earlier this month i read There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone; in the course of that reading, a section of Part Two stood out as demonstrating many of the worst, most ghoulish aspects of housing politics today. today we're going to focus on one of these aspects: the intentional murder of public housing.

i'm sure most of my audience doesn't need me to tell them that public housing was intentionally murdered; however, you might be unfamiliar with how this was done in practice. it was not just that public housing—over a number of presidential administrations—was racialized into housing suitable only for non-whites; that public housing was stigmatized as poverty-stricken, portrayed as crime-infested, described as full of drug-addicts and degenerates, and written off as “monstrous, depressing places,” in the words of Richard Nixon; or that public housing was defunded by a thousand, bipartisan cuts. it was that public housing, in many cases, was violently dismantled by capital in the service of profit—a neoliberal spin on the "slum clearance" of old. case in point, Atlanta, which Goldstone notes served as the model for contemporary dismembering of existing public housing stock:

[Beginning in 1994] Atlanta Housing Authority embarked on an ambitious campaign to dismantle the city’s public housing. Democratic mayor Bill Campbell appointed Renée Glover, a former Wall Street lawyer, to serve as the CEO of the agency. Under her leadership, AHA showed little interest in refurbishing Atlanta’s dilapidated projects, where a remarkable 13 percent of the city’s population (and 40 percent of schoolchildren) were living—a greater proportion than in any other American city. Rather, the agency rebranded itself as a “diversified real estate company” and took on the new mission of creating entire communities “from the ground up,” as Glover put it—which meant tearing down public housing complexes, giving eligible families vouchers, and enlisting private developers to build, own, and manage mixed-income communities where the projects had once stood.

But AHA’s innovations didn’t stop there. Inspired by efforts at the federal level to move people from “welfare to work,” AHA became the first housing authority in the country to impose a strict work requirement on its beneficiaries. These measures, declared an admiring column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had turned the city’s housing authority into a “conservative’s dream.” When Glover described her approach as revolutionary, she wasn’t exaggerating. The Atlanta Model, as it came to be known, was soon adopted as the blueprint for redevelopment in Chicago, Miami, and a number of other major cities.

the beauty of this mass-privatization for capital was the immense value and profit it provided to all of its participants—with the exception of actual tenants, who were left to flounder at the whims of the housing market and almost wholly cleansed from their long-time neighborhoods. particularly indicative of the fate of social housing tenants was what happened to the Techwood Homes project (once the pride of the Public Works Administration). despite "$1 billion of private investment that poured into the area" after its demolition in 1995—or rather, because of that $1 billion in private investment—the vast, vast majority of its tenants were displaced in favor of upscale tenants from which a much greater profit could be derived. again, quoting Goldstone,

In Atlanta, as in other booming cities where apartment vacancies were at an all-time low and rents in the private market were soaring, [Section 8] voucher holders suddenly found themselves competing for fewer and fewer eligible units. Many voucher-accepting landlords saw that they could extract greater profits from unassisted tenants.

to say nothing of the aforementioned stigmatization of public housing tenants (and low-income tenants generally), which wrought consequences far beyond the bounds of public housing projects like Techwood Homes. even though Section 8 was—in effect—a compromise with capital, capital-holders fought obliged participation in the program and, through the decades between the New Deal and present day, grew increasingly oppositional to the tenants reliant upon it for shelter. when Techwood Homes was demolished—along with every other public housing project in Atlanta—it reflected the belief that people dependant on Section 8 are not worthy of anything. there is no money to be made off of them; they are not responsible enough to deserve shelter, even from the government.

the result has been exactly what you would expect. even before the onerous requirements applied to voucher holders, many privately-operated apartments simply do not take Section 8 and render the value of holding a voucher moot. the "socioeconomic mobility" that is ostensibly offered by Section 8 is totally vaporous under market conditions, because a Section 8 tenant is invariably a unit operated at a relative loss for a landlord when the precious few vacant units to go around are a profiteer's dream. in the absence of public housing, there is no possibility here but a sort of social purification.