The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In"Purging the Poorest," Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the deserving poor. In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale s groundbreaking history of these twice-cleared communities provides...
The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. I...
