Public housing redevelopment, neighborhood change, and the restructuring of urban inequality

Housing policy plays a central role in the reproduction of urban inequalities. This study asks whether one such policy—public housing redevelopment via the federal HOPE VI program—altered the trajectories of high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods and reduced urban neighborhood inequality. Using a novel spatially integrated data set that combines administrative data with census data for 168 U.S. cities, the authors find that public housing redevelopment had significant direct and indirect spillover effects on neighborhood racial and economic composition between 1990 and 2010. The change induced by public housing redevelopment was ecologically significant, altering durable racial and economic hierarchies among urban neighborhoods. Changes in poor, minority neighborhoods were driven largely by displacement, however, from a net reduction in the number of poor and nonwhite residents. The authors evaluate the significance of these results for theories of neighborhood effects, gentrification, and durable urban inequality and discuss implications for urban policy.