| Description |
1 online resource (xiii, 460 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Introduction: The "Public" in Public Housing -- Public Housing as an American Problem -- Housing the Public Neighbor -- Public Housing in Boston -- I. The Prehistory of Public Housing -- 1 Coping with the Poor: Techniques and Institutions -- The Moral Geography of Puritan Space -- New Institutions for Indoor Relief -- Tenement Reform -- Settlement Houses -- Ideal Tenement Districts -- 2 Rewarding Upward Mobility: Public Lands, Private Houses, and New Communities -- Frontier Individualism on Public Lands -- Homesteads in the Boston Suburbs -- Residential Districts -- Communities by Design -- Public Neighborhoods without Public Neighbors -- II. Public Housing in Boston -- 3 Building Selective Collectives, 1934-1954 -- Boston's Selective Collectives -- Public Works and Private Markets -- Public Housing as Slum Reform -- Public Housing as War Production (1940-1945) -- Public Housing as Veterans' Assistance (1946-1954) -- The Authority Is Watching -- 4 Managing Poverty and Race, 1955-1980 -- The Geopolitics of Public Housing -- Urban Renewal -- Rewarding the Elderly -- The Mechanisms of Patronage -- Racial Discrimination and the BHA -- Battles within the Bureaucracy -- The Decline and Fall of the BHA -- 5 The Boston Housing Authority since 1980: The Puritans Return -- The Receivership -- Four Redevelopment Efforts in the 1980s -- The Politics of Public Housing Preferences -- Getting Beyond Receivership -- Boston Public Housing in the 1990s -- Ideological Retrenchment -- From the Puritans to the Projects |
| Summary |
Annotation This title is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years |
|
From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years. First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects. -- Publisher |
| Notes |
Originally published: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000 |
|
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2007 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 395-445) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Public housing -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History
|
|
Poor -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History
|
|
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
|
|
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Infrastructure.
|
|
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Sociology -- Urban.
|
|
Poor
|
|
Public housing
|
|
Massachusetts -- Boston
|
| Genre/Form |
History
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780674044579 |
|
0674044576 |
|
067402575X |
|
9780674025752 |
|
