Editing Urban Renewal Era (section)

== Public Housing ==

Philadelphia built thousands of public housing units during the urban renewal era, intended to replace "slum" housing with modern, sanitary accommodations for low-income residents. Some early projects, built in the 1940s and 1950s, consisted of low-rise buildings integrated into existing neighborhoods. Later projects followed the "tower in the park" model favored by modernist planners: high-rise buildings surrounded by open space, concentrating poor residents in isolated complexes. Projects like Raymond Rosen Homes and Richard Allen Homes housed thousands of families but also concentrated poverty, isolated residents from surrounding communities, and developed serious social problems.<ref name="hunt">{{cite book |last=Hunt |first=D. Bradford |title=Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing |year=2009 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |location=Chicago}}</ref>

By the 1970s, many public housing projects had become troubled places characterized by crime, poor maintenance, and social isolation. The projects designed to improve housing conditions for the poor had created new problems. Philadelphia began demolishing some projects in subsequent decades, replacing them with mixed-income developments under the HOPE VI program. The failures of public housing illustrated how renewal's assumptions—that planners knew best, that physical environment determined social outcomes, that concentrated projects were efficient—could produce results opposite to those intended.<ref name="teaford"/>