The chaos of not knowing

Embodied experiences of waiting for public housing redevelopment and relocation

Bibliographic Data

ID4842735
AuthorsMax Westbrook (0000-0003-1010-1844, Portland State University), Solange Muñoz (0000-0001-5353-184X, University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Jeremy Auerbach (0000-0003-0061-7943, University College Dublin)
Year2024
Volume359
Pages117266
Publication date2024-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science & Medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117266
PMID39217718
OpenAlexW4401898690
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited43

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has instituted several successive programs to redevelop aging and distressed US public housing. The current program, the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, aims not only to redevelop housing but also to improve the health of public housing residents through a whole neighborhood transformation, at the cost of privatizing components of housing. In the present case study, we examine relationships and perceptions about public housing redevelopment and health among residents affected by the Sun Valley Choice Neighborhood Initiative in Denver, Colorado. We address how public housing residents experience redevelopment, with particular emphasis on the temporal, physical and embodied mental experience of "waiting" for housing in a community undergoing radical transformation. We understand and conceptualize waiting as the process that generates stressors, and embodiment as the process of internalizing stressors through the mechanism of weathering (Geronimus, 1992; Krieger, 2021). Through repeated interviews with 21 residents, we highlight several themes that tie together experiences of waiting for displacement as well as experiences of stress and uncertainty related to the bureaucracy of public housing redevelopment. We document how participants struggled with the emotional impact of imposed change, found waiting to be destabilizing for their mental health, and how they embodied experiences of displacement anxiety. These findings show how redevelopment projects impose a forced waiting on the state that extends precarity and further destabilizes the lives and mental health of public housing residents

Economic growth · Economics · Embodied cognition · Mental health · Political science · Psychiatry · Public health · Public housing · Public relations · Redevelopment · Relocation · Sociology · Health disparities and outcomes · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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