Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century

by Nicholas Dagen Bloom

When it comes to large-scale public housing in the United States, the consensus for the past decades has been to let the wrecking balls fly. The demolition of infamous projects, such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and the towers of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, represents to most Americans the fate of all public housing. Yet one notable exception to this national tragedy remains. The New York City Housing Authority, America's largest public housing manager, still maintains over 400,000 tenants in its vast and well-run high-rise projects. While by no means utopian, New York City's public housing remains an acceptable and affordable option.The story of New York's success where so many other housing authorities faltered has been ignored for too long. Public Housing That Worked shows how New York's administrators, beginning in the 1930s, developed a rigorous system of public housing management that weathered a variety of social and political challenges. A key element in the long-term viability of New York's public housing has been the constant search for better methods in fields such as tenant selection, policing, renovation, community affairs, and landscape design.Nicholas Dagen Bloom presents the achievements that contradict the common wisdom that public housing projects are inherently unmanageable. By focusing on what worked, rather than on the conventional history of failure and blame, Bloom provides useful models for addressing the current crisis in affordable urban housing. Public Housing That Worked is essential reading for practitioners and scholars in the areas of public policy, urban history, planning, criminal justice, affordable housing management, social work, and urban affairs.

Genres: History, Cities, Nonfiction, New York, Urban Studies, Urban Planning

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 21, 2008

Reviews

[Canyon Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are supporter of poor people's empowerment, this book makes a point to tell you just how unruly the over-exploited class is, and how important iron-fisted policing and management is. Public housing, in my opinion, is something that should work to decommodify the housing stock and offer an alternative to parasitic landlordism. this book believes the only point of public housing is to be affordable and paternalistic. nonetheless, it's somewhat insightful if you can ignore offhanded comments by the author

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pretty suspicious of this book at first, and intended only to flip through it and return it right to the library shelf, but I became so enthralled that I had to spend a couple days with it. It may be one of the best books on public housing out there.

I thought the book was suspect because I simply didn't believe New York City public housing was some sort of sterling success story. After all, just because it didn't descend into the hellish levels of depravity and dysfunction that defined Chicago's and other cities' public housing didn't mean it wasn't an expensive and unnecessary blight on the city. I mean, who today actually argues for putting up hundreds of thousands government-run apartment complexes? Almost no one. Instead, housing activism among all except some planning theorists and historians has moved to advocating non-profit "affordable housing" and Section 8 housing vouchers. I thought we all agreed this experiment was an unfortunate detour.

That argument actually isn't central to this book, though, and as one can see by the other comments on Goodreads, the book is not ready-made to appeal to liberal "housers." Both Goodreads comments inexplicably refer to the book as "racist," a shocking claim made against an author celebrating housing whose occupants are over 80% minority. What Bloom argues, in fact, is that one of the main reasons for New York's relative success is that the New York City Housing Authority worked to limit the number of welfare and "problem" tenants, and for most of its history kept welfare tenantry below 30%, while its counterparts in Chicago often boasted more than 80% welfare tenants. The NYCHA knew that working families tended to take better care of the apartments and, instead of trying to only house the poorest people in the city, they established broad income limits. Today families can make up to $80,000 a year and still qualify for public housing in the city. This insures a mix of residents that newer Hope VI developments strive for but without all the expensive redevelopment (though it makes one question why the government should be supporting families making $80,000 a year). One result is that as late as the 1980s crime in NYC public housing was lower than the city as a whole. This is downright shocking when you consider the population was still poorer than the rest of the city. The special Housing Police force helped, but so did good tenants selection and management. That IS a success.

Bloom points out, however, that acolytes of the Great Society did everything possible to tear this down. Even though the Resident Advisory Council pleaded with the NYCHA to evict tenants that violated the rules, liberal lawyer groups in 1971 forced it into a consent decree that made eviction almost impossible. Municipal unions raised NYCHA wages faster than rents, putting the authority in a continual funding squeeze. Extra payments from the federal government for welfare tenants pushed the authority to make its "relief" population above 40% for awhile.

The NYCHA recovered from this federally imposed nadir, but I still wouldn't call it an unqualified success. After all, the first city projects were funded by an "occupancy tax" on renters, which meant it was just transferring money from one group of the poor to another. Also, throughout much of its history NYCHA bulldozed far more housing than it created. Its first chairman, Langdon Post, even heartlessly said that "The only way to get action [on public housing] is to create the need." For a city that houses about 1/4 of all public housing residents in the country, I can't but imagine there was a better way to help these people out.

[Mauri]

This was the only book I was reading when 2019 ended that I hadn't finished yet and still thought I might want to finish in 2020.

Unfortunately, the only source is ILL and I don't have the time or patience to deal with physical library book pick-up and drop-off these days. I also don't see having the resources necessary next year, so I am DNFing this.

[Justin Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book about the history of NYCHA, though I couldn't help but feel that the author presented a slightly rosier depiction of NYCHA's management and successes. In addition, some of his arguments lacked criticality and opposing viewpoints. However, this book is very much an analysis only of NYCHA's management as a whole and does not attempt to offer an opinion of classical notions of public housing as an institution. In that way, the reader is left with the impression that NYCHA has weathered the economic, political, and societal challenges to public housing and has emerged as one of the most successful authorities in the country. While I would agree with most of his arguments, I think that he could celebrate more of the successes of other authorities as well to offer a more critical analysis of improvements as well.

[Katie Brennan · Rating 2 out of 5]

at times racist and delusional, yet also thought-provoking and full of interesting tidbits of nycha history. i think it's possible to celebrate the authority's ability to maintain (or at least refusal to demolish) a system of low-income housing in new york throughout the 20th century without maligning every resident on welfare as a "problem tenant" and making absurdly false claims about the state of repairs in nycha buildings, which even nycha acknowledges is a problem.

also, to write a book about public housing that doesn't include an interview with a single public housing resident is crazy.

[Katie Goldstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

another racist book about low-income folks living together being to blame for the failure of public housing veiled in so-called objective policy talk. needs to be more written about public housing from a tenant perspective, NOT from a management perspective.