From Projects to Pediments

Housing Projects have always been an interesting issue for urban planners, designers, and architects to discuss. The problem of poverty is a big one, and one that has yet to be solved. There have been many models, yet none of them have been hailed as wildly successful. So today, many older housing projects are being torn down, demolished, and replaced with mixed income housing and strip malls. Basically, the idea is to replace these vertical ghettos with low rise housing with a portion dedicated to low income housing.


For the past nine months or so, Chicago has been trying something a little different. The Chicago Housing Authority has taken their 16 building Dearborn Homes low income housing project on South State Street, and is attempting to "beautify" the structures with pediments and keystones. It isn't clear how the units will be doled out when finished, whether it will all remain low income housing, or if they will try to sell most of the units as luxury condos and leave a percentage for low-income housing.


The CHA website, under the clever heading that reads "CHAnge," provides video documentation with classical music and animations on many of their housing project developments.  The Dearborn Homes link, however, simply goes to a brief information page that states:

"Dearborn Homes is currently operating as one of the CHA’s “relocation resources,” providing capacity for residents who have moved from other developments undergoing redevelopment or rehabilitation. Plans for the property’s future are currently under consideration. "

Whether these homes become luxary condos, or maintain thier public status, interesting discussion is sure to follow. Will people buy these units that were once considered slums? Will pediments and keystones solve the problems that exist in public housing? We shall see.

StimulusWatch and the Real American Housing Crisis

A couple of weeks ago, Drew posted about StimulusWatch, a site that lists all of the local projects in the United States that have been publicly announced as candidates for federal stimulus funds and lets the public vote on each project's merit. As luck would have it, my job involves researching construction projects, and I've been spending almost a month now combing through SW for several hours a day, looking for potential building projects. From what I've observed, it seems doubtful that the site will have any major impact on how stimulus dollars are spent ("Pork" is probably the most-used word in the very angry, uninformed comment sections no matter what state or city you're viewing). But SW does provide an opportunity for people working on the local level to gauge how their neighbors feel about a wide variety of public projects and services.

In the Energy category, for instance, one can see how effective the green movement has been on public opinion. Whereas a few short years ago Energy projects would undoubtably have been fewer in number and much lower in popularity, the Energy category seems to be one of the most popular, regardless of state or city, with the +/- ratio around half and half -- about the same as the ratio for Streets & Roads! Folks in small towns seem just as likely now to favor energy retrofits to their town hall and the addition of solar panels to school and library rooftops as urban and suburban Americans. People are still skeptical of hybrid vehicles, though, with many requests for money for hybrid or alternative energy-fueled municipal fleets meeting staunch resistance. But overall, the mainstreaming of energy efficiency efforts seems to have been a wide success.

It is seeing this shift that makes me hopeful that we can reverse what is undoubtedly the ugliest trend that I've noticed from coast to coast: the outright rejection of Housing projects. Items with "senior" or "demolition" in the title notwithstanding, Housing projects receive negative vote ratios so consistently that it's as if there was some sort of unspoken rule barring people from voting anything but "No." Even more disturbing than the negative vote ratios are the comments left by mostly anonymous posters at the bottom of each page. Affordable and public housing is called some terrible things, and there is more than anyone's fair share of racism, classism, and willful ignorance. Public housing in America, it is plain to see here, has still not recovered from the havoc wreaked by the slum-clearance-brought tower projects of the 1950s and 60s. Much like with Wall Street, American public housing is experiencing a crisis of confidence.

It would seem that, as much as we need the money to build units for the thousands of people who have lost or are about to lose their homes, it might not be a terrible idea to spend some of HUD's budget on increasing public awareness of the different kinds of housing available nowadays. Stigma attached to terms like "public housing" and "affordable housing" undoubtedly hampers efforts to create sustainable mixed-use communities, a contemporary goal of most major urban housing authorities, by keeping middle- and upper-income residents whose presence facilitates that integration at bay. The focus for housing advocates and agencies is no longer on concentrating poverty, but on economic integration -- and if it's not, it damn well should be. Without changing the conversation, attempts to tackle America's shortage of affordable housing will likely be uneven at best.

For anyone interested in transportation issues (Transit, Airports, Streets & Roads, Amtrak), Community Development, Energy, Housing, Public Safety, Schools, or Water infrastructure, StimulusWatch provides an opportunity to better understand the challenges facing those fields. Whether you're for or against the federal stimulus package, that opportunity shouldn't be missed.


(Photo from Flickr users TheeErin and andyandrew. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

Housing in Wartime

I've been reading this biography of Ove Arup (who was the hot-shit engineer, for what that's worth), and while it contains all of what irritates me about the biography genre -- who really cares about the minute relationship details of an angsty 20-something, even if they go on to Do Great Things? -- it also has a fascinating history of the architecture and politics of WWII-era British bomb shelters which are an example of the ways in which design matters.

During WWI, there were no private shelters and the London tube stations were used extensively, with some success ('only' 670 deaths to aerial bombing in the city). For the second act, uninterupted tube service was desired, so they were ruled out. Dedicated underground shelters were judges too costly to universally provide, so they were ruled out. Trenches in public parks were found to save burial costs, but few lives. Instead, Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary, promoted the shelters you see below.

They were cheaply made corrugated iron and steel structures, typically placed in domestic gardens, and capable of holding half a dozen adults: conscientious families half buried them in the earth and covered them with vegetation.

-Peter Jones in Ove Arup

Yes, the pictured shelter features a gasmask-clad stuffed animal hood ornament -- who says building your own bomb shelter can't be a hilarious? Anderson's government distributed several million of these structures during the early war years, all the while fought by Arup (among others), who argued for deep concrete shelters at the neighborhood-level. "Engineer advocates massive infrastructure project" is not exactly a shocking headline, but this time there was justification.

The Anderson shelters chief virtue was cheapness, but they were not particularly effective at life safety (relative to the tubes) or comfortable to use. As a partially buried structure with no waterproofing or even finish floor, a few inches of water would collect at the floor, making any extended stay in the shelter cold and wet. This may seem beside the point given the circumstances - surely, the end user's sole concern here is avoiding death!

However, bombings are not constant. Given a lapse, there is an understandable tendency to flee miserable dwelling and return to the exhorbitant luxury of floors and dryness. What protection Anderson shelter's did offer was proportionally reduced whenever tenants opted out, placing themselves at risk of a surprise assault. By the late 40s Sir John was promoted out of his post and the shelters that bore his name abandoned in favor of other options.

The important conclusion here, other than concrete >> corrugated metal, is that design is important! Even during air raids - especially during, when violence compresses decision-making -- design affects behavior, so it should be consciously considered. In the extreme case, it can save lives. Or at least keep your socks dry, which is almost as important.

(Photos from Flickr user Richard Parmiter and Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Section 8 Everywhere

Mixed-income neighborhoods are part of the urban planning canon and will make any good urbanist’s list of prescriptions for an ailing city.  The potential benefits are overwhelming: better job and school access for the poor, increased diversity of residents and services, reduced crime and class animosity, etc.  Most importantly, they are the exact opposite of “concentration of poverty,” the case against which has been made many, many, times (pdfs). Unfortunately mixed-income neighborhoods have proven difficult to achieve, and the degree to which our cities remain segregated by class is easily visible in the geographic distribution of per capita income of any major city, such as for Los Angeles at right.

Section 8 was supposed to fix this. Not fix poverty or make every block magically diverse, but de-concentrate poverty and create less daunting occurrences.  Not so, enclaves of extreme poverty remain; Section 8 has duplicated many of the problems of traditional public housing.  Why?

Currently through Section 8 (less popularly know as the Housing Choice Voucher Program) the US government subsidizes up to about 70% of the rent of low-income families. Landlords may make their building a project and receive payments through the local public housing authority or accept individual tenants who pay part of their rent with government vouchers.  This is the first problem.

Landlords may accept vouchers, but they also may not; participation has always been voluntary.  This has very effectively curtailed the range of housing options available to poor folk, in some cases leaving them with privately-owned ‘public’ housing as their only choice.  Responding to this issue, New Jersey, New York City, & DC have all enacted laws to prohibit landlords from discriminating based on income source, meaning that they can’t refuse a renter because they will pay with government vouchers. Giving low-income renters the opportunity to live where they choose is certainly a positive step that should be emulated elsewhere, even if the non-discrimination laws prove difficult to enforce.

As problematic as the legal barriers to allowing Section 8 tenants to move out of poor areas are, the social barriers are more intractable.  Moving To Opportunity is a test program to study the results of moving people out of low-income neighborhoods.  It suggests that even when given the option, many do not or cannot take advantage.  As summarized at The American Prospect:

“Many families offered the opportunity to move chose to stay. Others relocated but then returned to their old neighborhoods. When families did move, many youths remained strongly attached to their old neighborhoods. Most participating families who did move ended up in relatively nearby, majority-minority communities that were safer and modestly more prosperous than their old neighborhoods. Unfortunately, many of these receiving neighborhoods…themselves have relatively low-quality, racially segregated schools…children didn't show much academic improvement.”

So: how do you get people to move when your “concentration of poverty” is their lifelong home?  When they have a community of support they clearly value more than school quality?

Money is one answer: Government could provide a stipend or mandate that a landlords provide one to entice Section 8 tenants out of low-income areas.  Zoning is another: restrictions could be placed on the quantity of Section 8 housing available in low-income areas (something that has local political support in some poor areas).  Either way, it seems illegitimately paternalistic to attempt to manipulate low-income folks into deconstructing their communities - it’s based on the assumption that they can’t properly evaluate their housing choices.

Mixed-income neighborhoods remain a venerable goal.  Certainly laws should facilitate their formation rather than hinder.  However, the focus on where cities should stock their poor is misplaced, especially in the context of the choice of actual low-income people.

(Photos from Flickr user The Voice of Eye and Radical Cartography. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)