Dispatches Against Displacement. James Tracy

Punishment

      Like the Lucha Libre characters of Mexican wrestling, the Republican and Democratic parties have generally tag-teamed on dismantling the social support system ushered in by the New Deal. Throughout the 1990s, the rhetoric of welfare reform blamed “cultures of poverty” and “concentrations of poverty” for poverty itself. In other words, poverty can be blamed on bad parenting, low community expectations, and even poor people living too close to each other. These terms were popularized by right-wing politicians such as Newt Gingrich. In the 1990s this framework was used to obscure the roles of free trade agreements, structural unemployment, and the persistence of racism in perpetuating deep poverty. Residents of public housing were on the receiving end of a series of punitive measures that worked alongside the HOPE VI program to empty out federal housing.

      Another Clinton-era gift, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) of 1998, mandated that all public housing developments should become “mixed income,” usually meaning a reduction in homes available to very-low-income people. QHWRA also ripped housing subsidies from households of undocumented immigrants.

      Urban land being at a premium, the HOPE VI process usually results in the privatization of many developments as developers contracted to do the reconstruction generally gain partial ownership of the new housing (currently estimated at around $1 billion). So the poor continue to lose, as corporations, such as McCormack Baron and Sun America, make immense profits.

      Taken together, these measures accelerated spatial deconcentration—the exodus of low-income people of color from city centers to outlying suburbs. Spatial deconcentration has long been a staple in the pantheon of far-left (particularly anarchist) conspiracy theories. The theory went that, in response to the inner city uprisings (popularly known as riots) of the late 1960s and the threat of urban revolutionaries, the government set out to break up urban neighborhoods of color as a means of curtailing rebellion. It is alleged that an African-American federal worker, Yolanda Ward, was executed in the middle of Washington, DC, to prevent her from exposing the policy shift.21

      Whether Ward was executed for this reason or not, it is no secret that spatial deconcentration remains the anchor of what remains of federal housing policy. The US Code of Federal Regulations identifies “the growth of population in metropolitan and other urban areas, and the concentration of persons of lower income in central cities,” and sets a goal to “develop new centers of population growth and economic activity.” Its objective is “the reduction of the isolation of income groups within communities and geographical areas and the promotion and increase in the diversity and vitality of neighborhoods through the spatial deconcentration of housing opportunities for persons of lower income and the revitalization of deteriorating neighborhoods.”