More than Shelter: Activism and Community in San Francisco Public Housing

摘要

The demolition of high-rise public housing developments in cities across the United States has spurred popular and academic inquiry into the legacy of the public housing programme. Recent historical and contemporary analyses of public housing are doing much to disrupt and upend the declension narrative of the programme's history. Examining alternative functions of public housing that illuminate the social, economic and political benefits of the programme on tenants, the community and the city at large, do much to counter the largely negative image of public housing and its tenants in North America. With neoliberal regimes pushing the demolition of the Keynesian relic that is the US public housing programme to make way for privately funded mixed-income developments, the anti-declension literature is necessary to preserve and maintain affordable housing for an increasingly displaced low-income urban population.