Throughout the 20th century, housing movements in Atlanta were anchored by public housing tenant associations and a politics that materially and spatially addressed intersectional issues of discrimination in employment, welfare, education, and housing. I argue the strategies and outcomes of these movements collectivised, embedded, and placed Anneli Anttonen and Jorma Sipilä’s “care capital”—or an expansion of resources for care—in bell hooks’ “homeplaces”, for those marginalised both in social welfare policies and urban politics. Following the loss of over 7,000 public housing units in Atlanta, tenant associations’ care politics and the residents served were displaced and disembedded from the revitalised city. Using archival data, semi‐structured individual and group interviews, and observation of tenant organising meetings, this work examines how care politics are materially and spatially situated across housing movement geographies through Black resistance strategies to collectivise and embed care capital for a broader public.

U.S. cities transform public housing. Black municipal leadership (BML) may influence the scale and character of public housing removal and redevelopment. Informed by the “Black urban regime” literature, this study assesses whether presence and duration of BML, coupled with other factors, explains variation in public housing transformation for a sample of large cities. Its findings suggest that, controlling for other factors, BML is associated with moderately greater scales of public housing removal in the 1990s and 2000s, but BML is not associated with the “rate of return” by former public housing residents or new residence by public housing eligible households in Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) communities as of 2016. The findings invite further research on the intraracial dynamics and policy consequences of BML. They build, too, on public housing transformation scholarship, raising new questions about how municipal politics shape public housing and other sites of subsidized residence for low-income denizens of cities.

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The commentary argues that we need to address the wide variance in school building quality under and after COVID-19. Evidence suggests that historical underinvestment in school facility capital and maintenance has created unhealthy school buildings across the nation. Federal funding and research is necessary to ensure that schools are healthy places for educators, families, and youth even after the pandemic ends.