What is social capital and why is it important to public policy?

Abstract This article applies Robert Putnam's concept of social capital to housing and urban policy. We review the social capital literature that informs public policy and offer a new paradigmatic approach to solving social problems. We also introduce and summarize six articles that examine how social capital affects housing and community development. The work we summarize finds that social capital remains a relatively underdeveloped policy resource. The authors see the enhancement of social capital as key to improving the quality of life in low‐income neighborhoods. The idea of social capital, as developed in the articles presented here, structures the complex and often conflicting facts that characterize poverty into a set of strategic options that point to new, more subtle housing and urban policies.