In Will It Be Black Or White?, the Voices of New Orleans asks, “Does New Orleans need to be predominantly black to be New Orleans?” What an interesting question. In the same post, they quote housing activist Endesha Juakali:
“We need the chocolate back in the vanilla! … It will never be the same in my lifetime, we already know that,” … “The forces that control the redevelopment are going to string this thing out for at least five years. And people can’t wait that long.”
Now I ask different questions. New Orleans is the first city I’ve lived in where the majority on welfare and in public housing are black. Well, duh, that’s because the majority people here were black. The last population stats indicate that a large number of the people who haven’t returned to New Orleans are mostly the same, black. If these folks have jobs elsewhere in which they’re making twice as much as they were here, their kids are in better public schools and the city, state and federal bureaucracy combines to stall their return home,
- – will they return?
- – should they return?
- – can they return?
- – do you blame them for not wanting to come back?
- – once they come back, what options do they have for a respectable quality of life?
In a chat with Alan Gutierrez this morning, I said, “Public housing and the way in which it was used in New Orleans was a big problem before the storm. Just because it was before the storm doesn’t mean that’s how it should be now … The solution is also not to throw people in public housing because we can’t take care of policing, crime, economy, schools, corruption, etc. That’s doing them an injustice.”
dangerblond has a good post about the St. Bernard projects which she checked out yesterday, along with other bloggers. She’s right – there is nothing wrong with the quality and architecture of those buildings (or the Iberville or Calliope projects) and they need not be torn down. Again, there is nothing wrong with those buildings, but there has been something wrong with the philosophy behind them for the last three decades. Some older friends and work colleagues remember a time when the projects were the place to be, a nice stepping stone until you got on your own feet and into your own home. What negatively affected the city in the last 30 or so years has had a similar physical and psychological effect on these buildings.
I want this post to be a discussion about the pros and cons of public housing in 21st-century America, New Orleans, before and/or after the flood and your stance on it. If public housing is indeed about rehabilitation (in the form of schools, jobs, mentoring, mental and physical health), when will this most important goal be brought into the equation? To me, it seems like anti-abortion activists stating that each fetus must be brought to term, but not giving a hoot for the quality of life of that child once it is born.
Please don’t let this turn into a generalization fest which refers to some political dogma or the other. We all know this isn’t a black-and-white issue. Let’s really talk about it.
The problem with public housing is that we’ve not addressed the problem in the recovery. There is nothing that I can use to make an intelligent decision about public housing. From what I’ve heard, there is a blame the building attitude toward public housing, if we knock the buildings down, all that poverty will dry up.
I don’t think it will.
If public housing is bad, then is Section 8 housing with absenteed landlords better?
Also, what is the real scoop on the structures? We’re told that we need to knock ’em down because the pipes are hard to fix. An anecdote is going to have us raze 5000 housing units?
There is actual evidence that some of the problem is with layout of the buildings. Also even if they could be fixed, concentrating of the vulnerable in a small area creates problems. You get a larger concentration of poorly socialized individuals who use violence as a solution combined with a larger percentage of vulnerable people than in the general population. Bureaucratic barriers further make it difficult for Public Agencies to deal with bad actors.
Section 8 is not any better. It merely substitutes private financing for public financing. The effect is the same. It’s only advantage is that the developments are generally smaller than the older public projects, avoiding some of the concentration problems.
I don’t know if the buildings could be fixed, I can tell you as an architect the nature of their construction along the probable presence of lead paint and asbestos will make it expensive and very slow. Most of these building are more than fifty years old and their plumbing and wiring is near the end of its useful life, however sound the structure may be.
If the goal is to move people back quickly, provide a stable market for rental housing. That could be done by providing the former public housing residents with a general rent subsidy, free of many of the restrictions usually placed on rental assistance. Alternately you could provide low interest loans for non profit housing corporations, although I much prefer the former.
Thanks for the great and constructive comment, mominem!
To briefly respond to Mominem, I would like to see more people assisted in buying homes rather than renting, with homeownership being the end-point of some kind of rehabilitation program to get out of the projects.
Generally, I have come to a spongy (i.e. not firm) conclusion that we should rethink public housing along two tracks – rehabilitative and permanent. Rehabilitative would be for the able-bodied, young, mentally stable, with a goal to get services to them, intervene if needed, house them for a limited time and help them find and buy a house if they complete job training and get a job. House note could be lower than the lowest rents if it was non-profit and not corrupt. The bank gets the house for security. Grants to rehab historic houses and raise them.
Permanent public housing would be for the elderly, disabled, chronically ill or have a chronically ill child, those with learning or adjustment disorders that keep people from interacting normally in a job situation, people whose burdens are such that we just need to suck it up and take care of them. No relatives allowed to move in, high security, medical and social work students making house-calls, free cable, shuffleboard.
I think N.O. has some of the most “human-looking” projects, built on a human scale. I once knew a woman who was moving to town. When she saw the Orleans project from I-10, she said, “Oooh, I want to get one of those townhouses!”
I agree with Alan that we don’t know a thing about this. It would seem that if you had to change out the electic and water pipes, it might be about time for that anyway. How hard can it be with a building raised that high off the ground? I didn’t see any evidence of asbestos at St. Bernard. The outside walls are brick, and the inside walls and ceilings are plaster. I didn’t see anything sprayed on, like fire retardant. The shingles might be asbestos, but those will have to be handled just as carefully in a demolition as in a rehab.
As for lead, there is no paint at all on the outsides of the buildings. If the insides have lead paint, that might explain why Johnny can’t read. That should have been remediated years ago if it was present.
There is no way buildings anywhere near the quality of these projects can be constructed in today’s climate. They just want to make it more dense, instead of less dense. Less dense would be better for the people.
One of the problems with the design of “the bricks” as they used to be called in the ‘hood, is that they offer little resident security. Police are easily observed and tracked. They provide easy vantage points so “Collaborators” can be easily identified and targeted. The “pedestrian scale” and “play areas” make it hard to pursue people, except on foot, in an environment much more familiar to the criminals than the cops.
The “public space” becomes a “no-mans-land” with little ownership by the residents. You can actually see this same thing in Lake Vista.
If the residents were less vulnerable they would be able to build communities, defend themselves and provide for their own security. One possibility might be for exiting projects renovated into high end housing, with funding going into better housing for those in need. Unfortunately almost no one would accept that outcome.
No one set out for this to happen, but no one anticipated the changes in resident population, in particular the dissolution of what was considered the natural condition of the traditional family. Mom, Dad and kids. Certainly exceptions existed, widows and widowers were common, but children out of wedlock were virtually unheard of. In the thirties or the fifties when these projects were conceived no one anticipated the current conditions.
As for home ownership, I agree I would love to see a urban homesteading program. In agreement with DB’s comment it would be for the young, able bodied stable families. There should be ample housing stock for this program as a result of the Road Home and foreclosures. It could become a major attractor of young families if there is someplace for them to work.
I have heard that some communities on the Mississippi coast had already moved to providing public housing only for the elderly and disabled, with rent vouchers for the others.
Mominem, I don’t know which side of the Great New Urbanism Divide you come down on as an architect, but much of what you’ve said in your last comment here mirrors what Andres Duany said about the St. Bernard Development at the Gentilly Charette. He, too, pointed to the inherent problems created when everything outside your actual doorway is “public space”. With such a situation residents have much less control over who is right outside their apartment, and hence what is going on there. As he said, when you have a yard outside your door that is at least nominally “yours” (if you’re living in a rental, for example, you still have a sort of “territorial claim” over the landlord’s property when it comes to uninvited interlopers) you become more protective of your home and can demand that loiterers be removed from areas that currently they at least theoretically have a “right” to be in.
Duany’s team’s plan for the St. Bernard did not envision demolition of the entire project; his opinion was that the central core of buildings, which were the earliest phase of the development, were structurally sound even if some of the later “add ons” like porch roofing and such weren’t particularly architecturally pleasing. These buildings would be saved and reworked where possible such that individual residences could be entered from the outside rather than from common hallways and lobbies; each residence would have a fenced yard area outside their doorway. The street grid would be cut back through the parcel of land where it has been truncated, putting access to public thoroughfares (and the rest of the world) right outside each building and knitting the development back into the surrounding neighborhoods. The remainder of the project (that surrounding the oldest central core, which was built later and according to Duany was less-desirable due to both design and materials) would be razed and replaced with just the type of development you’re speaking of–perhaps some type of townhome style housing for mostly the elderly nearest the renovated buildings, with a blend going outward toward the surrounding neighborhood of “affordable” housing mixed in with market-rate housing.
I think Duany is a talented Designer. I take issue with his work being called Planning, which at least in my education operated at a higher level of abstraction and allowed for many different physical outcomes.
“New Urbanism” is in my opinion basically a life style choise like “Gated Community”, “Golf Community”, “Lofts” or “High Rise Condominum”. It is Urban Design at most, not planning.
Mark Folse published a piece where he said that in project management you needed to “get ugly early”. The Neighborhood Planning Process completely failed to follow that advice, and ignored the hard issues with predictable results. Including I think the continuation of out current administration.
Virtually everything Duany said about St. Bernard was said long ago by Oscar Newman and others about other projects.
It could work and perhaps should be tried. The one thing we shouldn’t try is reconstituting HANO.
Newman actually renovated a number of housing projects and brought about some remarkable changes based on Architecture and listening to residents. How much was the result of physical changes and how much the result of a process which built community has been the subject of some speculation.
It would be interesting to revisit those projects today, thirty years later and see how they held up.