HOPE VI dispersals felt in greater Chicago
Households displaced from Chicago public housing by HOPE VI demolition-and-rebuilding projects are straining the Sec. 8 voucher markets and public services of outlying towns, per this report by the News-Gazette of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. You wonder if there's another side to the part of the story in which small-town officials view urban people from the projects as criminal. But otherwise, this looks like a serious effort to document what happens when a center city pushes its low-income residents toward the suburbs.
Actually it's interesting simply that in 2005 a Chicago-area newspaper has chosen to report in detail on a local HOPE VI aftermath, since in many other places public attention to the subject of displacement seems to be past its peak. In San Francisco, for example, there was reporting in 2001 on the former public housing residents who found they had to transfer their Sec. 8 vouchers to the suburbs. (SF competition for Sec. 8 apartments eased up a little after the dot-com bust, though it's still fierce by the standards of any inland city.) Similar concerns showed up in Florida in 2003 and in a critical 2002 report from the National Housing Law Project. You don't see those kinds of articles quite so often now.
Not that the subject has been completely dropped by any means. The Urban Institute has done a lot of "where are they now?" research, with some partly cheerful results and with new work appearing as recently as this summer. And a Google News search on the term "HOPE VI" brings up lots of recent articles. But the articles that mention HOPE VI in general-circulation papers mainly don't seem to be about where people go next when "the projects" are gone. That's becoming a subject for academics like the Urban Institute -- and of course for the displaced people themselves and for their new neighborhoods.
[UPDATE: Just this past Monday, the 8th Circuit federal appeals court sided with a St. Louis HOPE VI project against a tenant organization's claims that the displacement it caused was a disparate-impact violation of the the Fair Housing Act.]
Actually it's interesting simply that in 2005 a Chicago-area newspaper has chosen to report in detail on a local HOPE VI aftermath, since in many other places public attention to the subject of displacement seems to be past its peak. In San Francisco, for example, there was reporting in 2001 on the former public housing residents who found they had to transfer their Sec. 8 vouchers to the suburbs. (SF competition for Sec. 8 apartments eased up a little after the dot-com bust, though it's still fierce by the standards of any inland city.) Similar concerns showed up in Florida in 2003 and in a critical 2002 report from the National Housing Law Project. You don't see those kinds of articles quite so often now.
Not that the subject has been completely dropped by any means. The Urban Institute has done a lot of "where are they now?" research, with some partly cheerful results and with new work appearing as recently as this summer. And a Google News search on the term "HOPE VI" brings up lots of recent articles. But the articles that mention HOPE VI in general-circulation papers mainly don't seem to be about where people go next when "the projects" are gone. That's becoming a subject for academics like the Urban Institute -- and of course for the displaced people themselves and for their new neighborhoods.
[UPDATE: Just this past Monday, the 8th Circuit federal appeals court sided with a St. Louis HOPE VI project against a tenant organization's claims that the displacement it caused was a disparate-impact violation of the the Fair Housing Act.]
posted by Martha Bridegam at 2:03 PM
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