The 2006 4th National Public Housing Residents’ Summit
Part II: Social Justice Through Real Estate Development

On the second day of the summit, Assistant Commissioner of Baltimore Housing Rosa Diaz helped lead an audience of residents through a presentation on the process of redevelopment under Hope VI, a federal grant program began in 1999 that provides funds to redevelop aging assets in the Housing Authority’s portfolio. Following her presentation Michael Kelly the Executive Director of the Housing Authority of the District of Columbia gave a presentation on how D.C. had used Hope VI to change the shape of public housing in his district. Much of the presentation focused on the way in which New Urbanism, the architectural style predominantly used in Hope VI redevelopments, disguises public housing by creating neighborhoods that look as if they are composed of middle-class home owners; many of the homes are row houses or similar-density structures that resemble suburban homes, such as by having pitched roofs, individual lawns, and front entrances that do not reveal that the building is a shared apartment space.
As Mr. Kelly explained, in D.C. some public housing residents cannot get a cab driver to come to their homes because the drivers recognize the address as a public housing project. “And how do you change that? Having a lawyer living next door to a school teacher, a fireman living next door to a welfare recipient. So, when that phone rings, that cab driver doesn’t know if it’s a congressman or a welfare recipient. It’s economic integration. At the end of the day, you can’t tell who’s who or what’s what.”
Mr. Kelly then explained how the management of these developments has changed “from a situation controlled by and dependant on federal bureaucracy, to independence and entrepreneurial spirit – from a resident dependency, to resident self-sufficiency. From isolated projects, to being connected to the neighborhood. Going from an old-fashioned government mindset to a private mindset. Going from projects as venues of crime to healthy, positive housing projects.”
The presentation defined the measurement of the ‘health’ of an area of the city in terms of vacancy, housing price at sale, and the income of the residents in that area; Kelly noted, “we look at vacancies as the prime determinant of distress.”
In these terms Baltimore, with its huge numbers of vacant units (42,481, according the HABC, making it the city with the fourth-highest ratio of vacant units to occupied units in the country), is definably a sick body. However, it is important to realize that, as private developers are brought into the game of building public housing, the same vectors that create disease of ghettoized spaces are the ones that profit from curing it.
The bulk of the vacant units in the city are owned either by the city or by institutional investors, who employ a tactic called land banking. The strategy of land banking, as defined in a text of the same name, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is to buy up property as it becomes available, and to then withhold any investments from the site, while buying up any nearby property that also comes up for sale. As the presence of vacancies and of derelict buildings causes property values to drop, people tend to move out while they can still get a decent market price for their homes. Thus, an institution can buy up an entire area for relatively low sums, and then demolish and redevelop an area for a large scale project. At a later presentation at the summit, a city official joked that “the city of Baltimore is the largest slum landlord in the city of Baltimore.”
With this in mind, we asked Mr. Kelly to comment on the above analysis of how the city causes vacancies with the interest of profiting upon them. He explained, “that’s why Baltimore is in such a great position – they’re land banking to the benefit of the low-income community – you’re right on point. In D.C. the big issue is the university (George Washington) buys up everything, and so consequentially, there’s no opportunity. What we’re finding is – had we done the same thing that Baltimore has done, we’d have a lot more opportunity to get to the question of moving folks.”
Noting that, under Hope VI, Baltimore has demolished large-scale high-rises, comprising better than 800 apartment units to make room for low-rise, mixed-income communities that house less than 260 units, only 30% of which are ear-marked for use as public housing, a resident from southwest Baltimore (who did not wish her name reproduced) asked, “to have these units where its going to be a mixed-population – the thing that bothers me about that is […] according to federal law, they cannot do that – but if private funding is doing it – then they don’t have to put low-income housing in there. Low-income people need housing!” In this way, it could be argued that, rather than disguising public housing projects as middle class developments, housing authorities are working with private developers to literally make middle class developments within the city, while many former residents accept subsidy under section 8 vouchers and move to the county, rather than sitting on a waiting list to try and get a new unit in a new mixed-income development.
In response, Kelly charged that, “I can’t disagree with you more – the romanticism of the ghetto is a lie – it says that there was something magical and wonderful about the projects in the state that we’re talking about that are going through revitalization. Warehousing people for the sake of warehousing people because we have a need is a disservice to those people that you’re warehousing.” He later claimed that public housing was not disappearing, and that mixed-income communities did not necessarily mean that residents would be displaced from public housing. Yet, at a session on “Strategies for Preserving Public Housing in the New Millennium,” Fradique Rocha, of CVR Associates, a company that works to advise on affordable-housing projects, and Larry Loyd, Executive Director of the Housing Commission of Ann Arundel County stated several times that public housing was indeed disappearing as cities redeveloped their housing stock. A similar perspective was offered by Maryland House of Delegates representative Catherine Pugh as she noted feeling that in her years as a public servant she had seen public housing increasingly diminished. However, Fradique Rocha affirmed Mr. Kelly’s approach as the only viable course for affordable housing in that all other sources of funding are drying up.
Despites these statements about the benefits of private subsidy and the inadequacies of high-rise projects, Kelly framed a somewhat contradictory view in a private discussion after the presentation. When asked to define what specific problems Bauhaus and International Style architecture, which was favored in public housing during the 1950’s and the 1960’s in such high-rise projects as the Cabrini-Green and Pruit Igoe developments in Chicago, Mr. Kelly stated that the move to New Urbanism’s strategy of creating “defensible architecture” to fight high-rise sprawl was motivated by “two things: one, it was the, there’s nothing inherently wrong with [high-rises] – [there are] some very successful examples still in Europe, still in New York City and San Francisco. No, I think it was, on the government side of it, it was an effort to concentrate low income folks, not provide the requisite services for those folks, and the maladies around drug addiction, when crack cocaine kicked in, etc. without having the programming to respond to that, these sort of social crises, along with the deterioration of the school system and stuff around those Bauhaus architectures. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the architecture. But, first it was mismanaged in terms of the human infrastructure, and then, the whole years, the Reagan years, of no money for modernization, and it’s incredible blight, physical blight, that occurred from deferred maintenance as problems were coming up”
When asked if “this shift to provide development could be seen as some control mechanism through defensible space as a result, in many ways, of a lack of federal involvement,” Mr. Kelly agreed, replying, “that’s a very good point, I never thought about it in those terms – because the failures of that movement was to have the whole thing contingent on the whims of the political party in power – but when you have the private sector market forces and the private sector investment having an investment in the upkeep of the property – it’s a pretty good chance you’re hedging the bet that there will not be the same level of deterioration because there will be the private sector motivation to keep these places up, where in the 60’s and 70’s there wasn’t that motivation – there was just the opposite – it was sort of demolition by neglect.” Counter to this, he summed his practice as “social justice through real estate development.”
However, if the process involves the relocation of residents outside of public housing programs without any real change in their socio-economic condition, we might phrase the city’s current practice of urban renaissance to be ‘neglect through real estate gentrification,’ which, unfortunately, is part of the process of economic integration.