MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Good housing design improves neighborhood quality as well as personal and family well-being, yet the physical form of housing for the poor (public housing) in the United States continues to be debated ad infinitum. Should public housing be different from other housing? With its HOPE VI program, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) appears to finally understand that housing for the less fortunate is as important as private market housing. With HOPE VI, HUD has been rebuilding and redesigning its problem-plagued developments to resemble private housing in the surrounding areas and giving residents better amenities.

Before HOPE VI, public housing were mostly either low-rise row houses or isolated blocks of high-rise apartment buildings, but with HOPE VI, this longstanding practice changed markedly. The dense concentrations of low and high-rise buildings on isolated properties are now eschewed in favor of housing integrated into their neighborhoods. Redevelopment targets sites with major physical defects (e.g. cracked walls, leaky roofs, unstable foundations, poor site design, obsolescence, poor construction, drab exterior, household size and bedroom configuration mismatch, no private outdoor space). Redeveloped sites now have single-family type housing, private street addresses, clearly-defined public and non-public outdoor spaces, and systems of streets that mimic the local street patterns.

In this presentation, research data from interviews conducted with residents and housing officials at three HOPE VI redeveloped sites in Camden, NJ will be presented. The findings indicate that the physical changes at these sites led to significant improvements in site and housing conditions and also contributed substantially to improving residents’ psycho-social, personal, and family well-being. However, as previously done, the overwhelming focus on physical design led to missed self-sufficiency goals. The presentation will focus primarily on physical design changes however and the impacts while highlighting pitfalls past and present.