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Between 1993 and 2010, the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program sought to transform public housing by demolishing large spatially concentrated developments and replacing them with mixed-income housing. Drawing on postcolonial geographical thought, this article interrogates HOPE VI as a colonial project. Through the displacement of public housing residents, the razing of the development in which they lived, and the rebuilding of mixed-income housing, including new public housing units, HOPE VI projects seek to revitalize neighborhoods by attracting higher-income homeowners to relocate in these areas. Proponents of HOPE VI and other mixed-income housing strategies contend that socioeconomic mixing will provide a range of benefits for low-income residents in these environments. Yet, there is a growing body of research suggesting that income mixing itself can be a problem for public housing residents because the neighborhood social relations operate to marginalize them. Using a case study conducted in a midsized southern city, we build on this prior work by examining the sociospatial narratives that neighbors surrounding the HOPE VI site use to identify themselves. The article focuses on how new homeowners, residing at VANDERBILT UNIV LIBRARY on November 29, 2012 uar.sagepub.com Downloaded from 2 Urban Affairs Review XX(X) in a self-contained development right across the street from a HOPE VI site, construct themselves as a community by situating public housing residents as their other. We conclude that these sociospatial distinctions are integral to the broader, state-led effort to colonize and transform this low-income neighborhood situated next to the downtown business district.

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A pivotal innovation in the production of urban space has been the rise of privately governed neighborhoods overseen by homeowners associations (HOAs). One in every five American households resides in an HOA neighborhood regulated by conditions, covenants, and restrictions amounting to what has been referred to as a ''quiet revolution'' of urban politics. Their proliferation across cities warrants greater attention as they signify the transformation of state-civil society relations whereby nonstate entities are increasingly important actors in shaping the terrain of citizenship. HOAs are granted broad powers by the state and have profound effects on homeowners' experiences of everyday life through regulations that generate neighborhood space. This article examines the different modalities of governance deployed by HOAs to shape homeowner participation in producing a certain yard aesthetic, namely the lawn. While the lawn is a dominant cultural landscape in the United States, we find that homeowners in privately governed neighborhoods report a greater commitment to producing a lush, green, wellmanicured lawn and apply higher rates of fertilizer to their yards than households in nonprivately governed neighborhoods. Although HOAs exercise power by directly regulating homeowners' spatial practices, they also govern indirectly by holding out the possibility of a sense of place and belonging that is connected to the production of aestheticized and commoditized landscapes. The deployment of both disciplinary and governmental forms of power supplement each other in the ongoing process of building neighborhood citizens that actively shape circuits of global capitalist investment in cities through the imaginary of neighborhood community.

The 1937 Housing Act granted local governments the rights to build and operate public housing. And, while this was a significant win for housing advocates, subsequent public housing policies throughout the 20th century ultimately recreated slum-like conditions leading to another round of demolition and redevelopment. Our paper examines this history in order to make sense of current policy initiatives that, in the name of helping the poor, have sought to reclaim these areas for potential private-sector investment and, simultaneously, re-regulate the poor by attaching the provision of housing to the reproduction of labour.