Public Housing Participation in Superstorm Sandy Recovery: Living in a Differentiated State in Rockaway, Queens

Recovery experiences of public housing residents in the Rockaways, Queens (New York City (NYC)), after Superstorm Sandy suggest that living in NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) properties creates circumscribed opportunities for local political participation, what I call a “differentiated state.” This di...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Urban affairs review (Thousand Oaks, Calif.) Calif.), 2020-01, Vol.56 (1), p.289-324
Main Author: Graham, Leigh
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affordable housing
Case studies
Disaster management
Disaster recovery
Disaster relief
Federal agencies
Government agencies
Housing
Housing authorities
Housing developments
Political behavior
Political participation
Property
Public housing
Public participation
Queens
Recovery
Regulation
Residents
Scholarship
Tenants
Urban development
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Summary:Recovery experiences of public housing residents in the Rockaways, Queens (New York City (NYC)), after Superstorm Sandy suggest that living in NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) properties creates circumscribed opportunities for local political participation, what I call a “differentiated state.” This differentiated state is constructed from four interconnected sociospatial features: (1) tenants’ stigmatized identities, (2) U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations, (3) NYCHA’s “para-governmental” status, and (4) spatial concentration of the developments. I empirically demonstrate this “differentiated state” based on a grounded case study of disparities in disaster recovery participation in Rockaway. This analysis offers a new spatial lens to the scholarship on policy feedbacks and delivers a new synthesis of the limits to tenants’ political participation in conventional public housing developments in the United States, home to more than two million people.
ISSN:1078-0874
1552-8332
DOI:10.1177/1078087418776438