Public Housing Policy.

This article presents an overview of public housing in the United States. Public housing provides affordable rental housing for low-income families, elderly individuals, and person with disabilities. Despite the common perception of the decaying condition of public housing, most subsidized inner-city housing was relatively functional until the 1980s. Demolition and replacement of the most run down of the older units began in the early 1990s. The primary crisis in public housing increasingly involves the availability and affordability of old and new units as much as the adequacy of living conditions. Efforts to reform the public housing system under the 1992 HOPE VI program through the integration of public housing residents into mixed-income communities (largely based on the defensible space theory) saw more than two hundred revitalization grants awarded to more than one hundred housing authorities between 1993 and 2010. The beneficiaries of these reforms, however, have arguably been the more socially and economically advantaged households that were often least in need of access to public housing. In short, two distinctly different responses have emerged from efforts at public housing reform: one that emphasizes the integration of residents with other, more heterogeneous urban communities and another that emphasizes the social values that can be identified within public housing communities.