From the Puritans to the Projects

by Vale, Lawrence J.

• ISBN13: 9780674025752
• ISBN10: 067402575X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. xi
Tables	p. xiv
Introduction: The "Public" in Public Housing	p. 1
Public Housing as an American Problem	p. 6
Housing the Public Neighbor	p. 8
Public Housing in Boston	p. 9
The Prehistory of Public Housing	p. 17
Coping with the Poor: Techniques and Institutions	p. 19
The Moral Geography of Puritan Space	p. 21
New Institutions for Indoor Relief	p. 32
Tenement Reform	p. 55
Settlement Houses	p. 72
Ideal Tenement Districts	p. 89
Rewarding Upward Mobility: Public Lands, Private Houses, and New Communities	p. 92
Frontier Individualism on Public Lands	p. 93
Homesteads in the Boston Suburbs	p. 105
Residential Districts	p. 116
Communities by Design	p. 128
Public Neighborhoods without Public Neighbors	p. 157
Public Housing in Boston	p. 159
Building Selective Collectives, 1934-1954	p. 161
Boston's Selective Collectives	p. 165
Public Works and Private Markets	p. 168
Public Housing as Slum Reform	p. 182
Public Housing as War Production (1940-1945)	p. 230
Public Housing as Veterans' Assistance (1946-1954)	p. 236
The Authority Is Watching	p. 256
Managing Poverty and Race, 1955-1980	p. 267
The Geopolitics of Public Housing	p. 267
Urban Renewal	p. 271
Rewarding the Elderly	p. 285
The Mechanisms of Patronage	p. 290
Racial Discrimination and the BHA	p. 301
Battles within the Bureaucracy	p. 325
The Decline and Fall of the BHA	p. 332
The Boston Housing Authority since 1980: The Puritans Return	p. 347
The Receivership	p. 347
Four Redevelopment Efforts in the 1980s	p. 353
The Politics of Public Housing Preferences	p. 361
Getting Beyond Receivership	p. 365
Boston Public Housing in the 1990s	p. 369
Ideological Retrenchment	p. 381
From the Puritans to the Projects	p. 386
Notes	p. 395
Credits	p. 447
Index	p. 449
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