Tag Archives: public housing

Taller & brighter

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Once upon a time, believe it or not, planners of public housing in the United States believed high rises were a good thing. In the early ‘40s, we learn from J.A. Stoloff’s history of public housing, the thought high-rises “could provide a healthy, unique living environment that would contrast favorably with surrounding slum areas.”

Well, as we all know, high-rises for families didn’t work too well in the big metro areas. Two notorious examples in Chicago were Cabrini Green …

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and Robert Taylor Homes…

 

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drab, unsightly, unlivable in many ways, they unfortunately tainted the popular conception of public housing. No public-housing high-rises were built after the early ‘70s, and by the ‘90s many of these buildings were being torn down.

As it turned out, though, some public-housing high-rises did work pretty well – for elderly residents. One such example, built in 1971, is the tallest building in Vermont – 11-story Decker Towers in Burlington, operated by the Burlington Housing Authority for elderly and disabled residents:

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Granted, construction of ANY public housing is passe in this country, sadly, but before you stop thinking about high-rises, look at some examples in Singapore, where public-housing high-rises are home to a majority of the population. These shots are by Peter Steinhauer, a photographer:

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These photos make two things really clear: (1) High rises don’t have to be drab and dreary…sing3

 

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… and (2) no one should have any trouble finding the street address of these places.

 

 

 

The bright colors bring to mind some of the buildings in Burlington’s Old North End, many of them owned or developed by Stu McGowan …

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Now that we’ve drawn your attention back to Vermont, let’s consider building height on a Vermont scale as we also consider how to add to the state’s affordable housing stock. High rises are out of the question, of course, especially in our small towns. But what about adding a third story to buildings in town centers, here and there, for family apartments? Is that such an outrageous idea? This three-story building in the photo below doesn’t look a bit out of place.

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Variations on a sordid theme

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“Forty families on one lot, using one water faucet. Living in barren one room huts, they were deprived of the glory of sunshine in the daytime, and were so poor they could not even at night use the electricity that is to be generated by our great river…

“I found one family that might almost be called typical. Living within one dreary room, where no single window let in the beneficent sunlight, and where not even the smallest vagrant breeze brought them relief in the hot summer – here they slept, here they cooked and ate, here they washed themselves in a leaky tin tub after carrying the water for 100 yards. Here they brought up their children ill-nourished and amid sordid surroundings…”

The speaker was Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, in his home district of Austin, describing the “slum tarnish” he observed during a Christmas Day walk through town. He made his remarks in a radio address to his constituents (this was well before LBJ himself got into the radio business), hoping to win their support for something new in town: public housing. The address became known as his “Tarnish” speech.

Here’s a photo (albeit not from Texas) that seems to capture what he was talking about:

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Thirty years before he orchestrated the passage of the Fair Housing Act as president, Johnson – whose ambition as a young congressman is captured by this 1937 photo of him shortly after his election, with FDR in Galveston – prevailed in that housing campaign.

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The first public housing in the country built under the 1937 housing act was in Austin. It was segregated, like most public housing that sprang up around the country over the next few decades, but less sordid than what they replaced. LBJ used that word – sordid – to good effect at HUD’s inauguration, when he declared: “Our cities and our new urban age must not be symbols of a sordid society.”

“Sordid” might be an apt description for some blocks of big-city, high-rise public housing, thoroughly segregated, underfunded and bereft of hope, if not sunlight. High rises came into planners’ favor in the ‘40s, but a couple of decades later they were not. For a tidy history of public housing, click here.

Some argue that public housing outside the big inner cities has worked quite well, and perhaps that can be said for places like Vermont, which apparently got into public housing fairly late in the game. (Burlington’s housing authority dates from 1961, and the state’s, from 1968.) If a history of Vermont’s public housing hasn’t been written, it’s a thesis topic in waiting.

Show me a micocosm

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If you never had the time or inclination to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century,” you could still learn a good deal about economic inequality simply by reading the reviews.

Similarly, if you haven’t seen the six-part TV series “Show Me a Hero,” which concluded recently on HBO, you can still learn a little something about affordable housing just by skimming the reviews. (Disclosure: We haven’t read Piketty in full or watched “Show Me.”)

The series – co-written by David Simon (of “The Wire,” which we have seen and can recommend) — depicts a political struggle in Yonkers during the ‘80s. The “Show Me” story resonates today with a plot-line driven by a maverick political leader and opposition to affordable housing that’s evocative of recent attacks on HUD’s affirmatively furthering fair housing rule.

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You can get a pretty good sense of the show, and its topical currency, in this treatment in the Washington Post, or in this one in the Guardian.

And lest you think the contesting attitudes and political battles are limited to the metropolis, think again. What the current director of public housing in Yonkers says , in this Slate interview, is true all over.

“There is always community resistance to affordable housing,” Joseph Shuldiner says. “People believe that affordable housing will bring down the value of their property and bring in people who are not desirable. I don’t think in most cases that’s proven to be the case. “

And he captures the dilemma of where to invest limited public resources:

“We really need to maximize the number of viable communities with affordable-housing opportunities. That means both getting affordable housing into already viable communities but it also means making the poverty concentrated areas viable so they will attract other-than low-income people.”