At a time of severe housing crisis in America, public housing is — often quite literally — in ruins. How did we get here?

Urban planning and policy scholar Edward Goetz tells the story of the destruction and dismantling of public housing that took off in the 1980s and accelerated during the ’90s under the Clinton administration’s Hope VI program. The stigmatization and demonization of public housing and then its demolition — about half of which took place under Hope VI — reduced the number of public housing units by 370,000 from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. The “hope” in Hope VI stood for “housing opportunities for people everywhere.” In fact, it was a neoliberal project to end public housing as we know it and remake cities for capital and the well-to-do.

All of this history matters right now. In the wake of the destruction of public housing, housing organizers are looking back to the social housing agenda.