Tursi, Natasha Ona. Poverty deconcentration, housing mobility, and the construction of recent US housing policy. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T31V5D1B
DescriptionThis study seeks to answer how and why poverty deconcentration and housing mobility have dominated recent housing policy discourse and produced the Moving to Opportunity demonstration program as HUD’s primary housing initiative in the 1990-2000 period. Through the examination of the policy discourse imbuing MTO I attempt to elucidate power relations and the role of elites in cultivating the housing mobility discourse. In addition, I demonstrate the hegemonic processes through which the dominant discourse proliferates. Employing a postpositivist approach to policy analysis, I examine the process of policy deliberation to expose the deliberative and discursive mechanisms through which MTO was engendered. Towards this end, the study explores the process, nature, and dynamics of policy deliberations at HUD to understand how federal policies are formed particularly with regard to embedded power dynamics and democratic processes. By illustrating the discursive practices that produced MTO, I uncover the politics, assumptions and frames through which HUD views poverty concentration, housing mobility, and voucher recipients. By depicting the evolutionary (genealogical) stages of MTO through a frame-critical discourse analysis, this study delimits the empirical findings produced through the demonstration. To that end I employ Fischer’s logic of policy evaluation and elucidate four interrelated discourses, which “extend from concrete empirical questions pertinent to a particular situation up to the abstract normative issues concerning a way of life” (1995:18). Accordingly, I produce an overall analysis of MTO, and offer suggestions on how the demonstration could have been structured or delineated differently, and what alternative assumptions or frames might have led to different analytical results.