Empowerment and participation: A contextual analysis of resident management in public housing

Resident Management, the policy that enables public housing tenants to act collectively to solve community problems, gained widespread public support and federal funding in 1987. After nearly ten years, however, and almost in spite $70 million in federal assistance, public housing residents have made only sporadic progress toward empowerment and tenant organizations fail at a relative high rate. This study explores the connections between location in black empowerment cities (where tenants are more likely to form their own organizations and the levels of empowerment that tenants from 55 organizations achieve. The unit of analysis for this study is the individual public housing project to which a tenant association is officially registered. The independent variables, which help to define the contexts believed to increase group consciousness among tenants, were selected to model both micro social and macro social contexts. The micro social contextual level was captured by project and neighborhood level variables. The study also tests the effect of demographics characteristics and municipal political institutions upon the rates of tenant empowerment. Despite the greater number of tenant organizations that form in black empowerment cities, the study finds little support for the hypothesized relationship between political contexts and tenant organization empowerment. Although the variables designating successful groups appear initially to be related to political environments---especially to "black empowerment" cities---no other relationships between location and success can be established to support the hypothesis about contextual effects on tenant group success. Only six of the twenty variables associated with black participation in collective action are significant. The study points to the need to examine other connections between location in a black empowerment city and the apparently greater willingness of public housing tenants in these cities to form grassroots associations for community development.