Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
Between 2006 and 2022, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) attempted to address the fiscal and infrastructural crises in public housing through a number of controversial privatization strategies. This contested push occurred alongside the pervasive role of policing in public housing. The New York Police Department utilizes several policing strategies specific to NYCHA communities, collaborating with the housing authority in the management of public housing residents. This article draws on qualitative content analysis of local policing strategies and public housing policy reforms in New York City to investigate how the state facilitates the displacement of disproportionately poor, non-white, public housing tenants while simultaneously sponsoring privatized redevelopment in their communities in ways that mirror gentrification processes usually studied in private housing. I focus on the content of and linkages between public housing-specific policing strategies and privatizing public housing redevelopment plans. By examining police as collaborators within public housing policy, I uncover the entanglement of law enforcement in urban development, as well as the underlying roles and relationships between the state, capital, and police in contemporary urban development and gentrification. The findings illuminate the processes of carceral urbanism, where the logics of the carceral state emerge as priorities throughout the urban governance of the contemporary neoliberal state in general, and public housing policy reform in particular.
Comments
Accepted version of the article. Final version published in Urban Studies Volume 61, Issue 3 https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231183791