Affordable Housing Institute : US

With the violence waning under the heavy sedation of a state of emergency, the French have bought themselves a winter of quiet desperation.  But time is useless … unless one uses it to act.

 

 

Interesting definition of ‘normality’

 

So what is the prescription for fixing France’s bankrupt urban housing policy?

 

 

Paris public housing high-rises

 

Tear them all down.

 

 

Tear down all the high-rises.

 

 

Clichy-sous-Bois, the morning after

 

Not because of the riots, in spite of the riots.

 

In a lengthy New York Times Magazine article, Christopher Caldwell gets it right:

 

There is a somewhat comic lining around the cloud of France’s suburban riots. Suddenly the word banlieue has been embraced by people not known for peppering their conversation with French words - callers to right-wing talk shows, for instance. Obviously, they want to stress how different those suburbs (burning cars and hip-hop hand gestures) are from our own (swing sets and Weber grills).

 

European politicians, anxious lest their countries be perceived as “the next France,” have made a similar point. Wolfgang Schauble, a prominent German Christian Democrat, said recently, “We do not have these gigantic high-rise projects that they have on the edge of French cities.”

 

[…]

 

[In] most French cities, the urban core is made up of neatly tended architectural treasures and the disorder is pushed to the periphery. [Marseilles] is turned inside out, so that “inner city” and “suburbia” retain their American connotations. That may have spared Marseille a lot of problems.

 

La crise des banlieues turns out to be an ambiguous phrase.  Is there a problem in France’s suburbs or with France’s suburbs?  For Schauble, it’s the buildings. For the boosters of Marseille, it’s where you put them.

 

It’s the buildings.

 

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization.

 

 

Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation (a “unit of habitation”)

 

But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males.

 

The young males needn’t be desperate, merely bored and testosterone-driven. 

 

 

 

Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.

 

Right.  In ergonomic terms, an apartment is:

 

A secure personal space.

Within a larger complex.

Reached through public areas.

 

What always dooms low-income high-rises is that third element: you cannot secure the public space.  Not economically, and therefore not in practice.  Only the people themselves secure the public space: what Jane Jacobs called ‘eyes on the street’:

 

Jacobs focused on sidewalks and city streets, human activity, and human watchfulness. A street needs three qualities to be safe, she said: a clear demarcation between public space and private space, “eyes upon the street,” and sidewalks in continuous use. Constant activity adds to the number of effective eyes on the street, she said, because it induces people in nearby buildings to watch the sidewalks.

 

When you enclose public space — such as in an elevator, a stairwell, or a long high-rise corridor — you create an environment that not only can be unsafe, it will be unsafe.  Nearly thirty years ago, Oscar Newman wrote in his seminal work, Defensible Space (1973), later updated in Creating Defensible Space.  As Newman wrote (1996):

 

A family’s claim to a territory diminishes proportionally as the number of families who share that claim increases.  The larger the number of people who share a territory, the less each individual feels rights to it.  Therefore, with only a few families sharing an area, whether it be the interior circulation areas of a building or the grounds outside, it is relatively easy for an informal understanding to be reached among the families as to what constitutes acceptable usage.

 

When the numbers increase, the opportunity for reaching such an implicit understanding diminishes to the point that no usage other than walking through the area is really possible, but any use is permissible. 

 

It is easier for outsiders to gain access to and linger in the interior areas of a building shared by 24 to 100 families that it is in a building shared by 6 to 12 families.

– Pages 17-18

 

 

Riot cop, Le Blanc-Mesnil

 

Back in the late 1970s, when I was just embarking on my glorious career in affordable housing, we were involved with a property known as Walden Square Apartments, a bizarre concatenation of a high-rise surrounded by very large walkup family apartment flats.  To get to the low-rise, you had to walk through the high-rise, where all the mailboxes were located, so there were entirely legitimate reasons for anyone to loiter anywhere. 

 

Young singles and elderly lived in the high-rise, welfare families in the low-rise.  So the teenage sons of the latter preyed upon the former, a predator-prey ecosystem that no amount of cameras, security guards, management supervision, or residency handbooks could arrest.  I remember riding those hideous elevators, their cabs painted with multiple layers of bright red enamel nevertheless scratched with obscene graffiti, and walking down urine-smelling corridors.  The space, in short, was not defensible. 

 

In the end, our management company reoriented the complex into two different entrances, one for the high-rise, one for the low-rise, effectively severing its corpus callosum and creating the schism of two outwardly facing properties each oblivious to the other. 

 

 

Janus was the Roman god of gates and doors

 

Our experiment in cross-generational cohabitation was over. 

 

France has never learned this most basic of urban-dwelling lessons:

 

Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they’re joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It focuses on the buildings by razing them.

 

This too is a lesson we learned in the US, the hard way.  In 1950, on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis, we cleared a decaying industrial slum and built Pruitt-Igoe, the archetypal urban high-rise, a city unto itself. 

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, under construction (1951)

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, completed (1955)

 

I was able to witness the newly constructed 2,740 unit public housing high-rise development Pruitt-Igoe, go to ruin.  The project was designed by one of the country’s most eminent architects and was hailed as the new enlightenment.  It followed the planning principles of Le Corbusier and the Internati8onal Congress of Modern Architects.  Even though the density was not very high [for a high-rise. — Ed], residents were raised into the air in 11-story buildings.  The idea was to keep the grounds and the first floor free for community activity.  “A river of trees” was to flow under the buildings.  Each building was given communal corridors on every third floor to house a laundry, a communal room, and a garbage room that contained a garbage chute.

– Oscar Newman, Creating Defensible Space, pages 9-10

 

Pruitt-Igoe, its own community (1955)

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, isolated but visible

 

With a few years, the architectural theories were on their way to ruin:

 

The areas proved unsafe.  The river of trees soon became a sewer of glass and garbage.  The mailboxes on the ground floor were vandalized.  The corridors, lobbies, elevators and stairs were dangerous places to walk.  They became covered with graffiti and littered with garbage and human waste.

 

The elevators, laundry, and community rooms were vandalized, and garbage was stacked high around the choked garbage chutes.  Women had to get together in groups to take their children to school and go shopping.  The project never achieved more than 60% occupancy.

– Newman, ibid., page 10

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, a third floor communal corridor as it actually turned out.

 

By 1972 Pruitt-Igoe had become such a slum inside that we tore it down.

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, demolition 1972

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, demolition 1972

 

The lesson we learned, the Dutch have also learned — the hard way:

 

Amsterdam and Rotterdam stand in the same urban-planning relationship as Paris and Marseille. The core of golden-age buildings along Amsterdam’s canals are surrounded by industrial-age apartments and then by a fan of housing projects. Rotterdam, because it was rebuilt after heavy bombing in World War II, has big concentrations of poor and working-class people, many of them immigrants and their children, living in the bull’s-eye of the metropolitan area.

 

Yet the cities’ redevelopment policies are virtually identical. Both are well into a headlong retreat from gigantism and uniformity. The notorious high rises of De Bijlmer in southeastern Amsterdam were completed only in 1975 but were soon generating the kind of pathology on display in the banlieues. 

 

 

De Bijlmer, Amsterdam

Words fail at imagining who could have inflicted such sterility upon people.

 

A succession of Labor mayors have presided over their dismantling to make way for smaller “garden houses.” When the city determined that 11,000 units of housing were needed in the Nieuw West area, it decided to demolish 13,000 units and build 24,000 on a more neighborly scale, to avoid what Cohen calls “huge, stretched-out deprived areas.”

 

In right-wing Rotterdam, meanwhile, Pastors has done almost exactly the same thing. He poured resources into mixed-income projects started by the Labor Party in the once-dismal neighborhood of Bospolder-Tussendijken and added others of his own. His reasoning is the same as Cohen’s. Both argue for maximum residential diversity on the grounds that people now have “housing careers.”

 

Why emphasize residential diversity?  Mr. Caldwell has it right:

 

In the old days, the argument runs, a person with a working-class identity could live in “working-class housing.” But today people have housing careers that vary as much as their professional ones. When they are young and not terribly bothered by noise, they might choose small, functional places close to cultural attractions and nightlife. They can move to larger, quieter ones when they have families and then trade space for comfort when their children leave home. Corbusier-style city planning shows no evidence of having considered this.

 

If you don’t vary the housing units in a given neighborhood - if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths - you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.

 

Multiple uses, multiple tenures, multiple configurations within the same neighborhood.  All this is essential to healthy communities.  Neighborhood ecosystemic diversity is thus not a luxury but rather an essential feature of systemic robustness and continuing vitality.

 

Monolithic structures are suitable only for clones. 

 

High-rise public housing never works.  Never has worked, never will work. 

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, vandalized (circa 1968)

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, being depopulated (circa 1968)

 

Tear them all down and build proper communities, with lower density, low-rise, mixed use, and mixed income.

 

Messieurs Chirac, de Villepin and Sarkozy: tear down the banlieues. 

 

 

“Dominique, you tear down the high-rises.”

“Non, non, mon cher Nicolas, apres vous!”

 

The cost will be mammoth.  It will be far beyond anything the French government can possibly imagine.  Affordable housing always costs money.  And the housing cost, huge though it will be, will be only one strategic intervention in a complex multi-activity interdependent solution (jobs and cultural assimilation are two other critical elements).

 

But unless and until you reinvent your housing, messieurs, everything else you try will fail.

 

Tear down the high-rises.  Tear them all down.

 

 

Pruitt-Igoe, demolition 1972

 

Tear them down now.

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