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E-book
Author Chenault, Tiffany Gayle, 1974-

Title The unseen politics of public housing : resident councils, communities, and change / Tiffany Chenault
Published Lanham ; Boulder ; New York ; London : Lexington Books, 2015

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Description 1 online resource (xviii, 131 pages)
Contents Introduction -- Welcome to rivertown -- Code for community engagement -- Who's leading the council -- Rules for organizing a council -- Not fitting the public housing image : location and communication -- Meeting and manager dynamics -- Policy recommendations -- References -- Appendices
Summary The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) emphasizes the word 'community' for building economic development, citizen participations, and revitalization of facilities and services in urban and rural areas. Resident Councils are one way to develop and build community among residents of public housing. Despite HUD stressing community building in public housing and investing money and policies around it, there are some resident councils that are not fulfilling the expectations of HUD. This book is my attempt to describe and explain HUD's expectations for the resident council as an active agent for community building and the actual practices of the resident council. I argue that policies and regulations of resident councils which exist to support the effectiveness of the resident council in creating and implementing community-building, self-sufficiency, and empowerment activities and goals in a public housing community may do more harm than good. The Department of Housing and Urban Development invests and spends billions on Public Housing Programs (6.6 billion in 2013). The majority of the 1.2 million people who live in public housing do not live in large urban areas with thousands of people confined to a certain space. The majority of public housing units (90%) have fewer than 500 units. These smaller units and the people that live in them tend to go unnoticed. This ethnographic case study focuses on explaining and understanding the factors and constraints that exist between HUD's expectations for the resident council as an active agent for community building and the actual practices of the resident council. To explain the disjunction -- in fact, to determine if such disjunctions identified by Rivertown council members are real. Using the tenets of Critical Race Theory allows us to understand what forces -- either real or imagined, structural or cultural -- prevent the resident council from being an effective agent for change in the public housing community
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 111-125) and index
Notes In English
Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed
Subject Public housing -- United States.
Low-income housing -- United States
Sociology, Urban -- United States
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Infrastructure.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
Low-income housing
Public housing
Race relations
Sociology, Urban
SUBJECT United States -- Race relations. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140494
Subject United States
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2021675484
ISBN 9780739165089
0739165089