Homeplace: Care and resistance among public housing residents facing mixed-income redevelopment.

ABSTRACT

Low-income communities of color experience significant political, economic, and health inequities and, not unrelatedly, are disproportionately exposed to violent crime than are residents of higher income communities. In an effort to mitigate concentrations of poverty and crime, governmental agencies have partnered with affordable housing developers to redevelop public housing "projects" into mixed-income communities and to do so within a "trauma-informed" framework. The current study analyzes how residents have historically and contemporaneously negotiated, endured, and resisted structural and interpersonal violence in 2 long-standing, predominately African American, public housing communities undergoing a public-private housing redevelopment initiative. Interviews with 44 adult public housing residents (age range = 18-75 years; 82% African American/Black) were conducted during a 2-year period while residents' homes were being demolished and rebuilt into mixed-income communities. Analysis of in-depth interviews used constructivist grounded theory principles to reveal a common theme and basic social process of the ongoing formation of homeplace, with subthemes focusing on the ways homeplace emerges through shared lineage, knowing and caring practices; how homeplace is maintained through networks of protection in unsafe contexts; how homeplace is disrupted as a result of redevelopment activities; and the reclamation of homeplace during redevelopment in the service of hope and healing. These findings offer a nuanced view of resident's lived experiences of place-based trauma and collective resistance and resilience, while also highlighting the place-specific ways in which redevelopment unsettles deeply rooted sociocultural configurations of home and community. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).