No Simple Solutions: Transforming Public Housing in Chicago(Urban Institute Press)

About the Book

In this book, Sue Popkin tells the story of how an ambitious—and risky—social experiment affected the lives of the people it was ultimately intended to benefit: the residents who had suffered through the worst days of crime, decay, and rampant mismanagement of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), and now had to face losing the only home many of them had known. The stories Popkin tells in this book offer important lessons not only for Chicago, but for the many other American cities still grappling with the legacy of racial segregation and failed federal housing policies, making this book a vital resource for city planners and managers, urban development professionals, and anti-poverty activists.

Table of Contents:

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Transforming Public Housing, Changing Residents’ Lives
Chapter Two: Transforming the CHA
Chapter Three: Better Housing, Safer Neighborhoods?
Chapter Four: The Hard to House
Chapter Five: Reaching the Next Generation
Chapter Six: No Simple Solutions
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

About the Author :
Susan Popkin is asenior fellow and director of the Neighborhoods and Youth Development initiative in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

Review :
All things considered, this is an important book that comprehensively and critically documents Chicago’s Plan for Transformation. It is a valuable book for anyone—scholars, practitioners, policymakers, community organizations, and students—interested in these important housing policies. The book does a great job in presenting cutting edge social research, while tracing the remarkably important role that the author (who has over 30 years of experience studying CHA residents) and her colleagues played in shaping the social service component of Chicago’s public housing transformation. . . Because No Simple Solutions represents the first major book on the conditions of HOPE VI relocatees, I recommend it to housing scholars and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic.

Applied sociologist Popkin presents vivid snapshots portraying the lived experiences of individuals, families, and neighborhoods impacted by public housing policies and revitalization efforts. In 1999, Chicago embarked on an ambitious venture: to rid the city of distressed and deteriorating public housing developments and their accompaniments, including crime, failing schools, crumbling infrastructures, and failed dreams. Popkin builds on her decades of research in Chicago’s public housing developments to answer the fundamental question of what the Plan for Transformation meant to Chicago Housing Authority families. In several longitudinal studies, Popkin and her team of researchers conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with hundreds of families and found that transforming the lives of public housing residents requires a more holistic approach that goes far beyond building new housing developments. Documenting the experiences of ‘hard to house’ families, Popkin demonstrates the need to combine housing assistance with meaningful services targeted at individual and family needs. A must-read for students, practitioners, and researchers interested in housing policy from the ground up.

Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

No Simple Solutions by Susan Popkin shows that most displaced residents have benefited, but a significant minority has been hurt. The book does a great job in presenting cutting edge social research, while tracing the remarkably important role that the author (who has over 30 years of experience studying CHA residents) and her colleagues played in shaping the social service component of Chicago’s public housing transformation…. I cannot overemphasize the value of this qualitative research…. Unlike other public housing books that end with a ‘gloom and doom’ scenario, Popkin urges readers to press on and to make incremental improvements…. Because No Simple Solutions represents the first major book on the conditions of HOPE VI relocatees, I recommend it to housing scholars and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic. The book is an insightful account… Popkin’s No Simple Solutions is an important addition to this literature. It is essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in the social and human consequences of mismanaged, underfunded, and neglected public housing, and the complicated challenges of addressing them. Epic and encyclopedic, this vital book illuminates the human drama induced by Chicago’s bold Plan for Transformation. Multiple surveys conducted over more than 15 years’ time, plus vivid in-depth interviews that put skin on the numbers, reveal a remarkable, surprising, and ultimately hopeful story. Award-winning author Susan Popkin delivers an essential read for anyone who cares about how our nation attends to the housing needs of the poor. “Susan Popkin’s clear-eyed, succinct, and compassionate book focuses on the children and parents who suffered through the intolerable conditions of Chicago’s public housing, and then navigated the complex attempts to transform it. With Popkin’s unique perspective gained from following families for more than a decade, No Easy Solutions provides a deeply well informed guide to what is needed next.” “This important new book offers a hopeful but unflinching account of one of America’s most ambitious and also misunderstood efforts to transform ghetto poverty in a major city. In this vivid and accessible account, we learn the real impacts on highly disadvantaged parents and their children over time—and what does and does not make a difference in their lives. Sue Popkin is one of our most astute, seasoned, and dedicated observers of vulnerable families in low-income housing. Her new book is required reading."