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.

For decades, the federal government's failure to provide decent and affordable housing to very low-income families has given rise to severely distressed urban neighborhoods that defeat the best hopes of both residents and local officials. Now, however, there is cause for optimism. From Despair to Hope documents the evolution of HOPE VI, a federal program that promotes mixed-income housing integrated with services and amenities to replace the economically and socially isolated public housing complexes of the past. As one of the most ambitious urban development initiatives in the last half century, HOPE VI has transformed the landscape in Atlanta, Baltimore, Louisville, Seattle, and other cities, providing vivid examples of a true federal-urban partnership and offering lessons for policy innovators. In From Despair to Hope, Henry Cisneros and Lora Engdahl collaborate with public and private sector leaders who were on the scene in the early 1990s when the intolerable conditions in the nation's worst public housing projects—and their devastating impact on inhabitants, neighborhoods, and cities—called for drastic action. These eyewitnesses from the policymaking, housing development, and architecture fields reveal how a program conceived to address one specific problem revolutionized the entire public housing system and solidified a set of principles that guide urban policy today. This vibrant, full-color exploration of HOPE VI details the fate of residents, neighborhoods, cities, and public housing systems through personal testimony, interviews, case studies, data analyses, research summaries, photographs, and more. Contributors examine what HOPE VI has accomplished as it brings disadvantaged families into more economically mixed communities. They also turn a critical eye on where the program falls short of its ideals. This important book continues the national conversation on poverty, race, and opportunity as the country moves ahead under a new president. Contributors: Richard D. Baron (McCormack Baron Salazar), Peter Calthorpe (Calthorpe Associates), Sheila Crowley (National Low-Income Housing Coalition), Mary K. Cunningham (Urban Institute), Richard C. Gentry (San Diego Housing Commission), Renée Lewis Glover (Atlanta Housing Authority), Bruce Katz (Brookings Institution), G. Thomas Kingsley (Urban Institute), Alexander Polikoff (Business and Professional People for the Public Interest), Susan J. Popkin (Urban Institute), Margery Austin Turner (Urban Institute), and Ronald D. Utt (Heritage Foundation). Poverty & Race

Unseen Threat uncovers the hidden history of government UFO investigations, exposing the truth behind classified encounters and enigmatic phenomena. This meticulously researched book presents a comprehensive account of the government's secretive programs, revealing the astonishing findings and cover-ups that have shaped our understanding of extraterrestrial life. Inside these pages, you will encounter compelling eyewitness accounts, leaked documents, and exclusive interviews that shed light on the extraordinary encounters between humans and unidentified objects. From the infamous Roswell incident to the mysterious Men in Black, Unseen Threat weaves together a gripping narrative that explores the government's hidden agenda and its implications for humanity. This book is an essential read for anyone fascinated by the UFO phenomenon, government secrecy, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It challenges long-held assumptions and provides a fresh perspective on one of the most enduring and enigmatic mysteries of our time. By delving into the Unseen Threat, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the government's secret UFO investigations, the compelling evidence that supports their existence, and the profound implications they hold for our planet's future. This book is a must-have for those seeking to uncover the truth behind one of the most intriguing and enigmatic phenomena of our time.

At a time when the technologies and techniques of producing the built environment are undergoing significant change, this book makes central architecture’s relationship to industry. Contributors turn to historical and theoretical questions, as well as to key contemporary developments, taking a humanities approach to the Industries of Architecture that will be of interest to practitioners and industry professionals, as much as to academic researchers, teachers and students. How has modern architecture responded to mass production? How do we understand the necessarily social nature of production in the architectural office and on the building site? And how is architecture entwined within wider fields of production and reproduction—finance capital, the spaces of regulation, and management techniques? What are the particular effects of techniques and technologies (and above all their inter-relations) on those who labour in architecture, the buildings they produce, and the discursive frameworks we mobilise to understand them?

This book offers a novel and parsimonious framework to help understand Hong Kong’s lengthy democratic transition by analyzing the electoral dynamics of the city’s competitive authoritarian political system, where pro-Beijing and pro-democracy parties have struggled to keep each other in check. The author demonstrates how a relatively liberal media environment has shaped the electoral incentives of the opposition and the pro-establishment elite differently, which has helped the latter improve its basis of electoral support. The political explanation the book puts forward seeks to shed new light on why many autocracies are interested in regularly holding elections that are considered somewhat competitive. This book will be of great interest not only to specialists in comparative studies of democratization, but also to all those concerned with Hong Kong’s democratic transition.

Mention the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the word scandal comes to mind. When it comes to recent history, the association is quite accurate; in 1989-90 congressional panels were investigating -abuses, favoritism, and mismanagement- at HUD; in 1954 HUD's predecessor, the Federal Housing Administration, was targeted by the FBI for involvement in fraudulent home-improvement schemes; in the 1970s HUD was scrutinized for lax lending standards, blatant overappraisals, and shoddy housing. In this ground-breaking volume, Irving Welfeld, a senior analyst with HUD, describes and explains these sensational episodes as well as a series of hidden blunders that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. In this thorough, firsthand account, Welfeld provides not only soundly documented history, but analyses of events that arrive at different interpretations than Congress reached in its investigations. Throughout, his readings ask hard and probing questions: Where were the overseers--the media, Congress, the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget? To what extent is poor management the root cause of HUD's failures? Will tighter regulation help in keeping out corruption? After his comprehensive survey of the scene, Welfeld goes the final step and offers solutions: a set of programs that would minimize secrecy on the part of federal administrators and the temptation to abuse the public trust. Most importantly, the programs outlined here will enable HUD to more effectively fulfill its mission to see that there is decent affordable housing for all Americans. HUD Scandals will be of interest to scholars of public administration, political scientists, and analysts of housing issues.

Well-written and extremely topical, Deciphering the City efficiently deals with the large and small issues facing cities today. A focus on globalization's impact on the role of cities, an explicit mission to drive home the applied nature of urban studies to students. This innovative text offers an exciting introduction to the history, issues, problems, potential solutions and challenges, facing cities in the developed and the developing world for the twenty-first century. Globalization has changed the roles of cities in the global economy and this text begins with an introduction to the phenomenon of globalization, and how the changes it has brought about have affected the social, political, and economic institutions of societies. The second section of the text concentrates on the psychology of the city and the community-building process, while the book's third section illustrates the structure of cities and their historical and emerging patterns. Deciphering the City makes studying the city a relevant and interesting subject necessary in understanding the functioning of today's world.