Inhabiting and Inhibiting River Garden

Chapter 5 reveals the challenges of inhabiting and managing River Garden. Phase 1 opened in November 2004. The devastation wrought by the Katrina disaster in August 2005—coupled with ensuing challenges to the housing market—caused subsequent phases to be delayed, altered, or cancelled. Rather than an investment that would create a “win-win” combination of a revitalized neighborhood and genuine opportunity for the former neighborhood’s least-advantaged residents, the redevelopment process, slowly but surely, shunted public housing tenants to the margins—both literally and figuratively—and also failed to construct the market-dominated community that the developer wanted. Framed by policymakers as a deconcentration of poverty, this strand of HOPE VI instead purged the poorest and yielded many ongoing tensions in community governance. Still, St. Thomas became a precedent for the post-Katrina transformation of many of the remaining large public housing developments in New Orleans.

Public Housing, Concentrated Poverty, and Crime

A number of studies have explored the relationship between public housing policy, poverty, and crime. This Commentary discusses the results of a recent study, which investigated the effects of closing large public housing developments on crime. To see if the demolitions—and the associated deconcentration of poverty—reduced crime or merely displaced it, researchers examined the case of Chicago. They found that closing large public housing developments and dispersing former residents throughout a wider portion of the city was associated with net reductions in violent crime, at the city level.