Displacement or forces relocation? : a comparative analysis, following the relocatees after urban restructuring in Amsterdam and Gainesville, Florida

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0 Research Master Urban Studies

Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Amsterdam

Thesis Amsterdam, June 13th, 2013

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sako Musterd, UvA Second Reader: Dr. Fenne Pinkster, UvA

DISPLACEMENT OR FORCED RELOCATION?

A comparative analysis, following the relocatees after urban

restructuring in Amsterdam and Gainesville, Florida

Koen Tieskens Student#: 0542520 koen.tieskens@gmail.com

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Foreword

This thesis is the result of a research conducted to obtain the degree of Master of Science finishing the research master Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The research was conducted in Amsterdam, NL and in Gainesville, Florida. The fieldwork in Gainesville was conducted during my exchange program at the Florida State University in Tallahassee. I would like to use this opportunity to thank my supervisor from FSU Dr. Andrew Aurand, who assisted me in finding appropriate data sources, which appeared to be more difficult than I expected. Moreover I would like to thank Elizabeth Thompson from the Shimberg Center at University of Florida, who was very kind to provide me with data on

relocation of tenants in Gainesville.

The fieldwork in the Netherlands was conducted very smoothly not in the least due to the assistance of the relocation staff from Amsterdam housing association Rochdale. Thanks to their willingness to share their archives with me and their professional insights, I was able to investigate forced relocation in the

Netherlands as it was never done before.

Parts of the results of this thesis were also used to write an article that was accepted by Journal of Urban Research and Practice and will most likely be published in the second issue of 20131. This article was written under the supervision and co-authorship with prof. Dr. Sako Musterd. He not only assisted me with the article, but throughout the whole process of this thesis. I would like to thank him as well for the assistance and inspiration. And finally I would like to thank my family, friends and my girlfriend Sarah who supported me in writing this thesis.

June 13, 2013

Koen Tieskens

This thesis was written to obtain the degree of MSc at the University of Amsterdam in co-operation with housing association Rochdale.

1_{Parts of this thesis will therefore also be published in this article: Tieskens KF and Musterd S. (2013) Displacement}

and urban restructuring in Amsterdam, following relocatees after demolition of social housing. Journal of Urban

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3.1.2: HOPE VI ... 23 3.2: The Netherlands ... 25 3.3: Conclusion... 27 4: Methodology ... 30 4.1: Questions ... 30 4.2: Macro-Micro-Macro ... 31 4.3: Conceptual Model ... 33 4.4: Data ... 34 4.4.1: Population ... 35 4.5: Operationalization ... 36 4.5.1: Relocatee Characteristics ... 38 4.5.2: Preferences ... 39

4.5.3: Information and Assistance ... 39

4.5.4: Institutional Constraints... 40 4.5.5: Relocation ... 40 4.5.6: Housing Improvement ... 41 4.5.7: Neighborhood Quality ... 41 5. Gainesville ... 43 5.1 Introduction ... 43

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5.2 General Characterization Gainesville... 45

5.2.1 Racial segregation ... 46

5.3: Description of the three projects ... 48

5.3.1: Glen Springs Manor ... 48

5.3.2: Seminary Lane ... 52

5.3.3: Kennedy Homes ... 55

5.4 Outcomes ... 58

5.4.1: Section 8 ... 58

5.4.2: Local Housing Market ... 60

5.4.3: Relocation ... 62

5.5: Discussion ... 67

6. Amsterdam ... 69

6.1 Context ... 69

6.1.1 Amsterdam... 69

6.1.2 Amsterdam Nieuw West ... 70

6.2 Case description ... 71

6.2.1 Bakema Sloop Noord ... 71

6.2.2 Van Tijenbuurt ... 72 6.2.3 Kolenkitbuurt ... 73 6.3 Outcomes ... 77 6.3.1 Preferences ... 77 6.3.2 Actual Relocation ... 79 6.3.3 Quality of housing ... 84 6.3.4 Rent ... 86 6.4 Summary ... 86

7. Discussion and Conclusions ... 87

7.1 Comparison ... 89

7.2 Conclusion and recommendations ... 90

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1 Introduction

Many cities are facing in Western post-industrialist societies are facing the accumulating problems in inner city neighborhoods. Throughout the world and throughout time, city governments have tried to combat concentrations of poverty in order to prevent the rise of slums and the accumulation of problems. One of the great examples is the attempts of Robert Moses to redevelop large parts of New York City in the decades after WWII. On his account many low-income dwellings were demolished and replaced with high- and middle-low-income housing. The low-income families –mostly black or Latino- were forced to move to the public housing projects elsewhere or find other alternatives. The urban redevelopment or slum clearance became also known as “negro removal” (Schwartz, 1993). One of the most notable critics of this policy, Jane Jacobs, argued that removing the poor out of a neighborhood was not solving any problem; at best it was relocating the problem (Jacobs, 1993). Strikingly the issue of urban redevelopment, slum clearance and relocating the poor is anno 2013 more than actual, more than 40 years after Jacobs’ seminal work on the great American cities. However the words and rhetoric have slightly changed. ‘Mixed neighborhood’ appears to be the magic word in urban policy, not only in US mega cities but also in Europe (Bridge et al., 2012).

Across Europe, concentrated poverty tends to be treated as an undesirable concept with unwanted segregated neighborhoods as a result. Social and ‘ethnic’ mixing is generally seen as the suitable policy to fight against it (Musterd 2005).These mixed neighborhoods would cater for better opportunities in terms of housing, social mobility opportunities for less affluent residents, and would supposedly create better conditions for the integration of immigrants, many of whom have different ethnic backgrounds. In many western cities, low-income households tend to be over represented in areas characterized by relatively low-quality housing, while frequently these areas also have higher crime rates and experience higher levels of unemployment.

A rather rigorous yet widely used instrument to de-concentrate relative poverty and obtain heterogeneous neighborhoods is encapsulated in the policy of urban restructuring. The extreme forms of such urban restructuring are characterized by objectives such as tearing down poor-quality housing structures, moving tenants to other parts of the city, building new housing of higher quality, with higher rents or for ownership, and attracting more affluent residents in order to create the transcendent mixed neighborhoods. This type of radical intervention is based on two

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5 assumptions: social mix – which overlaps with ethnic mix – would enhance the opportunities of the urban disadvantaged, and second, mix of housing would create social and ethnic mix (Musterd and Andersson, 2005).

Social mixing policies are said to stem from worries about lack of ‘integration’, which eventually might even result in the development of ‘parallel societies’ that are considered a threat to national unity and social order (Uitermark, 2003; Münch, 2009; Phillips, 2009). However, even in the US, where concentrations of poverty and race are much more intense than in Europe (Peach, 2009), evidence in support for social mix and the assumed effects is limited and often weak (for an overview, see Goetz and Chapple, 2010). In Europe, the negative effects of distressed neighborhoods on the opportunities of its residents are even more contested (Van Ham and Manley, 2010; Ostendorf et al., 2001; Musterd et al., 2012).

While social mix policies have been applied to an increasing extent, academic debate reflecting on it developed at the same pace. Comparable with Jacobs’ critics of urban redevelopment in Manhattan, Imbroscio (2011) dispraises the ‘mobility paradigm’ for not dealing with the problem at its heart. Instead he calls for a placemaking paradigm which ‘puts the emphasis on securing the necessary supply of affordable housing in urban neighborhoods, in order to mitigate the degree of displacement from the pressures of gentrification’ (Imbroscio, 2011: 13). Lees (2008) pointed out that social mix strategies may also serve completely other objectives. She and others argued that social mixing policies conceal gentrification strategies, which are often actively encouraged by the state, in partnership with private actors, but which, as a result, would displace lower-income households from attractive locations in the urban arena. Other authors also find this displacement effects (Smith, 2002a; Smith, 1996)

They argue that the original low-income population of redeveloped neighborhoods is forced to make place for middle-class ‘gentrifiers’. By being displaced they become the victims of the mixed neighborhood policies of many local governments. Most studies on these types of relocation have had this gentrification perspective with a very negative attitude towards the displacement of the original population (Kleinhans and Kearns, 2013). However recent studies show that displacement after forced relocation in the Netherlands should not be perceived negatively by definition (cf. Posthumus, 2013). Many scholars have tried to find out what happens with relocatees after they are being forced to relocate to make place for those mixed

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6 neighborhoods. The very fact that these people have been relocated makes them hard to study since it is often unknown where they have moved to. In the US many studies describe the relocation but often lack good data on the characteristics of relocatees while Dutch studies often have detailed data on relocatees but rely on questionnaires with response rates around 30%. In order to find out what happens with relocatees after forced relocation I have tried to investigate this process by using highly detailed data on four relocation projects in Amsterdam. The data contain the social demographic characteristics of all relocatees and their exact new location. The results of this Amsterdam study will be compared with a similar investigation of three forced relocation processes in the US, in Gainesville, Florida. However the data on Gainesville are less detailed and complete, but nevertheless can reveal patterns of forced relocation due to urban restructuring. The most important goal of this thesis is to find out whether the relocatees who are actually relocated from their original location could hence be regarded as victims of the mixed neighborhood policies. Therefore I have not only looked at the relocation outcomes but I also incorporated the preferences of relocatees and compare them with the actual outcomes. The questions that I will try to answer in this thesis are:

1. What are the location preferences of households who are involved in large-scale restructuring of their neighborhood?

2. How do these preferences relate to the actual residential relocation due to restructuring?

3. To what extent are relocatees (not) improving their housing situation after forced relocation and how does that differ between relocatee types?

4. How do the outcomes of the relocation from Amsterdam differ from those in Gainesville, FL?

These four questions should then help to answer the question posed in the title of this thesis: forced relocation or displacement? Relocatees are forced to move but are they also displaced with all its negative connotation? Essential to the comparison is the different institutional contexts in which the forced relocation takes place. The relocatees often are low-income and therefore are dependent on the supply of subsidized housing and the right they gain due to their forced relocation. Not very surprisingly both these rights and the supply of subsidized housing differ enormously between the US and the Netherlands. Therefore the chapter after this

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7 introduction consists of a brief history of subsidized housing in both countries and through what kind of policies low-income families are assisted in their housing finance. Then Chapter 3 discusses previous research on forced relocation while in the next chapter the methodology is explained. The following empirical chapters discuss the outcomes of relocation in respectively Gainesville and Amsterdam. The last chapter contains a discussion on the outcomes including a comparison between the two cases and a final conclusion.

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2: Assisted Housing: an historical background

In the two decades after the Second World War, both in the US (Schwartz, 2010; Florida and Feldman, 1988) as well as in large parts of Europe (Turkington et al., 2004; Rowlands et al., 2009), large mass housing estates emerged in rather similar fashion. The inner city slum dwelling could not meet the demands anymore of the rising urban underclass. An understanding of the history of public and social housing is essential for discussing contemporary urban problems such as displacement, relocation and neighborhood effects. In this chapter I will discuss how mass housing has emerged both in the US as well as in Europe focusing more on the Netherlands. I will start with elaborating on assisted housing in the US.

2.1: US Housing market

After the Great Depression of 1929 the US federal government was increasingly supporting homeownership among its residents. Many institutions were established in order to both provide and secure homebuyers mortgages which have significantly decrease the costs of homeownership. Examples were the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and later the Home Owners Lending Corporation (HOLC) and Fannie Mae. Although the FHA, HOLC and Fannie Mae provided access to the homebuyers market for the working-class, many regard these same institutions at least complicit to growing racial and spatial inequality (Jackson, 1987; Fishman, 2000). FHA was created mainly to insure mortgages. However they could obviously not insure every single mortgage and therefore they had adopted a set of requirements a mortgage had to meet before it was insured by FHA.

Jackson (1987) discusses how federal policies of the HOLC and FHA have encouraged suburbanization and how their discriminatory practices partly initiated a white flight out of the urban centers while African Americans were trapped inside the inner-city boroughs. One of the most notable requirements for an FHA default insurance was based on neighborhood appraisal by FHA officers. A standardized federal measurement system of neighborhood appraisal was created, that decided where insurances and loans were given. The presence of African American families in a neighborhood almost always let to a negative appraisal, which made the neighborhood unattractive for investments. According to HOLC appraisers “an entire area could lose its investment value if rigid white black segregation was not maintained” (Jackson, 1987: 214). In this fashion the appraisals worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jackson explains how

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9 the infamous practice of redlining led to stigmatization of, and structural disinvestment in neighborhoods where African Americans were residing. White middle-class families were given the opportunity with a federally insured loan to buy a home in the suburbs with monthly payments that were sometimes even twice as low as their rents in the inner cities (Jackson, 1987: 204). Not only had the white flight catered for the urban decline, but the negative appraisal of FHA officers made sure no significant investments were made in African American populated inner cities. The American dream of owning your own home in the suburbs was only meant for white families. Even the presence of one African-American family within a neighborhood was enough for an FHA appraiser to deny any mortgage insurance, since one of the most important criteria was the “protection from adverse influences” (Schwartz, 2010: 55). The presence of an African American was regarded as being one of these ‘adverse influences’ (Immergluck, 2004; Jackson, 1987).

2.1.1: Public Housing

The New Deal was however not only concerned with homeownership and mortgages. One of the last parts of this plan to get the US out of the Great Depression was the public housing program, now by far the most widely known form of subsidized housing in the US (Schwartz, 2010). Interrupted by the Second World War it was seriously taking its shape in 1949 when Congress passed the Public Housing Act. During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s over a million public housing units were built. In the larger cities public housing consisted mostly of the well-known high rise modernist towers, but a larger share of the total public housing stock was low-rise town homes, row-type housing or single family dwellings. Despite the mixed characteristics, public housing is easily recognizable due to its sober appearance, Spartan amenities and inferior quality. Even when Soviet architects were visiting a project in Chicago during the 1980s, they were devastated by the inferior quality of the public housing projects (Schwartz, 2010). The lack of quality was mainly due to the lack of funding for maintenance. Public housing was built with federal funds, but had to be maintained with the money that was coming in from rent. Since public housing was populated by the poorest of the poo, the rent was obviously not enough to keep the buildings in proper shape.

Originally public housing was meant for working class families who were due to reasons beyond their fault, unable to find a dwelling in the private market. However since FHA was providing or

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10 insuring relatively cheap mortgages, more affluent residents of public housing increasingly shifted to the private market or buyers’ market. Public housing projects had to cope with an increasingly poorer population: the median income of public housing dwellers fell from 57 per cent of the national median income in 1950 to less than 20 per cent of the national median income in 1990.

Important to note is that the decision to build public housing was in hands of local authorities. If a jurisdiction did not want to build any public housing it was free to do so. The decision to build public housing therefore became a matter of tax base and vocational support. Affluent white suburbs did not want any public housing projects in their jurisdictions while African American politicians wanted to keep public housing in their own neighborhood for vocational support. Although the overall population of public housing is fairly mixed with 51 per cent white families and 45 per cent African American, the individual projects became increasingly segregated with most large high-rise public housing projects being more than 90 per cent African American. More than 75 per cent of all minorities in public housing lives in central cities compared to 45 per cent of all rental units nationwide. (Turner et al., 2009; Schwartz, 2010).

2.1.2: Urban Decline

The worsening conditions of public housing in the inner cities are illustrative for the general decline which occurred widespread across the US in inner cities. The federal policies promoting owner occupation in the suburbs, the segregating construction of mass public housing combined with the increasing dismantling of heavy industries and large factories led to urban decline in almost every large American city. The most important features of urban decline are loss of population, rising unemployment, and a growing number of people relying on social welfare systems (Friedrichs, 1993). As a result cities had to cope with impoverished inner cities, large ghettos and public housing projects as breading grounds for criminality. Perhaps the best example of urban decline could be found in the well-known failure of public housing project Pruitt Igoe in post-war St. Louis. Pruitt and Igoe was a huge project finished in the early 1950s, consisting of 13 eleven story structures, housing 15.000 people at higher densities than in the original slum.

Soon after the opening the project had started to deteriorate and conditions were getting worse every year. Eventually the conditions got so bad; there was no other option than to demolish the

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11 entire projects. This demolition took place in 1974; only 20 years after the construction. Many reasons can be given for the decline. However the most often heard argument for the deterioration of Pruitt Igoe is the mismatch between architecture and population (Yancey, 1972). The project consisted of so many long corridors with no explicit owner or group of people feeling responsible to keep things tidy. Newman (1972) explicitly mentions Pruitt Igoe in his theory on the direct relation between physical environment and human behavior. The lack of so-called defensible places (i.e. demarcated semi-public areas where a small group of people feel responsible to ‘defend’ it) invokes unwanted behavior such as happened in Pruitt Igoe. However others have emphasized more structural causes for he failure, which might be generalizable to most public housing projects. Two main arguments can be identified. First some argue the whole public housing program was deemed to fail due to the impossible financing scheme (Bristol, 1991). The money from rents could have never been enough to maintain the massive housing projects; the projects were already a failure before they were even built. Secondly many mention structural forces such as white sub-urbanization, institutional racism and perverse effects of federal policy as causes for urban decline such as occurred in Pruitt Igoe (Jackson, 1987; Bristol, 1991; Fishman, 2000).

The latter arguments can easily be linked to a wider body of literature discussing the general decline of inner cities. Pruitt Igoe definitely did not stand on its own: it is often used as an explicit example of the failure of the modernist mass public housing, and urban decline within inner American cities. Perhaps the most important writing on this matter was by Wilson (1987). Wilson argues that trough racial discrimination and sub-urbanization, inner cities were left with a young black population. The shift from goods production to the service industries caused polarization on the labor market and led to growing unemployment for the young black population of the inner cities. Together with growing out-migration of working- and middle-class families the concentration of the disadvantaged was increasing every year. A mismatch of jobs in the suburbs and residence in the inner city and a lack of social ties with middle-class or working-class has been disastrous for the black population of the inner cities. The civil rights movement and institutional action against discrimination created opportunities for working-class and middle-class black families to escape the ghettos, but leaving an even poorer population behind (Wilson, 1987). Massey and Denton (1993) agree with Wilson on growing concentrations of poverty in inner cities but emphasize it is mainly racial segregation that is causing these

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12 concentrations. Worsening conditions, alarming studies and perhaps the riots of 1992 in LA fed the public concern with the ‘ghetto problem’ (Jargowsky, 1997).

The federal government applied several programs to counter the negative effect of this ghetto problem by assuming that living in a poor neighborhood decreases one’s opportunities, especially due to the mismatch in supply and demand of labor (Friedrichs et al., 2003). This assumption has led to solutions based on the mobility of residents from poor neighborhoods to neighborhoods where there were better opportunities in terms of labor, education and housing (Briggs, 1997; Imbroscio, 2011). One of the first and most famous attempts to do so was the Gautreaux program in Chicago which was established in 1976 and ran until 1998 (Rosenbaum, 1995). In this program African American households could apply to leave their impoverished neighborhood by obtaining a Section 8 voucher. A Section 8 voucher allows one to rent in the private market while paying only 30% of the income. The difference is paid by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Within the Gautreaux program the households would get assistance to use the voucher within a more affluent ‘white’ neighborhood. Early results of this program did reveal positive effects for its participants in terms of education and employment (Rosenbaum, 1995). Inspired on these successes HUD came with an even larger program called Moving To Opportunity (MTO). MTO worked rather similar as Gautreaux but was set up larger and had some minor differences which will be discussed later. A third and last program that relied heavily in residential mobility in order to counter problems of concentrated poverty was the massive revitalization and Section 8 relocation of distressed public housing sites under the name of HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for Everyone).

However many scholar have been increasingly critical towards HOPE VI since convincing evidence of improving conditions for those displaced by HOPE VI has yet to be found. The lack of evidence for benefits of residential mobility has been fueling discussion on more place-based solutions, dealing with black urban poor neighborhoods ‘as is’ (Pattillo, 2009; Imbroscio, 2011). Noteworthy is Michael Porter’s ongoing research translating his seminal work on the competitive advantage of nations into the competitive advantage of inner cities (Porter, 1995). As opposed to the mobility programs these scholars are arguing to bring jobs to the inner city instead of moving workers out of it (cf. Imbroscio, 2011) (but see Briggs, 2008: for a reply on Imbroscio's critiques on mobility). The question still remains: does neighborhood matter? Can a poor family gain from

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13 living in a mixed neighborhood? And inherently do poor families suffer from living next to other poor families? Are poor people bad for each other? The answers to these questions reach beyond the scope of this research. However the results of this study might provide better insights in the actual outcomes of so-called mobility programs.

2.2: Europe

As was the case in the US, urbanization due to the industrial revolution housing the new urban underclass became a major issue for countries in Europe. Rowlands et al. (2009) identified five different reasons why mass housing appeared so widely across Europe in the first decades after the Second World War. (1) The wave of industrialization which swept through Europe during the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, catered for a massive urbanization and rapid population growth of cities. The housing which was provided during that period was provisional and resulted in concentrated poor quality housing for the working class that was often described as slums. Already before the war, plans were being made to improve the quality of the housing stock. The war however had major impacts on housing needs (2). Not only due to the devastation it had created was there a greater need for housing, the unprecedented baby-boom resulted in a huge housing shortage. Most Western European countries had to cope with housing shortages of over 10% (Rowlands et al., 2009). Scarcity on the housing market and the need for rapid economic regeneration after the war resulted in rising housing prices and the disability of markets to cope with the huge shortage. Cheap massive construction could only be realized through state interventions (3). Together these demographic changes, the ruins of the war and the emerging welfare-states in Europe, saw and ideal solution in the emerging modernist architecture (4), based on the functionalists ideals of Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) formed by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. Technocratic solutions to provide housing for the poor by separating function were the adagio of modern architects. Since this offered a relatively cheap solution to urban problems and a tool to gain more control of the urban population, the modernists’ view on mass housing gained wide support across Europe (5). In rapid pace massive high-rise housing estates appeared in Europe during the 1950s 1960s and early 1970s (Wassenberg et al., 2004).

Despite these seemingly similar conditions for many countries in Europe, post-war housing estates developed in different ways and problems arose in different extents and of different kinds

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14 in each country or region. Since this study is a comparison between the US and the Netherlands, I will focus on post-war housing in the Netherlands. However I will also point out to what extent the Dutch context differs from the situation in other countries within Europe.

Formal intervention in housing of the less affluent started in the Netherlands in 1901 with the first Housing Act. After this act social housing in the Netherlands was in the hands of non-profit housing associations that were funded with loans from the national government. Housing associations acted under supervision of municipal governments which in turn were responsible for eventual losses. The social sector had a slow start, although some new housing was built by the associations, the national government was reluctant in providing loans (Van der Schaar, 1983). The social sector actually commenced after the Second World War when the demand for new housing was going through the roof and the welfare state was establishing in the Netherlands. Until the early 1990s association kept building new housing. They reached their plateau, owning 42 per cent of the housing stock in the country during the 1990s (Priemus, 2006). 0 200000 400000 600000 800000 1000000 1200000 1400000 1600000 1915 1925 1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985

Number of Units in Social Rent

Figure 2.1: figure 1 shows the total number of social housing units throughout the 20th century. After WWII a sharp rise in the number of social housing units is visible. Plans that were made before the war could be realized and the big demand for housing was increased by war devastations and the post-war baby boom

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15 Until then, housing associations were very tightly connected to the government. Since they were providing housing to low-income and middle-income tenants below the cost price, they were dependent on subsidies and other state funding. Neoliberal regimes however were transforming housing policies across Europe. For example, the Thatcher administration in the UK introduced ‘Right-to-Buy’ in 1980, increasing owner-occupation from 50 to 67 per cent in 1993 (Priemus, 1996). But even in strong social democracies such as Sweden, housing subsidies were dramatically decreased during the 1990s (Turner and Whitehead, 2002). The Netherlands had their own special way of liberalization of the housing market. Owner occupation increased to 50 percent, but the social rented sector remained stable at over 40 per cent during the 1990s. However the Dutch government created a unique situation by more or less privatizing the social housing sector. On the first of January 1995, the housing association repaid all their loans to the central government and received all their subsidies they were expecting for the coming 50 years all at once (€16.6 billion) to cut all direct ties with the government. Housing associations still have the task to provide housing at reduced prices for those who cannot afford to rent in the private market. To raise money, housing associations now sell property which is written in their book far below market rate and rent out a share of their stock in the private rental market.

2.2.1: Decline

Whereas in the US public housing is intended to house the most deprived part of the population, most European countries provide social housing for a much larger population (Schwartz, 2010; Turner and Whitehead, 2002). A percentage of 42 of the total housing stock, means that social housing is not strictly for the under-class. Middle-class and even a few upper-class households live in social housing in the Netherlands (Van Kempen and Priemus, 2002). Projects described as war-zones and breeding grounds for criminality like Pruitt Igoe have never existed in the Netherlands. As Peach (2009) argues, Chicago-style ghettos simply do not exist in Western Europe. Peach argues that even in the UK the neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of minorities do not resemble the ghettos of the US if proper measurement is used.

Nevertheless segregation and poverty concentration is regarded as a serious issue in Europe. Concentrations of poverty and ethnic segregation appeared frequently in those neighborhoods that were built in the first decades after the Second World War. These neighborhoods, at first built for lower middle classes, were increasingly populated by ethnic minorities and lower

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16 classes during the 1980s and 1990s. Problems arose such as unemployment, criminality and school drop-out. However not all post-war estates were coping with the same problems to the same extent (Rowlands et al., 2009). Physical determinism, blaming solely modernistic architecture for the decline also emerged in Europe but just as in the US appears to be short-sighted. Many scholars have come up with different sets of reasons for the decay in these neighborhoods. There are so many reasons for the decay, and simultaneously there are so many different post-war neighborhoods in Europe, so it is difficult to mention one specific reason for decline (for an overview see Van Beckhoven et al., 2009).

In the 1990s and onwards most post-war housing estates are far less desirable than they once were when they were constructed. The population of these estates has changed, the middle class has largely left these areas and mostly ethnic minorities, who had less choice in the housing market have replaced them (Musterd and Van Kempen, 2007). Although compared to American ghettos the levels of segregation are relatively low; concentration of poverty and ethnic segregation is by no means a trifle in the European political arena (Phillips, 2009). Even the European Commission warned for growing concentrations of poverty and ethnic minorities, calling for radical action. In many countries such as Belgium, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands the central government planned for action to counter growing segregation and concentrations of poverty (Musterd, 2003). It appeared as though the panacea for emerging problems was social mixing (Uitermark, 2003). The policies that were invented to mitigate the emerging problems are based on two assumptions: social mix – which overlaps with ethnic mix – would enhance the opportunities of the urban disadvantaged, and second, mix of housing would create social and ethnic mix (Musterd and Andersson, 2005). In most Western countries these social mixing instruments were put into practice in more or less similar ways (Andersen and Van Kempen, 2003). Examples are the Danish Urban Renewal Act, revitalizing post-war functionalist neighborhoods in Denmark, whereas in France urban renewal was carried out under the Politique de la Ville of the late 1990s (Gilbert, 2009). Next to physical interventions, these policies tried to change the social and ethnic compositions of the targeted areas, by dispersing the poor population and through an influx of middle-class. In the Netherlands policymakers tried to accomplish social mixing through the Big Cities Policy (Grotestedenbeleid).

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17 In the second half of the twentieth century and the years thereafter, there have been numerous area-based policies to combat problems related to urban decline and stimulating urban economies (for an overview see Musterd and Ostendorf, 2008). The introduction of the Big Cities Policy (BCP) in 1994 can be regarded as a starting point for social mixing by means of introducing middle-class into distressed neighborhoods (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2008). Councils of the four major cities in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague) saw problems such as increasing unemployment, criminality and urban decline growing rapidly, especially within these four big cities. To combat these problems, in 1994 they created a memorandum for the newly formed government calling for policy specific attention for problems in their big cities. Since the major goal of the newly installed government was the creation of jobs they were willing to incorporate the memorandum of the four cities and the BCP was initiated (Priemus et al., 1997). The policy was designed to target the most vulnerable groups in society: chronically unemployed, ethnic minorities, elderly, disabled etc. But more importantly it was also designed to target specific neighborhoods where concentration of these people existed to improve these neighborhoods both physically as well as socially (Van Kempen, 2000). Soon after its introduction other municipalities than the four big cities joined the program since they were facing similar problems. BCP I and its follow-ups II and III were all aimed at combating segregation. On the one hand by providing more mixed housing in disadvantaged neighborhoods so middle-class could move in, but on the other hand by providing opportunities for the original population to make housing career. In such a way successful residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods could remain in their neighborhood and out-migration of the successful would be omitted (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2008).

From the period between 1994 and 2002 there was a special minister allocated for the BCP. Between 2002 and 2007, when the tone of the political debate changed from fostering ‘multi-culturalism’ to forced assimilation and integration, the BCP was under the responsibility of the minister of Justice. Since 2007 it is again under a minister of housing and integration. Despite the large role central government took in implementing the BCP, one of the keywords was decentralization (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2008). The BCPs were implemented with money from central government (and to a small extent even from the EU) allocated to municipalities. These municipalities made a plan, approved by the central government, but together with other stakeholders such as housing associations, but also residents. The operationalized version of the

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18 BCPs are characterized by objectives such as tearing down poor-quality housing structures, moving tenants to other parts of the city, building new housing of higher quality, with higher rents or for ownership, and attracting more affluent residents in order to create the transcendent mixed neighborhoods. This has happened in many cities in the Netherlands on very large scale roughly in the first decade of the 21st century. A good example of this large scale restructuring can be found in Amsterdam Nieuw West (ANW).

ANW is more or less completely built in the first decades after WWII and consisted in 2002 of slightly more than 52.000 housing units (O+S Amsterdam, 2002). Under the name of Project Parkstad the entire post-war area in western Amsterdam was restructured. The plan was to demolish 13.300 units and replace them with 24.300 new units. The percentage of social rent would decrease from 76 to 46 which is closer to the national average (Van Beckhoven, 2007). The ten active housing associations in ANW bundled their assets into two consortia to work together with the central government, the municipality of Amsterdam and the residents on the massive urban restructuring, relocating thousands of people and creating many high-end rental and buyers dwellings.

Strikingly the discussed policies received only very little academic support in comparison with the largeness of the interventions. Musterd and Ostendorf (2008: 88) summarize the history of Dutch urban policies as follows: “[Urban policy had] strong focus on area-based approaches in disadvantaged neighborhoods, aiming to change the housing stock in order to create a social mix. With this ambition the picture of the real situation is out of sight. This is problematic, because the empirical situation differs considerably from the political perceptions and discourses”. A mixed neighborhood does not appear to stimulate social interactions between different social classes. Moreover Fenne Pinkster (2008) showed in a Dutch case study of several mixed income neighborhoods that social mixing can even destroy important social ties while not generating more. Therefore social mixing might even have more negative influence on the targeted area than it has positive effects.

2.3: Social mix and neighborhood effect

In both the US as well as in the Netherlands (and in the rest of Western Europe) ethnic or income segregation and concentrations of poverty were regarded as one of the most pressing urban problems. Many policies large scale policies such as HOPE VI, MTO and the Dutch BCP have

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19 tried to decrease segregation and concentration of poverty in order to mitigate for accumulating problems such as unemployment. All these policies are based on the assumptions that mix of housing creates social mix, which in turn enhances the opportunities of residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods. The relationship between neighborhood and its residents is however one that is very difficult to investigate or understand. There is some sort of consensus about the question if neighborhood matters; although scholars tend to agree that there is definitely an existing neighborhood effect, actual causal mechanisms proved to be difficult to tease out with empirical studies (Friedrichs et al., 2003; Galster, 2007; Ellen and Turner, 1997; Galster, 2012). Social mixing policies are said to stem from worries about lack of ‘integration’, which eventually might even result in the development of ‘parallel societies’ that are considered a threat to national unity and social order (Uitermark, 2003; Münch, 2009; Phillips, 2009). However, even in the US, where concentrations of poverty and race are much more intense than in Europe (Peach, 2009), evidence in support for social mix and the assumed effects is limited and often weak (for an overview, see Goetz and Chapple, 2010). In Europe, the negative effects of distressed neighborhoods on the opportunities of its residents are even more contested (Van Ham and Manley, 2010; Ostendorf et al., 2001; Musterd et al., 2012).

As I already pointed out, some scholars even found neighborhood effects that accomplish the opposite of what policymakers had in mind applying for example the BCP. Other studies have extensively followed families throughout their housing career and tried to find effects of certain neighborhoods on people’s employment and education. If there is so little evidence for positive neighborhood effects through social mixing, why do these social mixing policies persist so widely? Imbroscio (2011) argues that stubborn advocates of liberal urban policy have always relied on mobility, and if mobility does not work, “the preferred corrective is even more mobility” (Imbroscio, 2011: 3). Lees (2008) pointed out that social mix strategies may also serve completely other objectives. She and others argued that social mixing policies conceal gentrification strategies, which are often actively encouraged by the state, in partnership with private actors, but which, as a result, would displace lower-income households from attractive locations in the urban arena. Other authors also find this displacement effects and regard gentrification as a new global strategy (Smith, 2002a; Smith, 1996). In the Netherlands gentrification is however not used as a strategy by local governments to increase tax-bases or serve the middle-class, but explicitly to counter social problems in the city and actively pursue

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20 social mix (Uitermark et al., 2007). Gentrification has increasingly been associated with the negative effect of displacement of working-class from attractive neighborhoods (Atkinson, 2004; Bridge et al., 2012). Therefore if policies of urban restructuring, with the neighborhood effect/social mixing assumptions are evaluated, one has to look further than just the targeted neighborhood. What about those who are displaced? Aside from the restructuring effects on the targeted area, which can still mean an upgrading of a previously disadvantaged neighborhood, urban restructuring in the form of demolition of housing and replacement of more expansive dwellings, the relocation or displacement of the original population can at least have two other effect. On the one hand the relocation of less affluent residents can mean that other neighborhoods receive disproportionately many poor residents as a result from the relocation that concentrations of poverty can grow or appear in other parts of a city. In this line of thought urban restructuring is not dispersing poverty but is merely relocating problematic areas to other neighborhoods. Dutch scholars have found these types of patterns of these types of spillover-effects (Slob et al., 2008; Bolt and Van Kempen, 2010). On the other hand, more along the lines of the state-led gentrification theories, the urban restructuring is not causing the promised neighborhood effects and is merely displacing the original population. In this more structuralist and revanchist view, the middle-class is taking over attractive parts of the city while the working-class is paying high tolls (Newman and Wyly, 2006). Especially in the US and in the Netherlands there is a growing interest in displacement after urban restructuring. Several studies have tried to track down households that were relocated due to urban restructuring to define patterns of displacement and find out to what extent these relocatees are victims of urban restructuring and if new concentrations of poverty have risen. In the next paragraph I will elaborate more on these tracking-studies.

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3: Tracking the relocatees

Research with a specific focus on displacement of tenants of restructuring neighbourhoods has attracted ample attention, especially from American and Dutch scholars. In this section I will discuss findings of tracking studies of relocatees in regard with poverty de-concentration and/or urban restructuring. I will first start with discussing outcomes of relocation in the US.

3.1: US

In the US programs that involved the relocation of households explicitly try to disperse disadvantaged households to lessen poverty concentrations. The best known examples are Gautreaux, MTO and HOPE VI (Goetz and Chapple, 2010). An important difference however is that the first two programs involve voluntary relocation where households could sign up to get involved, while HOPE VI forces people to move due to the demolition of public housing (Goetz, 2002).

3.1.1: Gautreaux and MTO

Gautreaux was one of the first voucher programs in the US and started as early as 1976, relocating nearly 7600 mostly African American families out of the ghetto to more white neighborhoods. Gautreaux was initiated after a lawsuit of an African American woman challenging the Chicago Housing Authority for only providing housing for African Americans within the public housing black ghettos. After Gautreaux won the lawsuit, the Gautreaux program initiated trying to offer opportunities to African American households to relocate to white suburbs (Rosenbaum, 1991). Since low-skilled jobs were moving more and more from the inner cities to the suburbs and since suburban schools are generally better than their city counterparts a move to the suburbs could provide these African American households with many more opportunities than they had in the inner cities (Wilson, 1987). A disadvantage was however that these African American families can be regarded as black pioneers in white enclaves in the suburbs. Grocery stores in the suburbs never had to cope with food-stamps, suburban schools never experienced children with less affluent parents and most importantly, African American families did receive harassment from their white neighbors moving into their neighborhood (Rosenbaum, 1991). Since the Gautreaux program was one of the first of its kind, it was an opportunity for researchers to find out if a move from a disadvantaged neighborhood in the inner city to a white neighborhood in the suburbs or somewhere else would cater for better opportunities and eventually to improvement in employment and education of African American

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22 participants. The first results came in the early 1990s and were strikingly positive. Adult participants showed significant improvement in earnings and employment while children reported better results in school. Especially those who moved to the suburbs experienced these improvements (Popkin et al., 1993; Rosenbaum, 1995; Rosenbaum, 1991). More recent research, investigating long-term effects of Gautreaux moves show that especially moving to a neighborhood with lower concentrations of African Americans is beneficial for employment (Mendenhall et al., 2006).

The positive results of the Gautreaux inspired HUD in 1994 to launch its widely discussed experimental program Moving To Opportunity (MTO). MTO was launched in five American metropolitan regions, Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York and Boston. In this experimental program targeted at relocating people from the poorest neighborhoods to largely suburban neighborhoods with low poverty rates, three groups were defined. The first and experimental group received Section 8 vouchers which they were supposed to use in non-poverty neighborhoods. The second group received Section 8 vouchers as well but were not restricted to non-poverty neighborhoods in their choice of relocation and the third and last group was a control group who did not receive any voucher (Briggs, 1997; Rosenbaum et al., 2002; Katz et al., 2001). Contrary to Gautreaux no racial element was included in MTO. The only demand for the experimental group was they would relocate to a neighborhood with less than 10 per cent of its population under the poverty line. Although MTO in many ways was similar to Gautreaux, the results for participants were far less significant than for the Gautreaux movers (Kling et al., 2004). Many more researchers found disappointing results for MTO (Briggs and Turner, 2006; Briggs, 1997; Katz et al., 2001).

The differences of the outcomes between the two projects might be explained by the differences in design of the two programs. In a recent published book on outcomes of MTO Briggs et al. (2010) explain these differences by pointing at the fact that Gautreaux relocatees had to move to racially less segregated neighborhoods and they generally moved to neighborhoods that were located further away from their original location. MTO relocatees often remained fairly close to the original site and moved to neighborhoods with less poverty, but often with equal shares of African Americans, meaning they would remain resided in deeply segregated neighborhoods.

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23 Critics of MTO and Gautreaux claim that while the programs have a sense of randomness regarding the selection of applicants, there is certainly a selection bias in these programs (Hedman and van Ham, 2012). Applicants to both these programs had to meet certain demands to be eligible for Section 8. This included income demands, but also criminal records were taken into account. Moreover applying for one of these programs means automatically that a household is willing to improve their situation and escape the disadvantaged ghetto. MTO has omitted this problem by assigning two experimental groups, the ‘normal’ Section 8 group and the MTO group which were obliged to use their voucher in a less than 10 per cent poverty neighborhood. However as Galster (2003: 905) explains “even the treatment group receiving intensive mobility counseling and assistance, although constrained to move initially to a neighborhood with less than 10 per cent poverty rates, nevertheless has the ability to choose neighborhoods varying on their school quality, home ownership rates, racial composition, local institutional resources, etc.”.

3.1.2: HOPE VI

One of the most discussed relocation programs is HOPE VI. This program started in the 1990s with the objective to revitalize the most severely distressed public housing projects in the US (Popkin et al., 2002). At the end of the 1980s, public housing in the US was viewed as a complete failure. Although some project were faring relatively well, the most dilapidated projects had to deal with extreme economic and racial segregation, massive unemployment and high crime rates which led to dangerous living conditions, in terms of safety and health (Popkin et al., 2004). To overcome these problems in the deeply segregated public housing projects, in 1989 Congress appointed a Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, to identify the most distressed public housing projects and come up with a plan to revitalize these projects. As a result of the recommendations of the Commission, HUD initiated the HOPE VI program (Popkin et al., 2004). HOPE VI ran from 1993 and 2010, assigning approximately $6.3 billion allocated to 262 different projects throughout the US (HUD, 2010). A HOPE VI grant typically was used to demolish a severely distressed public housing project, replace it with a New Urbanist Style mixed housing community. The original tenants were either relocated with Section 8; they moved to other projects or could return to the original site. Since the projects were replaced by mixed types of housing only a portion of it would be public housing. In none of the projects was enough replacement housing to offer all tenants to return (Popkin et al., 2004).

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Figure 3.1a HOPE VI before intervention

Figure 3.1b HOPE VI after intervention

Figure 3.1a and b show a HOPE VI development in San Francisco, CA before and after the

intervention. Typically a high-rise modernistic structure was replaced with New Urbanist style mixed housing. In general New Urbanist style can be characterized by colorful housing, emphasis on ‘walkability’ and livability with attached housing (Schwartz, 2010). Photograph: SFHA

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25 HOPE VI was initiated not only to revitalize distressed projects in a physical manner, but had the explicit goal of “lessening concentration of the very poor and creating mixed neighbourhoods” (Salama, 1999: 97). Residents living in a public housing project to be addressed by HOPE VI were forced to leave their houses, but got the opportunity to return after revitalization, move to private rental housing by using vouchers or they moved to a different public housing project. Just as with the voluntary relocation programs the relocatees have been tracked in order to find out to what type of neighbourhood they moved. Most findings suggest that relocatees generally move to neighbourhoods with less unemployment and significantly less poverty (Popkin et al., 2002; Buron, 2004; Smith, 2002b; Comey and Popkin, 2004). However, relocatees, mostly African American or Hispanic, turned out to stay resided in deeply segregated areas with frequently over 90 per cent of the population being minorities (Clampet-Lundquist, 2004a). Those who managed to use a voucher that enabled them to rent at reduced cost in the private market reported most frequently an improvement in living condition, and generally moved to less segregated areas, while those who moved to other projects remained in neighborhoods with slightly less poverty than their original situation (Buron, 2004). However the process of relocation is often experienced as stressful, while choice for alternatives is limited. Strikingly there is not much research done in order to find out whether HOPE VI relocatees experienced any employment or educational gains. Clampet-Lundquist (2004b) conducted a qualitative survey to find out whether relocatees gained economically or socially by moving out. Strikingly she found no significant gains for relocatees two years after their move beside the fact that they had significantly less complaints about the quality of their new homes. In general most studies conclude that relocatees were more satisfied with their homes after their move (Comey and Popkin, 2004; Popkin et al., 2004; Popkin et al., 2009; Popkin et al., 2002; Clampet-Lundquist, 2004a; Buron, 2004). However, research also shows that relocated households had more difficulties building social ties in their new homes having difficulties integrating in their new neighborhoods (Clampet-Lundquist, 2010; Manzo et al., 2008).

3.2: The Netherlands

In the Netherlands relocation policies to the benefit of social mixing have not been set up so explicitly as MTO or Gautreaux. More similar to HOPE VI the Dutch government under the name of the BCP has relocated tenants out of their homes due to demolition. There were no particular restrictions to where relocatees should move to. Although every city in the Netherlands

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26 employ their own system of providing alternative housing to relocatees, most cities work by providing priority on waiting lists of social housing to forced relocatees. In this way those who are forced to move face a large set of alternative housing options ranging from similar dwellings close to their original homes to suburban single family homes. In order to find adequate alternative housing, relocatees receive assistance from their local housing association. In the end the housing association is legally responsible for providing adequate alternative housing to every single relocatee before they can start demolishing. Therefore demolition only takes place when every relocatee has found a new dwelling with enough rooms to house their family to a reasonable rent.

The wave of urban restructuring, initiated by the several BCPs was designed to replace dilapidated social housing with more mixed qualitative high standard housing. As was explained the BCPs main goals were social rather than physical. Yet the means of urban restructuring are physical to accomplish the social goal of safer and more livable communities through social mix. Strikingly apart from the discussion if social mix appears after mix of housing, research shows that through the dispersal of low income tenants from the demolished social housing, ethnic segregation is likely to increase (Bolt and Van Kempen, 2010; Bolt et al., 2009; Slob et al., 2008). Ethnic minority relocatees move to neighborhoods with sometimes even greater concentrations of ethnic minorities and low-incomes, but even more so do white relocatees avoid these neighborhoods (Bolt et al., 2008). Forced relocation after urban restructuring can lead to reinforcement of concentrations of low-income and ethnic minorities in other parts of the city. However they emphasize that forced relocatees only form a small part of the relocation flows into these new concentrations (Slob et al., 2008). Other researchers have investigated forced relocation not only to find macro effects of segregation but also looked for the displacement effects on individual relocatees. Up to now most research relied on sample and questionnaires to gain access to residents who experience relocation. Kleinhans (2003) was one of the first to investigate forced relocation in the Netherlands after urban restructuring. He concluded that most relocatees experienced improvement in their housing conditions after their move. However he adds that there is a potential danger in the system that relocatees often move to similar dwellings that are to be demolished soon after relocation. Therefore he warns for the emergence of urban restructuring ‘nomads’; moving from one demolition project to the other. Doff and Kleinhans (2011) confirmed that Dutch forced relocatees in most cases experienced serious improvement in

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27 their housing situation after their move. However they stated that there is a difference in improvement among native Dutch relocatees and those belonging to ethnic minorities. Immigrant relocatees had significantly less chance to experience considerable improvement than their native Dutch neighbors. These findings are backed up by some other researchers, although they find that immigrants not necessarily move to qualitatively worse dwellings than native Dutch relocatees, but for sure they move to worse neighborhoods, in terms of employment average income and ethnic segregation (Bolt et al., 2009; Slob et al., 2008; Van Bergeijk et al., 2008). Moreover, Slob et al. (2008) found that ethnic minorities appear to be less satisfied with their new dwellings after forced relocation than native Dutch. Young relocatees however appear to be more satisfied after their move and are believed to be better capable of adapting to their new neighborhood (Visser et al., 2013)

Meerts et al. (2011) have tried, in a more qualitative approach, to find out to what extent choice was limited by institutional and structural constraints. They conducted 150 in-depth interviews with forced relocatees from Dutch urban restructuring and found that these relocatees can be categorized into two groups. The first group is fairly satisfied with their new dwelling after relocation, despite the fact that they are seriously constrained and not all their preferences are met. A second and much smaller group is less satisfied, and find themselves pressured by time and money constraints so they let go most of their own preferences and ended up in a less satisfying housing situation. However, a recently published study showed that involuntarily relocated households have more options to choose from in their relocation process than is often believed. They should be regarded as ‘active agents’ and are not necessarily victims of urban restructuring (Posthumus, 2013). An interesting conclusion of the same study is that immigrant relocatees and those with children are less satisfied after relocation and often remain in close proximity with the old neighborhood, in neighborhoods with relatively high unemployment rates, and a large portion of minorities (Posthumus, 2013).

3.3: Conclusion

In general the whole process of urban restructuring and forced relocation does really resemble the classic examples of gentrification with the difference that it is induced by the government. Therefore the term ‘state-led gentrification’ appears to be appropriate. However gentrification is increasingly framed as a negative process where the emphasis is mostly on displacement.

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28 Although forced relocation inevitably implies displacement, studies show that this type of displacement does not necessarily mean that the lower classes are “paying the highest tolls” as Newman and Wyly (2006) claim in case of classic gentrification. Overall in both the US as well as in the Netherlands relocatees move to better housing when they were forced to move due to urban restructuring or revitalization. However new concentrations may arise and relocatees sometimes have difficulties rebuilding social ties in their new neighborhood.

In a recent special issue of Housing Studies (2013, issue 2) on the subject of forced relocation Kleinhans and Kearns (2013) try to steer the discussion on this topic in a different direction. They find that “[o]ver time, the notion of displacement has increasingly acquired a negative loading in the discourse on residential moves that are triggered by gentriﬁcation”. They continue: “the tendency to frame forced relocation connected to state-led restructuring in a gentriﬁcation discourse tends to ignore or downplay fundamental differences between these phenomena” (Kleinhans and Kearns, 2013: 168). In the same issue of Housing Studies Kearns and Mason (2013) go even further by arguing that terms as ‘displacement’ and ‘forced’ relocation should be employed with more care and preferably be avoided. Preferences of relocatees are too often assumed and not investigated; moreover conditions for ‘forced’ relocations can vary widely in terms of information provided, institutional settings, and mechanisms of support and choice (2013: 197).

The research in this thesis will partly be based on the discussion raised in the special of Housing Studies. I investigated four demolition projects in Amsterdam demolished under the name of urban restructuring. I believe I can add substantially to the discussion outlined above for several reasons. First I was able to collect complete datasets of relocation processes including background information on relocatees and their exact new addresses. In contrast with all earlier studies in the Netherlands I do not rely on questionnaires with 30 per cent response rate but I have access to the outcomes of the entire population of four projects in Amsterdam. Hereby I avoid the sample selection bias other studies had to cope with. Households that do not cooperate in academic surveys might very well show different relocating behavior due to the unknown factor that is causing them not to participate in academic research. In addition the data I have used consist of a survey that is conducted prior to the relocation. Next to income ethnicity and family size this survey included neighborhood preferences of relocatees. These preferences prior

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29 to relocation give a good view on the relocatees’ preferences not biased by the relocation process itself. These preferences can therefore be compared with actual outcomes to get a better look at the interaction between preferences and (institutional) constraints. All data are made available by the Amsterdam housing association Rochdale. For three months I have gathered data at the main office of Rochdale. This also entailed the opportunity to have daily discussion and conversations with the relocation staff of this particular housing association. In the methodology chapter I will elaborate more on the quality of the data. Moreover I will compare outcomes from forced relocation in Amsterdam with outcomes from forced relocation in three projects in Gainesville, Florida. The data from Florida are less detailed and will be used to understand the Dutch situation even better by comparing it internationally. In the next chapter on methods I will discuss the comparison in more detail.

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4: Methodology

In the special issue of Housing Studies on forced relocation Kearns and Mason (2013) question the appropriateness of the term displacement regarding those who were forced to move due to urban restructuring. Moreover Posthumus (2013) recently promoted at the University of Utrecht with a dissertation named “Displacement Myths”. It appears as though there is a shifting paradigm in discussing this particular topic. Whereas previous research framed this type of forced relocation as a merely negative consequence of questionable policies implying social mix, there are a growing number of studies emphasizing the merits of forced relocation and urban restructuring.

4.1: Questions

Not inclined to favor any of these two explanations of the process, I want to add empirical evidence to this discussion with this thesis. The evidence in this thesis is different from previous research. To my knowledge the empirical comparison between a Dutch case and an American case has only been conducted once and has room for extension. The data for my Dutch case are very unique, in the sense that they consist of detailed information on a complete relocating population of certain projects, not dependent on response rates through questionnaires. Moreover these data contain information on preferences identified right before the process of relocation started and can therefore be compared to final outcomes. These advantages will make it possible to find out whether displacement, with all its negative connotations, occurs after forced relocation. To examine the concept of displacement I will repeat the four questions from the introduction: