From Puritans to the Projects

about Lawrence Vale

other titles from
Dr. Vale

further reading recommended by Dr. Vale

other Friday Forum
events...

Spring 2001
Friday Forum Events

Past Friday Forum Events

Other Book Store Events

Chronicle for Higher Education

Select Seventy: Scholarly Books (20% off)

(Harvard University Press, Oct 2000) $45.00

Lawrence Vale
Associate Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

author of
From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors

an audio clip from Dr. Vale's Friday Forum
the question and answer session

From the Puritans to the Projects was released in October 2000 by Harvard University Press, and has received the 2001 "Best Book in Urban Affairs" Award from the Urban Affairs Association. The book traces American cultural attitudes toward the spatial isolation of the poor all the way back to the time of the 17th-century Puritans. A second volume, Three Public Neighborhoods: The Death and Life of American Public Housing, is forthcoming.

(From the book cover) From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.

First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.

"Lawrence Vale's major study throws new and important light on the contradictions and dilemmas of American public housing policy over the past half-century, as they worked themselves out in one of the nation’s greatest cities. It has vital messages both for scholars of public policy, planning, and urban studies, and for urban policy-makers, both in the United States and in the wider world. This is a major contribution to urban literature."

- Sir Peter Hall, author of Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order