Sense of Place among Atlanta Public Housing Residents

Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. 88, No. 3 doi:10.1007/s11524-011-9579-0* 2011 The New York Academy of Medicine

Griff Tester, Erin Ruel, Angela Anderson, Donald C. Reitzes,

ABSTRACT For almost two decades now, cities around the country have been demolishing traditional public housing and relocating residents to subsidized private market rental housing. In this paper, we examine sense of place, consisting of both community and place attachment, among a sample of Atlanta public housing residents prior to relocation (N=290). We find that 41% of the residents express place attachment, and a large percentage express some level of community attachment, though residents of senior public housing are far more attached than residents of family public housing. Positive neighborhood characteristics, such as collective efficacy and social support, are associated with community attachment, and social support is also associated with place attachment. Negative neighborhood characteristics, such as social disorder and fear of crime, are not consistently associated with sense of place. We argue that embodied in current public housing relocation initiatives is a real sense of loss among the residents. Policy makers may also want to consider the possibilities of drawing upon residents sense of place as a resource for renovating and revitalizing public housing communities rather than continuing to demolish them and relocating residents to other neighborhoods.

KEYWORDS Sense of place, Place and community attachment, Public housing transformation

INTRODUCTION

In 1992, the HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) Program was created by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. This program sought to transform public housing by demolishing the large, spatially concentrated developments and replacing them with mixed-income housing. The Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) has been at the forefront of such efforts, building 10 nationally acclaimed mixed-income projects between 1994 and 2004, and gaining reputation as a leader in rethinking public housing and addressing its perceived failures.

By the early 1990s, public housing had been deemed a policy failure because it concentrated very poor people by design. Thus, its primary failure was the concentration of poverty.1 Concentrated poverty is typically associated with a multitude of social and physical ills: high unemployment rates; high school dropout rates; single, female-headed households; high crime rates; and poor physical and mental health.26 Thus,...