HOPE VI

HOPE VI is a plan by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is meant to revitalize the worst public housing projects in the United States into mixed-income developments. Its philosophy is largely based on New Urbanism and the concept of Defensible space.

The program began in 1992, with formal recognition by law in 1998. As of 2005, the program had distributed $5.8 billion through 446 federal block grants to cities for the developments, with the highest individual grant being $67.7 million, awarded to Arverne/Edgemere Houses in New York, NY.

HOPE VI has included a variety of grant programs including: Revitalization, Demolition, Main Street, and Planning grant programs. As of June 1, 2010 there have been 254 HOPE VI Revitalization grants awarded to 132 housing authorities since 1993 – totaling more than $6.1 billion.

An exemplary precursor and inspiration to the HOPE VI model was the Columbia Point Housing Projects on Columbia Point in Boston, Massachusetts. Built in 1954, and consisting of approximately 1,500 apartment units, they fell into disrepair and became quite dangerous. By the 1980s, only 300 families lived there and the buildings were falling apart. Eventually, realizing the situation was almost hopeless, Boston turned over the management, cleanup, planning and revitalization of the property to a private development firm, Corcoran-Mullins-Jennison, in 1984. The construction work for the new Harbor Point development began in 1986 and was completed by 1990. It was a mixed income community, called Harbor Point Apartments.

Congress established the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing in 1989 to study the issue of dilapidated public housing. After submitting the report to Congress in 1992, legislation creating the HOPE VI grants was written. The first HOPE VI pilot grant was given to the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) in 1993. The original HOPE VI grant application by AHA was based on renovating/modernizing Techwood Homes, the nation's oldest housing project, and about a third of adjacent Clark Howell Homes. The grant envisioned Techwood/Clark Howell remaining entirely public housing. The mixed-income concept did not exist when the first HOPE VI grant awards were made and they were only made to housing authorities. Atlanta-based The Integral Group partnered with McCormack Baron Salazar of St. Louis to submit a proposal to AHA in the fall of 1994 in response to AHA's request for proposals. That resulted in the creation of Centennial Place, which has remained a successful mixed-income community. Instrumental in the process was AHA's new CEO Renee Lewis Glover, who has guided the agency through the demolition of all of its large housing projects and replaced them with mixed-income communities modeled on Centennial Place. The first HOPE VI mixed-income community (where public housing was a component) was Phase I of Centennial Place, which closed on March 8, 1996.

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