Eventually, realizing the situation was almost hopeless, in 1984 Boston turned over the management, cleanup, planning, and revitalization of the property to a private development firm, Corcoran-Mullins-Jennison, that won a competition for the project.
Although a mixed-income approach combining market rate units with subsidized units was not part of the first HOPE VI grant awards, these redevelopment grants required private equity often in the form of Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) which created what are known as “mixed finance”, combining governmental sources with private sources in what is now known as a “public-private partnership”.
The Atlanta-based The Integral Group partnered with McCormack Baron Salazar of St. Louis, and won a bid in the fall of 1994 for development of a new mixed-income project.
Instrumental in the process was AHA's new CEO Renee Lewis Glover, who over the next decade guided the agency through the demolition of its large, declining housing projects.
They were replaced on AHA land by private-public ventures of mixed-use, mixed-income communities modeled on Centennial Place, with a portion of units reserved for former public housing tenants.
The first HOPE VI mixed-income community (where public housing was a component) was Phase I of Centennial Place, which closed on March 8, 1996.
[4] President George W. Bush called for abolition of the HOPE VI program, and Congress reduced funding for the block grants.
Likewise, providing residents with high-quality materials and houses is believed to encourage pride in the space and an interest in keeping things in good condition.
[citation needed] Only with substantial wealth can an apartment building maintain the characteristics of security, social networking, and urban integration that the designers feel is necessary for a healthy community.
But one writer asserted that in the case of a section of Cabrini–Green in Chicago, residents were forced out by armed police in order for HOPE VI redevelopment to take place.
Federal auditors found that HUD was awarding grants based on the ability of the area to generate income for the city rather than the actual state of the housing project in question.
The Urban Institute reported that the number of units receiving a federal subsidy and available for the deeply poor to live in is cut in half in developments arising from the program.
[15] The National Low Income Housing Coalition has said that no HOPE VI grants should be allotted without requirements for one-for-one unit replacement.
[16] The NLIHC maintains that in order to acquire federal grants, local housing authorities have "demolished viable units and displaced families.
"[13][14] In San Francisco, which made extensive use of the HOPE VI program to redevelop its aging public housing supply, virtually all projects constructed significantly fewer units than they demolished.
In the Hayes Valley, Plaza East, Valencia Gardens, Geneva Towers, and Bernal Dwellings projects, Federal, State, and Local Housing Authorities spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000,000 to create a net loss of 457 apartments.