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Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses And City Planning Today


The opposing visions of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses towards city building resonate with many New Yorkers today. It is certainly clear to me that Jane Jacobs is now the prevailing force. While no one person changed the physical landscape of New York as much as Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs’ legacy and her influence is much more deeply rooted and felt widely by urbanists, planners and elected officials.

That legacy embraces:

  • the importance of the relationship of people and the public realm
  • the appreciation of networks created by diverse uses
  • understanding that blocks are the basic unit of the city
  • the primacy of the street as the glue of neighborhood life

Moses may have gotten a lot done, built a great deal in the name of “the people”, but the truth is that he wanted little to do with the people who would live in the city he created. Their voices were dispensable, their homes were dispensable. And that is why he couldn’t conceive of the importance of neighborhoods.

Jacobs, on the other hand, knew that if you neglect neighborhoods, you do so at the city’s peril. People who no longer have faith in the future of the place in which they were brought up or where they are raising a family, will, if they can afford it, leave for a more predictable, safer place.

So understanding and appreciating the integral character of diverse neighborhoods has to be a primary requirement for any planning initiative. The goal of city planners, or how we are looking at the city’s challenges today, is no longer the broad brush, the bold strokes, the big plan.

Make no mistake about it, we have an enormous need to build thousands of units of affordable housing; we must create a broad spectrum of jobs for a rapidly expanding population; we need to reclaim and revitalize our waterfront; and we must lay the foundations to support the growth that is to come and that we welcome.

But it is just not acceptable, or wise, or even possible to undertake these challenges without espousing Jacobs principles of city diversity, of the rich detail of urban life, to build in a way that nourishes complexity.

That is not an easy goal with the limited and somewhat crude tools that planners have at hand. We are rapidly trying to diversify the contents of the tool box to respond to community needs and community concerns.

And that brings me to one legacy that Jacobs left which has a daily influence on city policy today. And that is her role as a fearless civic advocate. She gave community activists the confidence that they indeed can make a difference and prevail.

She inspired individuals – inspired them to join community boards and advocacy organizations, to speak out at public hearings, and to lobby their elected officials.

Planning has changed because of Jane Jacobs. Robert Moses’ centralized planning is a thing of the past.

Planning today is noisy, combative, iterative and reliant on community involvement. Any initiative that does not build consensus -- that is not shaped by the give-and-take of the public review process -- will be an inferior plan and, deservedly, will be voted down by the City Council, and die.

Where we do, or some of us might, have nostalgia for Moses is in the realization that it is very very difficult to get very complex and expensive projects built that are critical to our city’s future such as the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access, a one seat ride to the airport from Lower Manhattan and the #7 line.

With the limitation of a two-term mayoralty, it is an enormous challenge to get great new open spaces such as Fresh Kills, the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan, the High Line and the Greenpoint Williamsburg waterfront approved, designed and built so that the initiative cannot be undone by subsequent administrations.

These are great projects that need the kind of sustained, focused leadership and a guaranteed funding stream that Robert Moses was so ingenious -- indeed diabolical -- in securing.

Big cities need big projects. Big projects are a necessary part of the diversity, competition and growth that both Jacobs and Moses fought for. But today’s big projects must have a human scale; must be designed, from idea to construction, to fit into the city. Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacob’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.

It is to the great credit of the mayor that we are building and rezoning today, once again, like Moses, on an unprecedented scale, but, with Jacobs firmly in mind, invigorated by the belief that the process matters and that great things can be built through a focus on the details, on the street, for the people who live in this great city.

Amanda Burden is the chair of the New York City Planning Commission and director of the Department of City Planning. This essay was adapted from remarks presented at a forum entitled "Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses: How Stands the Debate Today?", presented by the Gotham Center Of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

 

 

Tenant Organizing For 36 Years


If sheer animosity from one’s opponents is any gauge of one’s effectiveness, then Michael McKee may be the most effective tenant organizer in New York City: The landlords I talked to flat out refused to comment about him, not even anonymously.

Whether or not he is the most effective, McKee is certainly the longest-serving. It has been 36 years since he first became an advocate for rent regulation.

“If you go through the list of tenant victories, there isn’t one that doesn’t have Michael as its leader,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn told about 150 people who gathered recently to honor him. “Whether faced with bad speakers, bad governors, bad Rent Guidelines Boards, I’ve never seen Michael give up faith in the tenants movement.”

The tenant movement has faced rough times over the last few years. I thought it a good time to ask one opinionated man his opinion of tenant organizing, and the housing picture in the city:

How did you get involved in housing?

I stumbled into community organizing by organizing a rent strike in the building I was living in at the time.

What would you list as some achievements?

1. The warranty of habitability, which was a bill we drafted. We put a remarkable coalition together that supported that bill and it was one of the few times we got a bill through without having to water it down. And the landlords lobby at the time predicted that if it became law it would lead to another wave of abandonment, which of course did not happen.

2. The 1977 fight to renew the Emergency Tenant Protection Act when there was a danger it was going to be gutted.

3. The 1997 rent law fight, where Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno basically said he would not renew the rent laws and meant it, which I don’t think a lot of people understood. If only Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver hadn’t gone in the last weekend and given everything away, it would have been a great victory.

Why do elected representatives seem to discount housing as an issue?

I think the reason elected officials don’t take tenants seriously is because tenants don’t vote as tenants when they go into the voting booth. They vote pro-choice or anti-war or whatever. It’s much more difficult to organize tenants than it is to organize workers.

How do you explain your staying power?

Organizing is very difficult work, there are more defeats than victories. You have to be prepared to deal with that and roll with the punches.

In your opinion, what is the housing situation like today?

While we’ve always had too many people chasing too few housing units, it’s getting worse all the time. The rent laws were weakened at exactly the wrong moment, allowing landlords to take apartments out from under rent regulation. We don’t have an emergency anymore, we have a crisis, objectively speaking, and I think it’s going to get worse.

What do you mean objectively?

The number of people spending 50 percent or more of their income on rent has gone up dramatically. Overcrowding has gone up: Twenty years ago, overcrowding was six or seven percent of households; in 2002 it was 11 percent of households. I mean any objective measure you want to use, including the fact that homelessness is at an all-time high. If you look at the overall picture – rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments – we lost probably 57,000 units between 2002 and 2005. There’s virtually no measure that would show you that the housing situation is better.

And how would you say politicians are dealing with it?

I think it’s deplorable. The smart thing the real estate lobby did this time, unlike 1971, is they figured out that a gradual decontrol mechanism would not stir things up. People got totally up in arms between 1971 and 1974, resulting in the repeal of vacancy decontrol.

Do you think some form of rent regulation in New York City will always be necessary?

Absolutely. I think rent regulation should be universal…covering all buildings of, say, four units or more, regardless of when they were constructed or regardless of when people moved in or moved out.

We can’t sit around and wait for 2011 [when the legislature will decide whether to renew the rent laws]. It’ll be too late by then. There won’t be anything left. I think in two or three years it’ll be too late to turn it around. The real estate strategy is to have the laws come up in five more years and have many, many fewer rent regulated apartments so that we will be politically weaker.

What are the major areas you’ll spend your energy on over the next few years?

I don’t think anything is going to change until the Democrats take control of the State Senate. Not that the Democrats are so wonderful, but they are certainly better than the Republicans. And certainly there are more Democrats that will fight for us than there are Republicans who will fight for us. There are no Republicans who will fight for us. So even though some Democrats are not so pro-tenant or pro-rent regulation they are offset by people who are.

In NYC, does it all come down to money? Is that the root of the problem?

No question. The NYC real estate industry funnels money to state elected officials and state parties – they basically buy what they want in Albany. In my view it’s a form of corruption. They basically are buying deregulation by paying off legislators from upstate New York who do not have a single rent regulated unit in their districts. And yet who are the ones who make the decisions?

Knowing what you do about incremental changes, what can be achieved for tenants over the next few years?

I don’t think anything can be achieved legislatively until the Democrats take control of the senate. And that’s why I have not gone to Albany since June of 2003. There’s no point in doing any lobbying right now. Next year there will be a point in that there is a new governor.

Is there any hope that Spitzer will be more progressive with housing?

I think he’s going to be better than Pataki, but that’s not saying much. And who knows – we don’t know what Eliott Spitzer really thinks of rent regulation. He hasn’t said. I think he would not veto a bill passed by both houses, for example. The question is will he fight for anything? We know he’s opposed to home rule, although they’ve never told us that. Every meeting we had with him, they never would say what his position was. But now it’s official” He told the Times he opposed the repeal of the Urstadt Law.

Once there is a change in Albany, what can be done?

We can get a lot. We can get vacancy decontrol repealed, and I think we can get the Urstadt Law repealed. I think it would be very hard for the Senate Democrats not to do that when they’re the majority.

Housing advocates in Los Angeles told me once that that city got cyclical inspections of buildings to make sure they are up to code and that landlords love that system, that they say it helps them maintain their buildings. But the idea of housing advocates and landlords working together in New York City seems laughable. What do you think explains the housing climate in this city?

You have some of the richest people on the planet owning real property here. Literally, some of the richest people in the world own residential real estate in New York City. One difference between us and Los Angeles is we can’t spread out horizontally. Or the way Dallas can. We don’t have a sixth borough lying fallow waiting to be developed the way the Bronx was 100 years ago.

The real estate lobby has a ton of money and they use it.

What would you give as your strongest arguments for people to care about housing and get involved?

Well, you can’t do anything really without a roof over your head. There are people living in shelters who go to work every day, there are kids living in shelters who go to school every day. But it’s very difficult.

Housing is not, in my view, a luxury item. People need a place to live. Some people think the market should take care of it. There will never be a perfect tango between supply and demand the way the marketers think there will be. You will never have enough housing in a place like New York City to go around for everyone who needs it. You will always have an imbalance. The only way you would have that is if there were a national depression and people started moving out of the city. God forbid.

People want to live here. They come here and they want to live here. They come here from all over the country, they come here from all over the world. And in some cases they come here with a lot of money and in other cases they come here with no money and they end up eight to a room in a basement in Queens. So, you know, that’s not going to change. We’re going to be a magnet.

And as good as it is that the Bloomberg administration is embarking on a plan to build new housing, they’re being very shortsighted in the need to preserve the affordable housing that we have. The mayor is never going to build as much as we are losing. It’s not that the housing disappears, it just becomes unaffordable.

Is it just politics to them?

I think the mayor fundamentally believes that the city would be better off without rent regulation. I think he really thinks that the market would do a better job. I think he’s fooling himself but I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s what the man believes.

How would you rate the tenant movement today?

I think the tenant movement is amazing for hanging on in extraordinarily difficult circumstances….

This last year for the first time we succeeded in making a lot of new groups, that had never ever dealt with the Rent Guidelines Board before, ever, understand why they should pay attention to this board [which determines how much rents will go up in rent regulated apartments]. And they did.

The board had a historical practice of having daytime hearings in Manhattan. Who goes to daytime hearings? Elderly people. Younger people can’t go as a rule because they’re working somewhere. So consequently you’d have reporters writing, “A crowd of mostly elderly tenants blah blah blah.” We succeeded in bludgeoning the RGB into having nighttime meetings somewhere outside of Manhattan in a neighborhood like Harlem.

It’s a very different crowd and it’s a very different dynamic. I think some of the members of the RGB actually appreciated that and they were able to see a bigger picture by going to the Brooklyn hearing, the Bronx hearing.

You’re working on new things and still thinking about the fights. You’ve got a new group – Tenants PAC. You’re going to continue working on this stuff?

I haven’t really retired. It’s not a new group – we started Tenants PAC in 1997. But it was clear to me that if we were going to have a chance of having an impact on elections I had to free myself up to devote more time to Tenants PAC because I was essentially doing Tenants PAC in my spare time, of which I had none because my job at Tenants & Neighbors was like having two-and-a-half full time jobs. And I’m still doing things for Tenants & Neighbors as a volunteer, but I can pick and choose what I do. It has freed me up to concentrate more time on Tenants PAC to raise more money, to open an office and to really concentrate on a campaign in a way that we haven’t been able to do in the past because we didn’t have any staff. And I believe, and I’ve convinced a number of people in the tenant movement, that until such time that there is a change in Albany in terms of the political line-up there’s not going to be any chance of getting legislation.

The housing movement doesn’t seem to have high energy.

It’s a lot better than it was a couple years ago. People are much more motivated, I think. And there’s new people coming into the movement all the time.

Would you say you’re optimistic?

If I weren’t an optimist, I couldn’t do this work.

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.  

Long-Term Planning At City Hall


City Hall recently unveiled two new efforts to look at the long-term future of the city. On September 21, the Mayor’s Office announced the creation of a new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, with a 16-person Advisory Board. Rolled out during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s visit with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the initiative is billed as part of “an ambitious environmental agenda for New York City.”

The other effort, unceremoniously leaked to the press in recent weeks, proves to be no less ambitious. “Visions for New York City: Housing and the Public Realm” is a report to New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, dated May 2006, by former City Planning Commissioner Alex Garvin (best known for his role in the beginning of the effort to rebuild Lower Manhattan.) The report proposes 400,000 new units of private housing by 2030 by building platforms over rail yards and highway cuts, converting industrial waterfront property, and building new surface mass transit lines to spur private housing development. The report also calls for green boulevards, protected bicycle lanes, Sunday street closings, and new pedestrian streets to “improve the quality of life” and support higher density development.

The new office and the Garvin report are about one and the same objective: opening up opportunities for future growth. The city’s growth advocates and powerful real estate industry seem to be coming around to the view that ambitious development goals like those set out in the Garvin report will never be achieved unless they’re part of a bigger, long-term planning strategy that pays attention to the environment.

The Garvin Report: Envisioning A Growth Agenda

For years now community leaders have been after city officials to plan for the long-term future and not just rezone their neighborhoods for new development. The Task Force on Community-based Planning, a coalition of some 40 community organizations, community boards and professionals created five years ago, has stood behind the scores of neighborhood-based planning efforts. It asked city officials to support them, prompting the city government to do both city-wide and neighborhood-level planning.

But the main impetus for Alex Garvin’s visions report, and City Hall’s newfound interest in long-range planning, seems to be a realization among real estate developers that the city’s infrastructure, especially mass transit, can’t support a lot more growth in Manhattan and at existing transit hubs. While the number of riders of mass transit continues to grow, the system hasn’t added any major new lines since the 1930s; New Yorkers have among the longest average commute times in the nation. As a result, Garvin proposes new “transit-oriented development.” This would entail building new light rail, streetcar and bus rapid transit lines in areas that would be rezoned to spur private housing development. Two priority areas are identified: 3rd Avenue and 161st St. in the Bronx and 21st Street in Queens (with the possibility of continuing the line south to Red Hook in Brooklyn). The report gives no indication that existing community-based plans were consulted in the search for future development sites.

Garvin found that many of the lower-density areas of the city with available land for development lack mass transit and are not likely to attract investment in new housing. Instead, he believes investors will go to more centrally-located areas where developable parcels can be created by incentives and changes in land use policy. This would include, for example, building on platforms over the Sunnyside Rail Yards in Queens and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Waterfronts targeted for redevelopment are the Bronx River, Harlem River, and the North Shore of Staten Island. These are the strategic areas that would absorb most of future development, according to Garvin’s study.

But this top-down approach to planning is bound to raise questions in the neighborhoods. Garvin rejects starting from an analysis of “needs,” as most community-based plans do, and instead talks about “opportunities,” basically investment opportunities. He ignores the environmental consequences of building over highways. He claims there will be no displacement, but ignores the effects that increasing property values and rents will have on surrounding areas – that is, secondary or indirect displacement. And he neglects the issue of housing affordability. It is the kind of planning that is likely to produce instant resistance at the grass roots level. Neighborhood planning involving local residents and businesses (who also tend to be pro-development, as any survey of neighborhood plans will show) is more likely to find development opportunities that fit better with the existing urban context and also help to address needs.

To its credit, the Garvin report puts forth a bold set of recommendations about public space and transportation that will resonate with many community planning advocates. The section on “the public realm” says that “a fundamental shift needs to occur in planning and capital investment for streets.” The city should rely less on cars and develop “a more balanced public realm.” This includes greening boulevards so they are friendlier to pedestrians. Bicycle lanes would be upgraded from stripes painted on the pavement to safer, physically separated rights-of-way. Following the example of cities in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, selected avenues would be closed to traffic on Sundays, creating giant public spaces. Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, Broadway in Manhattan, Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and Kent Avenue/Vernon Boulevard in Brooklyn and Queens are some examples given. Finally, active neighborhood retail streets like Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, would be reclaimed as pedestrian streets.

Will The New Office Of Long-Term Planning And Sustainability Be Sustainable?

While the Garvin report only sketches out broad proposals and it is not clear what the current administration will embrace or reject, the huge leap in housing growth that it foresees inevitably leads to many bigger questions. How will the city’s already-strained transit, water, sewer and utility infrastructure handle all the new growth? What about the schools, libraries, and health facilities? While part of the transportation problem would be solved by improving the public realm and reducing traffic, it is bound to take a great deal of public investment and many more strategies to improve energy efficiency and environmental quality. And is anyone trying to insure that the costs and benefits of development are equitably distributed?

The new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability promises to grapple with some of these hard questions. Paraphrasing the classical United Nations definition, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated: “Sustainability is all about ensuring that economic growth and development today is compatible with the ability of our children and grandchildren to meet their needs in the future.”

If the new office is true to the sustainability mandate, they must take the “needs-based” approach that the Garvin report rejected. The ambitious agenda of the new office includes reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and exploring new strategies for energy efficiency in government and the private sector. Moving beyond City Hall’s successful High Performance Housing Initiative, the office proposes to make “green building” more widespread.

But while conserving energy and cleaning up the environment will create more opportunities for housing development, it remains to be seen how much the long-range planners will be looking at existing neighborhoods and the enormous environmental and public health crises they face, including asthma, lead poisoning, obesity and diabetes. To what extent will they be clearing the way for the pristine new housing enclaves foreseen in the Garvin report without addressing the profound deficiencies and inequalities in the quality of life that already divide the city? And with only a few years left in this administration’s mandate, to what extent can the long-range planners engage the city’s hundreds of diverse neighborhoods in the planning process so that whatever gets decided actually has a chance to be implemented in the decades to come? Will the new office have the time to change the deeply imbedded agency cultures that resist sustainable development strategies – for example, a Department of Transportation that resists traffic reduction and a Department of Sanitation that opposes waste reduction? While doing its share in the war against global warming, City Hall could also make peace with its own neighborhood planners.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning. 



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