An examination of America's housing crisis by the leading progressive housing activists in the country.

South End Community Development Inc. was a new idea when Whittlesey accepted its directorship. He worked with the United South End Settlements staff on a successful proposal to rehabilitate South End houses in one of Bostons urban renewal areas. They received a grant from the US Federal Housing and Home Agencies for $205,000 matched with a contribution of $50,000 from the United South End Settlements and $75,000 from the Committee of the Permanent Charity Fund, now known as the Boston Foundation. This book tells the story of the completion of that Demonstration Program, of its transformation into a technical assistance corporation, and its expansion into the Greater Boston area. Convinced that financing was key for successful affordable housing ventures, Whittlesey accepted the directorship of the Boston Housing Partnership (BHP). BHP organized the projects, raised financing for them, and had local community development corporations own and operate them. BHP became a model for the nation. Conducting a national survey and identifying the presence of significant housing organizations around the country, Whittlesey then left BHP to head up the organization of a national association of housing partnerships, now known as the Housing Partnership Network (HPN). With a hundred members, by 2014, HPN had collectively developed and preserved over three hundred thousand units of affordable rental housing and built, rehabilitated, or financed sixty-three thousand single-family homes.

How can we explain the persistent inability of the United States to meet the housing needs of a large portion of its people? What can we do about the problem? In this important new work leading progressive housing activists and thinkers examine the state of housing, the housed, and housing policy in the United States and then provide a comprehensive and detailed program for solving the problem, under the goal of a Right to Housing.

A richly illustrated history of below-market housing in New York, from the 1920s to today A colorful portrait of the people, places, and policies that have helped make New York City livable, Affordable Housing in New York is a comprehensive, authoritative, and richly illustrated history of the city's public and middle-income housing from the 1920s to today. Plans, models, archival photos, and newly commissioned portraits of buildings and tenants by sociologist and photographer David Schalliol put the efforts of the past century into context, and the book also looks ahead to future prospects for below-market subsidized housing. A dynamic account of an evolving city, Affordable Housing in New York is essential reading for understanding and advancing debates about how to enable future generations to call New York home.

Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

This publication examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists. It investigates the role of cultural practice in the organization of the public domain.

Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.

Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.