Reinventing public housing
From
During the mid-twentieth century, modernist architects like Le Corbusier imagined they could change human behavior, with concrete jumbles.
Wouldn’t you have liked
If you lived here, you’d be a droid now!
Monastery or parking garage? You decide!
The result was sterile high-rise blocks that anonymized residents:
A great high-rise dystopia by Robert Silverberg
The forbidding concrete towers were instantly recognizable as where ‘those people’ lived:
Residents of the old towers hated that the buildings looked different from the rest of
High-rise public housing being demolished
Public housing revitalization includes these principles:
1. Repudiate Le Corbusier’s misguided vision.
In those comfortless zones where vast public housing towers once stood, casting long shadows over whole neighborhoods, you can once again find normal-size streets and normal-size houses
2. De-densify, by demolishing if you have to.
The most obvious change is the architecture. Over the last decade, the Philadelphia Housing Authority has imploded most of its high-rise, high-density public housing, banishing a litany of notorious projects along with their modernist towers.
3. Build market-quality visuals.
In their stead, the authority has built low-rise, low-density homes that mimic the city’s traditional rowhouses and twins, right down to their decorative Victorian cornices and wood-railed front porches.
Typical
4. Add market amenities.
They come with amenities that previous public housing tenants never imagined, such as air-conditioning and dishwashers.
5. Create and enforce a sense of community.
The housing authority remains responsible for much of the exterior maintenance — even for the owner-occupied homes. Owners who want to change the color of their front door or add a sunroom will need permission from an owners’ association.
6. Mix incomes.
To avoid creating the economic ghettos of the past, new developments are required to include people with a range of incomes, from the single mother enrolled in a job-training program to the married wage-earners who staff the service jobs in the city’s hotels and hospitals.
7. Mix tenures.
Nearly 20 percent of the houses in each development are set aside for sale at subsidized rates, from $95,000 to $120,000. In two complexes — Martin Luther King and Falls Ridge — the authority is even hoping to sell some units at market prices, for as much as $400,000.
About 800 people have requested applications for the 150 sale units in the Lucien E. Blackwell Homes in
8. Provide homeownership assistance for those who need it.
Abraham Keita was among the first. A native of
9. Redesign the traffic flow, for streets are the community’s nervous system:
To make its new housing fit in, the authority also has worked hard to reestablish the old street patterns that were obliterated by the modernist plazas. At the former Tasker Homes — now Greater Grays Ferry Estates — the interior driveways were so confusing that police were often afraid of being trapped.
Those driveways are now just a bitter memory.
10. Spend money on more than housing, true urban infrastructure.
Green said the authority spent $20 million of its $165 million budget to re-create streets and infrastructure. It was money well spent. The mix of rowhouses, twins, and senior-citizen apartments now merges naturally with the older houses in Grays Ferry, helping to stabilize the neighborhood.
