Nashville is booming, and so is its real estate, and so is its income inequality. In one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods, East Nashville, the James A. Cayce Homes, a sixty-three-acre tract of aging, run-down public housing, are about to be razed, redeveloped, renamed, and radically transformed—a six-hundred-million-dollar project for the supposed benefit of all. “The Promise: Life, Death and Change in the Projects,” a stellar six-part series from Nashville Public Radio reported and produced by the WPLN staff reporter Meribah Knight, reflects on the role of public housing in America by presenting the story of Cayce’s transformation, through the voices of its residents. The redevelopment project, Envision Cayce, sees a future in which people in subsidized housing and young professionals paying market rate will live harmoniously in new and improved residences. Knight calls it “a grand experiment to mix things up—and a bold promise that everyone will get something better.” But history hasn’t given Cayce residents reason to have much faith in the city’s housing authority or in bold promises.

In the first episode, we meet Vernell McHenry, sixty-one, who has lived in Cayce (pronounced “Casey”) for more than seventeen years; she’s daydreaming about a place far away. “The beaches, the sandy beach, the water is blue. . . . We got my palm trees sitting out there, and I’m sitting and sippin’ on a pineapple spritzer, with the little umbrella,” she says, laughing. “I do travel away from here in my mind.” McHenry likes to sit on a folding beach chair on her stoop, alternating between thinking about her imaginary waterfront home—“It is a old Victorian house. And it is purple”—and greeting her neighbors, many of whom are kids. (“Good evening, young man!” she says. “Hey, Tay!” “Did you have a good day in school?” “Hello, Marcel!”) This deep desire to be a part of the community and also to escape it—McHenry’s apartment is small and dimly lit, with linoleum floors, and her building is later condemned, after a sewage problem—is a contradiction at the heart of “The Promise.” Change is complex: McHenry is offered an apartment in the first new building, Barrett Manor, built entirely for subsidized tenants. It has a bit more space, bigger windows, central air, electronic key fobs. “I am like a child in a new candy store,” McHenry says, when she first tours the building. But some aspects of it unnerve her. There are security cameras everywhere—fifty-seven, inside and out—and new rules for residents. And there’s nowhere to sit outside and talk. By the end of the episode, McHenry doesn’t want to live in Barrett Manor at all.

If you’re unfamiliar with the history of public housing in the United States, “The Promise” is eye-opening. Starting with the Housing Act of 1937, which was passed as part of the New Deal, public housing was intended to improve the living conditions of poor people by getting them out of slums. Cayce, which opened in 1941, was one of Nashville’s first developments and is its largest. Today, more than thirteen hundred people live there, and ninety per cent of them are African-American—but the development was originally built for white families, and black residents weren’t allowed. (Projects for black families were across town.) In its early years, Cayce had baby clinics, nurseries, sports teams, libraries, social groups for seniors, groundskeeping jobs for residents. We hear patriotic music and an old newsreel, and a man’s voice bellowing, “Every dedication in the United States of a public low-rent housing project is a rededication of our democracy to the principle that all men are created equal!"

[For more on this story by Sarah Larson, go to https://www.newyorker.com/cult...illes-public-housing]