The Past, Present, and Future of Public Housing

In the 25th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture, presented by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Kenzie Bok, CEO of the Boston Housing Authority and former Boston City Councilor, will bring together her experiences as a pioneering public housing administrator and intellectual historian to explore the past, present, and future of public housing in the United States. She will discuss how justice, fairness, and the role of government have shaped public housing, and how these ideas must evolve to meet today’s interconnected challenges of affordability, climate change, and inequality.

Following the lecture, Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, will moderate a conversation with Bok and Bernardo Zacka, an associate professor of political science at MIT, whose interests include the moral dilemmas that public service workers encounter when enacting public policy and how the architecture of welfare offices can shape interactions with citizens.