Foundations, nonprofits, and the fate of public housing: A critique of the Right to the City Alliance’s ‘‘We Call These Projects Home’’ report

For over three decades the US federal government has promoted the rollback of public housing through policies of privatization, deregulation, and devolution of responsibilities to localities. The embracing of austerity by the Obama administration and Congress have only accelerated this long term trend, with new legislation presaging the selling-off of large swaths of the remaining public housing stock. In this context The Right to the City (RTTC), an anti-gentrification group, issued a 2010 report that thoroughly critiques the neoliberal policies that have dismantled public housing communities and the “deconcentrating poverty” ideology that has legitimated this agenda. I identify four strengths the report makes toward building an effective movement to defend and expand public housing in the current hostile political environment. At the same time the report’s silence on the role that nonprofits and foundations have played in promoting privatization is a serious limitation on its effectiveness as a guide and weapon for the audience of pro-public housing activists and academics that the authors’ have, in part, directed their message to. I provide evidence of the direct role foundations and nonprofits have played privatizing public housing, with particular attention placed in post-Katrina New Orleans. Further, I suggest, through a review of a growing body of literature, that foundations also foment accommodation to privatization indirectly through their financing of ostensibly pro-public housing nonprofits.

► The RTTC report makes four key contributions to defend and expand public housing.
► Nonprofits and foundations promote the privatization of public housing.
► Only a mass movement can derail bipartisan efforts to dismantle public housing.