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Abstract
The recent global financial crisis increased the volatility of housing markets and furthered the ongoing disinvestment in public sector housing. This disinvestment has been manifest in urban restructuring programmes involving both the privatisation and the wholesale demolition of public/social housing. For example, programmes like HOPE VI in the USA have radically altered the landscape of public housing through the demolition of tens of thousands of housing units nationwide. However, what of the people who occupied this housing, and what of the lives they had built there? In such a context, deliberating on the notion of being at home becomes a pressing task, necessitating serious consideration of the lived experience of place and place attachments among those who have been displaced by such programmes. While research has studied outcomes such as the quality of the new neighbourhood and household economic stability, it does not adequately address the lived experience of place and the disruptions that forced relocation can cause. This paper brings the literature on place attachment into the discussion of urban restructuring programmes and discusses the findings of several empirical studies on place attachment to provide a more complete picture of the impacts of such programmes on poor people. It demonstrates how place attachments in the context of public housing are complicated by poverty, power dynamics, ambivalence, and stigma, underscoring how attachments are formed through the interplay of policy and programme rhetoric, and the active processes of meaning making among residents. Policy implications of considering place attachments in public housing redevelopment efforts are also addressed.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to express appreciation to Rachel Garshick Kleit for 11 years of collaboration on housing research projects, including the studies on which this paper is based.
Notes
1. In all, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded 262 HOPE VI revitalisation grants to 132 different public housing authorities across the nation in fiscal years 1993–2010, totalling approximately $6.2 billion (US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Citation2013).
2. A complete review of place attachment models and ongoing debates about the parameters of the construct and its relationship to related constructs like satisfaction, place identity, and sense of place are beyond the scope of this paper. For a review of place attachment literature over the past 40 years, see Lewicka (Citation2011). For a review of the distinctions among place attachment and related constructs, see Hernandez et al. (Citation2014).
3. For more details on the two original HOPE VI evaluations, see Manzo, Kleit, and Couch (Citation2005) and Manzo, Kleit, Dugdale, Kreigh, and Foster (Citation2013).
4. While these demographic profiles may be different from those of some public housing sites in other parts of the USA, the face of public housing has been changing in different regions. Moreover, the purpose of this paper is not to identify what might typify an entire population, but rather to expound upon the qualities and dimensions of place attachments in the face of forced relocation. Indeed, the fact that many residents of these sites can be considered among the ‘hard to house’ (see also Oakley et al., Citation2013) makes concerns about relocation and disruptions to place attachments even more pressing for these households.