The Galveston County Daily News

In early August, the Galveston Housing Authority announced plans to rebuild the 562 public housing units ravaged by Hurricane Ike, flying in the face of national trends to transform public housing into mixed-income developments and garnering both applause and outrage.

Displaced residents, civil rights and low-income housing advocates think the housing authority is doing the right thing. Same-site rebuilding ensures that everybody can come back to the place they call home in housing that’s affordable at their income levels. It also guarantees that all the low-income units destroyed by Ike are replaced.

Mixed-income proponents say the GHA plan will reconcentrate poor families.

A mixed-income approach would accomplish the opposite, deconcentration. The underlying but untested assumption is that this leads to improved neighborhoods and better living conditions and many cities have jumped on the mixed-income bandwagon. At the forefront is Atlanta, poised to become the first city in the nation to eliminate all of its traditional public housing by early 2010.

But who really benefits? Lost in the political hyperbole extolling the virtues of the Atlanta model is an important but often bypassed detail. By its very definition, mixed-income redevelopment means moving the majority of the poor residents out for good. National figures indicate that only about one-third of the relocated public-housing residents are able to return and in many cities the number is even less. In Atlanta, it is closer to 17 percent.

So where do the majority of relocated public-housing residents end up? Typically, they move to other equally poor neighborhoods with the help of a voucher (Section 8) subsidy. In fact, a 2005 Brookings Institution study found limited evidence that public-housing residents relocated with vouchers had improved living conditions.

Studies in other cities, including Chicago, Cincinnati and Miami, have found similar outcomes.

Given these mixed findings perhaps GHA is right to buck national trends. But just because its plan calls for same-site rebuilding does not mean it has to look like or become a poster child for traditional public-housing failure.

Decades of government neglect, not the residents themselves, led to the distressed conditions of many public-housing projects. The bottom line is that the housing authority is in a unique position to do public housing right this time around.

Deirdre Oakley and Erin Ruel are faculty members of the Sociology Department at Georgia State University.