Scope Background Investigation

Posted onNovember 22, 2011 - 11:40 pm by Admin | 0 Comments

Public housing was first introduced during the Great Depression as a temporary tool for those people that needed help regaining economic stability. [i] Families who lived in public housing were predominately poor but working-class, “families who sought the American Dream and worked hard to attain it.” [ii] After the worst of the economic storm had passed, however, eligibility requirements for public housing became very restrictive. Rent-setting policies began discouraging residents from working and penalizing those whose incomes increased even slightly. [iii] The passage of a 1981 “one-for-one” rule requiring every public housing unit demolished to be replaced by a new development kept crumbing units from being torn down. Housing authorities—many of them very poorly run—could not afford to replace every unlivable unit, and so such units simply remained and continued to languish. [iv]

Throughout the 1980s urban middle class households, realizing that the urban landscape was becoming mired in a drug epidemic, left for the suburbs. Due to this middle class flight, the overall poverty rate for cities rose from 17.2 percent in 1980 to 19 percent in 1990. [v] Violent crime rose in sync with the increased drug traffic; in the city of Chicago alone, violent crime rose 173 percent from 1979 to 1989. [vi] In 1991 almost 20 percent of public housing households earned less than 10 percent of the local median income. In 1981, when the “one-for-one” rule was enacted, that number had been 2.5 percent. [vii]

Building Blocks of HOPE VI Legislation

As is clear from such dismal statistics, America needed “drastic change as a way to save public housing, which had reached rock bottom in the court of public opinion” by the early 1990s. [viii] HOPE VI grew out of not only the incredibly dire situation faced by public housing residents but also the assumption that “changing the physical environment of the poor is not enough, by itself, to accomplish fundamental change.” [ix]


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