Photo by Iwan Baan | via thehighline.org

HIGH LINE PHASE 3
On November 1st, Mayor Bloomberg announced that all of the major stakeholders in the West Side Rail Yards have agreed to preserve the final section of the High Line for use as public space. CSX Transportation, a private freight rail company that still owns the undeveloped stretch of the elevated tracks, has committed to donating the remaining portion of the structure to the City; and the City, State and site developer Related Companies have all agreed to retain the structure and turn it into parkland. Meanwhile Friends of the High Line have been working hard to secure funding for phase three, helped by a recent $20 million donation from the Diller-Von Furstenberg Foundation. In his press statement, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that this project was part of a collaboration between the City of New York and Related Companies to revitalize the West side of Manhattan in order to encourage commercial activity and in turn to promote the creation of jobs. Legal details and final negotiations are still in process, but confidence is high that a complete High Line, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, is in New York’s future. For more information, check out the Friends of the High Line website.

City Lights | photo via tphifer.com

SLEEK CITY LIGHTS
Head down to Church and Warren Streets to see the latest addition to New York City’s streetscape design. In 2004, a team led by Thomas Phifer and Partners won City Lights, a juried design competition led by the Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation to conceive of a new streetlight for New York. Now, thanks to a reduction in cost of energy efficient LEDs over the past seven years, these sleek new lights are starting to appear on the city’s streets. For more pictures, check out The Architect’s Newspaper Blog and Thomas Phifer’s website.

TOKYO’S BACK-UP CITY
A consortium of Japanese political officials have proposed building a “back-up city” for Tokyo. — Wait, what? — After the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan in March, and with seismologists warning that Tokyo itself is long overdue for a major quake, people are looking for a contingency plan. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City, or IRTBBC, would house 50,000 residents and a working population of 200,000 (a far cry from the 13 million that currently live in Tokyo), and would serve to take over the major functions of the capital city in the case of a crippling disaster. The plan suggests using the site of the outdated Itami Airport outside of Osaka, 300 miles away. ”The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation,” said Hajime Ishii of Japan’s Democratic Party. For more coverage, check out The Telegraph.

via theatlanticcities.com

SELLING HOUSING
The Atlantic Cities has a a delightful collection of vintage posters that tell the story of how New York City originally sold the idea of public housing to the pubic. The New York City Housing Authority was the first of its kind in the United States. While strategies for redevelopment of housing have evolved past in the past eighty years, the posters reflect the fundamental motivations behind the founding of NYCHA in 1934, to provide safe and secure housing for low-income city residents. Check out the series of posters advertising the new program and buildings here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

EVENTS and TO DOs

Making Room Symposium: Tickets are still available for Monday’s Making Room symposium, where teams of architects commissioned by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League present innovative ideas for new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now. For an introduction to Making Room, click here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Performa 11, the fourth edition of the visual art performance biennial, is now in progress. Performa brings together dozens of arts institutions and curators to present discipline-meshing performances that explore visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts, in public and private spaces throughout the city. There’s also a Performa magazine, online TV show, radio program, film screenings, bookshop and lounge. For a complete list of events, running now through November 21, visit the Performa 11 website.

Poem Forest: This weekend, the Poetry Society of America is hosting Poem Forest, a walk along Thain Forest’s Sweetgum Trail designed by Jon Cotner (who recently took us on a walk through Fort Greene Park). Weaving together poetry and space, the self-guided tour relates lines of poetry from all different eras and regions with fifteen specific spots chosen along the trail.

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Grand Central Terminal, 1927; the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966 | Photo: Corbis; Ezra Stoller/Esto via nymag.com

GREATEST BUILDING EVER
What is the greatest building in New York? New York Magazine asked that question to a panel of noted architectural thinkers, including the League’s very own executive director Rosalie Genevro and board members Robert A.M. Stern and Gregg Pasquarelli, for its recent feature The Greatest New York Ever. The “arguers” weigh in on what makes a good New York building and debate their picks for the city’s best. Grand Central Terminal won points for its accessibility, legibility and beauty, and Breuer’s brutalist Whitney, with two votes, is runner up. Their debate generates insight into the past ten years of development and design in New York, which Mark Lamster talks more about in this Design Observer post.
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Trailer – The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH
A new documentary turns fresh eyes to the notorious demolition of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth examines the stories excluded when the housing project became a symbol for the death of modernism – namely those of its tenants – and looks to the urban context of 1960s St. Louis to provide a more complex understanding of the building’s ultimate demise. Through interviews and research the documentarians analyze the influence of urban renewal and suburbanization in the development of America’s post war urban landscape, in a film that, given the recent burst of the housing bubble, seems particularly timely. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth premieres at the Oxford Film Festival in Mississippi on February 11-13.
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NEW PARK DESIGN GUIDELINES
Streetsblog reports on the new High Performance Landscape Guidelines just released by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and the Design Trust for Public Space. “A comprehensive manual for the design and construction of sustainable parks and open space,” the guidelines offer best practices for stormwater management, reducing the urban heat island effect, encouraging physical activity and increasing bike and pedestrian accessibility. You can download a PDF of the complete manual on the Parks Department’s website.
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TOMORROW: ROBERT MOSES IN SONG
Who knew urban planning could elicit so much musical inspiration? Last month, we published a review of In the Footprint, a theatrical production about Atlantic Yards. Tomorrow night, the story of polemical planner Robert Moses will have the stage. Robert Moses Astride New York is a musical-in-progress chronicling the master builder’s career as he transformed New York and battled New Yorkers. Composer Gary Fagin scores the protests of mothers vying to save a Central Park playground and draws dialogue from Robert Caro’s definitive Moses tome, The Power Broker, (Caro himself got a sneak peek at the production for this New York Times piece). Starring Rinde Eckert and accompanied by the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra, Robert Moses Astride New York premieres tomorrow, January 15th, in a free, one night only performance at the World Financial Center Winter Garden.
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Scott Jordan uncovers historic refuse. Photo via Pardon Me For Asking

DIGGING UP BROOKLYN
Last week, we delved into the underworld of London’s sewers to show you fatbergs. This week’s excavated find is a little lighter on the ick-factor. Check out Pardon Me For Asking for a look at an excavated outhouse pit in the backyard of a Brooklyn Heights home built in 1845. Urban archeologists Scott Jordan and Jack Fortmeyer have unearthed discarded household objects from the 19th century in what is just the latest in their 35-year history of urban archaeological digs.
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REMINDER
If you haven’t done so already, please take a few minutes to fill out the Omnibus reader survey! Remember, one lucky survey respondent will win a $50 gift certificate to McNally Jackson Books.

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“Towers in the Park” sounds like what they are: high-rise residential buildings sited on large lots of open space. This particular type of building configuration — popular in postwar American urban renewal schemes, often used in public housing as well as in limited equity cooperative housing societies — is visible all over New York City. In urban design and architecture circles these days, this building typology is more often maligned that celebrated. Here on Urban Omnibus, we’ve presented some alternative views: we’ve walked among the housing projects of Avenue D with a sociologist who grew up there and we’ve looked at how some of the elements that urbanists tend to criticize about these towers actually make them uniquely suited to serve the interests of some of the city’s senior citizens. Both of these perspectives dealt more directly with the tower than with the park. Today, in the second of our series of reports on student projects in architecture and design schools, we hear from a designer and educator about an urban design studio project at the University of Michigan that sought to reimagine towers in the park, and their potential for reintegration with the rest of the city, by keeping the tower and reworking the park.

The Michigan students’ ambitious scheme reflects the growing support among New York City officials to reconsider the development potential of underutilized open space on city-owned land. In December 2006, the city put out bids for 600 new housing units on the sites of public housing projects. Speaking to the New York Sun in April of 2007, Department of Housing Preservation and Development spokesperson Neill Coleman said that the inventory of vacant land for affordable housing “is pretty much exhausted, so we’re looking for new sources of land.” Since then, the Department of City Planning has been working with the New York City Housing Authority to do just that: to modify height and setback requirements and to reduce the amount of required parking in order to facilitate new construction. The new construction envisioned in the studio project described below is not exclusively concerned with making more housing units, it also imagines a new way of weaving towers-in-the-park into their surrounding, and rapidly changing, neighborhoods. Read more below. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user ShiftOperations.

Michigan in New York
As part of its sequence of studio courses with sites across the United States and the world, the Master of Urban Design Program at the University of Michigan recently re-envisioned Manhattan’s Lower East Side housing projects. The housing projects, located between the Brooklyn Bridge and 14th Street, comprise one of the country’s largest concentrations of towers-in-the-park, the high-rise buildings set on superblocks that New York and other American cities erected as part of urban renewal schemes in the aftermath of World War II.

Borders of the Lower East Side's towers-in-the-park. (Includes Stuyvesant Town above 14th Street that was not part of studio project described in this text.) Source: Sanborn/Digital Globe.

The Manhattan housing projects were selected for study for three reasons: 1) After a studio that designed a new city in Turkey outside of Istanbul, we wanted MUD students to shift their attention from the tabula rasa to an existing urban context; 2) For an international student cohort consisting of people from the United States, China, Egypt, India, Korea and Nigeria, the towers-in-the-park typology is universally familiar and the lessons learned from designing for it are applicable to cities worldwide; 3) The Lower East Side housing projects’ particular conditions – abutting rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods and owned by a cash-strapped New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) that is looking for opportunities to increase its revenue stream – made the topic timely.

The outcomes of the studio benefited from the students’ range of professional and academic backgrounds in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. Over the course of a single semester, the 12 students in the studio visited New York twice, documenting and analyzing the site. Thereafter, three teams of four students each developed three detailed concepts, complete with comprehensive programs of use, design guidelines and implementation strategies.

A figure-ground diagram illustrates the amount of open space available for development among the towers-in-the-park of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Towers-in-the-Park: Open Space as Opportunity
The studio combined urban development with urban preservation: all project dwelling units were to be conserved in the interest of maintaining one of Manhattan’s important supplies of low-income housing. It proposed capitalizing on the projects’ extensive open grounds – approximately 84% of the site area – for new housing, work spaces, institutions and community facilities that would help generate new revenue streams for NYCHA while integrating the projects with adjacent neighborhoods, improving their connection with East River Park, and enhancing the quality of life for existing residents and newcomers.

By looking at the housing projects’ open spaces as a development opportunity, the studio questioned one of the major principles in post-World War II American urban renewal, which was to reduce the amount of ground each housing project covers. Based on nearly a century of housing reform attempts to open low-income neighborhoods to light and air and reduce their population densities, the need for open space was often cited by architects and public housing authorities as justification for building ever-taller housing projects. From the 50% ground coverage of mid-19th-century “model” tenements to the 16% ground coverage of mid-20th-century Lower East Side public housing, the provision of open space helped drive the design of urban housing for low-income people.

But open space did little to integrate these towers with their surrounding neighborhoods, and many post-World War II public-housing residents — whose high-rise homes were built in undesirable or outlying parts of the city where land was cheap enough for city, state and federal agencies to buy — felt isolated from the rest of the city. The land use planning practices prevalent at the time segregated residential from commercial uses. Almost from the start, post-war towers-in-the-park were criticized by social observers and project residents. The decision to demolish the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and, more recently, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, serve as reminders of the perceived inflexibility of the towers-in-the-park housing typology. Part of the premise of this studio was to find a way to intervene in this typology without destroying the existing housing units.

Today, the revitalization of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens adjacent to housing projects has added pressure to reconsider superblock open space, where community renewal stops at the housing projects’ edges. For the Michigan studio, the questions became: Can the under-utilized open space within tower-in-the-park superblocks be repurposed to accommodate neighborhood redevelopment trends, to serve housing project residents better and to help preserve public housing by leveraging NYCHA’s existing assets?

Analysis reveals the Lower East Side’s potential connections to rest of Manhattan.

Studio Outcomes
For the Lower East Side’s towers-in-the-park — including the cooperatives built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and other subsidized housing projects clustered around the Williamsburg Bridge — the Michigan design teams identified space for between 4,400 and 8,000 new apartments (both market-rate and “affordable”); a range of 1.6 million to 5 million square feet of commercial development; and from 600,000 to 3 million square feet of institutional spaces (for libraries, community centers, schools and colleges). The potential exists for between 13.7 million and 22 million square feet of new buildings in and around the towers. And because Michigan students arranged these additions between existing buildings along new streets and pathways cut through superblocks, the scheme conserves all NYCHA apartments.

The results: a boulevard-like FDR Drive, where some of Manhattan’s most desirable apartments can be located; lively streets connecting East River Park to inland neighborhoods; mixed-uses along Avenue D and Madison Street serving residents and visitors (offering business and employment opportunities, too); and at key points, where space, views and new land and water transportation connections encourage them, residential, office and hotel towers that will embellish the lower Manhattan skyline. The studio found that all of these uses can be accommodated by new buildings that cover between 30 and 40% of the lot size. This amount of ground coverage is higher than the study area’s current average but lower than blocks in the most desirable parts of Manhattan, including the Upper East and Upper West Sides. Therefore, the proposal will not obstruct existing housing units’ light and views.

Top: View of new buildings among towers-in-the-park. Bottom: View of new library near Manhattan Bridge. Public buildings reinforce the East River as a public amenity. They are erected by developers whose projects are rewarded increased floor areas.

At ground level, the Michigan studio proposed changing the form and use of open space. The landscapes of tower-in-the-park open spaces are typically passive and homogeneous. The studio’s strategy was to integrate intimate open spaces with a variety of new buildings, including schools (from pre-schools to colleges), live/work lofts, market structures, places of business and community centers. Rejecting the reductive planning philosophies of the 1950s that segregated housing on superblocks, the design teams programmed both buildings and spaces to promote active use throughout the site and to support residents’ ability to participate in community life and a dynamic local economy.

To implement their concepts, the Michigan teams proposed the creation of a public development agency similar to the New York State Empire Development Corporation or Battery Park City Authority whose structure would support both substantial community representation and a clearly-articulated process for larger community input. Indeed, given the complexity of the project and its likely impact on tens of thousands of people, the teams advocated an additional year upfront for creating the agency and its processes of decision-making and communication.

Project funding was also considered. Design teams suggested that federal dollars be applied to East River Drive, transportation and waterfront improvements. They also proposed that the sale or lease of NYCHA-held land underwrite improvements to existing apartments while maintaining their affordability and contribute to the maintenance and construction of affordable housing at other NYCHA projects and in other sites around the city. (Sales and leases include the transfer of air rights from empty or under-developed parts of the site area to locations where high density is desirable.) Additional affordable housing was proposed through incentives such as the New York “80/20” program that permits larger buildings if 20% of their units are provided at below-market rents. And tax credits and/or building bonuses could be offered to developers erecting public amenities and services on a turnkey basis (e.g. schools, libraries and community centers). Although new to NYCHA, such programs have ample precedent in New York City.

Concept view. Buildings in light blue are inserted among towers-in-the-park. Concept includes improvements to East River Park and water and land transportation systems.

Lessons
The Michigan studio learned the following lessons:

• It is possible to redevelop tower-in-the-park public housing without demolition or displacement.
• Tower-in-the-park open spaces are readily adaptable to a variety of physical and programmatic interventions, leading to inventive urban design.
• Forms of development financing that have evolved since post-World War II urban renewal can help support tower-in-the-park redevelopment, including public/private partnerships, incentive zoning, development rights transfers, etc.
• Tower-in-the-park housing, familiar to cities around the world, can be part of urban revitalization strategies that are socially and environmentally more sustainable than demolition schemes that dislocate communities and waste their physical materials.

For New York, the Michigan studio identified the development potential of one corner of NYCHA’s 2,500 acres of property. As the city’s largest landlord, NYCHA, more than any other owner, is positioned to reshape New York’s skyline — while it improves the quality of life for its residents. At a time when financial difficulties encourage the authority to explore alternative methods of retaining and improving its housing stock, the opportunity that this studio investigated is rich with possibilities for both a large public landowner like NYCHA and for the city and citizens it serves.

Roy Strickland is Director of the Master of Urban Design Program at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and, with Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, is the designer of the new Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Manhattan. He led the MUD studio consisting of Komal Anand, Daren Crabill, Emek Erdolu, Yingying Guan, Seun-Hyun Kim, Rachan Ky, Jun-Yi Lin, Obiamaka Ofodile, Kwanseok Oh, Danna Reyes, Amal Shaaban and Xuan Zheng.

Unless otherwise noted, all images produced and provided by the University of Michigan MUD Studio.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

On Urban Omnibus, our very first Walk and Talk was with another urban sociologist. Richard Sennett took us on a stroll through the West Village – where he first moved in 1962 – and shared observations on everything from the difference between borders and boundaries to philosophies of craftsmanship. As it happens, Sennett also grew up in the projects, in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex that is currently undergoing demolition to make way for a “mixed-income neighborhood composed of a both high-rise and low-rise buildings.” And on his walk with us, Sennett mentioned that he is “a big believer in architectural determinism” and that the “details of urban design can make or break urban-scale propositions.” Dalton Conley has a different view. He believes that economics – specifically the economics of homeownership – determine opportunity. Planners and designers would do well to heed the advice of both scholars. -C.S.

Urban Omnibus: What do you do?

Dalton Conley: I’m a sociologist. You could say I’m an urban sociologist. Basically I study economic opportunity. Let me put it this way: my father is a horse player (and an artist) and he spends a lot of time handicapping the Racing Form, predicting which horse is going to win the race. So when I need to explain to my parents what I do, I say “Dad, I do what you do: I use statistics to try to figure out who’s going to win, except I’m doing it on humans instead of horses.” I predict socio-economic success based on the conditions of one’s childhood, birth, family background etc. And my work is definitely informed by my attempts to understand the experience of my neighbors growing up here vis a vis myself.

UO: Tell us about where we are right now.

Conley: We’re at the intersection of Delancey Street and Columbia Street [which becomes Avenue D north of Houston -Ed.]. Growing up here, the Williamsburg Bridge was an important structure: it really marked the edge of the neighborhood. I’ve always read about how the highway construction of 1950s urban renewal cut off certain neighborhoods from other places. In this case, the bridge was exactly that type of barrier. Below that bridge you still find remnants of the old Jewish Lower East Side. There’s a very real division between what was the Jewish Lower East Side and the Puerto Rican Lower East Side, which I would say extends from the Williamsburg Bridge up to the Con Edison building that you can see in the distance at 14^th Street. If you go east, of course you hit the river. And if you go west, it used to go all the way to Allen St – or 1^st Ave – but now, more and more, cultural elites and gentrifiers have pushed the neighborhood’s western edge further and further eastwards to the point where it’s in constant flux.

But I do understand that this is still a Million Dollar Block, meaning that the state spends a million dollars or more on incarcerating people just from this block. So, clearly the problems haven’t gone completely away. But it is quite different now. It’s very international, there’s been a lot more immigration from other countries. When I was here it was just a little bit after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 that opened up the gates, and so it really hadn’t yet changed the character of the population so much. 75% of the population in this census tract in 1970 was Puerto Rican and about 20% African American, and the rest was folks like me or Chinese people.

UO: Where did you grow up?

I would sell all public housing to its residents for a dollar… It would radically change the physical environment.Conley: I grew up in Masaryk Towers. When I was born we were living in that tower over there, #73 and then we moved to #81, the corner one back there. #81 borders on Hamilton Fish Park, which was a cement park filled with lots of broken glass, malt liquor bottles and the like. We would play our baseball there. Masaryk Towers is Mitchell-Lama. The Mitchell-Lama Housing Program is geared towards low-income families, but ones that were better off than the people across the street in NYCHA housing for extremely poor folks. Masaryk was sandwiched on the other side by more NYCHA housing. There are Mitchell-Lama projects all over the city, like Co-op City for example in the Bronx, which is pretty middle class now, I think. But by virtue of the fact that Masaryk Towers is sandwiched between NYCHA buildings, it shared much of the crime and other problems that were rampant in public housing in those days.

UO: Growing up, did the different housing complexes have distinct identities?

Conley: We definitely divided up the little league baseball teams based on which housing complex you came from. We were Los Piratas, and there was a baseball team for Baruch houses, for Lillian Wald Houses, etc. I think we won once, one year. We would all play on East River Park, which is of course being redeveloped right now. And despite what you see in the movies, we did not play stickball. We played baseball.

UO: I’m curious about your view of what role physical design plays in your analysis of inequalities of opportunity.

Conley: I’m really skeptical about the notion that physical design can be a tool for better or worse in aiding opportunity or affecting the lives of people who live in low income communities. We’ve seen the fads come and go. We’ve seen this kind of housing, the sort of high-rise Le Corbusier style, creating open plazas by stacking people in high-density vertical towers, now be blamed for all social ills. I think that’s ridiculous.

I think the issue is not design but economics and specifically ownership structure. When people don’t have a stake in the local community – an economic stake that is – based on their concern for their property values, then social ills follow. Banks know this. Banks – at least before the bubble –  would not lend to buildings where less than 50% of units were owner-occupied. Because they know that owners take care of and want to preserve the property values of the building.

I have a fantasy plan called “A Dollar and a Dream,” which used to be the New York State Lotto’s slogan. Basically I would sell all the public housing to the residents for a dollar and create this equity for the families, and you would see, all of a sudden, owners associations springing up. I think it would radically change the physical environment: change driven by economics affecting the physical environment rather than thinking of the physical environment as the driver.

UO: Since the subprime mortgage crisis, we’re hearing lots of voices arguing that we should shift our national priorities away from home ownership.

We’re focusing our racial inequality amelioration efforts on education and affirmative action when we should be working to build up asset ownership.Conley: Certainly, trumpeting home ownership these days is not very popular. But I think actually now is exactly the time to have low income home ownership strategies because the prices are low! It’s all about how you do it. If you’re doing it through sub-prime and exotic mortgages that have balloon payments and everything, of course you’re going to get high defaults and it’s going to create this crash. But if people don’t expect to be doubling their money every five years but maybe double their money every 40 years – which was the norm in the middle of the 20^th century with more responsible home ownership – then I think that’s a definitely viable strategy and a very effective one. Homes are both a basic consumption good that we need, shelter, but they also have an investment purpose, and as much as it doesn’t appear so now, ultimately given population pressures, real property and real estate is always going to have a long-term trend upward.

UO: Hearing this, I can’t help but be reminded of Margaret Thatcher privatizing affordable housing in the UK in the ’80s…

Conley: The difference is I’m trying to come at this from a position on the left actually, to argue that this is an empowerment strategy. At least for the post-civil rights generation – my generation – continued racial equality rests in the property dimension, the housing market and the securities dimension, rather than education or labor market primarily. It’s the property inequality that drives the other inequalities. We’re focusing most of our racial inequality amelioration efforts, through education and affirmative action in labor law, on the wrong side of the equation so to speak, when we really should be working to build up asset ownership among low-wealth minority communities.

UO: Getting back to your skepticism of spatial or environmental determinism for a second, what about the use of space? Is that something that urban sociologists are looking at these days? The layout here is so different from the rest of the Manhattan street grid, and I’m curious about how that enables or prohibits different kinds of uses on the part of, say, young people for example.

Conley: I’m not trying to say that space doesn’t matter or that architecture doesn’t matter – my mother moved to where we moved because she thought it was pretty and because of the Le Corbusier style layout that meant there were parks for us kids to play in, jungle gyms and open space and benches and so forth.

And also, the distribution of people geographically totally matters. Though I think it matters largely because of the tension between where we live and where we go to school. Given how segregated we are economically and racially, you basically end up with a Catch 22 if you’re growing up in a low income community. You either can go to your local school and have this integration between your school life and your home life. Or you can do what I did and commute across town – I did it illegally, but these days there are plenty of legal options through charter schools and so forth – wasting hours of the day getting to and from school.

Some people say we should pour money into the schools in low-income communities, but equalizing funding isn’t going to do it, because the dirty little secret is that the single most powerful of the effects of school is your peer group. And unless you mix folks up, kids tend to sort themselves back into class-based peer groups. So we constantly face this tension around how we socialize our kids, given the fact that we are spatially organized and spatially segregated.

UO: Where are we now?

Conley: We crossed Houston St. and we’re outside the Lillian Wald Houses where the friend to whom I dedicated Honky grew up. When we were 12 or 13, he was shot in the neck on 7^th Street and Avenue C by a stray bullet as he was standing, chatting with his friend, outside his friend’s apartment. He became paralyzed from the neck down and has since worked very hard to regain use of his arms. Just last summer he and I came back here, and he hadn’t been here – let’s see, he was shot in 1981, Jan 1^st, 1981 – so he hadn’t been here for 28 years or so. We took a tour, and he noticed how much the Lillian Wald Houses had changed as well. Of course all the playground structures are new and there’s been a lot of money put in here, but also there are even community gardens here that provide vegetables for the folks who work at them and such. He was kind of shocked at how much nicer even the NYCHA housing was than it was. A couple of generations before that, whether you’re coming from the South or Puerto Rico, or even just across the street, you were living in a walk-up tenement with no hot water half the time and no heat during the winter. These housing complexes were certainly a step up. But as to why it changed at some point and this type of public housing become housing of last resort – I really don’t know. I would argue that probably the ownership structure mattered a great deal, but one can never know, because unfortunately there haven’t been enough actual conscious experiments by social scientists or urban planners to test hypotheses to some of these questions.

UO: Which begs the question, what, in your opinion, can architects and planners learn from social scientists?

Conley: I think what social science can offer urban planning and design and so forth would be their methodology: experimental methods. The first step is to do small-scale, explicit experiments of different housing forms, and different community structures, and then following those up with ethnographies and with statistical analysis and so forth. I know that’s being done in urban planning to a certain extent. But not enough.

Watch a video excerpt of this conversation below:

Conley holds a B.A. from the University of California – Berkeley and an M.P.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, as well as an M.S. in Biology from NYU. He is currently pursing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying transgenerational phenotypic plasticity and socially regulated genes.

Interview and photos: Cassim Shepard

Diagrams: Sarah Avvedimento with Andrew Balmer

Cabrini-Green once housed over 15,000 people, but developed a reputation for high levels of crime and poverty. Its razing is part of a wave of high-rise project demolitions that have occurred in many US cities. Here are a few – among many – significant events in the history of public housing demolitions:

1972: Demolition begins on St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project, less than twenty years after it was built. The massive complex was unsuccessful from the beginning, with violence and high vacancy rates. Because it was such a high-profile failure of a modernist housing scheme, Charles Jencks called the day of its demolition “the day Modern architecture died.”

1993: President Clinton starts the HOPE VI program, with the goals of improving public housing and reducing dense concentrations of poverty. Between 1996 and 2003, the program provided $395 million in grants towards the demolition of 287 public housing projects. Although it has funded rehabilitation and construction programs, HOPE VI has presided over a net loss to public housing units nationwide.

2007: The last of the buildings that comprised Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes is demolished. Once the largest public housing project in the country, the Robert Taylor Homes housed 27,000 people. It has since been replaced with “Legends South,” with low-rise, mixed income homes and apartments, community facilities, and retail spaces.

2010: The New York City Housing Authority announces plans to demolish Prospect Plaza, a complex of three high-rise towers in Brooklyn. The complex was not known for high rates of violence or drug use; rather, NYCHA claims that on this site, new construction is more financially and logistically feasible than rehabilitation. Heretofore, the City’s strategy has been to rehabilitate existing public housing rather than replace it. The Prospect Plaza project is the first significant exception to this approach.

NYU sociology professor Dalton Conley has argued that the form of a housing project does not affect the behaviors and overall living conditions of residents nearly as much as its socioeconomic makeup and ownership structure does. Coming soon on the Omnibus, we’ll hear some of Conley’s insights in his own words as he takes us on a walk up Avenue D, part of one of the largest swathes of public housing in New York. The destruction of Cabrini-Green reminds us that public housing – as public investment, as design product, as homes of choice or housing of last resort – is very much a reflection of broader cultural attitudes towards poverty, the role of government and the function of architecture, regardless of whether we decide to replace existing high-rises with new, low-rise facilities at great cost or focus on improving conditions within existing buildings.


Andrew Balmer is Project Associate for Urban Omnibus and a senior in the Barnard + Columbia Architecture program.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.