The Battle for Gotham (4 page)

BOOKS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

Thus, challenges to the highly planned, mechanistic strategies of building that Moses epitomized were in the air. Jacobs’s writing paralleled this humanistic trend. The city was not a machine for living, as architect Le Corbusier had pronounced. Urban life could not be reduced to engineering models for traffic, housing, entertainment, and employment, Jacobs argued. Ultimately, the world is too complicated for such simplistic approaches to the complex web of urban issues.

Jane Jacobs challenged the emperor’s new clothes when she said quite simply that things don’t happen the way the experts say they do or should; observation proves otherwise. She exposed the falsehood of expert predictions: If you move people out of tenements into high-rise housing blocks, crime will drop. If you build more roads, traffic will ease. If you direct the arts into cultural islands, the arts will be enriched. If you wipe out the messy mix of small and large companies, incubators and corporations, the city will grow. If you provide efficient new facilities in separate districts, the economy will improve. Jacobs’s observations of real city life showed these predictions were not true. Crime doesn’t decrease if you move people out of tenements. Traffic doesn’t get better if you build more roads. Artistic life isn’t richer if you create malls for the arts. The economy doesn’t improve by separating uses, trying to make the city efficient and wiping out the organically evolved diversity of businesses.

Jacobs challenged economists to think in new ways and to observe how things really work, not project how they should. She understood early the issues of urbanism and sustainability in both economic and environmental terms, but not until her later books did she focus directly on them. The complex underpinnings of society defied reengineering by experts, she argued. Universities and other intellectual institutions deceive the public into thinking urban issues are distinct and separate. Observe, observe, observe, and listen, Jacobs challenged the experts with the publication of her first book.

On the ground, people were doing what she wrote about. They were doing it intuitively, and she observed and learned from them, distilling the essence of what they did and validating both their observations and their strategies. Early in the introduction to
Death and Life
, for example, Jacobs cites her visits to public housing projects in East Harlem where Union Settlement social workers Ed Kirk and Ellen Lurie opened her eyes to the failures of public housing design and development. She listened to them, observed what they were seeing, and learned from them. The extraordinary impact on her thinking is clear. This excerpt about East Harlem speaks volumes:

There is a housing project with a conspicuous rectangular lawn which became an object of hatred to the project tenants. A social worker frequently at the project was astonished by how often the subject of the lawn came up, usually gratuitously . . . and how much the tenants despised it and urged that it be done away with. When she asked why, the usual answer was, “What good is it?” or “Who wants it?” Finally a tenant more articulate than the others made this pronouncement: “Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don’t have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful! Now the poor have everything.’”
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On the one hand, Jacobs gave voice to popular sentiments. On the other hand, she was too sophisticated and complicated a thinker to be just a voice. Even today, her teachings are the stuff of lively intellectual discourse, often invoked inappropriately to gain acceptance of a new development proposal.

Recent New York history is incomprehensible without some awareness and understanding of the clashing visions of these two seminal figures. Through the Moses-Jacobs lens, one recognizes the distinctions between genuine examples of regeneration and those that are only label deep. Genuine regeneration’s critical value to the city’s economy and social and physical framework becomes clear. Equally important, the wrongheadedness of some current Moses-style projects reveals itself as well.

EXAMINING THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

The Moses-Jacobs lens is as helpful in assessing what is happening today as it is relevant to understanding broad urban change in the second half of the last century in New York and other cities. The scale of clearance and displacement may be less than the heyday of urban renewal, but the destructive worship of bigness is no less now than it was then. What Jacobs identified as “the belief in bigness as a solution” is still central to official planning and development policies in New York City and elsewhere. But as Jacobs also observed, “More is not more if it is not right. People have been corrupted into thinking that the most important thing about anything is its size instead of the substance of what is happening.”
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When you hear the oft-repeated quote of Daniel Burnham, “Make no little plans,” you know something big and probably too big is about to be unveiled.
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Scale, however, is not the only issue today through which the Moses-Jacobs lens is useful. Considerable development is overplanned based on a simplistic interpretation of mixed use. Mixed use is much more complex than a combination of residential, commercial, and retail. The spontaneity and innovation of a true urban place can be just as stifled in a development of this combination as in a single-use project. The authentic urban fabric cannot be replicated whole cloth. As Jacobs shows, an all-new mixed-use project attracts only a limited variety of users, users suited to expensive new space. The real diversity of users in a vibrant city requires a mix of old and new buildings of different styles and scale, an authentic urban mix.

The impact and philosophies of Moses and Jacobs permeate New York controversies surrounding such recent and current city projects as Westway, the defeated proposal to expand and rebuild the West Side Highway along the Hudson River; the excessive investments of public funds in stadia instead of more critical city needs; and the upzoning (increasing what developers can build) of more than one hundred areas, including industrial and waterfront neighborhoods. Upzoning has had an enormous impact, pricing out middle-income tenants, new creative enterprises, and small manufacturing, all vital components of the city’s economy.
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Enormous projects are promoted as beneficial for the city’s future, while businesses and residents are pushed out of the targeted gritty, mixed-use districts. These megaprojects struggle even in good economic times due to their own internal weaknesses, and they undermine the creative resident community and local manufacturing that offer enduring social and economic value to the city. Worse, such projects erase early precursors of regeneration that, if allowed to evolve, can bring authentic, positive urban change, and they require enormous public funding.

The big projects never fulfill expectations; small ones always exceed theirs.

BIG IS EVEN BIGGER

The four-billion-dollar Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, in a twenty-two-acre campuslike setting, has stumbled along since 2003 and has already sacrificed a viable taxpaying community, productive jobs, occupied residences, and worthy historic buildings. This follows a long-discredited Moses tradition, as will be shown later in this book.

Columbia University pushes forward aggressively its new seventeen-acre campus in Harlem, displacing 400 families, 1,600 jobs, and countless businesses, home owners, and property owners, whereas a worthy expansion of Columbia could have been accommodated without this sacrifice. This, too, will be shown to be a Moses clone.

Willets Point, sixty-one highway-encircled, pothole-filled acres in Queens adjacent to Shea Stadium (now Citi Field), with its 250 known businesses—and more than 1,500 workers—is the target for total demolition in order to build yet another massive copycat mixed-use development. This area has never had sanitation, sewers, streetlights, or paved roads but survived a Moses scheme with the help of a young unknown Queens lawyer and future governor, Mario Cuomo. Now, it is a Moses vision revived. Willets Point is a dramatic example, as will be detailed later, of how to do the wrong thing, Moses style, with massive public subsidy. And here again the city is prepared to confiscate the land of staunch resisters under eminent domain at great expense and then turn it over to new private owners with tax breaks and other incentives.

These are only a few Moses-style projects being promoted as the next best “regenerative” plan (as discussed in the conclusion). These projects rely heavily on the strength of the real estate market, adding a vulnerability that over the years has seen much cleared land sit untouched and unproductive for decades after clearance is completed. The promise is always of jobs, taxes, and, these days, affordable housing, but no one calculates the jobs, taxes, and affordable commercial and residential units lost in the process. Demolition sweeps away uncalculated numbers of jobs, housing units, and other uses in a diverse urban district.

Moses relied on real estate and government funding; Jacobs looked to the energy, innovation, and commitment of citizens. For too long, developers and corporations either threaten to leave or promise Oz-like goodies will come of their projects. New York’s long-standing policy of giving them subsidies and tax incentives is unrelenting.

ENDURING CHANGE STARTS SMALLER

At the same time that these big projects are promoted and fought, escalate in costs, and, for the most part, fail, modest but meaningful things are actually happening, bringing positive change and showing the ongoing potential of big change achieved incrementally. The opportunity to nurture and build on such successes is lost because they are officially undervalued, sometimes hardly recognized, and too often stymied. Small upgrades are happening in every conceivable neighborhood, not because of any helpful official policy but because the appeal of urban life has accelerated in recent years and the opportunities to enjoy city life have expanded. In fact, independent of public policies, new areas of economic activity are occurring where civic resourcefulness, ingenuity, and improvisation are not interrupted. Occasionally, smart public policy follows these bottom-up initiatives.

The immigrant-filled neighborhoods that had been experiencing high vacancy rates not long ago bring new entrepreneurs and local vitality. New industries—food preparation, custom furniture, movie production, green products, and renovation and restoration services—have emerged just when the available industrial space is shrinking owing to upzoning and overdevelopment. Artfully converted empty buildings have been salvaged and upgraded with new creative uses in neighborhoods long declared dead by “experts” who have no real understanding of the authentic urban process.

As Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava have noted:

Fifty years after Jane Jacobs’ advocacy work in Manhattan, policy-makers and planning departments have yet to acknowledge what local knowledge and expertise can contribute to the planning process. Ignoring local actors comes at a high cost, accompanied as it is by strong op-positions, and more often than not resulting in inadequate urban development. It is only with a paradigm shift in the way we conceive of cities that we can actually tap into local intelligence and its productive capacity. In an age of “information” where billions of people are exchanging bits and data across platforms and boundaries, we should no longer rely on the master-planner’s map and the one-way PowerPoint presentations that pass off for community involvement.
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Individual catalysts have altered whole neighborhoods. The diversity of those catalysts is as rich as the work they do and illustrates, once again, how big change comes in varying ways dispersed around the city. Beat cop-turned-developer Gregory O’Connell, for example, has transformed Brooklyn’s Red Hook in the fifteen years since he started converting Civil War warehouses on the waterfront that the city wanted to demolish. He created space for 150 businesses and 1,200 workers and always has a waiting list for available space. He was the catalyst for the explosion of economic activity in Red Hook.

Common Ground, an organization developing low-income housing in renovated buildings especially for the formerly homeless, exhibits a different creative problem-solving path. Involving future tenants in the design, Roseanne Haggerty has created three thousand units of housing for displaced low-income tenants and the homeless in the fewer than fifteen years since she started Common Ground. Her strategy is to ask potential tenants what they need and build it. Common Ground facilities, mostly restored formerly deteriorated hotels, fit comfortably in their community from West Forty-second Street to Bushwick.

Challenging standard economic assumptions, Jacobs argued that meaningful economic progress always depends on the continued development of new kinds of work replacing or expanding existing forms. In this vein, a new “green” industry is evolving in small steps in various corners of the city. For instance, Omar Freilla’s expanding recycling operation, ReBuilders Source, in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, sells used and overstocked building supplies at deep discounts, almost like a Salvation Army model for home improvement, Freilla says.
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Freilla believes it to be the first worker-owned cooperative for reused building materials. He got the idea of selling salvaged and donated materials while working for Sustainable South Bronx, or SSBx. That grassroots organization, under the formidable leadership of its founder, Majora Carter, pioneered a green roof project with its own newly created for-profit installation company, Smart Roofs, LLC, and started a “green-collar” job-training program.