Nicholas Dagen Bloom . Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press . 2008 . Pp. viii, 354. $39.95.

Abstract

Nicolas Dagen Bloom's rigorous, comprehensive, and fluidly written history of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) adds to an impressive new scholarship that is reassessing much of the conventional wisdom about American public policy and metropolitan development since the New Deal. More specifically, it is an important addition to an exciting list of new histories of the U.S. experiment with public housing. Here Bloom focuses little on tenants and their efforts to secure resources, sustain their communities, and negotiate often hazardous conditions—a hallmark of the best recent ethnographic studies and oral histories; instead he details the motives and performance of the officials, planners, and management staffers who built and literally maintained the city's public housing infrastructure. The result is a story that will no doubt be unfamiliar to many readers but is essential to understanding the history of metropolitan politics and equity in the United States. By the 1960s, simply managing New York City's public housing was no small task: the NYCHA was responsible for 2,600 high-rise towers that were home to 400,000 residents, representing a considerable percentage of the nation's public housing stock. Bloom attributes the authority's enduring “success”—which he contrasts repeatedly with the “failures” of other municipal housing authorities—to its commitment to good management practices. The measure of that success? “[I]ts projects were better built, the tenants more carefully selected, and the buildings better managed than those in other cities” (p. 109).