Guest Editors' Introduction: Policy Assumptions and Lived Realities of Mixed- Income Housing on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2013)

IntroductionDuring the past several decades, a number of housing programs sought to create mixed-income housing and neighborhoods in the United States and Europe to negate the effects of concentrated poverty. In the United States, such initiatives have included the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity housing experiment, whereby low-income residents volunteered for relocation to low-poverty areas; the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program for public housing transformation; and Choice Neighborhoods, a program broadly based on the HOPE VI model but expanded to revitalize entire neighborhoods (Fraser, Oakley, and Bazuin, 2012).In Europe, such initiatives fall under the rubric of neighborhood restructuring or urban renewal. These efforts often include mixed-housing strategies and have been implemented in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Finland, and Sweden. European strategies focus more on mixing homeowners with social renters-the equivalent of public housing renters in the United States-with the similar assumption that a more diverse socioeconomic mix of residents will remove the negative neighborhood effects of poverty. By far the largest European mixed-housing initiative is the Right to Buy (RTB) scheme in the United Kingdom. Since the 1970s, more than 2.7 million socially rented houses have been sold with large discounts, mainly to existing tenants and other more affluent households (see Reinout Kleinhans and Maarten van Ham's article in this symposium). This Cityscape symposium showcases a series of refereed articles in which authors critically examine mixed-income housing initiatives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and, to a lesser extent, the Netherlands through both empirical and theoretical lenses, paying particular attention to whether benefits outweigh limitations in terms of resident, neighborhood, and sustainability outcomes. overall goal of the symposium is to provide a nuanced critique of mixed-income housing by situating these initiatives within the broader context of affordable housing and diverse, healthy communities. In addition, the symposium addresses the question of whose responsibility it is to house the poor and which strategies are most effective.The genesis of this symposium was the 41st annual conference, in 2011, of the Urban Affairs Association. During a session, The Future in and of HOPE VI Developments, many of the authors in this issue, including Diane K. Levy, James C. Fraser, Robert J. Chaskin, Mark L. Joseph, and JoDee Keller, presented articles. During that same conference, Edward Goetz moderated a session entitled Public Housing Transformation and the Right to the City and also presented his own work on poverty deconcentration and HOPE VI. During the 42nd annual conference of the Urban Affairs Association, many of the participants and presenters continued a broader discussion of the ways in which mixed-income housing was affecting low-income and public housing residents. In a session moderated by James C. Fraser, The Onset and Aftermath of HOPE VI, Deirdre Oakley, Katherine Hankins, Rachel Garshick Kleit, and Edward G. Goetz presented additional work on HOPE VI and resident experiences. These two conferences solidified our intention to produce a set of articles that would broaden our understanding of mixed-income housing as a policy and in implementation.Mixed-Income HousingMixed-income housing and neighborhood development efforts go beyond the transformation of public housing. Their history extends back to Ebenezer Howards garden city movement at the turn of the 20th century. Emerging out of the ideology that social mix-having a variety of income levels live in the same area-was necessary for moral order, mixed-income towns were planned to integrate the lower and middle socioeconomic classes with the wealthy, yet building types that housed different income groups were distinct and sited in separate areas of these developments in many cases (Rose et al, 2013). …