Notes on New York Housing
van den Haag, Ernest
The absence of esthetic gratification—an outstanding characteristic of the architecture of our cities—has definite effects on the community as well as on individuals. The main effects become...
...In general, it is a well meaning but utterly tyrannical and interfering landlord, a landlord who reserves the right to enter tenants' apartments at any time, and, in effect, regards, however unsuccessfully, the tenants as wards...
...It would not create but it would permit esthetic gratification or at least an environment in which it can be imagined...
...The architecture of the City of New York not only fails to offer the esthetic gratification that inheres in good urban design and building and meet the visitor unsought, it also misses or spoils numberless natural opportunities...
...Why, on the other hand, do either...
...The population is recruited from the poor, the old, and the marginal of a great variety of ethnic and cultural groups...
...First, the inhabitants of each slum were ethnically homogeneous, in the main, and often the tenants of entire blocks came from the same village or region...
...some people get rich...
...So far zoning has often made matters worse in this respect...
...Yet it would be simple to have high and low rent apartments in the same development if not in the same house...
...The many renewal projects—apart from the advantages and disadvantages mentioned—at best relocate slums...
...They could not be more corrupt...
...There were perhaps two major reasons for this...
...Thus, only the disadvantages of the slums have remained, the badly built, badly maintained, crowded, ugly and dirty houses...
...They fear quiet, spontaneity, walking and anything that does not involve the sale of something...
...Today the slum is no longer homogeneous...
...Buildings are monotonous rather than varied and picturesque...
...It seems most illiberal to tender a subsidy to people in need, on condition that it be used for housing...
...It is costly...
...One might also subsidize individual builders—as is done to some extent—by tax concessions and, by helping them to borrow on the market at low rates...
...How great a place it would be if we could get not just a city government that was honest at the top, as LaGuardia was, but also imaginative...
...The planned "ethnic mixture" of some housing developments combined with rigidly maintained social monotony seems like an unintended self-parody...
...they succeed altogether in blocking the communal feeling and the liveliness that was the one redeeming feature at least of some slums...
...It is remarkable how much more ready everybody seems to be to clamor for additional subsidies than to do anything at all to reduce costs, or to investigate how they are to be spent...
...WE HAVE TO DEFINE the desirable and then think of ways of making it desired...
...In this respect, far too little is done...
...I am referring to over-occupancy of already built ones—due to shortage of dwelling space, and not, as the law seems to imply, the perversity of tenants...
...Nonetheless our slums at one time were neighborhoods which generated or permitted communal feelings, if we are to believe the memories of many writers who were brought up in them...
...So far operative planning seems to be in the hands of cement and gasoline fanatics who want neatness, even if it be monotony, and traffic, even if it kills them...
...Antiquated building codes require expensive and unnecessary features and procedures, and prevent the use of new materials and techniques...
...Unions are permitted to, and protected in, barring less costly techniques and the entrance of additional labor into the building trades...
...Though by now many of the original inhabitants of New York tend to move to the suburbs as soon as they have families and can afford to, the city remains attractive to our least privileged citizens, Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans...
...They shared the same culture, the same past...
...If we do not want to use the miserable dormitories that "solve" the problem in Russia and China, the only thing that can be done is to plainly inform prospective immigrants of the unsatisfactory conditions they will find in New York...
...bureaucrats thrive...
...The housing conditions themselves are the effect, not the cause of these factors, which are also associated with delinquency...
...And they were bound together by their common situation with respect to outside society...
...Variety might be preserved or created by making it illegal to devote more than a portion of any block or area to residential or to business purposes—at least in those parts of the town that can still be saved from the utter boredom of "functional" division...
...The best we can do at present is to prepare the soil...
...At present, building, and therefore housing, is too expensive largely because of a combination of government policies which the government then attempts to counteract by subsidies...
...But we also have no responsibility to provide them housing they were warned would not be available...
...They have in common nothing but poverty...
...It would be simple, too, to stimulate small business enterprises—but the housing authority does its best to suppress them...
...Thus, better housing, though worthwhile per se, is most unlikely to reduce crime rates...
...The unmet problem is perpetuated all around us...
...nor can they be manufactured...
...These problems are hard to solve politically...
...or, finally, they ask the Federal government to finance housing for immigrants...
...Delinquency, though located in the slums, is causally connected with dwelling conditions no more than the piety of hermits, or monks, was connected with their dwelling places...
...THESE DISADVANTAGES are real enough, as is the poverty of those who suffer them...
...They have nothing of their own...
...There is no reason why landlords should not be obligated to plant trees before their houses, or automobile owners and manufacturers to control the poisonous fumes from cars which, together with many other things are known to increase the lung cancer rate in cities over that of the countryside—quite apart from the unpleasantness...
...And why not subsidize city dwelling as farming is subsidized...
...Even as it is, I like living in New York better than living anywhere else in the United States...
...There is no evidence to show that housing is always the most important factor in improving a family's life style...
...It would be simpler and better to subsidize, if subsidize we must, not developments or renewal projects but tenants...
...And our municipal planners have done their best to eliminate it...
...Thus what might have been a temporary problem becomes a permanent one by dint of great effort and expenditure...
...But it would be a beginning...
...The authorities are more interested in tearing down old, and building new houses than in restoring and adding, despite speeches to the contrary...
...Yet, they cannot earn the income required to house them according to the standards we regard as minimal in New York...
...and in limiting the productivity of existing labor...
...They may be right...
...these purposes may be more important to them...
...On balance government built or sponsored housing has, at great cost, not improved matters...
...Of course, the subsidized may use the monetary subsidy for other purposes...
...This places New Yorkers in a curious position: either they house at their own expense every poverty stricken American who wishes to move from elsewhere—which will not decrease the desire to do so—or they tolerate housing they have decided to find intolerable...
...Unlike many European slums, they are not, after all, neglected places through which the splendor of the past still shines...
...The building of overly cramped dwelling spaces can be prohibited...
...If they prefer these to their present ones, we have no right to balk them anymore than we can compel people to cease smoking because of lung cancer...
...Our tax system places a premium on neglect of houses...
...AMERICAN SLUMS never offered much esthetic gratification...
...FAR TOO LITTLE attention is paid—partly because of high labor costs, partly because of neophilia—to restoring neglected buildings...
...Apart from these two kinds of subsidy (and from better building and zoning provisions) it would be best if the government were to stay out of housing except for providing parks...
...Let me illustrate...
...And the buildings are so built as to attract only low income groups...
...For slum housing, at most, plays a very minor role in crime which is more directly associated—to the extent to which it is associated with social conditions at all—with poverty and with difficulties of acculturation...
...A street is interesting if it has variety and 'pedestrian traffic...
...Puerto Rican slums are perhaps an exception...
...The feeling of valuelessness, of futility—which oozes from our suburbs as much as it does from the city itself—is at the root of the tedium vitae, the listless and the restless boredom, the quiet or unquiet desperation which generates so many of our amusements, crimes and neuroses...
...but actually we are strewing it with rubble, and cementing it over...
...Politically it is the easiest thing...
...The untranscended life is not worth living, though it sputters on amorphously...
...Subsidies to tenants might be better and could hardly be worse...
...This could be changed...
...The slumdwellers are on the outside...
...In some ways the sterility is more awesome because it seems so orderly, seamless, and, therefore, ineluctable...
...They should be free to decide...
...HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS instead of replacing slums have more often displaced them, i.e., shifted their location...
...More important, they are no less sterile esthetically than the slums were...
...It involves numerous remedies each of limited effect, and cumulatively perhaps not sufficient, but certainly necessary...
...this means that money from taxpayers, or tenants, who are often less well off is channeled into the pocket of workers better off than most of those who subsidize them...
...We should have laws to prevent the further "functional" division of the city into business and residential districts...
...BUT THE TROUBLE with housing developments is not so much that they make things worse...
...Others are far more tangled...
...What we need now is not so much the replacement of old by new structures, but simply more dwelling space, i.e., additional structures and restoration and maintenance of old ones...
...No one every bothered to adorn the streets on which they were built with monuments or fountains, or even trees...
...Thus the slumdwellers could hardly maintain a shared culture if they had one...
...The main effects become apparent through a multitude of symptoms, ambiguous enough to be seldom traced and related to their origin: without esthetic gratification man's capacity to give meaning to his life atrophies...
...It is quite unnecessary, as well as wrong, to attribute additional problems—such as high crime rates—to these deplorable conditions...
...It is true that landlords are criminally liable for certain types of neglect, but this has not served as an effective remedy and would not serve, I think, even if the inspecting agencies were less corrupt than they are...
...But we might drop the pious talk and clarify the problem...
...For this division makes both boring...
...Thus developments are for "low" or "middle" incomes—not for both...
...They must grow...
...And bureaucratic direction has been substituted for community...
...Of course, all costs should be assessed against such landlords and rent payments or titles held as security...
...The housing problem cannot be solved in a general way by a few sweeping measures...
...They were built as slums, as tenements, or, as ramshackle houses once sheltering the middle class...
...And it is this improvement not improvement in "housing" per se that would redound to the benefit of the city at large...
...On the other hand, city ordinances against overcrowding apartments are of no use: no tenant crowds an apartment if he can help it and unenforceable laws merely abet corruption...
...There is no splendor, no past...
...I am not under the illusion that the achievement of all that has been proposed would solve the problems of the city...
...They should be given the amount needed to rent suitable dwelling space on the market, instead of being subsidized in kind by being offered the dwelling space that the authorities consider suitable...
...But this is not because, it is despite the efforts of our municipal authorities...
...but at least they are easy to decide morally...
...The inhabitants do not benefit...
...The main trouble is that they do not make things better...
...but they each look toward American society at large, not toward an autonomous slum community...
...Of course, esthetic gratifications are not likely to be obtained by an effort of the will...
...They also foster corruption: the codes are so impractical that officials must be bribed to interpret them so as to make building practical...
...No city should get any Federal help in housing unless its building codes are rationalized...
...We need laws authorizing the city to make needed repairs, and provide services, such as heating, even to take over the management of the property if the landlord, duly warned, fails to act, or is unavailable...
...The refusal of the housing authorities to allow social variety makes the already institutional air even harder to breathe...
...and in raising wage rates to such a point that the government, by subsidizing housing, in effect pays a major share of the wages...
...They come because they can expect to make a better living than at home—however bad it be...
...and the Negro slums are ethnically homogeneous, but not otherwise...
...In essence, this is what we are doing now despite the pious talk...
...Both the physical and social structure of housing developments is designed to prevent spontaneity and variety...
...This last seems a little, but not much, more equitable than to burden the New York taxpayer: why should a Missouri farmer be asked to house a Puerto Rican as soon as the latter decides to move to New York...
...Secondly, the pervasiveness of modern means of transportation and communication impairs the existence of separate cultural communities within the city...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
