Building on lessons learned : too high hopes without HOPE VI?

Abstract

By providing substantial grants to public housing authorities to demolish and rebuild distressed public housing and provide services to public housing residents, the HOPE VI program has helped transform these developments and their surrounding communities since 1992. HOPE VI has not only brought public and private investment to distressed neighborhoods but also has played an important role in increasing development capacity for housing authorities and HUD. In spite of the successful completion of many projects in the last decade, arguments have been made that HOPE VI is not only too expensive and too slow but is no longer needed. Housing advocates have also argued that there are programmatic flaws that must be reformed. The Bush Administration has sought to cut HOPE VI from the federal budget for the last four fiscal years. Congress has reinstated it each year, albeit at lower and lower funding levels, but the future of HOPE VI is uncertain at best. As the only funding program specifically designed to meet the needs of distressed public housing and its very low-income residents, HOPE VI is not easily replaced.

(cont.) Despite the challenges, many housing authorities and their partners are attempting to assemble funding for desperately needed public housing redevelopment projects. Interviews with housing authorities, developers, and consultants provide an understanding of the strategies that housing authorities are using to make these "post-HOPE VI" projects work. Housing authorities and their public and private partners have crafted innovations intended to replicate HOPE VI results, but without HOPE VI funds, these projects will only be possible through the piecemeal assembly of public and private funds and are likely to lack the holistic approach and broader vision enabled by HOPE VI. Without seed capital and without the flexibility to be creative, public housing authorities will have a limited ability to build on their entrepreneurial skills, partner with the private sector, and meet the needs of their residents and capital assets. Killing one of the few innovative government programs to emerge in the last decade is a waste and does not bode well for the future of very low-income families-a "HOPE VII" program is needed to build on the public learning achieved during HOPE VI and these early post-HOPE VI efforts.