Few policy debates have launched greater scholarly inquiry than discussions of the so-called “underclass” in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning in the Reagan administration, conservatives such as political scientist Charles Murray (1984) condemned what they saw as the adverse effects of the liberal welfare state (see also Mead, 1986). Programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and public housing, in their view, rewarded poor people for bad behavior, and scholars like Murray catalogued a long list of consequences that had allegedly resulted from the liberal safety net, including laziness, promiscuity, and crime. Although individuals ultimately made choices about right and wrong, conservative critics claimed that the very programs meant to help low income Americans had ironically trapped them in a nearly inescapable cycle of poverty. Public housing, for example, segregated residents from jobs and possible middle-class role models, while AFDC allegedly encouraged single-mothers to have more children. These conservative critiques helped tip public opinion against support for liberal welfare policies in the 1990s and ultimately led to bipartisan efforts to reform them. In 1996, President Bill Clinton announced the end of the “era of big government” and signed bills that eliminated AFDC and destroyed some of the nation’s largest housing projects.

These debates inspired numerous books from sociologists, geographers, and historians, including Amy Howard’s recent work More Than Shelter: Activism and Community in San Francisco’s Public Housing. Since the 1990s scholars have drawn a couple of important overlapping conclusions specifically about the history of public housing in the United States (see for example, Bloom, 2008; Venkatesh, 2000; Williams, 2004). First, voters and political leaders have exaggerated the “failures” of the programs, overlooking the range of kinds of public housing and the varied experiences of people who lived there. Although the problems of places like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green drew national condemnation, cities like New York ran functional projects into the 1990s and drew less attention. In many cases, the destruction of public housing in Chicago and elsewhere merely displaced poor people and eased redevelopers’ efforts to gentrify neighborhoods. Second, scholars of welfare assistance need to privilege the voices of the people who most used the safety net before they can label any program a “disaster.” Recent studies of public housing that have focused on low income tenants have not only challenged stereotypes of poor people as lazy, criminal, and promiscuous, they have also proven that many residents opposed the destruction of their homes. Painfully aware of the many problems facing public housing, low-income tenants have frequently been the most ardent advocates for reform. Rather than tearing down buildings, they have often called for better funding, policing, and management of projects.

Howard draws on some of the best parts of this literature to tell the history of San Francisco’s public housing from the New Deal to the New Millennium. She creatively frames her narrative as a series of competing visions of “community,” using the lives of low-income residents to draw conclusions about the successes and failures of public housing. Government officials in San Francisco have frequently seen housing programs as tools for eliminating “blight” and “slums.” First during the New Deal and again in the late twentieth century, the policymakers and administrators in More Than Shelter paid little interest to the views of low-income residents. Instead, they often built projects that they hoped would sanitize the city and improve the behavior of the poor. Howard contrasts this vision with the views of public housing residents. She argues that these tenants developed what she calls “affective activism,” or engagement “focused on intentional relationships and community building to fortify residents in the face of shared challenges” (pages xii-xiii). At times, tenants’ visions of community helped them work with administrators. But in other circumstances, their needs and desires clashed with those of government authorities. Most notably, public housing tenants used their personal connections with one another to resist the redevelopment plans of the 1990s and early 2000s. Since residents pushed for many reforms that went unheeded by city officials, Howard argues that San Francisco’s recent attempts to replace projects with “mixed income” developments have at best produced mixed results. By highlighting the experiences of the people who lost their homes in the redevelopment process, she convincingly explains that the elimination of public housing most often hurt the residents it was allegedly meant to help.

In order to explain the differing visions of community in her account, Howard has organized More Than Shelter into two distinct parts. First, she lays out the history of the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA). She uses one chapter to chart the agency’s history from New Deal Liberalism to the Neoliberalism of the Clinton and Bush administrations. Begun in the Great Depression, the SFHA mixed a desire to eradicate urban slums with a paternalistic mission to reform the lives of former slum-dwellers. From the 1930s through the 1950s, San Francisco housing officials offered tenants clean places to live with running water and electricity. At the same time, they screened would-be residents based on their marital status, employment history, and credit standing. Led by Executive Director John Beard, the SFHA reinforced segregation by enforcing a “whites only” policy in many of its projects and imposed middle-class ideas about marriage and respectability on its tenants. Beginning in the 1960s, the agency became at once more democratic and inept. Tenant organizations and civil rights groups in this period challenged many of the SFHA’s policies restricting entry to housing based on race and marital status. At the same time, the federal government’s economic commitment to public housing dwindled, and in an era of scarcer resources, many of Beard’s successors, plundered the agency’s accounts for their own benefit. Howard, then, concludes the first chapter with the story of HOPE VI, the Clinton-era initiative that encouraged cities to tear down New Deal-era projects and replace them with “mixed income” developments. In one of the strongest points in the book, she underscores the parallels between the paternalism of early public housing advocates with the reformers of the late twentieth century. Intent upon reforming the poor, administrators under HOPE VI screened out would-be tenants for what they deemed “bad behavior” and built new projects without much concern for the needs of the people who would live in them.

Second, Howard uses three chapters to tell the history of public housing at the grassroots level in three different projects in San Francisco: Valencia Gardens in the Mission District, Chinatown’s Ping Yuen, and North Beach Place near the Waterfront. Central to these chapters is Howard’s notion of “affective activism.” In each chapter, she explores the day-to day-concerns of public housing residents that led them to work together to improve living conditions in their homes and neighborhoods. These bonds developed out of seemingly small issues like what kind of food to serve at a cookout or attempts to stop break-ins. At the end of each chapter, Howard concludes with the ways that these bonds helped tenants fight for better housing as city officials used HOPE VI funds to tear down their projects. In some cases, “affective” and formal activism led to the preservation of existing developments like Ping Yuen. In other cases, such as Valencia Gardens and North Beach Place, they failed to stop the wrecking ball. But Howard highlights the meaningful connections tenants made with one another in each chapter and argues that demolition did not merely destroy crime-ridden housing projects. It also uprooted the longstanding communities that residents had forged with one another at the grassroots level. Therefore, demolition incurred social costs that are difficult to find in a city budget.

Howard’s organization highlights one of the many strengths of her book. More Than Shelter provides a succinct overview of the history of public housing and privileges the voices of SFHA tenants. Howard clearly hopes to not only speak to historians but also policymakers interested in assessing the success of HOPE VI redevelopment projects. Her work provides scholars and public officials with a succinct overview of the history of San Francisco’s public housing, and offers them a number of thoughtful conclusions that might contribute to better initiatives in the future. At the time HOPE VI passed, federal policymakers at best assumed that public housing residents wanted redevelopment and at worst ignored the actual desires of many tenants to keep their complexes intact. Howard’s work, therefore, not only disrupts many stereotypes about public housing residents, but also casts doubt on the alleged successes of low-income housing in the HOPE VI era. While careful to acknowledge some of the improvements of new housing projects, Howard also draws readers’ attention to the sacrifices tenants made when they faced eviction. Because her book came out almost twenty years after the passage of HOPE VI in 1996, it offers one of the best analyses of how the law affected public housing residents. If policymakers and scholars think of public housing as “more than shelter,” then they can see that rebuilding projects requires more than merely thinking about bricks and mortar.

Howard’s notion of “affective activism,” moreover, will appeal to scholars in multiple fields interested in the intersections between formal political organizing and the routines of everyday life. She breaks apart neat binaries that separate personal and public experiences, since the relationships that residents made over barbecues and childcare, ultimately enabled them to fight the destruction of their homes in the 1990s and early 2000s. By highlighting the ways in which tenants defined “community” for themselves, Howard both explains the origins of resistance to redevelopment and broadens the definition of what constitutes “activism” to include a plethora or day-to-day interactions that helped neighbors become more engaged with one another. Since Howard frames the efforts of residents to overcome problems like crime as a kind of social action, her analysis potentially offers scholars in multiple fields a useful tool for describing activism in other kinds of places, including wealthier districts like Pacific Heights or the suburbs.

More Than Shelter offers a succinct overview of the history of public housing that academics and policymakers will find useful. Yet, it also leaves important questions unaddressed. Howard focuses on the specific question of how to build suitable housing for low-income San Franciscans, but she avoids larger concerns like the origins of inequality that create the need for public housing or the causes of the backlash against the safety net in the 1980s and 1990s. Scholars like Gail Radford (1997) have convincingly argued that the very split in the federal budget between first tier spending on “development” and a second tier “safety net” makes it difficult for policymakers to fight poverty (also Sugrue, 1996). Homeowners who benefit from the former often do not see themselves as the beneficiaries of government support and want to cut the latter. Readers of More Than Shelter, moreover, will get few details about the wider San Francisco real estate market or even poverty outside SFHA projects. Other than a brief explanation of gentrification, Howard keeps her argument narrowly focused on public housing and avoids the Bay Area suburbs, which housed many of the taxpayers most outraged by what they saw as the safety net’s failures. As an urban historian, she undoubtedly knows these arguments, and made a strategic decision to give her book narrower parameters. The targeted nature of the book is one of its strengths. But it also leaves other writers the task of exploring if books like More Than Shelter alone can make wealthier voters and policymakers sympathetic enough to the needs of poorer San Franciscans to actually implement Howard’s vision for better housing. 

References

Bloom N (2008) Public Housing that Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mead L (1985) Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press.

Murray C (1984) Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 New York: Basic Books.

Radford G (1997) Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sugrue T (1996) The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Venkatesh SA (2000) American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Williams R (2004) The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press.