Contents -- Illustrations -- Tables -- Introduction: The "Public" in Public Housing -- Public Housing as an American Problem -- Housing the Public Neighbor -- Public Housing in Boston -- I. The Prehistory of Public Housing -- 1 Coping with the Poor: Techniques and Institutions -- The Moral Geography of Puritan Space -- New Institutions for Indoor Relief -- Tenement Reform -- Settlement Houses -- Ideal Tenement Districts -- 2 Rewarding Upward Mobility: Public Lands, Private Houses, and New Communities -- Frontier Individualism on Public Lands -- Homesteads in the Boston Suburbs -- Residential Districts -- Communities by Design -- Public Neighborhoods without Public Neighbors -- II. Public Housing in Boston -- 3 Building Selective Collectives, 1934-1954 -- Boston's Selective Collectives -- Public Works and Private Markets -- Public Housing as Slum Reform -- Public Housing as War Production (1940-1945) -- Public Housing as Veterans' Assistance (1946-1954) -- The Authority Is Watching -- 4 Managing Poverty and Race, 1955-1980 -- The Geopolitics of Public Housing -- Urban Renewal -- Rewarding the Elderly -- The Mechanisms of Patronage -- Racial Discrimination and the BHA -- Battles within the Bureaucracy -- The Decline and Fall of the BHA -- 5 The Boston Housing Authority since 1980: The Puritans Return -- The Receivership -- Four Redevelopment Efforts in the 1980s -- The Politics of Public Housing Preferences -- Getting Beyond Receivership -- Boston Public Housing in the 1990s -- Ideological Retrenchment -- From the Puritans to the Projects -- Notes -- Credits -- Index.