3
BLACK FOLKS IN CHICAGO
Introduction
When I was a child growing up in Detroit, Michigan, my parents would read to my sister and me before we went to bed. In the 1980s and 1990s, my mom went through significant pains to collect Black American, African, and Caribbean folktales from throughout the Black diaspora. Stories like Anansi and Brer Rabbit taught us about the value of intellect and resilience. But the myths that stay with me to this day are stories emphasizing the collective power found within community. As I’ve grown older and transitioned to reading Black science fiction from throughout the diaspora, I have been struck by the way ideas about community link Black diasporic stories together. When I began collecting interviews from Black women who lived in the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, I was not surprised to recognize the thread of community weaving through their stories as well.1
Black feminist social scientists and writers have consistently argued that community is a central and defining feature of Black sociopolitical life throughout the United States. I build upon their work by developing a Black feminist definitional criterion (BFDC) of politics and the political, which helps political practitioners recognize the unique features of sociopolitical life within Black marginalized groups. A clear understanding of respondent spatial context, as well as their sociopolitical community, is foundational to these theoretical criteria. As I will continue to argue throughout this book, a clear and holistic understanding of the politics of a Black marginalized population cannot be achieved without first understanding their spatial context, their sociopolitical community, and the public spheres they have access to. In this chapter, I begin by pinpointing how and why sociopolitical community, the public sphere, and spatial context function as theoretical mechanisms within the BFDC of politics and the political. From there, I focus on the sociopolitical context and spatial context of the research undergirding this book. I then go on to describe the methodological process that made this book possible. Finally, at the end of this chapter, I discuss a broader history of Black women’s organizing within public housing and the impact of neoliberalism on the sociopolitical work of Black marginalized communities more broadly.
The Black Public Sphere(s) of Chicago Public Housing
Many scholars argue that the public sphere is a requirement for the existence of democracy.2 They believe that public sphere(s) exist to cultivate a sense of community, so the community can take care of itself. Nina Eliasoph’s work on citizen apathy provides an important framework for understanding how residential spaces can shape the political behavior of individuals.3 In Avoiding Politics, she argues that public spaces that allow citizens to “talk politics” are critical for learning democratic principles and social responsibility as well as for generating power. For this reason, Eliasoph believes associations and groups are critical to the political learning of citizens; accordingly, “associations form the public sphere.”4
The public sphere is, theoretically, defined as the realm of institutions in which private citizens can carry on free and egalitarian conversation . . . it is not just a closed, hierarchical workplace, and not just family but is a third setting for conversation, with three main characteristics: participation is optional, potentially open to all and potentially egalitarian.5
Within Eliasoph’s framework, the purpose of the public sphere is to cultivate a sense of community so people care more about the world around them, as well as to become a source of “meaning-making power.”6 One of the primary ways the public sphere achieves meaning-making power is by cultivating political imagination in individuals.7 This imagination helps citizens develop an awareness of “the constant interplay between our personal lives and the political world.”8 Through talking, reading, and otherwise interacting, citizens are able to grasp the critical nature of politics and thus begin to care about, and become motivated to address issues in, the wider world.
Eliasoph argues that this kind of meaning-making political talk happens best within the privacy of homes and neighborhoods.9 Otherwise, individuals and groups often fear being judged by outsiders (or in the case of Black marginalized populations, surveilled by the state). One of Eliasoph’s most critical contributions is her conceptualization of “public spirited conversation.” She contends that public-spirited conversation enables the public sphere to function. She goes on to define public-spirited conversation as “a process of giving voice to a wide circle of concern—a public spirited way of talking . . . public spirited conversation happens when citizens speak in terms of ‘justice.’”10 Significantly, Eliasoph’s concept of public-spirited conversation provides a critical contribution to my Black feminist political criteria because it reaches beyond simple definitions of political talk. The concept of public-spirited conversation illustrates the mechanism through which an individual’s politics goes from intellectual work to political work.* Put another way, public-spirited conversation helps an individual develop an expanded view of politics, a politics capable of considering the way public spheres, and indeed democracies, can operate as tools of collective power. Public spheres and sociopolitical communities function to legitimize and provide space for public-spirited conversation. Public-spirited conversation gives birth to political imagination and eventually political power.
However, the work of public spheres as spaces where political power can be generated brings to light a critical issue. As Catherine R. Squires makes clear, a lack of access to the public sphere has a substantial impact on marginalized Black sociopolitical communities:11
Unfortunately, participation in public discourse is not always so accessible or vibrant. Not every group or individual enjoys the same access to public spaces, media resources, or other tools to participate in discursive activities. Particular groups may be targeted by government officials for censorship and have a harder time distributing their ideas. Furthermore, prevailing social norms may instill fear in citizens of marginalized publics that their ideas would at best be met with indifference, and at worst violence.12
A lack of access to the public sphere creates a lack of access to political power. As I point out in Chapter 2, the creation of political power requires multiple people coming together to create (or limit) a political goal. However, if Black marginalized sociopolitical communities are barred access to spaces or modes of communication where they can engage in public-spirited conversation, then those communities are effectively blocked from cultivating political power. Political scientist Traci Burch argues that one example of a structurally constructed denial of political power is the disenfranchisement of many formerly incarcerated people (a large number of whom are low income).13 Without this basic right, formerly incarcerated individuals are unable to participate in the democratic process, which has a substantial impact on the neighborhoods they go back home to.14 Many others living below the poverty line simply become so alienated from the government, they no longer see the point of participating in traditional forms of politics, like voting.15 Thus, their needs often go unmet on the federal policy level.16 But it is not just the larger public spheres that block the sociopolitical development of Black marginalized communities. Since the long civil rights movement, Black political discourse within the United States has been dominated by the mainstream Black counterpublic—a counterpublic Black people living below the poverty line have infrequent access to.17
Catherine R. Squires argues that not only are there multiple public spheres but there are multiple Black publics:18
I propose we speak of multiple Black publics. Thus, a Black public is an emergent collective composed of people who (a) engage in common discourses and negotiations of what it means to be Black, and (b) pursue particularly defined Black interests. This definition, although still wedded to the idea that there is a Black social group, does allow for heterogeneous Black publics to emerge, and also for people who do not identify as Black, but are concerned with similar issues, to be involved in a coalition with Black people.19
When I use the phrase “mainstream Black counterpublic,” I am using Squires’s definition of the Black counterpublic. Squires defines the counterpublic as the Black public “which can engage in debate with wider publics to test ideas and perhaps utilize traditional social movement tactics (boycotts, civil disobedience).”20 For the purposes of this book, the “mainstream Black counterpublic” refers to the Black middle-class counterpublic focused on respectability politics. As Frederick C. Harris and Cathy J. Cohen show in their work, this “mainstream Black counterpublic” currently dominates the Black American political agenda in the United States.21
That said, the absence of marginalized Black people from traditional politics does not mean that people on the margins opt out of politics altogether.22 They simply use their sociopolitical tools within separate political spheres.23 Marginalized Black populations like poor Black women have access to what Squires calls an enclave public sphere:24
Oppressed groups often do not have the choice of picking safe spaces for themselves. Marginalized groups are commonly denied public voice or entrance into public spaces by dominant groups and thus are forced into enclaves. At different times in history, African Americans have been forced into enclaves by repressive state policies and have used these enclave spaces to create discursive strategies and gather oppositional resources. . . . The enclave is signified by the utilization of spaces and discourses that are hidden from the view of the dominant public and the state. These clandestine places and communications are dedicated to Black interests and needs. . . . Thus, an enclave public sphere requires the maintenance of safe spaces, hidden communication networks, and group memory to guard against unwanted publicity of the group’s true opinions, ideas, and tactics for survival.25
Chicago public housing is one such “Black enclave public sphere.” This Black enclave public sphere allows residents to develop their PPS through public-spirited conversation and also troubles firm divisions between ideas of “public” and “private” space.26 As Squires notes, a Black public can “enclave itself, hiding counterhegemonic ideas and strategies in order to survive or avoid sanctions, while internally producing lively debate and planning.”27 In other words, the Black enclave public sphere facilitates concealed in-group conversations, hidden from the surveillance of the state and mainstream Black counterpublics, what James C. Scott calls hidden transcripts.28 Many respondents discussed hidden strategic methods for thwarting welfare street-level bureaucrats to gain access to key household goods and resources, strategies they often shared within the Black enclave public sphere.29 The sociopolitical community should be considered a diverse network of individuals linked together by a shared residential neighborhood, a workplace, or even a grassroots organization. A Black enclave public sphere is a larger formation of individuals or groups who generally share one or two identities (race, gender, socioeconomic status, or even city) but do not necessarily have to.
For example, a Black enclave public sphere (made up of public housing residents within the United States) could comprise several sociopolitical communities from public housing developments all over the United States. Squires goes on to specify further that “this definition, although still wedded to the idea that there is a Black social group, does allow for heterogeneous Black publics to emerge, and also for people who do not identify as Black, but are concerned with similar issues, to be involved in a coalition with Black people.”30 Black feminist scholars note, talking and interacting with one another allows members of the sociopolitical community or Black public spheres to grasp the critical nature of politics.31 Most importantly, public-spirited conversations within sociopolitical communities and public spheres facilitate the development of political imagination and political power.32
As Baker (1995) puts it, the civil rights movement was a product of the “active working imagination” of a Black public sphere (p. 16). Today, such imaginative work, in concert with the political and economic action Dawson calls for, is still urgently needed. In the absence of the obvious target of Jim Crow and in the midst of entrenched economic problems and conservative backlash, Blacks are in the process of reimagining their struggle, their relationship to shared aspects of Black heritage and identities, and their future as a social group in the post–civil rights movement era.33
This is the central takeaway: every formation of community serves to stimulate individual and group political imagination and provide crucial forms of political education. Without public-spirited conversation and the resulting political imagination, political identity, political groups, and political power cannot be created.
Public housing and its Black enclave public sphere are politically important, as they straddle the line between private homes and publicly owned property the state has full control over. Like the home spaces Black feminists describe in their work, public housing is a public and a private home space for residents.34 As in the work of Kevin Fox Gotham and Krista Brumbley, for residents I interviewed, each apartment constituted a private home, and for Black political women operating within the Black enclave public sphere and the Altgeld sociopolitical community, those homes were also spaces where they engaged in the politics of homemaking and sociopolitical community work.35 Throughout my many conversations with Black women living in the Altgeld Gardens development, the sanctity of their homes, as a personal space and a sociopolitical space, came up again and again. Through the politics of homemaking, many respondents used the relative safety they created within their homes to facilitate public-spirited conversations. Those conversations helped their neighbors learn about the politics of negotiating public housing and welfare bureaucracies while also developing political imagination and collective power. In the following section, I provide an example of one of those public-spirited conversations at Altgeld Gardens and the political power it created.
An Example of Black Enclave Publics Developed to Fight Welfare Street-Level Bureaucrats
When I met Sara, she had moved into Altgeld five months prior. She did not enjoy living there, but at forty-eight years old, Sara had been on the brink of homelessness before CHA called her daughter about living in Altgeld. Sara had four daughters, all adults, as well as several sisters who mostly lived in Chicago. But Sara was pointed about not allowing family to come visit her at Altgeld. While she described her life as active—she frequently volunteered and participated in community organizations—Sara also lived with significant fear.
Sara worried a lot about robbery and rape at the hands of the young men who lived in the development. Without a doubt, if she could have lived elsewhere, she would have. But in the face of that fear, Sara’s interview is an example of why traditional forms of political assessment miss important forms of political advocacy. Although she voted regularly, there were additional ways she advocated for the people in her neighborhood. Sara harnessed her “meaning-making” power by using her knowledge of the entitlements bureaucracy to help herself, her family, and others.36 She engaged her community via public-spirited conversation, which created political power capable of helping women who struggled to take care of their families.
A: How has the government treated you?
S: Oh, they been good to me, because see, I get mines. I get mine, I get my daughter’s. . . .
A: And how do you do that?
S: . . . I go to the aid office. I be on the caseworkers. I said I know what they qualify for and I know what [I] can get.
A: So how do you educate yourself? How do you find all of that out?
S: I read. I talk to people when I go up to there. It’s a supervisor; her name is Jones; she tell me everything; she gives me pamphlets. But it’s who . . . you have to interact with people to find out what’s going on, because it might be a person that’s been getting stuff from them for years, and they be sitting in there talking to people. This one lady asked me, she was like, “How you get [Medicaid]?” and I told her! She be like, “I didn’t know that.” I said you not going to know until we start asking questions. We sitting up here six hours anyway, so why not talk to each other, find out what’s going on. Just like they told this one lady she wasn’t going to get her stamps for two months because they were backed up forty days. . . , that ain’t our motherfucking fault you backed up forty days. She supposed to get her goddamn stamps. I said, “so get a supervisor down here ’cuz I want to know why.” And that wasn’t even my business. And the lady was so grateful.
A: So it got worked out?
S: She got her stamps in two days.
A: Oh, wow.
S: See, if she had sit there and listened to this new caseworker, she’d have been waiting . . . hell, she’d have been starved to death. Ask for supervisors, ask for managers, ask questions. . . .
A: Can you remember when you started learning how to do that and advocating for yourself in that way?
S: Long as I can remember, I’ve been advocating. My grandma, she was born and raised in Mississippi. She used to have a truck; she would go around and see about the older people. Take ’em biscuits and meat and cook, make them cakes and pies, tea cakes. And we’d just ride on the back of the truck. And she’d get out, “Come on,” and she’d go talk to them, see what they need . . . well, Ms. Jones, she need this, and she need . . . and she did this. And I seen my grandmother get these did. So if you don’t talk for yourself, I tell [my daughter], you can’t keep waiting for me.
Almost every aspect of residents’ lives and their politics inhabited both public and private space. The welfare office is a public sphere where entitlement beneficiaries must advocate for the “private” need of feeding their families. As a result, residents throughout the development cultivated a Black enclave public sphere invested in making sure residents could get the resources they needed to survive. At its core, this fight for survival, for fair resource distribution, was a political one.37
One way Sara protected herself was by using this Black enclave public sphere to educate herself and her neighbors about the entitlements policies they were eligible for. Sara was consistently public spirited in her advocacy for herself and others.38 Eliasoph argues that the concept “public spirited” emphasizes an individual’s concern for a broader world beyond their own. To be public spirited is to promote a view of politics beyond simple self-interest.39 This view of politics considers how the various public spheres and democracies can function to support the greater good.40 Sara’s demand that the welfare office educate her and provide other women like her with what they were owed (in this case food stamps) was a fight to support the greater good. At their basest level, political fights are centrally concerned with the equitable distribution of resources.41 As I show in the upcoming discussions of the spatial context of this study (Chicago, Illinois), ultimately, the fight for safe, accessible, healthy, and publicly owned housing is no different.
Public Housing in Chicago
Chicago has, and has had, the distinction of being one of the most segregated cities in the United States.42 Many African Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, and whites live in distinctly different neighborhoods and communities. As a result, racial groups have vastly different lived experiences in the same city. Many Black Americans have little access to healthy food options, and many Latinx lack access to basic social services. White neighborhoods on the North Side are beneficiaries of the heavy economic and social development city officials hoped would bring increased tourism.43 Because the city is so segregated, many job opportunities bring minority residents into contact with white Americans of considerable social and financial privilege. Black folks living below the poverty line have a heightened awareness of the lack of investment their neighborhoods receive from local, state, and federal governments.* This inequity deeply affected the sociopolitical development of the Chicago public housing residents I had the opportunity to interview during my time there.
A History of Chicago Public Housing
Many Black Americans who migrated from the Deep South in the mid-twentieth century saw Chicago’s housing projects as a refuge. Built originally to house World War II veterans and the increasing numbers of southern migrants to the Midwest, these urban communities gave working-class Americans of all races a jumping-off point for their new urban lives.44 From the beginning, there was resistance to public housing across the country, mostly because of homeowner resistance to public housing being built in their neighborhoods.45 Sudhir Venkatesh (2002) argues that
the location of public housing in neighborhoods of highest poverty concentration is the result of federal toleration of extensive segregation against African Americans in urban housing markets, as well as acquiescence to organized neighborhood groups.46
As in most urban cities throughout the United States, the placement of public housing in Chicago directly reflected the desires of its white citizens and their socio-political-economic interests. Scholar Jessica Trounstine argues that these processes of neighborhood segregation have “profound political consequences.”47 As she points out, segregation wasn’t merely the project of a few racist “citizens’ committees” throughout the suburbs.
Segregation is not simply the result of individual choices about where to live. Neither racial antipathy nor economic inequalities between groups are sufficient to create and perpetuate segregation. The maintenance of property values and the quality of public goods are collective endeavors. And like all collective endeavors they require collective action for production and stability. Local governments provide this collective action.48
By facilitating and affirming the practice of local segregation, housing authorities all over the United States facilitated the systemic residential and economic marginalization of Black Americans who sought to use public housing as a pathway to build generational wealth. Because of white backlash, the City of Chicago often placed public housing in poverty-stricken Black neighborhoods.49
Early on, most public housing residents were white. However, white Americans also had access to housing markets, facilitated by legislation like the New Deal. Subsequently, it was easier for white Americans to eventually access homeownership.50 “There were chronic shortages of decent housing for Black Americans in most cities. Consequently, most applicants for new public housing projects were Black.”51 Public housing played an important role for Black Americans escaping the South during the Great Migration. As J. S. Fuerst noted:
Public housing once served as an engine for upward mobility and as an incubator of the middle-class, a fact largely ignored today. Early Chicago Housing Authority projects like Ida B. Wells, Altgeld Gardens, Dearborn Homes, Cabrini Homes and Leclaire Courts, to name a few, helped thousands of Chicagoans escape slum-housing conditions and enter a world that offered first-rate housing, a close-knit community, and the positive pride that comes from a shared experience.52
Scholar Edward G. Goetz noted that by the 1960s whites were leaving public housing in “even greater numbers,” until over time, public housing was occupied almost entirely by people of color across the country.53 In 2017, out of 16,150 total households in Chicago public housing, 12,211 heads of households were African American, 1,729 were Hispanic, and 938 were Asian.54 “The popular image of public housing changed when its demographics changed.”55 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a Reagan-era moral panic about gangs, drugs, and inner cities caused the public to turn against the broader aims of the New Deal. Soon Americans believed welfare, public housing, and other forms of public aid only served Black Americans.56 Racism, fueled by a lack of public support, allowed officials to justify chronic mismanagement of public housing all over the country, and as a result, public housing became plagued by violence, mismanagement, and disrepair.57 This violence, alongside the government’s chronic neglect of public housing neighborhoods and buildings, had a significant impact on the political strategies used by CHA residents, particularly residents at hyperisolated public housing developments like the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes.58
The Site of the Study: Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, Chicago
In the summer of 2011, when visitors drove within a block of the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, smells from the nearby sewage plant typically overwhelmed them.59 As the weather got warmer, the smell got stronger. Originally, the entire area was covered by swamp. In the early twentieth century, Pullman Factory used the swamp as an industrial waste site.60 Decades later, the City of Chicago filled the swamp and built the Altgeld Gardens Murray Homes to house low-income people of color.
Altgeld Gardens was surrounded by industry and built on a toxic waste dump and sewage farm that had been created by the Pullman Palace Car Company decades earlier. The far south side of Chicago has been a dumping ground for industrial waste since the late nineteenth century, and it became officially sanctioned as the waste site for the whole metropolitan area when the city opened a large municipal dump there in 1940, five years before Altgeld Gardens opened. [At one point], about 250 underground chemical storage tanks actively leaked into the groundwater. Altgeld Gardens was also surrounded by approximately 50 landfills. . . .
The Chicago Housing Authority, which owned and operated Altgeld Gardens, made resident exposure even worse by ignoring what toxins were coming from the former waste dump underneath Altgeld Gardens, using building materials containing asbestos and dumping PCB waste at the site.61
Across the street from the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes were several abandoned steel mills; the area is an industrial site.62 Down the street from the old mills was a toxic landfill.63
Because of the odor and the toxins emitted, residents frequently complained about the chemical fumes from the old mills and the illnesses that they caused.64 As a result, in October 1999, fifty former and current residents of Altgeld Gardens filed a lawsuit against the CHA.
Plaintiffs assert that CHA built the Altgeld Gardens housing development “in an industrialized area, in and around a former sewage waste site,” (Fourth Amended Complaint to Aaron et al. v. Chicago Housing Auth. (hereinafter, “Aaron FAC”), Ex. 5 to Defendant’s Corrected Answer to Plaintiff’s Complaint for Declaratory Relief, pp. 7), that CHA “knew that certain contaminants, toxic substances and chemicals, including but not limited to PCBs, PAHs, selenium, arsenic, lead, mercury and pesticides were introduced, released and allowed to remain in the environment in Altgeld Gardens by the surrounding industrial plants, abandoned factories, toxic waste dumps, landfills and a Metropolitan Sanitary District plant, and their agents and employees,” (id. Pp. 24), that CHA “caused and was responsible for introducing, releasing and allowing PCBs and PAHs to remain in the environment in Altgeld Gardens,” (id. Pp. 25), and that CHA failed to “advise, warn or educate the Plaintiffs of the full nature and extent of the presence and existence of the PCB[s] and PAHs[,] the risks associated with such, or the precautions that the Plaintiffs could take.”65
According to residents, because of their exposure to such a broad range of toxins over the last twenty years, there were abnormally high rates of cancer and asthma in young people who grew up in the development.66
Residents of Altgeld Gardens received a $10.5 million settlement after they filed a class action lawsuit against CHA, accusing the agency of exposing them to medical risks linked to PCBs, which were released after employees dumped oil as they took copper from electric transformers. The settlement money went toward CHA tenants’ monthly rent.67
In 2003, past and present residents of Altgeld Gardens won the class action lawsuit against CHA because of CHA’s failure to notify residents of the toxic PCBs below their homes.68 Altgeld Gardens “sits in one of the city’s most isolated areas. The nearest supermarket is miles away, only one bus route serves the development.”69 In 2011 and 2012, generally the development looked abandoned; there were rows of abandoned or boarded-up homes on the development. Notably, in 2009 the crime rate at Altgeld was double the city of Chicago’s crime rate.70 The spatial realities described here, particularly the varying forms of residential violence (which includes environmental and bureaucratic violence) witnessed and experienced by residents, deeply affected the mental health and physical well-being of many Black women throughout Altgeld Gardens.
The CHA and the Neoliberal Plan for Transformation
Over fifty years, the CHA developed a reputation for mismanaged and dilapidated public housing systems. In 1995, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) took control of CHA to “salvage public housing.”71 Chicago local government resumed control of public housing in 1999, and that year, the CHA began the Plan for Transformation. “The $1.5 billion Plan for Transformation [called] for the largest reconstruction of public housing in the nation’s history. All but one of its 52 high-rise buildings [were] leveled.”72 The central narrative around the Plan for Transformation was that the old Chicago public housing policy design facilitated concentrated pockets of poverty that “exacerbated the problems of unemployment, substance abuse and crime.”73 Therefore, advocates of the new policy argued that the Plan would allow for a transition from clumping poor residents in high-rise buildings to instead integrating them into mixed-income neighborhoods.*
In 1998, nearly 19,000 of the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA’s) units failed viability inspection, meaning that under federal law the CHA was required to demolish the units within five years. As a result, the city put forth a plan to “transform” the CHA’s enormous high-rise developments into smaller mixed-income communities of town homes and low-rise buildings. The CHA Plan for Transformation calls for the demolition of 51 gallery high-rise buildings, as well as several thousand mid-rise and low-rise units. The CHA will redevelop or rehabilitate 25,000 units of public housing; however, the plan calls for a substantial reduction in family public housing units (a net loss of 14,000 units). The original plan called for the relocation of as many as 6,000 families with Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8 vouchers). This plan, including relocation and revitalization, is estimated to cost $1.5 billion over 10 years.74
Advocates of the Plan for Transformation argued that if families had the option to relocate using Housing Choice Vouchers (which allowed families to enter the private market or live in new CHA developments), residents would be increasingly likely to become economically self-sufficient.
The overarching goals of CHA’s relocation services were to help participants make good housing choices for themselves and their families; help participants make a successful transition to the private market; and prevent the creation of clusters of relocatees in other high-poverty neighborhoods.75
Soon after, CHA addressed what they viewed as the central problem of public housing, the high-rise project buildings.76
The Plan for Transformation represent[ed] the most ambitious effort in the United States to remake public housing. [Originally] scheduled for completion in 2015, the Transformation [was supposed to] result in the demolition of approximately 22,000 units of public housing, the rehabilitation of over 17,000 units, and the creation of over 10 new mixed-income developments containing a mix of public housing replacement, affordable and market-rate units.77
The Plan for Transformation was a CHA policy proposal adopted in 1999 to redevelop the entire Chicago public housing system. The idea was to place CHA residents in middle-class neighborhoods to facilitate additional opportunities for residents.
To put it plainly, the Plan for Transformation was designed around the idea that placing low-income residents in middle-class neighborhoods would “improve” them both socially and economically.78 The Plan for Transformation was aggressively publicized throughout Chicago as a progressive plan to “transform” the lives of public housing residents for the better. However, HOPE VI policies, like the Plan for Transformation, are neoliberal projects in sheep’s clothing.* Scholar Jason Hackworth argues:
Though it is the second-largest housing authority in the United States, overseeing 34,699 physical units and 33,582 Section 8 vouchers, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) does not have the wider political support enjoyed in New York or Seattle. Chicago’s history as a cauldron for land-use disputes associated with the siting of public housing is an important reason for this. Public housing has been and continues to be a deeply divisive issue in Chicago, and its provisioning approach during the past fifteen years reflects this acrimony. The HOPE VI program offered city officials the opportunity to put aside this unparalleled acrimony by simply putting aside public housing. Rather than choose a retention, or mixed-income approach, the CHA has used its six grants during the 1990s largely to divest itself of its physical stock.79
However, many CHA residents did not leave Black low-income communities. Most significantly, despite the vilification of housing project spaces that went on to justify this million-dollar spending project, the Plan still called for one in every ten CHA residents to be housed in a housing project in the city limits, Altgeld Gardens.80 At the completion of high-rise housing demolition, thousands of CHA families were dispersed or displaced all over the city of Chicago and its suburbs. To date, many CHA residents have not been able to return to Chicago public housing because of the organized housing stock shortage.81 Simply, CHA demolished a significant amount of housing stock and has not replaced it. This “organized housing scarcity,” or what Ruthie Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment” via the state, has forced many poor Black Chicago residents out of the city entirely.82
Neoliberal public housing transformation plans nationwide are marketed as policy focused on residents’ well-being and their ability to “choose” where and how they live. However in practice, neoliberal impulses have facilitated the continuation of moral-respectability policing of Black women living below the poverty line by equating poverty with moral ineptitude.83 As Black feminist political scientist Cathy J. Cohen argues:
New ideological narratives that emerge under advanced marginalization highlight the formal equality achieved by marginal groups, while actual inequalities are overlooked and avoided. Marginal groups looking for formal recognition and rights under advanced marginalization must embrace a model of inclusion premised on the idea that formal rights are to be granted only to those who demonstrate adherence to dominant norms of work, love and social interaction. Marginal group members are forced, therefore, to demonstrate their normativity and legitimacy through the class privilege they acquire, through the attitudes and behavior they exhibit, and through the dominant institutions in which they operate.84
Ultimately, as Hackworth made clear, in Chicago, the Plan for Transformation has signaled a full embrace of policy informed by respectability politics.
HOPE VI thus represents much more than a basic divestment of the housing stock. It also represents a more transparent roll out of neoliberal policy in practice. It has been linked . . . to the “work responsibility” acts discussed earlier, and the program’s promotional material is rife with the language of economic “self-sufficiency.” Increasingly, tenants must behave in “acceptable” ways to continue their housing benefits. PHAs [Public Housing Authorities] have been given new powers to evict for behavioral or even economic reasons.85
CHA diverted the management and maintenance of some public housing stock to private housing managers, moving many former public housing residents to Section 8 housing owned by private landlords. Subsequently, CHA scattered an active multigenerational resident sociopolitical community all over the metro Chicago area.86 Ultimately, CHA transferred their mandate to care for the most vulnerable and destitute to the private market.
Whether the Plan achieved anything is a matter of perspective. Researchers at the Urban Institute argue that “most CHA families now live in better housing, in safer neighborhoods.”87 While voucher programs placed some residents in safer neighborhoods, it also isolated them from family, friends, and support systems. Ultimately, the consequences of Section 8 dispersal programs were financial, social, and political.88 By transferring residents all over the metro Chicago area, the CHA could break up important political communities. It has become much harder for tenants to advocate for themselves to the CHA or the private management companies CHA empowered. Scattering residents across the region has also undermined the ability of tenants’ rights groups within the Chicago public housing space to organize around broader political issues they share with Chicago locals living in poverty.
Ultimately, Chicago public housing has been through a tumultuous half century. While the social and political impulse of many is to place public housing on the outskirts of the city to keep the poor out of sight, this is not a decision without real consequences for the public sphere.89 Given that local, state, and federal governments have so much power over the everyday lives of public housing residents, we must take seriously whether politicians and bureaucrats are creating residential spaces that provide dignified, sanitary, and safe living conditions for marginalized communities. By falling far short of these minimum qualifications, the U.S. political-industrial complex has helped birth a generation of citizens who have cocreated political identities—and resulting political strategies—that fall outside of what many traditional political practitioners recognize as political. If we are to understand who poor Black women are as citizens, we must look carefully at their lived environments.90
Does Neoliberalism Shape What Kind of Politics an Individual Will Have?
Neighborhood placement and design have a profound impact on political development.91 Each neighborhood or residential space teaches distinctive lessons about what a member of the sociopolitical community could and should look like, as well as what citizens can reasonably expect from the state over their lifetime. White American individuals living in impoverished rural areas within the United States learn completely dissimilar lessons about what membership in the sociopolitical community looks like (as compared to Black people within the United States who live in urban public housing while also living below the poverty line).92 Despite their poverty, white people in the United States receive messages affirming them as voters and as hard workers.93 This political affirmation happens via media but also through institutions (e.g., this can be as simple as the availability of voting places that do not seek to impede their access).
Black people who live in poverty in the United States are frequently treated like badly behaved, neglected children. As scholars have indicated, poverty entitlement programs throughout the United States denigrate, disempower, and humiliate those seeking aid.94 They are as intentionally difficult, complicated, and discouraging as possible.95 Not only are public housing buildings intentionally neglected and ignored until they fall into complete disrepair, but U.S. public housing policy treats residents similarly.96 This policy of intentional neglect is what geographer Ruthie Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment” by the state.97 As Osama Tanous and Rabea Eghbariah explain:
Her analysis of organized abandonment and organized violence explores how states simultaneously use these two tools to further dispossess and control the already impoverished and marginalized. Her work tracks how the state disregards its obligations toward certain people, households, and communities in what Gilmore calls “the anti-state state” and provides unequal levels of support and protection. These same communities that are subjected to organized abandonment are criminalized and marked as undeserving and ineligible for social programs.98
The scholarship is clear: U.S. policy has a deep and sometimes lasting impact on the sociopolitical tools accessible to marginalized political communities (e.g. Black people living below the poverty line). Through policies of organized abandonment, the state can expose marginalized populations to disproportionate levels of violence and an artificial scarcity of housing, safety, education, and food.99 In short, the government can use policy to create sociopolitical communities that appear to be politically disenfranchised. However, as other scholars have made clear, these same circumstances have also historically created a vibrant and powerful extrasystemic politics within Black Afro-diasporic communities globally.100 Like Eliasoph, I argue that people learn what sociopolitical tools look like via their experience within neighborhoods.101 This is reinforced through government institutions and street-level bureaucrats like CHA, welfare bureaucracies, resident interactions with the police, and entitlements policy writ large.102 But sociopolitical tools are also reinforced via the social networks and communities of care developed by public housing residents over generations.103
I should clarify that the argument I am making about the impact of built structure on political engagement is separate and apart from the “failed architecture” and “broken windows” arguments, popular among the proponents of the 1990s HOPE VI HUD policy.104 Similar to Hackworth, I argue that the 1990s policy to demolish high-rise public housing and build new mixed-income townhomes as a corrective to the issues within Chicago public housing, muddied more urgent issues present in many of the demolished public housing buildings.
The “failed architecture” argument has also been harshly criticized by a group of housing scholars who argue that the overwhelming focus on design obscures more important causes of “failure,” such as congressional funding levels, federally imposed design restrictions, and pressure from homebuilding lobbyists to make public housing “stand out.”105
Public housing is in crisis throughout the United States, but it is not because public housing developments in places like Chicago, New York, and Detroit were high-rises. Instead, as Hackworth and D. Bradford Hunt make clear, the failure of public housing in the United States is because of federal, state, and local governments’ choice to neglect and abandon the poor.106
As the Plan for Transformation slowly gathered steam, some Altgeld Gardens residents knew they were being moved to a rehabbed apartment. Other residents knew that new people were being brought in and out of Altgeld Gardens, seemingly on a whim. But residents seemed to lack the formal political capital that would give them transparent access to information about the Plan or allow their needs to be heard by those in power. After all, in 2011 residents frequently lacked internet access and transportation. As a result, getting information about CHA policy could be challenging.107 One of the primary mechanisms the CHA used to perpetuate the political invisibility around its housing policy was neoliberalism and the ongoing privatization of its housing developments. When private companies began managing CHA public housing, the extent to which residents could go to their management company for information about the larger policy projects of CHA was often unclear, maybe intentionally so.
Iris Marion Young argues that “interest-group pluralism . . . perpetuates a depoliticized public life that fragments social life and privatizes citizens’ relationship to the state.”108 This is especially clear within the privatization of the welfare state as facilitated by the neoliberal turn, particularly as it pertains to public housing.109 When private business represents the government’s interests within public housing, it perpetuates the idea that public housing residents are clients, not citizens.110 Within this framework, only the residents with the greatest amount of social and financial capital, as determined by street-level bureaucrats, got their needs met.
The depoliticized process of policy formation in welfare capitalist society, thus makes it difficult to see the institutional rules, practices and social relations that support domination and oppression, much less to challenge them.111
When Young mentions the “depoliticized client-consumer citizen characteristic of welfare capitalist society,” she is describing neoliberal policy.112 The financial interests of privatization can obscure the legal rights of residents who live on public property. The welfare-industrial capitalist complex and its ensuing neoliberal privatization can prevent residents from seeing or understanding that privatized interests within public housing perpetuate domination and oppression.
The housing policy of organized abandonment directly affected the Black women I interviewed during this study. Political empowerment within their sociopolitical communities facilitated respondents’ capacity to engage in what Zenzele Isoke (2011) calls “a politics of homemaking.”113 In several ways, their political empowerment was shaped by the infrastructures they lived in and called home. This was especially true for respondents who grew up in one Chicago public housing development and still lived there at the time of the interview. But frequently the Black women who took part in my study were unsuccessful in their attempts to get their needs met by CHA or any of the welfare agencies in Chicago. Various street-level bureaucrats of all races, who believed that the women in the development had nothing to offer the community, frequently gave the residents lectures about their unwillingness to “work hard.” Scholars have consistently found middle- and upper-class Black bureaucrats to be some of the most aggressive proponents of neoliberal policies that frame Black women on welfare as being counterproductive to the race.114
But despite the neoliberal effort to re-create poor Black people in its own image, policy feedback scholarship has clarified that experiences with the state have had a different set of political consequences than intended.115 While welfare recipients may not always see traditional forms of political engagement—such as voting or writing to a senator—as particularly useful, they do in fact engage with and make claims on the state.116 Soss argues that “welfare institutions have become key sites of political action for many people in the United States.”117 Throughout my interviews, a repeated theme was the importance of “knowing what you are doing” when engaging welfare agencies. Several respondents spoke about learning to navigate the welfare and public housing bureaucracy system via their mothers, friends, or neighbors. Negotiating entitlement benefits, and navigating government bureaucracies more broadly, became a highly valued political skill in the lives of public housing residents. It was also a skill passed down through informal information dissemination among public housing resident sociopolitical communities and their larger Black enclave public sphere.118
A History of Black Women’s Organizing within Public Housing
Informal information dissemination focused on successfully navigating welfare and public housing bureaucracies is one of several extrasystemic sociopolitical tools I noted while in the field. Scholars of public housing argue that poor Black women who engage with the state are part of an important and ongoing political movement happening behind closed doors all over the United States.119 According to Lisa Levenstein, there was “a mass movement of African American women to claim the benefits and use the services of public institutions.”120 Both Rhonda Williams and Levenstein point to the way “the government’s subsidy of low-rent housing implied a right to decent living conditions for U.S. citizens.”121 Engagement with the welfare state is a legitimate political strategy in its demand that the U.S. government live up to its promises.122 By grounding my project within public housing scholarship, I continue the effort pointing to the urgency of this political work.
There is a long history of Black women in public housing who organized their sociopolitical communities in meaningful ways. Ethnographies answering the question of how public housing can and has developed the politics of residents across time and place have been incredibly important to the development of this project.123 Historian Rhonda Williams (2005) points to the spaces and places that shaped poor Black women’s politics and explores what forced them into militant protest to get their basic needs met. Williams’s insistence that we take seriously the need for “activism at the point of consumption—that is, around housing, food, clothing, and daily life in community spaces”—is a prescient reminder that politics exist beyond electoral fights for power.124 For Black women living below the poverty line, politics are a fight for the essentials of basic survival.
Although poor people and black women had to contend with onerous and intrusive regulations as public assistance recipients, many low-income black women received a political education through their engagement with the welfare system. The federal government’s subsidy of low-rent housing implied a right to decent living conditions for U.S. citizens. From the beginning, this implied right highlighted poor people’s low citizenship status and politicized groups of tenants. For poor women, in particular, subsidized housing created a sense that the previously private sphere of home had become public and political space.125
Like the respondents who participated in my research, the Black women Williams describes in The Politics of Public Housing clarified how the infrastructure, resident communities, and representatives of the state all serve as mechanisms through which resident politics are developed. Black women living in poverty within state-owned public housing experience street-level bureaucrats as an obstructive, if not violent, force in their lives. In public housing there is no clear dividing line between public and private. Public housing residents have little agency over when, how, or where street-level bureaucrats enter their homes for welfare checks, Child Protective Services monitoring, food stamp monitoring, or public housing inspections.126 While this had severe consequences for their privacy and sense of personal autonomy, the Black women in Baltimore public housing interviewed by Rhonda Williams and the women in Chicago public housing that I interviewed, had access to a political education about the inner workings of government few citizens ever had.127 Residents used the social networks within their neighborhoods to educate one another via informal information dissemination.
Social Networks as a Sociopolitical Tool
Monthly CHA meetings are a good example of how social networks frequently functioned while I was in the field. Tenant Services meetings or CHA Board meetings drew public housing residents from all over the city. A consistent topic at those meetings was the demolition of high-rise public housing throughout Chicago and the subsequent destruction of the sociopolitical communities who used to call those buildings their homes. Given recent trends in public housing policy over the last twenty years (e.g., mass demolitions of high-rises), some public housing residents are being placed in developments or mixed-income housing that isolate them from friends, family, and job opportunities.128 The social networks of those receiving public assistance are being tremendously—and forcefully—transformed. Political scientist Betsy Sinclair’s framework is a key component needed to understand the connections between social networks and political identity development.129 I extend her argument by arguing that the social networks of individuals receiving various types of social welfare are defined and developed by the state and its representatives.130 The power of the state to shape, define, and erase the social networks of its dependents living in poverty has urgent ramifications for their political development and the state of democracy in the United States, writ large.
The potential impact of state-run institutions on the makeup of neighborhoods is critically important when you consider arguments made by scholars like Robert Huckfeldt, whose work considers the importance of neighborhoods in the development and maintenance of social networks.131
Neighborhood residents can seldom escape interacting with people who share the same living space. These social interactions take different forms: standing in line at the post office, getting together with friends, talking across a backyard fence or on a street corner, sharing the same public facilities—supermarkets, gas stations, laundromats. None of the interactions are politically neutral. Politics, especially urban politics, is not merely a function of individual characteristics and predispositions, it is also shaped by the social context within which it occurs.132
For Huckfeldt, neighborhoods are not a politically neutral space individuals choose to live in, depending on racial, economic, or religious preferences. Instead, they are a highly politicized space where individuals are constantly interacting with and learning from one another. Similarly, multiple scholars have thought about the importance of the residential neighborhood as a politicized space.133 It is important to keep in mind, then, that the choices the government makes around who should live where, and with whom, have significant implications for the political development of people who live in neighborhoods below the poverty line.134
Methods, Theory, and Questions of Political Definition
A growing and substantial body of scholarship within the academy has carefully documented the massive amount of political work Black women, and in particular, poor Black women, have been doing since Reconstruction.135 Central to this growing body of work is the ever-increasing number of political scientists who use a diverse methodological toolkit to get at the diverse political experiences of Black women living in the United States.136 It is critically important to use qualitative data, ethnography and in-depth interviewing specifically, to capture the political engagement and political identity formation of marginalized groups. As I mentioned in the Introduction, groups like poor Black women are often missed in large surveys because of the well-recognized problem of incomparability between survey questions because of differing interpretations of variables related to cultural context.137
Scholars of race, ethnicity, and politics continue to point out characteristics unique to the political engagement and political identity formation of various marginalized groups (e.g., Afro-Cuban immigrants, Black trans women, and DACA students seeking citizenship). Survey data frequently misses intersectional and secondarily marginalized groups like poor Black women in the United States.138 We know they are being missed because of the extensive qualitative data (and quantitative data) showing marginalized populations and their ongoing resistance to the power and politics affecting their everyday lives.139
Over the course of a year (2011–2012), I conducted twenty-nine in-depth interviews with Black women who lived in Altgeld Gardens and two in-depth interviews with Black women who had recently left the development. I also followed various respondents around the development and attended several political meetings and community events. Throughout my time at Altgeld Gardens, I asked respondents how they defined the political and whether they considered themselves to be politically active. I compared these responses to my observations of their actual behaviors and reported activities. As a result, I collected concrete data that assesses and engages with the traditional measures of politics, political engagement, identity, efficacy, and alienation used by political scientists. I use this data as the jumping-off point for developing conceptual categories that provide a stronger and more substantial theoretical framework that can recognize and understand the politics of marginalized individuals living in the United States.
By using qualitative methods, I can specify the mechanisms at work when respondents react to indicators that ultimately cause researchers to label them as cynical or efficacious. The hallmark of this project is a specification of the language respondents used to describe themselves as members of sociopolitical community.140 I entered this project by asking methodological questions: What combinations of these broad concepts do people use to describe themselves? How do individuals understand their efficacy and cynicism (for example) working together? Most significantly, how do individuals understand their own holistic political identity? Ultimately, these questions concern political imagination. How do individuals’ conceptions of their political placement within the public sphere affect how they engage the sociopolitical community? I argue that the individual engages the state based on how they understand their political possible-self (PPS; that is, what they believe to be politically possible for themselves as a part of sociopolitical community). How a person understands their PPS is based, in part, on how the state treats them.
Methodological Choices
I used the case study method to examine whether public housing shaped the political identities of Black women living within CHA housing developments. Robert K. Yin argues the case study is useful when observing context is especially important.
In other words, you would use the case study method because you wanted to understand a real-life phenomenon in depth, but such understanding encompassed important contextual conditions—because they were highly pertinent to your phenomenon of study.141
By using the case study method, I observed the shifting political identities of CHA tenants. Case study also allowed me to observe respondents’ lived experiences, spatial context, and understandings of themselves as members of a sociopolitical community. In this study, the context cannot (and should not) be separated from the case itself; the case study method facilitates the “study [of] a case when it itself is of very special interest. We look for the detail of interaction with its contexts. Case study is the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case, coming to understand its activity within important circumstances.”142 I argue that we cannot separate the influence of the material structure of public housing on the political lives of residents from their lived experience within the housing developments.143
Data Collection
As is typical in the case study method, I triangulated the data with three sources of information. I used in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis to examine my questions. In this study, I conducted in-depth interviews with thirty-one Black women who were past and present residents of Altgeld Gardens. These interviews allowed me to slowly get to know the women and the nuances of their lives within the housing development and surrounding neighborhoods. I asked questions about how these women understood politics and whether they considered themselves to be members of a sociopolitical community. Most significantly, the in-depth interviews examined how the women felt about the public housing space and the presence (or nonpresence) of government actors in their lives. While each in-depth interview was based loosely on the same interview guide, the questions were open ended to allow each individual woman’s narrative to develop. It was not my goal to shape how the respondents told their stories. It was my goal to get as close to an authentic self-description of their politics as possible. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed.
I used participant observation within the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes so I could pay especially close attention to Altgeld Gardens and the people who live there. I attended Altgeld-Murray LAC meetings, CHA Central Advisory Council meetings, and CHA Board of Commissioners meetings, as well as local community organization gatherings, events, and other spontaneous or planned political gatherings on the development. Spending time within the housing development itself, as well as observing CHA meetings and gatherings, facilitated a greater understanding of the discourses within public housing spaces and the residents they affect, but also to examine how the space shifts and changes over time to fit the needs and desires of those in power.
Procedure
Before entering the field, I designed the interview protocol around the research questions. These questions were open ended in design to allow respondents to answer as they saw fit. I tested the interview protocol in the spring of 2011 during the initial pilot study in the Altgeld Gardens and Murray Homes. Throughout this period, I refined the protocol until it yielded consistent and reliable results. I began my study by attending as many public meetings as I could. What I found during my months of observation at those meetings was the intensity with which tenants fought for basic necessities. The meetings were always scheduled for midmorning, so often only a handful of residents could actually attend. This meant that older residents (in terms of both natal age and number of years lived on the development) held most of the tenant leadership positions and advocated on behalf of all residents, new and old. As a result, there was a fracture between residents who’d lived in CHA for over ten years and residents who were relatively new to the developments (less than five years).
Each interview was held in the respondent’s home, the only exceptions being when multiple respondents were interviewed in one day or when the respondent was uncomfortable having me in their home. I interviewed individuals in their homes to facilitate their comfort and to build trust. I did not want to bring respondents to the University of Chicago or the CHA offices, where potential negative bureaucratic associations might exist. By interviewing respondents in their homes, I minimized the inconvenience posed to them. However, meeting individuals in their homes also allowed me the opportunity to further study their relationship to their place of residence, as well as document the aesthetics of their lived experience.
I paid each respondent twenty dollars for their participation. I paid in cash because of the remoteness of the Altgeld Gardens and Murray Homes from any major retail establishments. The closest shopping centers were at least thirty minutes away by bus, and many of the women did not shop online. Interviews, on average, lasted about forty minutes to one hour. However, individual interviews ranged from three hours to twenty minutes. The shorter interviews were with women who were elderly or battling various addictions or illnesses. I kept the shorter interviews in my dataset because they offered differing perspectives important to my study.
Sampling and Recruitment
I defined the case by a sample of thirty-one Black women who lived within the CHA development, the Altgeld-Murray Homes. All respondents were over eighteen years old, and I strove for a diversity of age ranges from young adult to senior. To create diversity in my sample, I recruited potential respondents by posting flyers throughout the housing development. Essentially, there are two units of analysis in my project, the individuals and the development itself. Within the individual unit of analysis, there are actually three different populations: those who were new to public housing, those who were new to Altgeld Gardens, and those who had lived in Altgeld Gardens for a significant period (ten or more years). Since my primary interest was in the ways public housing shaped the political identity of its residents, the diversity within the individual units of analysis provided me with the purchase I needed on the core conceptual questions. Given this, I shaped my subject pool around these three population groups.
I used a snowball or convenience sampling method. I interviewed the women who volunteered for the study and who met the specifications of my sample. From there I asked my respondents to recommend other women for the study. This sampling method enabled a better understanding of the community and of the political and social networks of the respondents. As has been noted time and time again in studies of political participation, an individual’s political and social network has one of the largest impacts on their ever-evolving political identity.144 Understanding the broad networks of the respondents gave me better leverage when constructing a theory of political identity development. Within the context of public housing, it is also critical to consider how demolishing high-rise communities that had existed for at least forty years shifted, and sometimes even destroyed, the social networks women in public housing depend on.
Conclusion
In this chapter I’ve argued that the spatial conditions of public housing shaped the politics of residents who lived in CHA developments.145 Neoliberal policies of the 1990s and 2000s have meant that the CHA has systematically been removing itself from management and the basic infrastructure maintenance of the remaining Chicago public housing developments.146 But despite almost constant surveillance by street-level bureaucrats and worries about state and residential violence, Black communities living within public housing still develop political strategies to nurture themselves, their families, and their community.147
* As discussed in the Introduction, according to my Black feminist theoretical framework of politics and the political, two or more people are required to cultivate community-based power. When individuals think about politics but do not communicate those ideas, they are engaged in intellectual work, not political work. This could be due to an individual concern for their own self-interest. For further discussion, see the introduction to Chapter 4.
* In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks argued in the first edition preface that “to be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. . . . We could enter that world [the white wealthy world], but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to beyond the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both” (hooks, xvi). This awareness that Black folks have of the inequities between the places where they live and the white spaces where they must work creates a hyperawareness of inequity. I argue that this hyperawareness can act as both a politically edifying force and a politically alienating force in the Black public sphere—particularly in the Black public sphere of communities living below the poverty line.
* Susan J. Popkin et al., “The HOPE VI Program: What about the Residents?,” Housing Policy Debate 15, no. 2 (2010): 385–414, https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2004.9521506.
* HOPE VI is a federal neoliberal policy that offers grants to public housing authorities who are willing to demolish some, if not all, of their high-rise public housing stock (see Hackworth, Neoliberal City).