Where They Going To Put All These People?
Chattanooga, Tennessee
At age 26, Michael Hutchins moved into his own apartment in College Hill Courts. It was on the second floor of a squat brick row house ringed by a laundry line and a cement front stoop. He had his own walk-through kitchen, a private bedroom, and a little living room in which he displayed his two most prized possessions: the framed original of his Howard High School graduation certificate and a photo of his junior-year track team. He took pride in his space, saving the leftover money from his disability checks so that he could afford to buy a small television and a couch. He mostly kept to himself and stayed inside. Hettie remembers that her son was worried that people were looking at him because he walked funny and had little control over his right arm. His speech, too, was slow, and he still often forgot specific words. For the first few years, he didn’t talk to his neighbors all that often. He simply watched the people gather for afternoon football games and the annual summer barbecue on the central quad, thinking that maybe someday he’d join in.
Michael’s apartment was one of 497 units, making College Hill Courts one of the largest public housing developments in the city when he first moved in 1998. It was the anchor of the Westside neighborhood, a small pocket of Chattanooga just west of downtown. As a result of urban renewal, the entire Westside is cut off from the rest of the city—and all of its jobs, stores and services—by two curved highways. In 2010, the median annual income of Westside residents was just over $9,400, and exactly 100 percent of the children were living in poverty.104
The history of College Hill Courts is the quintessential story of public housing in the twentieth-century United States. Built in 1941, the project traces the great failure of the for-profit housing market of the 1930s, the struggle for a new model, the rise of public housing, the disinvestment under President Nixon, and the frenzied threat of demolition since President Clinton. Yet, the history of College Hill Courts is much more than the chronicle of a public housing project. It is also a contested story about the country’s changing labor force and the money and power behind the United States’ addiction to mortgaged houses. Simply put, for the for-profit model to rise to such spectacular dominance by the end of the twentieth century, the public housing vision introduced early in the century had to fall. And millions of people who weren’t profitable to house—people like Michael Hutchins—had to fall with it.
Before College Hill Courts was built, there were alleys to sleep in. That’s how Helen Kelley, a Chattanooga resident who lived through the Great Depression, remembers it.
“Don’t you know we didn’t have anything like this,” Kelley told the Chattanooga Times Free Press as she gestured at the walls of her public housing tower in south Chattanooga. “We all lived in alleys.”105
The Great Depression created one of the worst housing crises in U.S. history. In the cities, displacement was rampant. By 1933, banks foreclosed on an average of 1,000 homes every single day. By 1934, nearly half of all urban mortgage holders had fallen behind on their payments and were at risk of eviction.106
In rural areas, the situation was even more dire, because foreclosure meant the loss of families’ livelihoods along with their homes. Eliza Edwards, another Chattanooga resident, remembers working in the fields alongside her family members in the Depression’s aftermath. She was only a child—she’d been born the year the market collapsed—but in those days, everyone in a sharecropping family worked. During the 1930s, her family’s annual income was $300—about $5,000 a year in 2012 dollars.
By the early 1930s, people in both cities and rural areas had mobilized against the continued onslaught of foreclosures and evictions.
“There is an incredible history of anti-eviction organizing,” said Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University and one of the nation’s leading researchers about housing organizing during the Depression.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers came together to form anti-eviction and tenants’ rights groups like the Farm Holiday Association in the Midwest; the Alabama Sharecroppers Union in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which stretched from Tennessee to Texas. The groups descended on farm auctions en masse to intimidate investors and speculators and then bet on the property with absurdly low prices—a penny! A dollar!—until the property was returned to the owner. They also banded together to do eviction defense, which, in rural areas, was simple and classically Southern.
“It was people with rifles standing there and defending the house,” said Naison.
In Northern cities, eviction defense teams didn’t wield guns, but they were equally effective. Primarily organized by the Communist Party, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people mobilized to stop the police from evicting families in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Toledo, and other urban centers. Masses of women filled the streets and contested homes, pouring buckets of water on the police from the rooftops. The women also beat back the police officers’ horses by sticking them with long hatpins from the garment district or pouring marbles into the streets. If the police were successful in moving the family’s furniture out to the curb, the crowd simply broke down the door and moved the family’s belongings back inside after the police had left.
“There were times that landlords were saying, ‘You can’t evict anymore in the Bronx. These people control the streets,’ ” said Naison.
By the mid-1930s, the for-profit housing model was in crisis. New construction was at a virtual standstill. Widespread rent strikes made it impossible to turn a profit on buildings across New York City. Hundreds of World War I veterans had marched on Washington and established a tent city they called Hooverville. The encampment protests—where people lived outside the private housing market—spread across the country, entirely built, governed, and populated by the displaced. One of the largest, located in Seattle, stood for ten years, housed more than one thousand residents at its peak, and held its own elections for the community’s mayor.
Elected officials finally took notice.
“Shoot the banker if he comes to your farm!” declared North Dakota Governor William Langer during his 1932 election campaign.107107 Once in office, he became one of twenty-seven governors to enact a moratorium on farm or home foreclosures during the 1930s. Governor Langer even called in the National Guard to stop sheriff sales.108
The crisis also initiated sweeping federal legislation, the two most comprehensive being the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937, which created federal subsidies for public housing.
The latter legislation was designed to “head off any great outburst of protest or revolt” by the “multitudes left unemployed, impoverished, and often homeless,” writes Peter Marcuse, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University.109
Although public housing was a system that activists had been dreaming of for more than a decade, it wasn’t politically tenable until the Great Depression. Led by women intellectuals, especially author and urban strategist Catherine Bauer, a strong housing movement emerged in the 1920s. These activists recognized that the era’s deplorable slum conditions were caused not by social issues but by an underlying failure in the for-profit housing market. Many of these organizers had become disenchanted with the very premise that the market system could be expected to house the entire country—especially because the situation for the country’s poor was only growing worse despite a roaring economic boom.
“Private enterprise and restrictive legislation alone have proved themselves incapable of meeting the needs of small-wage earners for adequate housing,” wrote Elizabeth Hughes, director of the Bureau for Social Research for Chicago in the 1920s.110
The most influential work to emerge from this movement was Catherine Bauer’s 1934 Modern Housing. The book was a study of the 4.5 million units of new housing that European governments had subsidized since the end of World War I and a clear proposal for an entirely new system of housing in the United States. Advocating for homes to be built for their use value rather than their profit margins, Bauer believed that a massive ideological shift was necessary to create a better housing model.
“The premises underlying the most successful and forward-pointing housing developments are not the premises of capitalism, of inviolate private property, of entrenched nationalism, of class distinction, of governments bent on preserving old interests rather than creating new values,” she wrote.111
Three years after the book’s publication, Bauer’s ideas had permeated the highest offices in Washington. She was a lead author of the Housing Act of 1937, which mandated federal funds for public housing construction. Between 1937 and 1942, the government funded the construction of 130,000 units of affordable housing in hundreds of projects across the country.112112 In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a “Second Bill of Rights” during his State of the Union Address, which re-enshrined public housing as a government priority.
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men,” he declared.
He then listed a number of “economic truths [that] have become self-evident,” including “the right of every family to a decent home.”113
Five years later, The Housing Act of 1949, enacted under President Harry Truman, approved the funds for 810,000 new units of public housing.
In 1940, the newly formed Chattanooga Housing Authority approved the construction of its first development, College Hill Courts. Built of masonry and brick, it was constructed in the popular public housing style of the era: blocks of two-story, connected brick row houses laid out like a small, gridded town. This style would later be criticized for looking unfriendly, almost like Soviet prisons, but public housing construction had strict per-unit cost caps resulting from the compromises required to pass the controversial legislation. (Interestingly, when the Soviet Union’s minister of city and urban construction visited similar public housing projects in Chicago during the 1950s, he told journalists, “We would be thrown off our jobs in Moscow if we left unfinished walls like this.”)114
The College Hill Courts complex was built in the center of downtown, just off the waterfront, so that it would be located close to the factories. The first residents of College Hill Courts were almost all white industrial workers at the nearby Union Carbide chemical factory. Chattanooga was an industrial city in that era, and the downtown waterfront was littered with foundries, factories that made metal castings, and coal-processing plants. Walker Cronkite would declare on the CBS evening news that Chattanooga was the dirtiest city in America.
During the 1950s and 1960s, African American families began moving into College Hill Courts and the city’s other projects. At Michael’s childhood home, Harriet Tubman, the integration infuriated the city’s chapter of the Klu Klux Klan, who ended one rally outside Tubman by shooting tear gas at African American residents in 1965.115 The demographic shift was largely caused by the Federal Housing Authority’s policy of extending mortgages only to white Americans, which allowed working-class whites to move out of public housing and into suburban homes, while African Americans had no such opportunity. By 1960, nearly 70 percent of white families owned their own homes, compared to less than 40 percent of African American families—a greater racial gap than at any other point in the twentieth century.116
But black or white, early public housing worked.
Oscar C. Brown, the first manager of the Ida B. Wells home in Chicago, recounted running the project for J.S. Fuerst’s ethnography, When Public Housing Was Paradise.
“It worked 100 percent,” said Brown. “They had flowers in the windows, flowers everyplace. So much so that the people outside Wells who had thought it was going to deteriorate their neighborhood said after two or three years, ‘You’ve improved the neighborhood.’ I didn’t do it. They did it. They planted the flowers, washed the windows, rolled the babies.”117
This era of public housing and its successes are rarely heard in mainstream media. Instead, the coverage focuses on the projects’ unraveling, which—according to this narrative—began in the 1970s, when the community inside public housing complexes supposedly collapsed under the weight of narcotics, violence, gangs, teenage pregnancy and other social issues. In this era, government officials began aggressively pushing the theory of the “culture of poverty,” the idea that public housing communities—and all neighborhoods of color—were socially inferior places where people languished for lack of a hardworking, middle-class environment. As scholar Catherine R. Squires explains, this “culture of poverty” narrative was a shift away from the more overt biological arguments about African American racial inferiority—yet a story no less insidiously racist.
As she writes, “discourses of ‘modern racism,’ or what some called ‘cultural racism,’ replaced biological reasoning for the economic subordination of African Americans with the argument that ‘black culture’ was ‘pathological’ and not securely assimilated to ‘American’ bootstrapping values.”118
And the unspoken “original sin” in this narrative was the setting itself: housing that operated outside the capitalist system.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, there were strong economic and ideological incentives promoting this culture of poverty theory and the attacks on public housing. The deindustrialization of urban centers decreased the demand for factory workers, many of whom lived in the projects because their wages were so low. As the industrial plants were slowly shuttered—in Chattanooga and almost every city—the government grew less and less interested in subsidizing workers’ housing. In 1973, Nixon declared a moratorium on new public housing construction. That same year, Congress passed Section 8, a program to push public housing residents into the for-profit housing market by offering them housing cost vouchers. President Reagan later cut the funding for public housing by nearly 80 percent, down to $7 billion a year.119
Meanwhile, as the manufacturing industry declined, the practice of creating wealth by leveraging the U.S. economy rose. The mortgage industry led the charge, generating incredible amounts of money by pushing white-picket-fenced homes with 30-year price tags. The national homeownership rate jumped a full 20 percent in only four decades: from 44 percent in 1940 to 64 percent in 1980.120 Actually, homeownership is the wrong word, because few of these families actually owned their houses outright. What was really on the rise was federally subsidized mortgage indebtedness. In 1900, about 30 percent of homes had a mortgage; by 1990s, nearly 80 percent did.121
Curiously, the expansion of the mortgaged housing market was not all that different from the creation of public housing earlier in the century: Both were created with vast amounts of government funding. The federal government used income tax deductions and mortgage rate subsides through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to promote and pay for homeownership, a practice that essentially funneled taxpayer money directly into the pockets of the mortgage industry. The amount the government spent each year on these subsidies was dizzying. In the 1980s, tax breaks for mortgage-holding families increased to an annual $50 billion even as public housing funds fell to only $7 billion. By 2012, the annual expense of this subsidy topped $100 billion. Additional federal tax breaks and financial aid to a variety of industries—including real estate, insurance, oil, and finance—further spurred the expansion of a mortgaged economy, inspiring one team of scholars to call suburbanization and the rise of homeownership “the largest welfare program in American history. . . falsely remembered as a golden age of the private market.”122
Yet the people who stood to profit from homeownership were different from those who benefited from public housing. Homeownership subsidies overwhelmingly went to large corporations and wealthy families, and a powerful lobbying force coalesced around the expansion of the mortgaged-housing model. In contrast, public housing residents and advocates had almost no lobbying force or political clout to push the continuation of their model. With no need for factory workers, a rapidly expanding mortgage industry, and little political pressure to continue funding housing for the nation’s most vulnerable, the government decided on a new course of action for public housing: run the developments into the ground, blame the residents for the failure, and then sell off the remains of the program to private industry.
By the Clinton era, the government’s new approach had succeeded. Public housing was widely regarded as a failed social experiment. The divestment had physically destroyed a number of developments. At one residence, the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago, dozens of dead cats and dogs were found floating in the basement of a building.123 But even more important, the relentless propaganda pushing the theory that public housing bred the so-called culture of poverty had fully permeated American society.
“Politically, HUD is about as popular as smallpox,” a Washington Post article declared in 1995.124 That same year, Congress repealed the one-to-one replacement rule, which had required that any public housing unit torn down had to be replaced. A frenzied demolition began.
There was only one problem. Inside the projects, many of the residents actually considered public housing a great success.
“I love it now,” said Michael. “I really do.”
As he settled into College Hill Courts over the years, Michael grew to feel comfortable and secure in his new home. His apartment was small and old, but it was well built. There had been a major renovation the year before he moved in, and his apartment had brand-new windows and doors. A few years later, the CHA also repaired the electrical wiring and plumbing. There was plenty of work to be done, but it wasn’t that bad.
He joined a group of men who played dominos outside, and he began to socialize with his neighbors. The neighbors always had dogs around, and he used to save chicken bones for them.
In the afternoon, he walked across the street from College Hill Courts and volunteered at the child-care center. Michael had a way with the children; he took after his mother, who had worked in day care for years. He enjoyed being helpful, he said, and it gave him a way to give back to the community. Over the summer, he began attending the neighborhood’s annual barbecue.
Michael Hutchins wasn’t the only one to find College Hill Courts a supportive social environment. Close-knit communities formed there, complete with the love and rivalries of large extended families. At College Hill Courts, some older men explained that they called each other not by their first names, but by their mothers’ maiden names, “in memory” of the old days when the now-deceased women lived with them in the same apartments.
Many people who reside in public housing say that these long-term support networks are the best thing about living there—and the part that the newspapers always seemed to leave out.
“When you hear public housing [in the media] you think gunshots, fires, crimes, and drugs, and murders, and killings. But they also do not tell you that the next-door neighbor is there for you. They got your back,” one public housing resident in Miami explained to a team of researchers who spoke to more than seventy public housing residents in six cities. “These projects—they are considered a family. We call these projects home. That is what people really need to know.”125
Damaris Reyes, a longtime public housing resident in New York City and the executive director of the Good Old Lower East Side, one of the nation’s longest-established public housing advocacy organizations, agrees.
“I see public housing as one of the most successful New Deal and twentieth-century programs,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to change the perception of public housing, who lives in it, and what it brings to a city.”
In Chattanooga, the demolition season started with a bang. In 2002, the city tore down the Spencer J. McCallie Homes, then the city’s largest public housing development. After $35 million in Hope VI grants—a federal program to turn public housing into mixed-income developments with private residences alongside public housing—McCallie reopened. Only a quarter of McCallie’s former residents were allowed to return. In 2005, the city demolished the Reverend H.J. Johnson Apartments and the Maurice Poss Homes. In 2010, the Fairmount Avenue Apartments fell. The following year, the Chattanooga Housing Authority announced that Harriet Tubman, the second-largest public housing complex in the city and Michael’s childhood home, would be sold. City officials wanted to tear it down, but the CHA realized it didn’t even have enough funds to pay for a wrecking ball.
In other cities, the scale of the demolition was even worse. In 2000, Chicago launched a “Plan for Transformation” that destroyed 25,000 units of public housing. Atlanta made headlines by setting the goal of becoming the first city in the United States to demolish all of its large public housing complexes. Using hurricane Katrina as an excuse, New Orleans closed down almost 5,000 public housing units at a time when the city desperately needed housing. As the 2008 foreclosure and eviction crisis began, more people than ever needed the safety net of public housing. But nationally, the demolition of the projects only accelerated.
The government’s solution to the demolition of public housing, the Section 8 voucher program passed under President Nixon, embodies the contradictions and failures of privatizing the government’s responsibilities. It costs the government more to give a person a Section 8 voucher than to maintain a public housing unit.126 Public housing advocates widely consider the program to be a handout for private landlords. But the biggest issue is that the vouchers create massive instability for many former public housing residents—including people right in Michael’s neighborhood.
Marline Greene, a mother of three, is considered one of Chattanooga’s lucky low-income residents, because after her eviction from public housing she received Section 8. The vouchers expire after a short period of time, so Greene scrambled to find a landlord willing to accept the subsidy. She found one, but the banks foreclosed on her landlord, so she and her family had to move out or be evicted by force. She found another apartment and quickly moved in. Within months, the house had neither heat nor electricity. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. Rats scurried in the corners and the walls. The police later said the house should have been condemned.
But Greene knew it was too risky to move; landlords are not required to take Section 8 vouchers, so demand is fierce for the few houses that do. So Marline Greene simply tried to make the apartment livable. She slipped cardboard underneath the rug to try to level the sagging floor. The entire family slept in the kitchen with extra blankets and kerosene lamps to stay warm. Less than a year after moving in, the landlord informed her that the house was in foreclosure; she’d have to move again. The next day, Greene woke up, took her three children to the bus stop, stuffed her kids’ clothes into bags, packed their birth certificates, her food stamp card, and other important papers into a briefcase, and left.
“You’re trying to act like everything is all right when you’re carrying around all your clothes,” Greene recalls, forcing a laugh. That night, she and her youngest son slept on the floor of a shelter. Her older two sons moved in with their father. The family stayed separated for months while Greene searched, without success, for another landlord willing to accept her voucher. Her two older sons missed their mother and wanted to live with her, but Greene had nowhere to take them.
She remembered one afternoon when her sons called from school to ask if the family could spend just that one night together. Greene was forced to say no: She had no bus fare to use to go pick them up and no idea where she herself would sleep that evening.
“My whole life is like Russian roulette,” Greene reflected.
The city’s housing advocates and other public housing residents say that Greene’s experience is common for those on Section 8.
“This is often what you see with below-market-rate slum landlords,” said Ladonna Guffey, a case manager at one of the largest shelters in Chattanooga. Her clients are nearly always pushed into below-market-rate apartments, because the Section 8 credits are far less than the price of an apartment at fair market value—a reality that turns the federal government into one of slumlords’ largest customers. Another Chattanooga public housing resident named Joe Clark compares Section 8 to “giving a person food stamps without a grocery store,” because the city has so few affordable rental apartments.127
Chattanooga government officials are also well aware of the lack of affordable apartments in the city and the problems this scarcity causes.
“You can’t find rent here in Chattanooga that you can afford with a minimum-wage job,” said Richard Beeland, the press secretary for the mayor’s office. “The math just doesn’t add up. You have to have three jobs at minimum wage to afford housing. That’s a problem.”
The demolition of public housing has only exacerbated the crisis, he explained.
“We don’t have as many public housing complexes to move people too, and . . . there are only so many landlords who will accept housing choice vouchers. So what do you do? Where do you go? That’s a good question.”
When asked if he is worried, he said, “We are, and every other city in America is too. We know there are people who won’t have a place to live. So what do we do if we don’t have adequate housing for everyone? Because we don’t. It’s not just us; it’s everyone. It’s a common problem.”
As of 2013, Chattanooga had 1,500 people on the closed waiting list for public housing, 5,000 on the closed waiting list for Section 8, no year-round overnight city shelters, and more people than ever sleeping by the railroad tracks. The cost of renting was rising faster than in any city in the country outside New York City and San Francisco, making the for-profit market ever more inaccessible.128 The Chattanooga Housing Authority was so vastly underfunded that its executive director, Betsy McCright, described her job as “triage.”
In December 2011, a handful of Westside residents received a letter from Mayor Littlefield’s office inviting them to a presentation and discussion regarding the future of College Hill Courts. Like the majority of the project’s actual residents, Michael Hutchins wasn’t invited. But he would soon hear the meeting’s outcome: The city was proposing to close down College Hill Courts, evict the residents, and hand the property over to an Atlanta-based developer called Purpose Built, which specialized in privatizing public housing. Some of the residents would be allowed to return; the majority would get Section 8. As the rumors swirled, Michael and his neighbors wanted to know one thing: If the Courts closed, where were all these people going to go?
Many believe that answering that question is not the government’s responsibility. But if the state legalizes, subsidizes, and glorifies one economic model that even government officials admit will never and could never lead to adequate housing for everyone, then whose responsibility is it?
104. United States Census Bureau, Selected Economic Characteristics, 2007-2011 American Community Survey, Five-Year Estimates, Census Tract 16, Hamilton County, TN (Washington D.C., US Census Bureau).
105. Andy Johns, “Great Depression Provides Perspective on Today’s Economy,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, March 2, 2009. http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2009/mar/02/chattanooga-great-depression-provides-perspective-/?mobile
106. David C. Wheelock, “Changing the Rules: State Mortgage Foreclosure Moratoria During the Great Depression,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, November/December 2008, 90(6), p. 570. http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/08/11/Wheelock.pdf
107. Catherine McNicol Stock, Main Street in Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 140
108. State Historical Society of North Dakota online exhibit on Governor William Langer. http://history.nd.gov/exhibits/governors/governors17.html
109. Peter Marcuse, “Interpreting Public Housing History,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, August 1995. Vol. 12, No.. 3, pp. 240–258.
110. Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (University of Chicago Press), p. 49.
111. Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). Quoted in Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles In the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 79.
112. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 224
113. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944. See the American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16518
114. Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 22.
115. Aaron Cook, “Our Story: Harriet Tubman,” 2009. http://hope4theinnercity.org/page/our-story/harriet-tubman
116. William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, “Race and Homeownership: A Century-Long View,” Working Paper for the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University, May 2000. See Figures 1 and 2. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu00-w12.pdf
117. J.S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 11.
118. Catherine R Squires, “Coloring in the Bubble: Perspectives from Black-Oriented Media on the (Latest) Economic Disaster,” American Quarterly Vol. 64, No. 3, September 2012, p. 548.
119. “We Call These Projects Home,” A Right to the City Alliance Report on Public Housing, May 2010. http://www.righttothecity.org/index.php/resources/reports/item/61-we-call-these-projects-home
120. United States Census Bureau, Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership Rates (Washington, DC, US Bureau of the Census). http://www.census.gov/housing/census/data/owner/owner_tab.txt
121. Collins and Margo, “Race and Homeownership,” Table 4. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu00-w12.pdf
122. Elvin Wyly, C.S. Ponder, Pierson Nettling, Bosco Ho, Sophie Ellen Fung, Zachary Liebowitz, and Dan Hammel, “New Racialized Meanings of Housing in America,” American Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3, September 2012, p. 575.
123. Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here, p. 240.
124. Guy Guliotta, “Saving HUD: One Department’s Risky Strategy for Radical Change,” Washington Post, February 6, 1995. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-819765.html
125. “We Call These Projects Home,” A Right to the City Alliance Report on Public Housing, May 2010, p. 45.
126. Ibid., p. 13.
127. Yolanda Putman, “Chattanooga Switching to More Vouchers, Less Public Housing,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, May 31, 2011. http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2011/may/31/chattanooga-switching-more-vouchers-less-public-ho/
128. Mike Pare, “Chattanooga Ranks Third in Apartment Cost Growth,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, January 19, 2012. http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2012/jan/19/city-ranks-no-3-in-apartment-cost-growth/?businesstnvalley