Within the workshops of the summit, the ideal of the public, albeit subaltern, polis often seemed at conflict with the presupposed position of the presenters and organizers as subjects of individuated (though not necessarily unwarranted) veneration. By recurrently presenting certain figures, such as the persons responsible for planning the conference, as successful organizers, specifically for past actions, the summit subjected its attendees to a nostalgic image of individualistic achievement, while providing only the most vague descriptions of how to go about self-organizing a response to the problems faced by residents. It is worth recalling that this conference was not at all a self-organized venture, but a project undertaken by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City and several Resident Commissioners, who work closely with the city on a regular basis, and who receive reimbursement for this work.

Often, the concerns of residents, which included allegations of gross misconduct and illegal mismanagement on the part of Resident Advisory Boards, Resident Commissioners, Project Managers and Housing Authorities, suffered responses so vague that they only served to underline the inadequacy of the systems installed to ensure resident involvement in public housing policy-making under the 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which required that all public housing developments have at least one member on the board of commissioners for their Housing Authority.

Questions of misconduct would follow a general pathway of miscommunication and de facto evasion that can be characterized from exchanges in a workshop on “An Overview of Housing Authority Board of Commissioners.” The head presenter, Majorie Murphy, a Resident Commissioner from Trenton, NJ explained how she works with her residents to do “any long-term planning – if we’re going to put on a new roof – the residents are part of that process. They’re part of the process of putting out that bid. If we’re going to do a new playground, they’re part of the process of picking out what we want – they know what’s best for their kids, they know what’s best for their homes.” After this detail, a resident from New York raised her hand towards the presenting party and said, “that may happen where you live. That don’t happen where we live,” to which the presenter merely responded, “well, hopefully you can bring back some information that would allow it to happen.” Murphy was as dogged in her belief of the power of residents to define their own lives as she was strident in voicing it. She also had a habit of avoiding advice on legal routes of tackling mismanagement and of avoiding definite answers by using self-affirming phrases such as “well, personally, I wouldn’t want that,” when she did not have a knowledge of legal requirements.

Minutes after the presenter tried to move on, another resident, confused, asked, “are you saying that someone – a real resident could be on the real board of commissioners?”
To which the presenter responded, “by law, they’re supposed to be.”
“Well, we need to start doing that now.”
“By law you should be – you’re in violation of the law – that law was passed in 1998!”
“Well, it ain’t doing no good.”
Suchlike malfeasance and evidence of a systemic lack of understanding was commonplace. Mere minutes later another resident asked, “you mean to tell me that the B of C meets with the residents?
“Yes!”
“Oh no – we definitely don’t have that!” She followed, “are you allowed to ask them questions?”
“Yes baby, this is America! Of course!”
“Well, honey, I don’t live in America, then.”

The summit, as a whole, was a long chain of impasses such as this. As residents described illegal activity or professed a critical lack of knowledge, the typical responses involved redirecting the resident to the very institutions that were involved in creating their problems, or, failing that, the residents were given glib advice to protest or sign petitions to force the cooperation of said groups. When a local resident (who did not wish to be cited in print) alleged the manager of her facility (a HUD employee) had told residents that they would be evicted if they did not renew their leasing contract on “blank leases,” she was told to lodge a complaint with the manager. In fact, she claimed, when she had tried to tell residents not to sign the documents, the manager issued her a citation for “inciting the residents.”

In another presentation, the dialogue between the presenter proscribed a course of action to a resident complaining of a lack of security in her facility:
“Ok, one of things you may want to do is, in writing, ask that you have a residents on the advisory board as one of the members – then you know what [if that doesn’t work] – the city police department is responsible for the health and wellbeing of every resident in the town”
“Oh, for real?”
“YES!”
“They told us no.”
“By law, they are responsible for the health and wellbeing of every resident in their jurisdiction. Go to the police department and say what you need to say, do what you need to do.”
“They said we private because we public housing; they said that because we’re public housing we don’t get the same service as taxpayers”
To which the presenter said, “next question?”

If questions of legal recourse everyday experiences of misconduct were met with mild evasion and inefficacious advice to go to public portion meetings or to ‘protest,’ then questions of the corollaries of current policy outside of the legally-requisite (but often absent) realm of resident input met with redirection to electoral process; As one presenter rerouted a question on funding for security in a New Jersey senior housing project, “if you vote, be sure to vote fore people who are working for you – and you’ve got to get out – you can’t sit there and cry – and you’ve got to get out there – and, believe me, the only way to change it is to get people in there who know what it is like to need help.” while this certainly is a enfranchised agency available to residents, its inability to directly affecting policy decisions that shape the future of public housing and its inability to bring aid to immediate concerns make it seem altogether alienating.

Similarly, when a dreadfully concerned local resident asked, “what happens if you’re constantly demolishing for new sites when you’re already at 100% capacity,” Mr. Kelly directed her to worry more about her neck than her hair when the ax is swinging. “Listen,” he said, “your president doesn’t like public housing – let me wake you up – today the house took the president’s $0 for Hope VI and gave it a whole thirty million dollars, down from six-hundred million six years ago. This government wants guns instead of homes.”

This proposes a primary question of generative apparatus of policy-production. As one of the presenters began their session, they off-handedly attempted to outline the relationship of the client to the housing authority as one of a client to a service designed to meet their needs. Yet, in the course of planning, the needs of a city’s impoverished residents, such as large amounts of affordable housing and other forms of economic assistance, have, in the words of Evans Paul of the Baltimore Development Corporation, “limited potential for cities that are fighting to get new investment and to recover lost population.” This statement, it should be noted, again overlooks the role that the city of Baltimore has historically played in the increase of vacant units through land banking.

In many ways the presenters produced an image of the use of public housing that was transitory, or that should be, in that to be living in such a place implied dependency. One presentation was on a relatively new program known as QHWRA, or Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which, among other things, required that at least one resident from each community in a city be on the housing authority’s board of commissioners. In the presentation, this act was billed as having given residents the right to “set their own destiny” through family sufficiency programs, which help residents to “graduate” to becoming “home owners.” In this way, the process of living in public housing was implied to be a disciplinary measure; it might also be said that effectively, cities don’t like public housing, because it does not eliminate poverty, but rather makes the poverty inherent in many cities a visible aspect of the city’s skyline.

The handbook for commissioners, both resident and professional, outlines the duty of all those serving on the board to “make every effort to keep residents and the community informed. You release as much positive information as possible – you have to be as positive in what you do with the residents and with the community – you are an advocate for how good public housing is – and how special it is for us to have this bill that was started in 1937.” It seems that garrulous enunciation was just as much the duty of the summit itself – to reiterate the benefits of a system while neglecting to share what is truly worrying, in a way no different from the commissioner boards that I heard of so often from residents – those that never bothered to tell their residents that the city was planning to liquidate their homes until a legally-sacrosanct 90 day period required them to do so.