From High-Rise Projects to HOPE VI Vouchers: Race and Space in Baltimore Public Housing

Like many cities in the United States during World War II, Baltimore experienced an influx of workers to meet the demands of wartime production.  Struggling to deal with the increased housing demands, cities like Baltimore created or expanded their public housing projects, a move they originally hoped would be temporary. It was not; the last public housing high-rise in Baltimore stood until 2002.

            The demolition of the high-rise projects beginning in the 1990s in Baltimore was a continuation of urban policy that repeatedly displaced public housing residents. Continuing the historiography trend as more historians are turning their attention to the end of the housing project era, including Lawrence Vale in Purging the Poorest and Edward Goetz in New Deal Ruins, my work analyzes the debate among city planners, government officials, and public housing residents as to the best way to serve these populations between different decades. The earliest iteration was slum clearance – a plan to raze entire neighborhoods and move residents into planned public housing communities. Later, as the public housing projects were themselves considered blight, the HOPE VI program provided impetus to destroy traditional housing projects and offer displaced residents Section 8 housing vouchers instead.

            This paper compares the discussions and debates surrounding where to build early public housing projects from the 1940s-1950s with the rhetoric surrounding large-scale demolition of projects in the 1990s. As low-income Baltimoreans were first pushed into public housing and then later pushed out, I follow the striking parallels of arguments about where to place housing projects within Baltimore City and later struggles over where to allow HOPE VI scattered-site housing in the surrounding region. I argue that by comparing these debates, we can see how race and space remain deeply entwined even as the form of public housing changes.