Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In an effort to turn around ailing neighborhoods, cities and the federal government have directed large sums of money to demolishing public housing, often in the name of decreasing concentrated poverty. In Chicago, the city’s Plan for Transformation, aided by federal HOPE VI funds, led to the demolition of more than 20,000 units of public housing between 2000 and 2010. However, research on the effects of public housing demolitions are mixed, and generally focus on individual outcomes of people displaced by demolition rather than how demolitions influence the trajectories of surrounding neighborhoods.

This paper addresses the research gap concerning place-based effects of public housing demolition by exploring the trajectories of neighborhoods that experienced high levels of public housing demolition compared to those neighborhoods without public housing demolition. Using Census data, I develop a combined scale that measures the direction and magnitude of neighborhood demographic and economic changes relative to the city average to examine trends of neighborhood upgrading and downgrading. Using multi-decade, address-level data on public housing demolition from the Chicago Housing Authority, I then compare the geographic relationship of upgrading neighborhoods to the sites of public housing demolition.

Preliminary findings show that 23 of Chicago’s 77 community areas experienced changes consistent with upgrading or gentrification between 2000 and 2010. Of the 23 upgrading neighborhoods, 35 percent experienced some demolition (more than 1 unit) of public housing while nearly 20 percent had 1500 or more units demolished over the study period. Compared to citywide changes, these upgrading neighborhoods experienced dramatic demographic shifts: percent white increased by 139 percent compared to the citywide average increase of 46 percent, median income increased 18 percent compared to the citywide average increase of 2 percent, and median rent increased 23 percent compared to a citywide average increase of 18 percent. Moreover, results from a local Moran’s I test suggests that we can reject the hypothesis that this pattern of neighborhood upgrading is non-random and conclude that upgrading strongly correlates with the demolition of public housing. Further analysis will add temporal depth by examining how neighborhood trajectories differ for areas that experienced earlier compared to more recent periods of demolition and will use a difference-in-differences design to show that in comparison to census tracts that did not experience any public housing demolition, census tracts that did experience demolition saw a much greater degree of neighborhood upgrading.

While these initial findings are not completely surprising – one would expect that public housing demolition would lead to demographic shifts through displacement – these changes in surrounding neighborhoods raise important policy questions about the effects of demolition on poor communities and the ramifications of demolition and displacement more broadly.