Can Mixed-Income Housing Ameliorate Concentrated Poverty? The Significance of a Geographically Informed Sense of Community

Since the 1990s, public policymakers have renewed support for mixed-income housing development in low-income neighborhoods as a means toward neighborhood revitalization and poverty amelioration. Research to date finds that, while mixed-income developments in lower-income neighborhoods have promoted area revitalization, they have accomplished less for people in these areas who live in poverty. This article focuses on mixed-income projects that seek to de-concentrate poverty in impoverished, urban neighborhoods. It finds that, because these efforts are largely market-based approaches, they have paid less direct attention to the needs of lower-income residents. While this shortcoming may be attributed to structural barriers that prevent developers, housing authorities, and service providers from implementing effective practices, resource limitations can be offset by strong community-based participation. Drawing on this conclusion, it is suggested that community empowerment strategies should be implemented in tandem with mixed-income approaches in order to achieve positive outcomes for lower-income residents, but that reliance on place-based community will unlikely create the necessary conditions to improve the wealth and everyday quality of life issues that poor people face in a predominantly market-based economy. Thus, as a weapon of social exclusion, housing normally works extremely well. (Adams 1984, 519) Almost a quarter of a century ago, in his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers, John S. Adams discussed the geographic separation of race and class in American cities. His thesis: ‘To be poor is to be isolated’ (p. 519). Adams argued for the necessity of greater socioeconomic integration, but was not optimistic about overcoming the obstacles to create these integrated neighborhoods. Adams predicted that households with greater resources would continue to build new communities on the periphery of urban settlements as they were encroached by undesirable neighbors: ‘Inside every metro region, wealth constantly shifts from declining neighborhoods [often in the inner city] and towards fast growing locales, 2128 Mixed-income housing and poverty © 2008 The Authors Geography Compass 2/6 (2008): 2127–2144, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00175.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd usually in the suburban ring’ (p. 521). This outward movement reinforced wealthy households’ own class privileges and was quite effectively protected by zoning and price mechanisms. Changing this pattern of exclusivity seemed a daunting challenge. Nevertheless, only a decade later, there would be broad-based support for the federal government to begin investing over 6 billion dollars in mixed-income housing in the inner city (McCarty 2007). By the end of the 20th century, geographers Wyly and Hammel (1999) were describing the urban landscape of American cities as ‘Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal’, a reversal of Berry’s influential 1985 chapter titled ‘Islands of Renewal in Seas of Decay’. The authors attributed this change to a reformulation of government policies – a reformulation built on several precedents, as will be outlined below. In 1987, prominent Chicago sociologist, William Julius Wilson, published The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, where he forcefully articulated the individual, community, and societal problems associated with concentrated poverty. The National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing (NCSDPH; 1989) released a report calling for 86,000 public housing units to be replaced in downtown areas across the country. Changes in the structure of the urban housing market led to major increases in investment in the urban core, an area largely neglected since the out-migration of the 1950s ( J Smith 2000; Wyly and Hammel 2000). Consequently, a group of planners formed the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), which commanded attention for its advocacy of neotraditional neighborhoods which promised to reduce crime, increase economic vitality and employment opportunities, and reduce the harmful environmental impacts of suburban sprawl (Katz 1993). Federal policymakers embraced the sociological insights of Wilson’s work, the recommendations of the NCSDPH, the vision of new urban neighborhoods provided by CNU, and the new opportunities afforded by changing investment and settlement patterns in downtown neighborhoods. A new paradigm of revitalized, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods was to be a central goal of federal housing policy. From the early 1990s onward, mixed-income developments were regarded as the new solution to solve America’s urban housing crisis. This response was not unique to the United States. Over the past two decades, European and Oceanic countries have been shifting their housing policy to incorporate poverty dispersal strategies and mixed-income developments in the urban core (Kleinhans 2004; Wood 2003). While grounded in the particular US context of housing policy, and especially the federal HOPE VI program, this article will also draw on international studies of mixed-income and mixed-tenure developments. This article examines the extant literature on mixed-income housing programs that seek to draw higher socioeconomic status individuals/families into lower-income neighborhoods and public housing developments. We focus on the dual goals of mixed-income policies and programs, that is, to promote people