PUTTING PEOPLE BACK INTO PLACE-BASED PUBLIC POLICIES AMY T. KHARE The University of Chicago INTRODUCTION There are several policies of the Obama administration that foreground places as important realms that shape the lives and life courses of those within them. This commentary seeks to answer the question of how the Obama administration’s signature place-based initiatives focus on catalyzing changes in urban environments: What do these place-based policies suggest about the role of the federal government in developing urban communities? This essay will first briefly contextualize the Obama administration’s place-based initiatives within the foundational literature that considers conceptions of community. Next, I will explore the movement to integrate place-based initiatives through White House-led directives, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Devel- opment’s (HUD) signature place-based program, Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, that redevelops neighborhoods deemed as distressed. While Choice works to resolve some of the inherent challenges of the HOPE VI program, it continues the history of federal investment into urban neighborhoods in ways that overtly prioritize changes to the spatial environment—these communities as places—while leaving unresolved the conflicts over how the communities of people living there are intended to benefit. CONCEPTIONS OF COMMUNITY WITHIN PLACE-BASED PUBLIC POLICIES Scholarly literature provides a variety of conceptions to what forms the basis of community, raising ambiguities, contradictions and conflicts in defining community as either place or people (or at times vague combinations of both place and people). Communities are often conceived of as geographic places existing in the built environment. Place-based conceptions of community explain the signifi- cance of spatially-defined arrangements, such as the density of the physical environment (Chaskin, 1997; Ferguson & Stoutland, 1999; Rothman, 1995; Sampson, 1999). People-based notions account for how socially constructed groups form and are influenced by common interests, relationships, and institutional arrangements (DeFilippis et al., 2010; Fisher & Kling, 1997; Piven & Cloward, 1977; Suttles, 1972; Young, 1990). Placed-based definitions tend to denote local places that may be physically delineated (though with debatable boundaries), whereas people-based conceptions tend to examine how communities exist within and outside of geographic constraints. Both place and people conceptions assume that individuals within communities share some degree of common identification, such as living on the same neighborhood block or sharing the experience of immigrating to a new country. External political economic forces and social contexts are assumed to shape the nature of communities. Debates exist, however, about the extent to which these macro forces matter to meta-level undercurrents within communities (Marwell, 2007; Sites, Chaskin, & Parks, 2007). Direct correspondence to: Amy T. Khare, The University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration, 969 E 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. E-mail: akhare@uchicago.edu. JOURNAL OFURBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 37, Number 1, pages 47–52. Copyright C  2015 Urban Affairs Association All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0735-2166. DOI: 10.1111/juaf.12161