The Rise of the Horizontal Ghetto: Poverty in a Post-public Housing Era

Abstract

In the past two decades, changes in American housing policy have transformed the landscape of high-rise ghetto poverty. In its place, has emerged what I call the horizontal ghetto, where high-rise public housing has been demolished and poverty is turned on its side, spreading across the cityscape. Researchers are now beginning to document the reconcentration of voucher holders in moderately poor neighborhoods. This dissertation examines how residents come to live in this type of neighborhood, and how this new context shapes social organization for those who reside within it. I examine a case study neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore called Park Heights, in which I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 102 in-depth interviews. This neighborhood has a large population of working class black families who settled there in the late 1960's, a recent influx of voucher holders, and also a population of residentially unstable unassisted renters. I examine two complementary explanations for how and why voucher holders end up in neighborhoods like Park Heights. I propose that the landlord is an important piece of the puzzle; landlord practices sort the most disadvantaged voucher holders into some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, serving as a mechanism in the reproduction of spatial inequality and the concentration of poverty. I also consider how residents' experiences in contexts like Park Heights shape their decisions to remain in, and move to similar neighborhoods. Finally, I examine how the neighborhood context shapes social organization, and I argue that although poverty may be more moderate than in neighborhoods dominated by large-scale public housing, the horizontal context of instability and clustered voucher use may have deleterious consequences for social relations.