The Next Frontier of Public Housing Redevelopment: Resident Reflections on the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program Across Neighborhoods in San Francisco,CA

Abstract

Despite being the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's largest public housing redevelopment program to date, very little research has shed light on resident experiences with the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a rapidly growing initiative that is redeveloping public housing through the introduction of nonpublic actors. In the first examination of residents’ experiences with RAD within a major US city, this article uses in-depth interviews, site visits, and descriptive statistics to contextualize how residents describe changes in their homes and communities across San Francisco, CA. I find that residents have a range of positive and negative experiences after RAD conversions. While RAD appears to be succeeding in its goals of financially stabilizing aging public housing and keeping residents in place, resident perceptions of housing quality after conversions is mixed. Further, place-based disparities embedded in public housing histories reproduce inequalities for residents living in RAD projects across the same city.