To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD

By SUDHIR VENKATESH
Published: July 25, 2008
NYT

..."In this new era, HUD’s each-city-is-a-separate-whole approach is not only too inflexible and short-sighted, it also hinders effective regional growth.
To see why, consider HUD’s most prominent urban development program: Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (VI)[ HOPE VI]. Introduced with much fanfare in 1993, HOPE helped municipal governments demolish dilapidated public housing projects and revitalize their inner cities. To receive program money, mayors agreed to move families from the projects to low-poverty neighborhoods and build mixed-income housing where the projects once stood.
Clinton administration officials were quick to credit HOPE for reducing inner-city poverty. Big city mayors loved it because it gave them license to raze unsightly projects and gentrify their downtowns. Attractive parks and revamped schools — entirely new communities, in essence — brought thousands of middle-class families back to the central city.
But a closer look reveals a more complicated story.
In large cities like Atlanta, Baltimore and Chicago, the program reshuffled project residents to outlying neighborhoods and struggling inner-ring suburbs whose mayors lack the experience and resources to help the incoming poor and stem rising crime and gang activity. More than 80 percent of the families who left Chicago’s demolished projects moved into equally poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.
Lawsuits have appeared every few years since the inception of the HOPE program, alleging that HUD used these funds to resegregate the poor, a violation of civil rights statutes.
A 1998 report from the Government Accountability Office also concluded that HUD oversight was lacking, and HOPE VI was giving greater weight to the interests of real estate developers. This raised widespread concern since private developers are less likely to build affordable housing or maintain usable public spaces.