Housing Capital: Race, Class, and Low-Income Housing in Urban America, 1968–2018

In the 2010s, efforts to increase urban housing production to meet demand were frequently mired in controversies over questions of unaffordability. Even if new buildings were slated to include “below-market” housing, working class and residents of color were wary of this kind of development amid the specter of increased displacement. The opposition was sometimes ironic because gentrification came after decades of concerted efforts at “community control” by neighborhood-based nonprofit groups which had opposed outside government planning in their communities. Within the span of the decades between public housing’s defunding in the early 1970s and the fallout of 2008 economic crisis, the United States had developed a unique approach to the financing and local development of “affordable housing,” one which made it if not vulnerable to, then unable to address many of the effects of gentrification where they arose. This dissertation examines politics around low-income housing through key moments in the emergence of a nonprofit affordable housing system within the larger social and economic transformations of the United States from 1968–2018. In particular, I focus on the role of housing within racial capitalism in the United States which oversees vastly different outcomes in housing wealth for Black Americans in particular. I follow a focus especially on the rising emphasis of low-income homeownership, and Black homeownership, as the answer to a radicalized “urban crisis” signaled with urban uprising in the late 1960s. I argue that this emphasis on homeownership was an ideological response, fostered by the success of New Deal homeownership politics, which had the important effect of undermining the possibilities for a socially democratic form of municipal housing. At multiple moments in the creation of an alternative to public housing, homeownership programs were heralded as the solution, even while less attention was drawn to efforts to also increase financing to the more practical nonprofit management of mutli-family or rental housing. I argue the homeownership emphasis has had damning implications for the ability of tenants to the realize political power necessary to win demands such as rent control in majority-homeowner jurisdictions. To understand the development of a nonprofit controlled affordable housing industry, I examine two related developments in US political and economic life: the rise of community development, and the increasingly prominent role of a philanthropic sector in designing and administering social welfare programs. Both of these developments are in turn related to a need, on the part of public officials, to find or create alternative sources of funding in the wake of public austerity. I examine the early efforts of groups like Chicago’s The Woodlawn Organization, a prominent Black Power group, to contest urban renewal and create their own paradigm of community-controlled housing development. I argue that the contradictions of these efforts, which lacked capital resources, presaged larger issues with Community Development Corporations (CDCs) as they viewed them as a more appropriate alternative to government development of inner-city housing. This dissertation contextualizes the need to create a funding source for this nonprofit system within a neoliberal political climate which turned to novel sources in the tax code and using issuance of tax credits to solve political and fiscal concerns. Housing Capital brings housing policy into conversation with politics by utilizing the methods of scholars of social movement politics, racial capitalism, and labor history. Architectural and urban historians, by focusing on discrete places and events, can overlook the role of larger institutions, political tendencies, and ways of organizing politics. I look at the interaction of local groups and specific urban contexts with larger federal policies and national organizations, such as foundations, economists, and other policy advisors, to understand the impact of the later groups in shaping the political possibilities in local contexts. I argue that this approach is necessary to understand how certain modes of housing provision and certain market arrangements achieve dominance, and to understand their implications for community groups and tenants writ large./n

Advisor: Crysler, C. Greig