Before HOPE VI: The Promise, Paradox, and Price of Rebuilding Public Housing

For readers who followed our previous post on HOPE IV, the names can be confusing.

HOPE IV and HOPE VI sound like neighboring chapters in the same federal story. In truth, they represented very different ideas about what public housing could become.

Program	Core Idea	Primary Population	Main Tool	Promise	Central Tension
HOPE IV	Help low-income seniors remain independent	Older adults in subsidized housing	Housing plus services	Let people age in place with dignity	Housing and care systems were fragmented
HOPE VI	Rebuild severely distressed public housing	Families in large distressed public housing sites	Demolition, redevelopment, mixed-income housing	Replace isolated poverty with healthier neighborhoods	Redevelopment often displaced the very residents it was meant to help

HOPE IV asked: What if housing came with enough support for people to stay?

HOPE VI asked something much bigger, riskier, and more disruptive:

What if the place itself had to be remade?

The Public Housing Crisis That Produced HOPE VI

By the early 1990s, public housing in America was carrying the weight of decades of policy failure. Many developments had been built as isolated, high-density, low-cost projects. Some became physically deteriorated. Others became concentrated pockets of poverty, racial segregation, unemployment, poor maintenance, and public neglect.

The 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper Creating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods notes that by 1992 a national commission found that 86,000 of the nation’s 1.4 million public housing units were “severely distressed.” That meant more than old buildings. It meant places where housing quality, poverty, crime, and isolation had combined into a national emergency.

Congress responded with HOPE VI, formally Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere. Between 1993 and 2010, HUD awarded 262 revitalization grants to local public housing authorities. The program used $6.2 billion in federal funds to leverage nearly $11 billion more, much of it from private sources.

This was not small maintenance. This was demolition and rebirth.

What HOPE VI Tried To Do

HOPE VI rested on three big ideas.

First, tear down severely distressed public housing and replace it with better-designed housing. The old model of towers, superblocks, and dense isolation gave way to New Urbanist ideas: lower-rise housing, streets that looked more like surrounding neighborhoods, front doors, porches, sidewalks, mixed uses, and a stronger sense of “defensible space.”

Second, deconcentrate poverty. Instead of rebuilding public housing as entirely low-income developments, HOPE VI encouraged mixed-income communities. Public housing units might sit beside affordable tax-credit units and market-rate rentals or homes.

Third, add supportive services. HOPE VI was not only bricks and mortar. It allowed funds for childcare, job training, youth services, community programs, and other supports meant to help families move toward stability.

In theory, this was public housing with the walls knocked down, both literally and socially. It was meant to connect residents to safer streets, better schools, broader opportunity, and neighbors of different incomes.

But theory is one thing. Return rights are another.

The Paradox At The Heart Of HOPE VI

Matthew H. Greene’s article The HOPE VI Paradox gives us the sharpest warning about the program. HOPE VI could produce beautiful, safer, more economically diverse developments and still fail the poorest residents who had lived there before demolition.

That is the paradox.

A housing authority could point to a successful redevelopment: better buildings, lower visible poverty, higher property values, new private investment, improved design, more mixed-income residents. But if most original public housing tenants never returned, then who exactly had the program saved?

The NBER paper confirms the scale of that concern. Nationally, only 27.6% of original public housing households returned to the development where they had previously lived by 2014.

Some families received vouchers. Some moved elsewhere. Some could not meet new screening rules. Some built new lives in new places. Some were simply severed from home.

That matters deeply for how we tell this history.

If a neighborhood looks better after the people are gone, we have to ask whether the people were helped or replaced.

The San Francisco Case Study

The San Francisco Health Impact Assessment, HOPE VI to HOPE SF, is especially valuable because it brings the discussion down from policy language into lived reality. San Francisco received HOPE VI funds for five redevelopment projects: Valencia Gardens, North Beach, Plaza East, Bernal Dwellings, and Hayes Valley.

The report found real gains. Housing conditions improved. Environmental hazards declined. Residents often reported cleaner, safer, more attractive homes. Community centers became important anchors for youth programs, food support, and neighborhood services. At North Beach Place, residents described the redeveloped site as calmer, cleaner, and safer than before.

But the report also preserved the harder side of the story.

Many current residents were new after redevelopment. A majority of prior residents did not return. Social ties were strained when families were relocated across the Bay Area. Some residents may have been unable to return because fewer units were available, because screening standards changed, or because their lives had been re-rooted elsewhere.

One line from the San Francisco report deserves to sit near the center of any honest HOPE VI discussion: “Don’t forget the mission of public housing. Don’t exclude low-income folks because of your new concepts.”

That is the whole debate in one sentence.

The New Research: Children Gained, Adults Did Not

The newest scholarship complicates the story in an important way.

The 2026 NBER study by Raj Chetty, Rebecca Diamond, Thomas B. Foster, Lawrence F. Katz, Sonya Porter, Matthew Staiger, and Laura Tach found that HOPE VI did improve neighborhoods in ways that mattered for children. Children raised in revitalized public housing units earned more as adults, were more likely to attend college, and, among boys, were less likely to be incarcerated.

The study found that children who moved into HOPE VI public housing after revitalization earned 16% more, were 17% more likely to attend college, and, among boys, were 20% less likely to be incarcerated than comparable children in non-revitalized public housing.

That is not nothing. That is generational.

The study also found that the gains were linked, in large part, to social interaction. HOPE VI appears to have increased contact between public housing residents and peers in surrounding neighborhoods. In plainer language, children benefited when redevelopment broke down some of the isolation that had marked distressed public housing.

But the same study found no causal impact on the earnings of adults who lived in public housing units. The neighborhood’s income rose, but largely because higher-income people moved in. Adults already living in public housing did not suddenly experience an economic transformation.

So the adult story and the child story diverge.

For children, HOPE VI could create real long-term opportunity.

For adults, especially original residents, the benefits were much less clear.

For families forced to move, the disruption itself was part of the cost.

Why This Matters To Wheeling

The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation studies Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley through local records, family memory, public documents, and the long arc of Black civic life. But local history never happens in isolation.

Wheeling’s housing story belongs inside this larger national framework.

When we write about poor housing conditions, Hil-Dar, the Wheeling Housing Authority, Lincoln Homes, East Wheeling, Elm Grove, and Black neighborhoods pressed by neglect or redevelopment, we are also writing about national ideas that filtered down into local decisions. Federal housing policy shaped what cities thought was possible. It shaped what counted as “progress.” It shaped how officials talked about blight, modernization, relocation, poverty, and renewal.

HOPE VI matters to our readers because it reveals the language of a whole era.

“Revitalization” could mean new homes.

It could also mean fewer original residents.

“Mixed-income” could mean opportunity.

It could also mean exclusion.

“Deconcentration of poverty” could mean breaking isolation.

It could also mean scattering communities that had survived generations of segregation, disinvestment, and insult.

That is why the Foundation’s work is so important. We are not only asking whether a policy looked successful from the outside. We are asking what happened to the people inside the story.

The Hard Question: What Counts As Success?

One of the most important lessons from HOPE VI is that success depends on what you measure.

If you measure buildings, HOPE VI often looks successful.

If you measure surrounding property values, it can look successful.

If you measure neighborhood poverty rates, it can look successful.

If you measure children’s long-term outcomes, the newest evidence suggests real and meaningful gains.

But if you measure whether original residents returned, whether older adults survived disruption, whether tenant leadership grew stronger, whether families kept their social networks, and whether the poorest residents benefited, the story becomes much more complicated.

Matthew Greene argued that HUD and housing authorities too often measured the development rather than the tenant. That distinction matters. A redeveloped site can succeed as real estate while failing as public housing.

San Francisco’s later HOPE SF principles appear to recognize that danger. The HOPE SF framework emphasized no loss of public housing, resident participation, economic opportunity through rebuilding, neighborhood improvement, environmental sustainability, and a stronger sense of community. In other words, it tried to correct some of the wounds left by the HOPE VI model.

That too is a lesson.

Even when a policy creates something valuable, it may also teach future generations what not to repeat.

The Foundation’s Lens

For our Foundation, HOPE VI is not merely a housing program. It is a cautionary framework for reading local history.

We have already seen, again and again, how Black communities in Wheeling built institutions under pressure: schools, churches, lodges, clubs, athletic teams, civic organizations, and mutual aid networks. These institutions did more than serve people.

They held people together.

Housing policy can either strengthen those networks or tear them apart.

The story of HOPE VI reminds us that a building is not just a building. A neighborhood is not just a collection of addresses. A public housing development is not just a problem to be solved from above.

It is home.

It is memory.

It is a network of grandparents, cousins, church members, classmates, barbers, teachers, corner stores, playgrounds, porches, sidewalks, and people watching out for one another.

That does not mean distressed housing should be romanticized. Unsafe, unhealthy, neglected housing is not heritage. It is injustice. Families deserve clean, safe, beautiful, well-maintained homes. Children deserve neighborhoods that open doors rather than close them.

But the cure cannot erase the patient.

The Lesson Before We Return To Wheeling

HOPE VI forces us to hold two truths at once.

The first truth is that concentrated poverty and neglected public housing harmed families. The old model was not acceptable. Something had to change.

The second truth is that redevelopment without deep resident protection can become another form of removal.

That is the line our housing series will keep walking.

As we turn back to Wheeling and examine how national housing policy touched local lives, HOPE VI gives us language, warning, and evidence. It shows how public housing moved from shelter, to stigma, to demolition, to mixed-income redevelopment. It also shows that the people most affected by these changes must never be treated as background figures in a planning document.

For Wheeling, the question is not simply whether housing changed.

The question is who got to stay, who had to leave, who benefited, who was forgotten, and what kind of community was built in the name of progress.

We will continue the series by diving deeper into the Wheeling Housing Authority's results.

-T

Sources

• Raj Chetty, Rebecca Diamond, Thomas B. Foster, Lawrence F. Katz, Sonya R. Porter, Matthew Staiger, and Laura Tach, Creating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI Program, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 34720, January 2026.

• Matthew H. Greene, The HOPE VI Paradox: Why Do HUD’s Most Successful Housing Developments Fail to Benefit the Poorest of the Poor?, Journal of Law and Policy, Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2008.

• UC Berkeley Health Impact Group, HOPE VI to HOPE SF: San Francisco Public Housing Redevelopment, A Health Impact Assessment, University of California, Berkeley, November 2009.