From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors

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Description

From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the USA has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence in regards to the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale’s groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the character and extent of public obligation to accommodate socially and economically marginal Americans throughout the past 350 years.

First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way in which housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and within the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially conquer, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to deal with society’s least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in The usa, from the Puritans to the projects.

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