Public housing is effectively over in Houston. What comes next?

Housing Foundations is a series about the policies, systems and history behind the housing challenges facing Houston and other large metropolitan areas. This post focuses on the role of public housing.

Public housing seems to have ended not with a bang but a whimper.

The local end of public housing did not make front-page news at the Houston Chronicle, likely because the decline has occurred over decades. In 2024, public housing was not the biggest subsidized housing program that HHA managed. The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is significantly larger, serving about 19,000 households, compared to about 2,300 households in seven public housing developments and five fixed mixed-income public/private developments, according to information presented at a recent HHA Board of Commissioners meeting.

The key difference between the two programs is that HCV residents live in privately owned buildings, while public housing residents live in publicly owned buildings. HCV emerged as a way to get the federal government out of the housing management sector, and to deconcentrate poverty and eliminate the perceived ills of public housing.

Public housing communities are called “public” for a reason: They’re owned by HHA, a chartered public corporation that receives the bulk of its funding (85% in 2023) from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Other government sources and grants cover the rest. Residents in public housing must apply, win a lottery and be lower income. They pay no more than a certain share of their income, usually 30%, on rent. HHA’s funds cover operation and maintenance costs beyond this rent. HHA outsources everyday property management of its seven public housing communities to two private property management companies, J. Allen and AOG Living (formerly Allied Orion Group).

90 years of housing

Public housing emerged during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Beyond people not being able to afford housing, home amenities like indoor plumbing or sewage connections were far less common at the time. Per the 1940 census of Texas, over 60% of homes did not have adequate plumbing. Such conditions were concentrated in rural areas and cities’ poorer neighborhoods. Prior to the middle of the 20th century, neighborhoods without plumbing or sewage, and homes made of tar paper and scrap wood, could be still be found relatively easily in urban centers. Policymakers aimed for “slum clearance” of these neighborhoods, along with providing affordable housing.

A 1937 federal law provided authority and funding for local public housing agencies to do those two things. HHA was formed in 1938 — it was initially known as the Housing Authority of the City of Houston. The new agency completed its first public housing development, Cuney Homes, in 1940, though notably on vacant land and without needing to clear any slums.[1] Applicants accepted to live in Cuney Homes were not the neediest of the needy: They had to be employed in order to get an apartment, and those with children and coming from “slums” were given priority. Early public housing projects maintained a color line: Cuney Homes and Kelly Village (another early development in Fifth Ward) were all-Black projects, and San Felipe (later Allen Parkway Village) and Irvinton Village were originally only for White residents.[2] Legal segregation officially ended after the Fair Housing Act of 1968, meaning that for at least 30 years there was no federal rule forbidding segregation in HHA’s public housing communities.

The federal commitment to affordable public housing development ceased in 1973. That year, President Richard Nixon put forward a moratorium on additional funding, stopping new construction. The policy continued through the 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, the funding moratorium led to worse building conditions, as demolition became the policy priority. Through the Clinton years in the 1990s, the HOPE VI program helped demolish housing developments and replaced them with mixed-income, privately managed communities with far fewer units affordable to the poorest residents. Allen Parkway Village at the former site of San Felipe is one local example of a HOPE VI project, maintained by a private entity through the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. Allen Parkway Village is HHA’s only such project, but if you know of a mixed-income community in another city built in the 1990s at the site of a former public housing complex, there are good odds it’s a HOPE VI project.

In 1999, the federal Faircloth Amendment effectively forbade housing authorities from building more public housing. At its peak, HHA managed at least 11 public housing complexes,[3] but now only seven, and soon to be zero.

What comes next

What are the plans for the remaining seven communities? Three federal programs — project-based vouchers, RAD and Choice Neighborhoods — will help finance the demolition and redevelopment of the sites, replacing the existing publicly owned units with privately developed and managed sites.

Under HHA’s five-year plan for 2025-2029, two public housing communities, Kelly Village and Ewing, will be demolished, with their affordable units replaced (at least partially) with project-based voucher units managed by a private entity.

For Cuney Homes, HHA received a $50 million Choice Neighborhood Implementation Grant from HUD in 2024 to fund its redevelopment. The existing structures will be demolished and replaced with mixed-income properties, while the Choice Neighborhood plan asserts that all 553 current households will be replaced with privately managed, subsidized, affordable units inside and outside the existing site (though within Third Ward), plus an additional 447 affordable rental units.

Given HHA’s success in securing funding for Cuney’s redevelopment, a similar Choice Neighborhood Implementation Grant application was filed to redevelop Irvinton Village.

HHA intends to submit RAD applications to convert Bellerive, Lyerly and Kennedy Place to project-based voucher funding.

While these seven developments will no longer be traditional public housing, some form of subsidized affordable housing will take their place, though it’s unknown at this moment exactly how much there will be.

Meanwhile, the national outlook for public housing, which provides homes to over 800,000 households, offers no hope of a profound reinvestment. According to press reports, the current administration could reduce HUD's headcount by 50% — including most of the agency's office on homelessness.

A mixed legacy

To paraphrase scholar Ed Goetz, the public housing program had a lot of quiet successes and loud failures.

While the decline of public housing comes from policymakers wanting to avoid “concentrated poverty” and the extremely well-publicized ills of certain housing projects, dismantling public housing brought about other bad outcomes. Demolishing public housing put low-income tenants into the comparatively unregulated private market, and extensive investigations showed the negative effects on housing affordability, social networks and place attachment for former public housing residents.

Public housing emerged from another affordability crisis facing U.S. cities in the 1930s, and also in the immediate post-World War II years. Public housing was one of a few solutions to that crisis, alongside the massive highway and banking subsidies that enabled mass suburbanization. Public housing’s “failure” is not a matter of undisputed fact, for reasons stated above.

At its onset, the public housing program provided poor families with new affordable homes with modern amenities, at a time when even adequate indoor plumbing was not a fact for the majority of Texans. They were also settled per the strict Jim Crow-era color line. Over the decades, these communities, despite their deferred maintenance challenges, housed thousands of low-income households at rents guaranteed to be affordable by the power of law.

Despite the elimination of public housing, HHA will still have a role monitoring and implementing publicly subsidized yet privately executed affordable housing programs. Researchers, journalists and housing advocates will be following and assessing these changes to see whether abandoning 90 years of public housing in Houston and across the country actually leads to better housing conditions.