Affordable Housing Institute : US

[On Patriots’ Day, which is a holiday in Boston – as it should be! –

 

Finding a decent apartment in Boston is a marathon, not a sprint

 

–my quirky sense of humor suggests that we should highlight the

 

Housing endures.  It endures as a physical space, and as a cultural artifact, and as an economic asset.  It’s the longest-lived.

 

“The future will prove me right!”

 

Government-sponsored or government-owned housing tends to endure the longest, if only because it is built to rugged standards.  Even to demolish it would take some doing.

 

Whatever else it is, it’s hard to knock down

 

There’s a reason why statism, monolithic architecture, and public housing all seem to go together.  They all flow from the same Augustinian view of human nature, that we are unworthy sinners. 

 

We are all sinners, and I should know

 

Untrustworthy in our motivations, and too ignorant to decide for ourselves, we need a wise hand to govern us.  A hand such as Leon Trotsky’s, as I discovered when reading Isaac Deutscher’s massive three-volume hagiographic biography, which in turn led me to this quote, from Trotsky’s 1924 Literature and Revolution:

 

In these latter years, architecture has suffered most of all, and this is true not only of our country alone; old buildings have been gradually destroyed, and new ones have not been built, Hence the housing crisis the world over. When work was resumed after the War, the people directed their energies, first of all, towards the most essential articles of consumption, and only secondarily towards the reconstruction of basic capital and houses.

 

When government sees an urgent problem, it tends to talk itself into believing that the private sector won’t move, or won’t move fast enough. 

 

You can paint it cheerful colors, but it’s still solid concrete

 

What government builds, though, is monolithic, because that is fastest.

 

 

Ultimately, the destructiveness of wars and revolutions will give a powerful impetus to architecture, in the same way as the fire of 1812 helped to beautify Moscow.  In Russia, the cultural material to be destroyed was less than in other countries, the destruction was greater than in other countries, while the rebuilding is immeasurably more difficult than in other countries. It is not surprising, then, that we have had no time for architecture, one of the most monumental of arts.

 

The solution?  Government must come to the rescue:

 

There is no doubt that, in the future – and the farther we go, the more true it will be –

 

To be fair to Trotsky, he believed in permanent revolution, and total revolution, that would eventually sweep the entire world.

 

Trotsky (lower right) with Lenin in the early 1920’s

 

– such monumental tasks as the planning of city gardens, of model houses, of railroads, and of ports, will interest vitally not only engineering architects, participators in competitions, but the large popular masses as well.

 

The imperceptible, ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to titanic constructions of city-villages, with map and compass in hand.

 

Not for Trotsky the messy city of Jane Jacobs, with eyes on the street, and flats over shops.  Rather, heroic architects would be build heroically scaled cities to be occupied by heroic steelworkers.

 

 

In this struggle, architecture will again be filled with the spirit of mass feelings and moods, only on a much higher plane, and mankind will educate itself plastically, it will become accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life.

 

There is the statist perspective viewed as a metaphysical philosophy: the world is submissive clay, and by extension the people within it will embrace their new environs. 

 

If it endures, who cares what living inside it is like?

 

It’s part of a belief system that I described in The Law of the Observant Herd:

 

All of this is crucial to affordable housing programs, which measure success using Benthamite utilitarianism: the greatest good of the greatest number.

 

 

In affordable housing, everyone involved, but most especially the families and households that are our customers, is both:

 

1.       A beneficiary, someone whom we are trying to help. 

2.       An economic actor, whose motivation and behavior are critical to our cost containment and cost-effectiveness

 

Beneficiary mindset emphasizes Pelagian charity; economic activity thinking focuses on Augustinian enforcement. 

 

For Trotsky, you just had to get the surrounds right, and then you got the people right.

 

The wall between art and industry will come down. The great style of the future will be formative, not ornamental. Here the Futurists are right. But it would be wrong to look at this as a liquidating of art, as a voluntary giving way to technique.

 

Much of this philosophy – the state can do, the state is larger, the state must protect you and to do that it must think for you – suffuses the governmental approach to affordable housing. 

 

Its visible manifestation, which peaked in the 1950’s, is the large-scale public housing urban development project – in just about every country, from Holland:

De Bijlmer, Amsterdam

 

To America:

 

Pruitt Igoe, St. Louis

 

To France:

 

Sapporo, Mexico, and Athenes Towers, Paris, Secteur Italie

 

(Even their cosmopolitan faraway names evoke Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside.  No wonder they became the slums inside.)

 

To Siberia:

 

Gavar, Russia

 

Back to Chicago:

 

Robert Taylor Homes, South Side

 

In government’s endless quest for scale, what gets lost, as Jane Jacobs was the first of many to identify, is the human desire to impose our own personality on our spaces.  When the architecture is Brutalist, the residents want to brutalize it. 

 

Prison, industrial plant, or Soviet housing?  What you express is what you believe

 

When the space is harsh, it is impersonal, and when it is impersonal, it is where we surreptitiously urinate or hook up or shoot up; it becomes the house of crime.

 

I trace it all back to Trotsky, not because public housing is inherently Trotskyite, but rather because Trotsky was the first thinker I’ve found to express this purely Augustinian perspective on humanity, and to assert that residential architecture could lead people to a heroic civilized future.

 

Whether they wanted to or not

 

Wall being built, Berlin, 1961

 

Hence he was the first to be so monumentally wrong:

 

What’s it to be, then?

 

As the Soviet Union crumbled,

 

Patrolling the Berlin Wall

 

so too has crumbled its symbols and its buildings:

 

 

A decade ago, I joked that the last surviving soviet republic was the public housing system.  Before my friends in public housing jump on me, let me add that they too have seen that the gargantuan concrete buildings have to go, and the sooner the better.

 

Got something to say to comrade Trotsky, babushka?

 

 

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