Assessing the Impact of Relocation in Two Urban Neighborhoods

University Of South Florida, Tampa FL

Investigators

Abstract

In many cities of the US public officials are demolishing public housing and relocating poor families into dispersed private housing, following a program called HOPE IV whose goal is to "deconcentrate" poverty. Two competing models predict different outcomes from this relocation: Social Disorganization (SD) asserts that public housing projects generate negative social capital and that escape will relieve those problems, and further that relocation neighborhoods will afford new social opportunities and access to new valuable information. Cooperative Assets (CA) regards the social ties of public housing to be positive assets embedded in kinship and locality networks, so that relocation will harm reciprocal support arrangements, and further that relocation neighborhoods will be hostile or at minimum unfamiliar, so the net effect of relocation will be to harm families. This study by a team of cultural anthropologists from the University of South Florida will measure the social networks of a sample of affected households in two sites in Tampa, Florida, representing the most typical receiving areas to HOPE VI programs. Methods include formal interviews with a random sample of 100 households and their non-HOPE neighbors, participant observation and semi-structured key-person interviews and documentary analysis to establish a statistical profile of each site. The results will be valuable to planners as well as to affected communities, to inform public policy as well as to help participant households cope with the problems of adjustment to relocation.