At the Table or In the Streets? Collaboration and Cooptation in Public Housing

• In Event: Shortcomings of Democracy and the Path Forward

Abstract

Collaborative governance and other modes of formal collaborative decision-making emerged in the 1990s as a community- or stakeholder-focused alternative to the top-down elite-driven policy approaches of traditional hierarchical decision-making. (Ansell and Gash 2008) Rather than trusting in centralized decision-making to respond to community interests or resolve “wicked problems,” collaborative-based efforts highlighted the benefits of local knowledge and the need for people and community organizations to be directly involved in policymaking, implementation and management at all levels of development and implementation. (Newman, Barnes, Sullivan and Knops 2004; Kallis, Kiparsky and Norgaard 2009) What has emerged is a push to widen the net of potential participants in public policy to include front-line workers, community leaders, non-profits and community members. The impetus is threefold. First, policy and programmatic innovations at the local level highlight the potential for innovation that emerges from pooling talent, resources and expertise. Second, collaboration can reduce costs and extend scarce resources. Third, advocates of collaboration have pointed to the representative and enfranchising potential of collaborative governance.

Once considered a revolutionary form of decision-making, collaborative governance is now a frequent tool in the federal government’s arsenal of policy prescriptions—particularly those involving social service programs. Federally-funded but locally-implemented social service programs often require local stakeholders to join forces in order to remain competitive for federal funds or specialized grants. Policies focused on workforce development, education, affordable housing and health care, for instance, regularly require local governments to develop industry and regional collaboratives in order to apply for federal funding.

Often these federal requests for proposals (RFPs) require applicants to include policy-relevant and vulnerable community members as part of the collaborative governing structure. The idea (or the hope among community activists) is that, if community members have a seat at the table, they will have meaningful input into designing and managing the programs that serve their interests and address their concerns. Yet, in some policy arenas, collaborative governance has fallen far short of its promise to enfranchise community participation. While collaborative structures may formalize spaces and opportunities for community input, they also have the capacity to permanently sideline and silence community feedback by using the trappings of inclusion and compromise to subvert community opposition. In this paper, we focus on affordable housing to explore the potential for collaborative governance to inhibit rather than empower vulnerable communities and ask: are affordable housing resident interests best served through collaborative or through adversarial modes of dispute-resolution? We compare tenant empowerment showcased in the 1960s and 1970s St. Louis and Newark tenant uprisings with local implementation of HUD’s Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) grant program. Each of these initiatives is grounded in the rhetoric of tenant participation either through protest, in the case of tenant uprisings, or through federally mandated collaboration in the case of HOPE VI. We ask: to what degree does mandated participation in formal collaborative structures like HOPE VI impose power and resource constraints that actually dampen rather than expand meaningful tenant self-advocacy? Do explicitly adversarial tenant strategies – like protests and rent strikes – secure a better position for tenants to leverage meaningful gains?

Authors

• Alison Gash, University of Oregon

• Alex K Farrington, University of Oregon