Illustrations

Tables

Introduction: The "Public" in Public Housing

Public Housing as an American Problem

Housing the Public Neighbor

Public Housing in Boston



PART I: THE PREHISTORY OF PUBLIC HOUSING

1. Coping with the Poor: Techniques and Institutions

The Moral Geography of Puritan Space

New Institutions for Indoor Relief

Tenement Reform

Settlement Houses

Ideal Tenement Districts

2. Rewarding Upward Mobility: Public Lands, Private Houses, and New Communities

Frontier Individualism on Public Lands

Homesteads in the Boston Suburbs

Residential Districts

Communities by Design

Public Neighborhoods without Public Neighbors

PART II: PUBLIC HOUSING IN BOSTON

3. Building Selective Collectives, 1934-1954

Boston's Selective Collectives

Public Works and Private Markets

Public Housing as Slum Reform

Public Housing as War Production (1940 -1945)

Public Housing as Veterans' Assistance (1946 -1954)

The Authority Is Watching

4. Managing Poverty and Race, 1955-1980

The Geopolitics of Public Housing

Urban Renewal

Rewarding the Elderly

The Mechanisms of Patronage

Racial Discrimination and the BHA

Battles within the Bureaucracy

The Decline and Fall of the BHA

5. The Boston Housing Authority since 1980: The Puritans Return

The Receivership

Four Redevelopment Efforts in the 1980s

The Politics of Public Housing Preferences

Getting Beyond Receivership

Boston Public Housing in the 1990s

Ideological Retrenchment

From the Puritans to the Projects

Notes

Credits

Index