Hoping for More: Renewing and Redeveloping Public Housing without Marginalizing Low-Income Residents

Since the 1980s, politicians, government officials, and real estate developers have popularized the strategy of building mixed-income housing to replace troubled public housing projects in the United States.  Although the term is used to describe a growing number of developments, “mixed-income” has never been officially or consistently defined.  Drawing upon a newly-constructed database of income-mixing in projects completed under the HOPE VI program since 1993, as well as on other initiatives, this paper investigates selected public housing sites that have been redeveloped into so-called mixed-income housing in order to understand what qualifies as mixed-income and to develop a more analytically precise way of describing these projects.  We reveal that the mixed-income label is applied to a wide range of income mixes, from projects that try to minimize the presence of low-income housing (less than 1/3 of total units), to projects that attempt to preserve a substantial majority of units for low-income households.  In addition, we develop a new way of identifying and categorizing mixed-income developments in terms of how income mixing is implemented: 1) mixing in a few low-income residents into a mostly high-income project or vice versa, 2) mixing together roughly equal proportions of low-income and high-income families into a single project, 3) mixing in new high-income residents around low-income residents living in an existing project, and 4) mixing in low-income residents by spreading them out into a larger neighborhood, rather than a project.  The categories reflect divergent ideological positions about both the physical and social place that low-income people should have in mixed-income communities, and by extension, the role of public housing in American society.  Although mixed-income developments can be a useful tool to insert affordable housing into tight housing markets, we argue that these developments are too often used to displace formerly all low-income communities.