In this panel, four scholars of public housing will explore one area of contestation in public housing during the 1980s and 1990s--public housing resident management. Perhaps surprisingly, resident management, a product of late 1960s and early 1970s resident organizing, became a pet project of some conservative politicians across party lines in the 1980s. These politicians viewed resident management as a form of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility for public housing residents. The rearticulation of resident management as aligned with conservative ideology reflected the larger rise in conservatism happening at that time. Public housing residents themselves, who, especially in large housing authorities in major cities, were disproportionately Black women, were not immune to the shifting political culture. Some leaders of resident management corporations used similar language around self-sufficiency and personal responsibility in their attempts to garner both political support and funding for their management initiatives.

The papers in this panel will examine conservatism in U.S. public housing resident management across cities, resident management corporations, public housing residents, politicians, and over time. Rosemary Ndubuizu will discuss the Republican Party’s attempt to adapt racial and gender politics for conservative purposes. Akira Drake Rodriguez’s paper will examine the limits of tenant management and ownership models, and how these models and their limits impact activists’ current struggle for housing justice. Chanelle Rose will explore the conservatism of some of the Black women public housing residents who led their development’s management corporations. And Gillet Rosenblith will compare how politicians and public housing resident managers viewed resident management as a vehicle for personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, and empowerment. Together, their work reveals not only what the history of public housing resident management teaches us about public housing in this era, but also how various expressions of conservatism took shape across distinct groups of people in the Reagan-Bush era, and to what end.

This panel will appeal to twentieth century U.S. historians interested in housing, African American history, race, policy, conservatism, gender, social movement, and urban studies.