Harry Moroz

The New Housing Paradigm: Choice Over Hope

Last week, the House held a hearing on the Obama administration’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. CNI is an expansion of the HOPE VI program for revitalizing public housing that makes a broader range of housing types eligible for redevelopment and seeks to tie service provision, particularly quality schools, to this redevelopment. Along with its Sustainable Communities Initiative, CNI is one of several examples of the administration’s attempts to break down barriers between policy silos to address problems – such as distressed neighborhoods – with a more holistic policy approach. As Secretary Donovan said at the hearing:

[I]f seventeen years of HOPE VI has taught us anything, it’s that building communities in a more integrated and inclusive way isn’t separate from advancing social and economic justice and the promise of America – it’s absolutely essential to it.

Yet, this very comprehensive approach also opens CNI to charges of perpetuating some of the failures of HOPE VI. According to Edward Goetz of the University of Minnesota:

The potential of [Choice Neighborhoods] to lead to a repetition of this pattern in which functioning communities are unnecessarily eliminated in favor of a demolition approach calculated to produce the greatest amount of neighborhood change is, I believe, great.

Sheila Crowley of the National Low Income Housing Coalition was more strident:

[Choice Neighborhoods] is a new HUD program that will have little or no impact on the millions of extremely low income people for whom housing affordability and stability are still out of reach. The number of neighborhoods that can be transformed is very small (five at the most?) at the level of funding that the Administration is proposing.

While criticisms of CNI might fall into the “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” category, they also point out the significant challenges that arise when trying to coordinate housing policy with service delivery. Lots and lots of ducks need to be in a row in order for such programs to succeed – revitalized housing must be provided where community groups are also present and capable of providing educational services to students and their families in addition to other services, from elderly care to health assistance – so the administration has chosen to link provision of CNI funds to a neighborhood’s long-term “viability.” This means that the initiative will favor neighborhoods with or close to anchor institutions and probably, as Crowley pointed out in her testimony, gentrifying areas. This is a classic policy problem in which places that are already “improving” attract attention for the very reason that they are improving.

CNI is not the only game in town for the provision of affordable housing and it is a relatively modest investment ($250 million). But the most worrisome aspect of the criticisms of CNI is that they are very similar to those leveled against HOPE VI, the program CNI is designed to improve.

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Posted at 4:02 PM, Mar 22, 2010 in
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