Success by Design: HOPE VI, New Urbanism, and the Neoliberal Transformation of Public Housing in the United States

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s over 200 public housing projects across the United States have been redeveloped through a Department of Housing and Urban Development program called HOPE VI. The objectives of HOPE VI, each of which bears the imprint of neoliberal urban policy, include: promoting ‘mixed-finance’ partnerships between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors; replacing housing projects with ‘mixed-income’ communities; and rebuilding those communities in ways that bear no resemblance to traditional public housing. In this paper I interrogate the means and motives of these objectives through the lens of a ‘successful’ HOPE VI site. My case study is Park DuValle in Louisville, Kentucky, which is widely regarded as one of the program's crowning achievements. This approach allows for a more precise explication of how HOPE VI is intended to work than existing research on the program provides, and in turn affords a clearer perspective on the underlying rationales for, and broader implications of, HOPE VI revitalization. A key component of Park DuValle's apparent success is its embrace of New Urbanism and the stark contrast to the architecture of public housing that this planning and design paradigm presents. The physical transformation effected through HOPE VI, as exemplified by Park DuValle, both enables and legitimates the program's mixed-finance and mixed-income objectives while eliding the costs of pursuing these objectives.