Documenting the Voices of Public Housing Residents

Thursday June 18, 2009 | National

 

Overview of White Paper

Over the past 8 months, the RTTC HUD workgroup has been engaged in an 8 city grassroots, participatory research project to highlight the major issues facing public and subsidized housing residents across the country, to develop policy recommendations for improvements to the public housing system and to counter the neo-liberal policies that dominate the low-income housing debate.  This project, which has engaged all three levels of the Right to the City membership (base-building membership organizations, resource ally organizations and academics) will result in a report that will be used to promote the Right to the City framework and the policy priorities of the RTTC HUD workgroup with elected officials, media and the public.  In addition to documenting the voices of public and subsidized housing residents, the report will build the framework for a strategic national campaign, led by public and subsidized housing residents, to win concrete improvements to public housing policy.

Community Data Workshops and Focus Groups

In April, the RTTC HUD Workgroup held community data workshops in NYC, Washington D.C, San Francisco, Oakland, Miami, Chicago and New Orleans.  Each workshop brought together public housing residents to discuss the public housing data that RTTC resource groups have been collecting and to identify what data is missing.  The goal of the workshop was to identify what public housing residents want to know about public housing and to hear from the real experts on public housing, the people that live there.  The workshops included a participatory game, "data feud" and other activities and discussions. In total, 90 residents in 7 cities participated making the workshops were a huge success!  We received great feedback from participants and many of the participants volunteered to participate in the next phase of the research, the focus groups.

In May, focus group were conducted to collect more in depth information from residents about their experiences living or waiting to live in public housing.  The focus groups included 65 public housing residents in 6 cities and Los Angeles and Chicago are set to hold their focus groups over the summer.  The focus groups were held in Spanish and English.  Over the summer, the HUD workgroup will work to analyze the data we have collected, develop grassroots policy recommendations for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and to write the white paper.  Look out for the white paper release in the fall!

Meeting with Adolfo Carrion

On May 19th, RTTC met with President Obama's Director of the Office or Urban Affairs.  The alliance met with this newly appointed position official to articulate the work and concerns of RTTC member groups.  The HUD workgroup participated in this meeting and presented the white paper to Mr. Carrion.  Mr. Carrion asked to be kept up to date on the development of the white paper and its release.