Those of us who live in Massachusetts are fortunate that Lawrence Vale settled here to apply his considerable intellectual and writing talents to the study of public housing in Boston, rather than, say, in Chicago, San Francisco, or St. Louis. The rest of you, don’t despair: From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors is not just a parochial story about Boston, but an insightful historical analysis of the relationship between the cultural meanings of land and home, attitudes about responsibility for both oneself and others, urban design, and social policy. Vale convincingly argues that one cannot begin to understand policy in the United States toward the design and allocation of public housing without first understanding the subtle, often implicit, rationale underlying these decisions—decisions that date back at least three centuries.

Eschewing the usual origin myths of public housing—that it came with the New Deal as a way to house the temporarily out-of-work and out-of-luck, while acting as a pump priming mechanism and a way to placate the masses during the Great Depression—Vale looks to Jefferson, and even further back to the early days of the Puritans in Massachusetts. From them, he launches an exploration into current policy solutions using the notion of “public neighbors” and their spatial relation with the rest of us. How did Jefferson and the Puritans think about land and how does that relate to current public policy? To Jefferson in the eighteenth century, land was an appropriate reward given to the worthy for their hard work. The Puritans, not unlike contemporary pundits and politicians, agitated over how one categorizes the unfortunate. Would it be by assigning moral values and spatially segregating those who cannot afford a home, regardless of reason? Are such public neighbors treated with sympathy, or like criminals? Are the almshouses of old and public houses of the last seventy-plus years to be situated or separated within the larger community? What is the proper role and means of public support?

In the process of putting together a study that is part intrigue and part story of patronage, racism, duplicity, and power, Vale painstakingly analyzed the archives of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA), the organization responsible for Boston’s public housing; explored memos between BHA officials and employees; read over minutes of meetings; and interviewed many key players of the last quarter-century. Analysis of these archives is complemented by Vale’s understanding of federal housing policy and his previous research on several Boston projects, such as the Commonwealth project, where he worked closely with tenants to gather their input and reactions to the transition from run-down project to model living environment. Unlike many commentators on low-income housing, Vale recognizes the significant difference between policies or attitudes that benefit tenants (or potential tenants) and ones that simply benefit the buildings in which they live. To him, modernizing a unit or razing substandard homes for sounder structures is not necessarily a human benefit.

Every time I tried to skim quickly past a page I found myself returning to the beginning for a more careful read. Like a good detective novel, From the Puritans to the Projects sets out carefully culled clues, from stories of Puritan “warnings” against public neighbors to BHA internal memoranda concerning patronage and segregation, as well as discussions about who does and does not deserve to live in public housing. How is it that single parents, primarily women, were seen as unfit to be awarded public housing units? At the other end of the family spectrum, why were extended families also routinely denied? How did the BHA set up a system of tenant screening that strongly favored the two-parent nuclear family? What was the impetus for deemphasizing family public housing in favor of housing for the elderly? How did the public pronouncements about the relation of the projects to their surrounding neighborhoods mesh—or not—with the internal memos Vale uncovers? What happened that shifted the modus operandi of public housing from totally professional management to also include tenant management?

Long before there was public housing, good housing in the United States was seen as a means to help the unassimilated—people down on their luck such as widows or victims of the Depression, low-income immigrants, or social deviants—learn proper behavior as defined by the power structure. Yet, as Vale so clearly shows, the policies designed to “improve” low-income people’s prospects often had the opposite effect. It is here that Vale is at his best, not just finding the contradictions between public pronouncement and action, but situating these contradictions within their historical and ideological contexts to help explain how they could be accepted, missed, or simply overlooked.

In one chapter, “Building Selective Collectives, 1934-1954,” Vale explores the compromises necessary to enable publicly-funded housing legislation to exist amid an ideology of individualism, which, in good Jeffersonian style, sees land as a reward, as a sign of hard work and worthiness. Owner-occupied, single-family houses represent this Jeffersonian ideal, certainly not publicly-owned warrens for people who do not have the get-up-and-go to acquire them on their own. Ironically, while detractors of public housing legislation were busy damning it as the last bastion of socialists, these selective collectives excluded the neediest and included friends, relatives, and constituents of Boston politicians and religious leaders, as well as veterans. Vale, like other affordable-housing advocates, reminds us that the largest public subsidies have never gone to the neediest; they have gone, in fact, to those who most clearly fit the American ideology, to those who, in Jeffersonian terms, are to be rewarded for their fortitude and hard work: homeowners. Only two percent of the population live in public housing, whereas some two-thirds of the population receive housing subsidies in the form of tax breaks on their mortgages.

All of these issues, in context with the earlier history of attitudes towards public neighbors, become essential for understanding the current HUD push in Boston, and nationwide, to raze public housing and rebuild it as mixed-income, mixed-ethnic housing built using a combination of public and private monies. Known as HOPE VI, this urban “revitalization” initiative relies on New Urbanist design concepts to attract the middle-class—or, in other words, the historically worthy—as opposed to the persistently poor. Noting that the HOPE VI program does not require that all publicly subsidized units are to be replaced after they are demolished, Vale again highlights with striking clarity the relationship between buildings and people: “The real battle is not over housing types, but the types of tenants these buildings will house…[over] who deserved to become a public neighbor” (375).

Once again the questions arise, as they did three centuries ago: What is the appropriate spatial relation between the community at large and those who have been determined worthy of public subsidy, or not? How can land be used as a moral lever? HOPE VI permits selective screening to ascertain which of the former public housing residents is worthy of reinstatement in the new development, typically leaving many of the neediest—the least assimilated into middle-class values—displaced from publicly subsidized housing, a new unworthy for the new millennium. The complex story that Vale tells is not only an impressive intellectual history, but also a deeply moving story of the hidden stuff, the daily thoughts and actions that impact larger social policies, and through them the lives of everyday folk. Unfortunately for everyday folks, the story Vale discovered is often not in their best interests.

The depth and breadth of From the Puritans to the Projects makes this an important and impressive book. It adds to Lawrence Vale’s compendium of publications on the built environment, such as his book Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and his many articles on Boston public housing projects. The extended time he spent listening to tenants pays off; their perspectives are taken very seriously, leading to an unusually nuanced understanding of the political dimensions of changing public-housing policies. All of this leads him to conclude that “above all, the thorny questions of public housing policy and design point out the underlying inequities of class, gender, and race relations, just as earlier generations of housing policy conflated slum clearance with efforts to reform or replace the city’s least-wanted immigrants” (387).