Housing is by far the number one issue we hear about in cities across the country. Public housing transformation, specifically the challenge of turning around troubled projects into thriving mixed-income communities, is one of the most instructive and consequential stories in urban planning today. It is the subject of a key segment of the Living Downtown episode of the Saving the City documentary series about how to make cities better places.
Our public housing transformation segment compares two landmark projects on opposite sides of the US-Canada border, revealing both the shared challenges and the strikingly different approaches cities have taken to housing policy.
Atlanta’s public housing transformation story centers on Centennial Place, a thriving mixed-income community built on the site of Techwood Homes, a 1930s public housing compound located in the shadow of Coca Cola’s headquarters and adjacent to Georgia Tech University. Centennial Place’s public housing transformation included a new school and YMCA alongside market-rate and subsidized units, creating a genuinely integrated neighborhood where Techwood Homes had warehoused poverty for decades.
Centennial Place was the forerunner for HUD’s Hope VI program, now called Choice Communities, which led to the replacement of outmoded public housing projects across the country. Atlanta’s public housing transformation became the national template for what was possible.
In Toronto, we examine the public housing transformation of Regent Park, Canada’s oldest, largest, and most notorious social housing development. Built in the late 1940s, Regent Park began a dramatic public housing transformation in 2005 under a 30-year master plan calling for almost 10,000 total units, roughly one-third subsidized and two-thirds market rate, alongside educational, social, and commercial facilities.
The Toronto approach to public housing transformation reflects a different national philosophy around mixed income housing development, one that integrates affordable and market housing more deliberately and at larger scale than most American models.
Meet Elinor Bacon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Housing at HUD and daughter of noted Philadelphia planner Edmund Bacon, on the HUD Hope VI program and what the best public housing transformation projects have in common. Watch more videos.
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