Recovery experiences of public housing residents in the Rockaways, Queens (New York City (NYC)), after Superstorm Sandy suggest that living in NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) properties creates circumscribed opportunities for local political participation, what I call a “differentiated state.” This differentiated state is constructed from four interconnected sociospatial features: (1) tenants’ stigmatized identities, (2) U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations, (3) NYCHA’s “para-governmental” status, and (4) spatial concentration of the developments. I empirically demonstrate this “differentiated state” based on a grounded case study of disparities in disaster recovery participation in Rockaway. This analysis offers a new spatial lens to the scholarship on policy feedbacks and delivers a new synthesis of the limits to tenants’ political participation in conventional public housing developments in the United States, home to more than two million people.
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