic fabric of American cities.” Yet as highly as new urbanists regard the program, it has always been underappreciated elsewhere.

Advocates for the poor often complain that HOPE VI tears down more public housing than it replaces. The Bush Administration, for its part, sees little benefit from redeveloping public housing — it slashed HOPE VI funding by two thirds in the current fiscal year and will probably eliminate the program entirely. Even the Clinton Administration, which created HOPE VI, barely seemed to notice what it had achieved.

Maybe now somebody will notice, because the evidence suggests that HOPE VI is succeeding beyond the hopes of supporters. A recent study by Sean Zielenbach of the Housing Research Foundation in Washington, DC, is comprehensive and breathtaking. Zielenbach used census tracts to examine substantially built HOPE VI projects and their surrounding neighborhoods. He compared these census tracts to other poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and to their cities as a whole. He set up criteria and studied every HOPE VI that met those criteria — so there was no cherry-picking of projects.

It turns out that prior to HOPE VI, neighborhoods surrounding public housing were basket cases even from the standpoint of all poverty-afflicted areas. Income in HOPE VI neighborhoods in 1990 was 59 percent below citywide averages and 17 percent below that of other high-poverty neighborhoods. From every standpoint — unemployment, percentage of households on public assistance, crime — public housing and their surrounding neighborhoods performed the worst of the worst.
A decade later and the situation is reversed

Now, census tracts with HOPE VI projects perform better in every category than all poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Income is now 9 percent higher in HOPE VI neighborhoods for example. The rising economy lifted all boats during the 1990s, but the tide was much higher in HOPE VI areas. Income rose 59 percent, versus 21 percent in all high-poverty neighborhoods and 12 percent in cities as a whole. Similarly dramatic numbers show up when you look at poverty rates, unemployment, percentage of residents on public assistance, and especially crime.

In 1990, the public housing tracts were shooting galleries. In 2000, the gaping chasm between crime rates in public housing census tracts and cities as a whole had narrowed from 141 percent to only 26 percent. And this change took place while citywide rates fell dramatically. The HOPE VI neighborhoods were substantially safer in 2000 than their cities were in 1990.

HOPE VI is living up to its name. Whereas neighborhoods around public housing were left for dead economically in 1990, a decade later there is considerable hope for investment. In Milwaukee, Zielenbach reports, the HOPE VI Hillside project helped usher in the fashionable new Beerline neighborhood and paved the way for demolition of a freeway section, which will catalyze still more investment. “The city could never have brought down the freeway spur if people thought of Hillside Terrace as a pathological threat,” says former Milwaukee mayor and CNU head John Norquist.

As Norquist succinctly notes, “It’s reached a point where public housing adds value to the communities around it.” That certainly wasn’t true in 1990, and it’s an achievement due entirely to HOPE VI and the program’s architects. Regardless of whether the program itself can be saved, its success is a victory of common sense and of principles of urban design (as well as better community policing, tenant management, and the virtues of mixed-income neighborhoods). This victory is bound to have repercussions far into the future. As they say, numbers don’t lie.

The study, “Assessing Economic Change in HOPE VI Neighborhoods,” appeared in Housing Policy Debate, Volume 14, Issue 4.