Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In 1957 the goddess of “modern” housing, Catherine Bauer, declared public housing a “dreary deadlock” (Architectural Forum, June 1957), and those who followed her—sociologists, architectural critics, and historians—only swelled the chorus. Now Nicholas Dagen Bloom seeks to alter that verdict by arguing that at least in New York City public housing policy worked. Employing a partially chronological, partially topical structure, Bloom neatly unfolds the long history of public housing in New York from its conceptual roots as model, philanthropic housing to the current age of the federal Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (Hope VI) program. Public housing there succeeded, argues Bloom, mainly because the New York City Housing Authority (nycha) built well and, in the face of almost overwhelming social and economic obstacles, kept its housing maintained. The author freely admits Gotham's “exceptionalism”: the city enjoyed “a long tradition of multi-family housing management” (p. 3); its housers, such as Mary Simkhovitch and Ira Robbins, shared a European vision of model housing as a “public utility” and “a tool for civic uplift” (p. 6); not content with federal support alone after 1937, the city committed its own funds to public housing and after 1945 embraced Le Corbusier's vision of “towers in the park.” Undaunted in the late 1950s by a host of critics, Jane Jacobs among them, the nycha built one high-rise superblock after another, screened and steered tenant families, hired armies of housing police and maintenance personnel, and, unlike Chicago and St. Louis, kept public housing operating and respectable. That respectability, explains Bloom convincingly, derived in no small measure from the nycha's diligent battle to preserve a tenantry that was a suitable mix of solid, working-class families.