"Tarred with The Exceptional Image": Public Housing and Popular Discourse, 1950-1990

In 1986, readers of a major news magazine learned about Desire, a New Orleans housing project. Presumably open to all of New Orleans' poor people, most of Desire's residents as the text and photographs made clear were AfricanAmericans. Out of the project's population of 7,800, almost 3,000 were children, some of whom represented a third generation of poverty characterized by an inexorable cycle of crime, welfare dependency and dimmed hopes. Moreover, Desire was a world without order, cleanliness, privacy or parental supervision, where school drop-outs, teenage fathers, and unwed mothers were common. But if Desire conformed to a grim yet all too familiar image of public housing, its residents' behaviors, which included violence, drug use, and random sex, were identified as the chief causes.1 While Desire typified the image of public housing presented by the periodical press in the 1980s, the issues of race and tenant behavior had not always framed depictions of housing projects. Between 1950 and the early 1960s,afairly positive conception of low-income subsidized housing dominated popular coverage, a dialogue that stressed slum clearance and the dearth of affordable housing. By the late 1960s, though, a highly problematic image based largely on race had come to dominate the popular press, obscuring alternative representations that would have more accurately depicted the range and variety of public housing throughout America. Indeed, national data for 1 989 indicated that public housing was neither racially monolithic (one out of every three units was