The renaissance comes to the projects: Public housing, urban redevelopment, and racial inequality in Baltimore

This dissertation tells the story of public housing change in Baltimore during the 1990s and 2000s. The Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program demolished five housing projects in neighborhoods surrounding downtown, and replaced them with mixed-income developments, in order to change not just the physical landscape of public housing but also address social problems associated with concentrated poverty. Yet in doing so, it displaced more than 2,000 families, and has altered the geography of public housing in the city. I use a counterfactual framework to examine changes in investment that have followed the HOPE VI program, and find that banks have become more willing to lend in the neighborhoods surrounding the rebuilt housing developments than they might have been before the policy began. This is significant given the history of racially motivated disinvestment that has marked these areas in Baltimore and across the country. I also explore the neighborhood outcomes for displaced families. In contrast to the fears of critics that HOPE VI would displace families to new ghettos, I find that these families have moved to lower poverty, safer neighborhoods. While public housing is often thought of as a specific set of policies designed to assist low income families, it is also a set of political decisions about how to manage urban space and urban populations. In telling the story of HOPE VI in Baltimore, I show how public housing policy has been shaped since the 1930s by efforts to fight blight and by the resistance of white families to low-income black neighbors---two factors that continue to influence public housing policy in the 21 st century city.