Power, Personal Responsibility, and Public Housing Resident Management

Public housing resident management in the United States emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely due to resident organizing as part of the movements for racial justice, welfare rights, and feminism. Residents pushed for tenant power alongside Black and Woman Power. Public housing agencies and HUD responded by acknowledging that residents should play a role in at least some aspects of PHA governance, but, as this paper will discuss, views on what this role entailed varied over time and across different housing authorities. In the 1980s, conservatives across party lines appropriated the language of the left while pushing for policies and programs that undermined the original meaning of those words. In this period, calls for tenant power became support for tenant empowerment. As Rhonda Williams has discussed, this shift in language from active to passive reflected the diminished radical potential of tenant organizing by their incorporation into institutional structures. Similarly, while the initial push for resident management started because of the left-leaning organizing of residents, by the mid-late 1980s, proponents of resident management—including residents, public housing administrators, and also legislators—increasingly used the language of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility as the logic behind their support. Public housing residents have never been ideologically monolithic. However, their testimony before Congress reveals that they understood terms including self-sufficiency, empowerment, and personal responsibility perhaps more broadly than many of the lawmakers before whom they testified. This paper will explore the early evolution of resident management and the ways in which, during the Reagan-Bush era, public housing residents and politicians used the same language in discussing their desire for resident management, but with different meanings.