Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Emotions of Public Housing Policy - A Critical Humanist Exploration of the Creation and Implementation of HOPE VI

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The public housing landscape in the United States has undergone dramatic shifts over the past fifteen years. An important part of this shift is HOPE VI, a program created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in order to alter and/or demolish severely distressed properties. The HOPE VI program proposes to replace barracks-style and high rise apartments with a new public housing landscape based on the planning principles of New Urbanism: small-scale developments of single family homes and townhouses. Given the massive financial investment, radical landscape alteration, and impact on residents' lives, researchers have been interested in critically analyzing (1) why HOPE VI was created and (2) how HOPE VI has been implemented. Analyses have used historical, economic, and political lenses for these tasks. These analyses, however, treat HUD officials, Congressmen, and housing authority officials as mere units in a bureaucratic machine driven by economics and politics. The human, emotional dimension of decision making is not considered, resulting in an incomplete and skewed understanding of HOPE VI. This project explores how specific emotions have influenced and impacted the creation and implementation of HOPE VI by asking two questions: 1. how do emotions help form consensus among policymakers and 2. how do emotions inform the application and implementation process for local housing authorities? To answer these questions, the project is organized around an analysis of government officials' 'emotive narratives' - their emotion-laden descriptions and representations of public housing landscapes. A mixed methods approach will be used to access emotive narratives: archival analysis of Congressional and HUD documents, semi-structured interviews with key players in the creation of HOPE VI, and semi-structured interviews and participant observation in two cities with HOPE VI grants - Lexington, Kentucky and Charlotte, North Carolina.This research enhances our understanding of housing policy creation and implementation. Research often assumes that government officials and policymakers are emotion-less. As a result, the inner workings of HUD and public housing authorities are rarely analyzed. By attending to government officials' emotive descriptions and representations of the public housing landscape, this project will counter stereotypes of government agencies as monolithic entities and will shed light on how the public policy process works. Disseminating the results of this research has the potential to encourage geographers to think about the intersection of emotions, landscape, and policy and will also bring a potentially new conversation about landscape to psychologists and emotions to government officials and professionals. The research will also provide a framework for evaluating and understanding future policy decisions regarding the public housing landscape.