Black Women, Public Housing, and Resistance
For as long as public housing has been described as a “failure,” lower-income Black women have been the face of that supposed failure. On the 20th year anniversary, since Rhonda Y. Williams literally wrote the book on Black women and public housing, I recall her retelling of stories of everyday resistance. Lower-income Black women sit at an invisible intersection, defined by race, class, and gender; yet still they question, organize, and fight for decent housing, resisting a dominant narrative imposed on them as “lazy” and non-working. As Williams writes, “The government…offered African-American women and their families a mixed bag of opportunity and discrimination, possibilities and restrictions, freedoms and surveillance. For just as race and class circumscribed poor [B]lack women’s lives in cities, they also shaped [B]lack women’s relationships to the state.”
The ‘mixed bag’ of contradictions represented by early public housing policy and how it shaped poorer Black women’s responses to it is evidenced through everyday resistance and activism within the public housing system. However, these stories remain largely hidden. Williams’ reframing of traditional stereotypes about poverty and Black women sheds light on their overlooked agency and grassroots efforts.
Narratives from Black women in public housing provide context for modern-day threats to low-income households. Framing today’s housing crisis involves understanding the political and economic motivations for public housing development and for whom it was designed.
The evolution of public housing – starting with the New Deal programs of the 1930s, followed by the Housing Act of 1949 – ushered in a wave of questioning and problem-solving. A recurring question for policymakers, federal actors, and local officials was an economic one: How do we improve the economy following the Great Depression? The solution came in the form of an actual “project”- create jobs to stimulate the economy through low-income housing construction. Therefore, public housing was never conceived as a permanent nor comprehensive solution to housing the ill-housed. Rather, the impetus to create a national public housing program was to address economic and labor concerns for temporarily unemployed white middle-class men in the New Deal era. As a result, roughly 122,000 public housing units were built across 140 cities by 1942. From the start, there were challenges. Debates about where public housing should be built, what it should look like aesthetically, and who should reside in them began a complicated and troubled history of public housing.
To be clear, Black families were not the intended recipients of public housing in the first place. The first residents were poorer employed families (or the working poor), temporarily enduring hardships brought on by the Great Depression. Screening processes, gatekeeping, and existing segregation left most Black residents without access to public housing in the early years. Eventually, separate and segregated housing projects were constructed in predominantly Black (and often blighted) areas at the same time that Black families were being excluded from homeownership opportunities, reinforcing racialized segregation. Later efforts to address the obvious and growing need for long-term, low-income housing were stalled; instead, slum clearance ensued, clearing and displacing the same racially segregated and blighted areas for economic redevelopment, forcing Black families to more resource-poor areas, leading to the period marked by urban renewal.
Revisiting this history is significant because it sets the stage for later tensions, tropes, and legacies framing Black women in relation to public housing. On the one hand, public housing provided an affordable option for many families, including Black families. On the other hand, Black residents (and Black women specifically) faced severe exclusion, discrimination, and scrutiny from the state through social welfare programs and other practices tied to surveillance and entitlements. Collectively, the FHA, New Deal programs, and the Social Security Act—all social welfare programs—have largely supported and subsidized the elderly and white lower-income workers, those considered to be worthy or the “deserving poor.”On the receiving end of racialized poverty policing, however, Black single mothers (the undeserving poor) asserted their learned knowledge of state practices to advocate, resist, and stretch the boundaries that attempted to relegate them to the lowest rungs of society.
As one example, following income limits that pushed moderate-income families out of public housing, Black women activists advocated for expansions to alternate housing types for working families in the form of cooperatives. One activist, Queen Mother Audley Moore, was an organizer for several movements, including housing and reparations. She lived in a prominent housing cooperative in New York City, leading several pioneering activist efforts, yet her story is virtually unknown. Part of this, Ashley D. Farmer suggests, is the inability to tap diverse types of insider knowledges that can render the work of women operating outside of formal institutions invisible; their stories go untold, deemed “illegible” or uninterpretable. Everyday Black women working within housing advocacy embody this invisibility.
My own work engages with tenant activists and Black women’s everyday resistance. I am inspired by earlier work examining the hows, the whys – the intersections – of lower-income Black women advocating for dignity within public housing. In speaking with current tenants, many of whom are still navigating delayed repairs, eviction threats, and displacement, what I learned harkens back to the narratives of strength and resilience that Williams and others have written about. Research questions are driven by the invisible narratives: What is living in public housing like today? Women’s interviews reveal feelings of disappointment, fear, and uncertainty about what public housing has become, making a case for why new investment is needed to preserve permanently safe and affordable housing.
One single mother shares how she remains in Baltimore City Public Housing through delayed repairs dating back to the early months of COVID-19 because she has no alternative. Though parenting a teenage son, she was unable to secure a two-bedroom apartment, accepting what was available at the time:
“My son and I became homeless. Because we became homeless, I had to drop out of school because I needed to get us in a stable environment. So we were homeless for about a year and a half and by circumstances we wound up in this place….unfortunately, we never got the two-bedroom. And I told my son, ‘when I get financially stable, we’ll move out of here and get another apartment.’ That was six and a half years ago. We’re still in a one-bedroom, one bath. My son is now in college and his room is the living room. So he’s been here, doing schooling five days a week. I work in my room, and he goes to school in the living room.…And it’s hard because we can’t leave. I found that…the building is infested with black mold. I mean, it’s in our HVAC system. It’s on our walls. It’s in our ceilings. We’re also infested with rats and mice. They’re in our walls. They’re nesting in our walls. We have roaches. We have bed bugs. We have spider beetles. We have grain weevils. We have ant nests…so we’re constantly dealing with something. […]Nobody should have to live like this. You know what I mean?”
Though remaining resolute in “fighting back” against subversive tactics, organizing with other Black women in the building to increase pressure for management to act, the fight has compromised a sense of well-being and safety. She says she does it because “somebody has to.”
“We have had confirmed, two people who have died in their apartments from the black mold, from the exposure. Since March when the pandemic hit and we went into quarantine, we’ve had six people die in this building and they won’t tell us what they died from. So it’s a very serious situation and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing because somebody has to.”
An unsuitable living situation during a time when rental vacancies are low and rents are high leaves many women feeling trapped. Today, the disinvestment in public housing continues to threaten safety and community life for lower-income families. Newer policies that exclude and displace public housing residents hurt poorer Black women the most. For instance, Black women now lead the country in eviction filings. Provisions for rent relief and emergency rental assistance (ERAP) that might have stemmed evictions following COVID-19 initially excluded public housing residents, who are overwhelmingly lower-income women. In New York, tenants of privately owned buildings could access ERAP funds to help cover rent, while New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents could not. These decisions have severe, long-lasting impacts. In 2023, NYCHA’s tenant arrears totaled $466 million across more than 73,000 households, a fourfold increase since 2019. Defaults provided a rationale to “cut expenses and decrease property repairs” beginning in 2024, straining an already distressed housing stock, compromising habitability, and forgoing essential repairs required for HUD compliance.
Across cities nationally, evictions and displacement from public housing continue. New development schemes privatizing public housing developments, for example, can accelerate the number of eviction proceedings brought against tenants for non-payment of rent.
While evictions were temporarily halted during the height of the pandemic, the expiration of rent moratoria has seen a dramatic increase in filings, notices sent to tenants, and tenant anxieties about “where will I go next?” Though virtually unseen, Black women in public housing are at the forefront of resistance efforts to prevent and protest evictions through aligned movements, such as Save Section 9.
These stories matter. Documenting micro-narratives in the context of historical and current policy legislation is not solely about amplifying unheard voices, it threads the needle of how even in public housing, stability and habitability can be tenuous for those who need it most. Lower-income Black women are often serially displaced or, alternatively, forced to place themselves in “risky” situations to remain stably housed. In this way, counter-storytelling from the ground up is an important exercise for public intellectualism and academe. Poorer Black women’s advocacy from within public housing is one way of ‘making place’ and, at a broader level – resisting erasure and displacement.
Taken together, the supposed failure of public housing is not due to who lives there but rather how it was designed, is supported politically, and, in some ways, operates as a mechanism for exclusion. To fully realize the promise of affordable and low-income housing, it must be a political priority and mainstreamed into national discussions on housing policy. Narratives matter both in bringing attention to Black women in organizing efforts as well as recognizing their humanity and agency. Black communities are frequently depicted as helpless victims of poor urban conditions; at the same time, women in these communities have always been a source of stewardship, caretaking, community development, and organizing. In other words, they were placemakers before placemaking became popularized, persisting in transforming public housing into livable places.
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