For many years Chicago's looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment – via the Chicago Housing Authority's "Plan for Transformation" – has been perhaps the most startling change in the city's urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph's findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward.
About the Author
Robert J. Chaskin is professor and deputy dean at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and director of the University of Chicago Urban Network. He is the author or editor of several books, including, most recently, "Youth Gangs and Community Intervention".
Mark L. Joseph is associate professor in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western University and director of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities. He is co-author of "Voices from the Field: Learning from Comprehensive Community Initiatives".
Reviews
"'Integrating the Inner City' is the first serious, empirically based, book-length analysis of mixed-income housing and is destined to become the leading study in its field for years to come. Drawing on exceptional research, Chaskin and Joseph carefully ground the book in theory while providing rich data to support their arguments along the way. Few works have examined life inside public mixed-income communities, making this book a valuable addition that will be highly sought after by the many people concerned with affordable housing" – D. Bradford Hunt, author of "Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing"
"'Integrating the Inner City' rises above politics, profit-motives, and moralizing and offers a real look at how mixed-income communities are working and not working for the people who live in them. Chaskin and Joseph give us a rigorously empirical account of the translation of theory into practice, and the story is a sobering one. The buildings are new and the streets are safer, but poor residents still experience considerable social stigma and economic fragility. Meticulously researched, accessibly written, and powerfully argued, this book should guide public housing policy and our approach to racial and class integration for decades to come" – Mary Pattillo, author of "Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City"
"Chaskin and Joseph's study of the promises and the limitations of The Chicago Plan for Transformation, the largest attempt at mixed-income public housing reform in the US, reveals a challenge that many urban planners do not foresee – the continued economic and social marginalization of the poor families who gain a place in mixed-income developments. Integrating the 'Inner City' not only combines compelling data, based on six years of in-depth field research, and considerate theoretical arguments to describe and explain the problem of economic and social integration in these developments, it also suggests several positive actions that might be taken to address it. Chaskin and Joseph's impressive study is a must-read" – William Julius Wilson, author of "The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy"
