DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Regulated Public Environments: The Changing Geography of U.S. Urban Poverty

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Contemporary research on concentrated poverty assumes intractable ghettos and a dying urban core. In the meantime, welfare reform and gentrification have changed the framework for these debates, giving rise to new spatial arrangements and a new geography of poverty and opportunity in America's urban areas. Central to this new geography are spaces of poverty management the researcher describes as regulated public environments. While one can identify numerous types of places where poverty flourishes or where a poor public needs assistance, regulated public environments receive their distinct characteristics through their relationship with the current system of poverty regulation where they are maintained through the apparatus of the state. Using one paradigmatic case, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)'s Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program, this research will examine how poverty is diagnosed and managed within the contemporary US welfare state. It will consider the discourses, practices, and relationships that shape how a local housing authority implements HOPE VI and will elucidate the historical and social processes of poverty management embedded in those practices. This research will be situated at both the federal and local levels: in Washington DC, the site of policy formulation and regulation, and at a local public housing authority in San Francisco, the site of implementation. Archival research into the institutional history of the San Francisco Housing Authority and the policy-making discourses behind HOPE VI will uncover the goals and means embedded in the program. Direct observation in the arenas of knowledge production, decision-making, and institutional practice including the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) and professional conferences, meetings and trainings will reveal how institutional understandings of poverty, housing, and HOPE VI are constructed and disseminated. Narratives of SFHA staff and participants in local housing collaborations will explore how they experience and make sense of the potentially conflicting goals of poverty alleviation, housing provision, and the HOPE VI program in their everyday work. It also will provide an opportunity to place these conflicts in space, connecting them to emerging spaces of urban poverty management. Ultimately, this research will provide empirical evidence that reveals the ways that poverty-management programs impact the institutional, physical, and social geographies of poverty and opportunity in US urban areas. This work investigates HOPE VI as a project of poverty management with specific tensions and dynamics that emerge from its unique institutional and spatial arrangements. It analyzes how these dynamics play out on the ground, connecting welfare state scholarship to the question of space. At a time when catastrophic events are forcing the nation to rethink the vulnerability of its urban poor and the role of the state in providing basic resources for all citizens in need, this project provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between poverty framing, poverty alleviation and urban space as well as the challenges of poverty management implicit in the post-welfare era. It is expected that this research will be of significance not only to academic disciplines, but also to future public policy, philanthropic agenda-setting, and the practices of urban planning and community development. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.