Linking a City Housing Authority’s Money Woes and a Jacobs Complaint

Can the New York City Housing Authority, landlord to more than 180,000 families and owner of one of every 13 rental units in the city, relieve some of its financial problems by responding to a criticism voiced by Jane Jacobs?In viewing cities as “delicate, teeming ecosystems,” the urban writer and activist disdained public housing projects as concrete monocultures deliberately designed without the functional and commercial diversity she admired. The street-level merchants who kept traditional neighborhoods safe both by their watchfulness and the activity they promoted were typically eliminated by urban renewal, leaving public housing tenants bereft of grocery stores, restaurants, and services. Indeed, decades after Jacobs (1916–2006) wrote her 1961 classic “Death and Life of Great American Cities,” most NYCHA buildings still lack retail and business services. Because just 28 of its 343 developments offer commercial leases, NYCHA deprives itself of revenue, even as its faces an annual operating deficit of some $225 million.Despite her many criticisms over the years, Jacobs said in a 1992 speech that it was possible for public housing to rectify this commercial absence. She argued that “the ground levels of self-isolating projects” could be “radically erased and reconstituted” by relinking the projects to the normal city and by refitting them with plentiful new connecting streets. More important, the projects should be converted into “urban places” by adding diverse new commercial facilities along the newly built streets. The catch, though, was the new commercial facilities would have to respond to their markets and work out economically — as proof “of their genuine and not fake usefulness,” Jacobs said.“The retail question is huge,” the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, Jerilyn Perine, a longtime supporter of public housing, said. “NYCHA is still being driven by the bad architectural concepts of the 1960s.”As the city’s housing commissioner in the first Bloomberg administration, Ms. Perine encouraged NYCHA to include retail in its new developments. “I couldn’t get them to budge,” she said. “On 5th Street and Avenue C they were designing a project to obliterate the retail strip. They said, ‘The federal government won’t pay for retail, so we won’t design it that way.'”Or, as an emeritus professor of sociology and education, Nathan Glazer, once summed up the dilemma of federal oversight, “federal rules made imagination difficult.”In retrospect, it is understandable that public housing got so big, so cut off, and so bereft of commerce, given the misguided postwar architectural concepts Jacobs criticized so harshly: Site public housing apart from the degraded neighborhoods from which it would draw. Move the towers back, away from the filthy streets. Close off those streets, breaking the traditional grid, by erecting “superblocks” that would be selfcontained. Separate the towers from each other to allow light, air, and space. Zone out all work and commerce, maintaining a purely residentialarea. Constructbreezeways that would function as “streets in the sky” for children to play under their mothers’ watchful gazes. One result was dangerous isolation.Jacobs first learned about public housing by walking the streets of East Harlem with William Kirk, executive director of Union Settlement, who sought to preserve Harlem’s diversity in scale and population.Mostly Italian when graduates of Union Theological Seminary founded Union Settlement in 1895, East Harlem was absorbing a huge influx of Puerto Rican and African immigrants by the time Kirk arrived, in 1949. He was certain that different ethnic groups could live together happily, so long as the right attention was focused on what made neighborhoods strong.But when Kirk met Jacobs in her office at Architectural Forum magazine in 1955, urban renewal was already destroying the fabric of the neighborhood, which city officials regarded as one of the city’s worst slums. Even if it was not, it was surely the worst slum adjoining a “good” neighborhood like Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Kirk taught Jacobs how “to try to begin understanding the intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities,” she wrote in the introduction to “Death and Life.” And he also taught her to fight the combined forces of federal, state, and city government agencies — though Jacobs achieved far more successful results downtown than Kirk was able to achieve uptown.In place of East Harlem’s tenements, row houses, stores, and small businesses, the city built some of the nation’s largest public housing projects. Economist Martin Anderson, who was studying East Harlem at the same time as Jacobs, concluded that urban renewal cleared a third of East Harlem’s land in order to build the Wagner, Jefferson, and Taft projects. Some 1,500 businesses and tens of thousands of homes were wiped out, and the residents mourned their loss, Jacobs wrote. “Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place,” one resident told her. “They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don’t have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow 50 cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful. Now the poor have everything.'”In his 1964 book “The Federal Bulldozer,” Mr. Anderson concluded that through 1962, New York State alone accounted for 32.4% of America’s federally funded urban renewal construction activity — nearly all of it in New York City. The sheer scale was astonishing, inducing a wrath in Jacobs that never fully eased. In an amicus brief for the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. City of New London (2005), she wrote that those “who get marked with the planners’ hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. Thousands upon thousands of small businesses are destroyed. Whole communities are torn apart and sown to the winds with a reaping of cynicism, resentment, and despair that must be seen to be believed.”It is not too late for NYCHA to rethink its policies and designs, analysts say. “Public housing does everything Jacobs doesn’t want,” a columnist for the New York Daily News who as a child lived in the Manhattanville Houses, Errol Louis, said. “The next logical step is for them to take a New Urbanist approach to reform: Bust up the streets. Add diversity of use. There are businesses that would pay an arm and a leg to be within spitting distance of Columbus Circle, so lease them space in Amsterdam Houses.”A classic grouping of 13 low-rise buildings right behind Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s West Side, Amsterdam Houses is good enough architecturally to be listed in the American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City. Yet while it leases space to a settlement house, it has no grocery store, pharmacy, bank, or dry cleaner, all services needed by its residents. Nor does it take advantage of its prime location to lease space to businesses serving Lincoln Center patrons, a virtually unheard of thought among public housing advocates. (In fact, NYCHA forbids granting new leases to restaurants “or similar food service uses.”)Can public housing reconnect to the city, as Jacobs so often urged? Mr. Glazer, who grew up in an East Harlem tenement replaced by a public housing superblock, appears hopeful. Middle-class residents are returning to East Harlem, he said, and the public housing in their midst will permit Harlem “to hold onto its workingclass character in the midst of a changing city.” One result will be a strong commercial demand by the new residents, which can both help the streetscape and ease NYCHA’s financial problems.

Linking a City Housing Authority’s Money Woes and a Jacobs Complaint

Linking a City Housing Authority’s Money Woes and a Jacobs Complaint

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