Collecting seventy-nine oral histories from former public housing residents and staff, J. S. Fuerst's When Public Housing Was Paradise is a powerful testament to the fact that well-designed, well-managed low-rent housing has worked, as well as a demonstration of how it could be made to work again. J. S. Fuerst has been involved with public housing in Chicago for more than half a century. He retired from Loyola University, where he was a professor of social welfare policy. He was the editor of Public Housing in Europe and America. D. Bradford Hunt is an assistant professor of social science at Roosevelt University. John Hope Franklin is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and many more.

Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago's public housing projects once housed residents who described them as paradise. So what went wrong? To answer this question, the author traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard Daley's 'Plan for Transformation'.

With distressing statistics about rising cost burdens, increasing foreclosure rates, rising unemployment, falling wages, and widespread homelessness, building affordable housing is one of our most pressing social policy problems. Affordable Housing and Public-Private Partnerships focuses attention on this critical need, as leading experts on affordable housing law and policy come together to address key issues of concern and to suggest appropriate responses for future action. Focusing in particular on how best to understand and implement the joint work of public and private actors in housing, this book considers the real estate aspects of affordable housing law and policy, access to housing, housing finance and affordability, land use, housing regulation and housing issues in a post-Katrina context. Filling a critical gap in the scholarly literature available, this book will be of particular interest to policy-makers, academics, lawyers and students of housing, land use, real estate, property, community development and urban planning

Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing. With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception.

When it comes to large-scale public housing in the United States, the consensus for the past decades has been to let the wrecking balls fly. The demolition of infamous projects, such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and the towers of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, represents to most Americans the fate of all public housing. Yet one notable exception to this national tragedy remains. The New York City Housing Authority, America's largest public housing manager, still maintains over 400,000 tenants in its vast and well-run high-rise projects. While by no means utopian, New York City's public housing remains an acceptable and affordable option. The story of New York's success where so many other housing authorities faltered has been ignored for too long. Public Housing That Worked shows how New York's administrators, beginning in the 1930s, developed a rigorous system of public housing management that weathered a variety of social and political challenges. A key element in the long-term viability of New York's public housing has been the constant search for better methods in fields such as tenant selection, policing, renovation, community affairs, and landscape design. Nicholas Dagen Bloom presents the achievements that contradict the common wisdom that public housing projects are inherently unmanageable. By focusing on what worked, rather than on the conventional history of failure and blame, Bloom provides useful models for addressing the current crisis in affordable urban housing. Public Housing That Worked is essential reading for practitioners and scholars in the areas of public policy, urban history, planning, criminal justice, affordable housing management, social work, and urban affairs.

Contemporary urban renewal is the subject of intense academic and policy debate regarding whether it promotes social mixing and spatial justice, or instead enhances neoliberal privatization and state-led gentrification. This book offers a cross-national perspective on contemporary urban renewal in relation to social rental housing.

Policy, Planning, and People presents original essays by leading authorities in the field of urban policy and planning. The volume includes theoretical and practice-based essays that integrate social equity considerations into state-of-the-art discussions of findings in a variety of planning issues.