Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.]

 

As we’ve seen so far in this extended series on the economics of water taking off from Duke law professor Jim Salzman’s article Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water, since housing is what makes cities, infrastructure – at its most basic, water and sanitation – is necessary for cities to scale upward.  Thus the greatest city of antiquity, Rome, was the first to create large-scale municipal infrastructure, and to do it using the Basic Model:

 

 

When Rome fell, no similarly urban and civilized city arose for a millennium and a half, and when it did, it spoke English.  Professor Salzman’s article covers both London and New York, but for our purposes, New York is the more interesting as it is a more complete and clear advance on the Roman model in its use of private capital:

 

The story of New York’s drinking water provides an instructive contrast with Rome.  

 

Though I’m a confirmed Bostonian and birthright citizen of Red Sox nation, I’ve posted many times about New York, as it is the cradle of apartment living, the birthplace of the co-operative, the last holdout of pernicious and metastasizing rent control, and the inventor of air rights.

 

1.         From the beginning, water supply constrained New York’s growth

 

Despite being surrounded by water on three sides, lower Manhattan (the original New Amsterdam) had a very finite supply of water: one pond.

 

Might make a good investment …

 

Ever since Peter Minuit’s celebrated purchase of Manhattan Island from the natives for beads and trinkets in 1626, the settlement has faced challenges of ensuring adequate drinking water.  While New York is obviously surrounded by large rivers, they open on the ocean and are too salty for drinking. 

 

Most of the settlement’s water came from a spring-fed, deep freshwater pond covering 70 acres in lower Manhattan, known as the “Kalch-Hook.” Interestingly, much of the fresh water was used not for direct drinking but, instead, for brewing beer or cooking. 

 

Does that include infrastructure?

 

Presumably (Professor Salzman doesn’t say) the communal pond was shared in the same manner as the pre-urban societies he profiled (Jewish, Islamic, African, Indian). 

 

Then New York grew.

 

You got any wells inside that Vaubin fort?

 

2.         Lacking government, there was no public-policy … which proved indefensible

 

The first Europeans to live in Manhattan, the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, relied on basic technologies to provide drinking water – collecting rainwater in cisterns and digging shallow wells. 

 

The biggest Dutch city in the New World, 1660

 

The wells in New Amsterdam were private. 

 

Private markets will move when government doesn’t.  The colony, thousands of miles from its capital and national resources, had to make do.  In such a case, the greatest asset they had was their settlers’ enterprise and intelligence, and they formed informal markets of their own – just like what happens in today’s slums.

 

Public well?  What an extravagance!

 

Although there were plans in 1660 to build a public well, the famed regional governor, Peter Stuyvesant, refused to approve the funding. 

 

Makes one wonder what the old Dutchman would think of the massive affordable housing property now named after him?

 

 

This proved remarkably short-sighted, however, for when British warships sailed up the Hudson in 1664 the Dutch defense was brief.  Besieged in a fort, the Dutch realized to their chagrin that the fort had no wells and therefore no water sources.

 

“Sir, about those warships …”

 

Following a quick surrender, which kept the town’s commercial prospects intact, Stuyvesant justified the loss to his employers as not a particularly serious matter since the lack of fresh water on the island made it impossible to defend and easy to regain.

 

No surprise, then, that one of the first acts of the new British masters, after renaming the city New Yorke, was construction of public wells in the city.  Begun in 1667, these would remain a primary source of water for New Yorkers well into the 19th century. 

 

While this is a special case, it’s instructive that the municipal infrastructure was seen as a military resource, just as at Masada and elsewhere.

 

While regarded as public works projects, few public monies were actually spent.  People living on the street where a well had been sited were told to undertake construction on their own. 

 

Three hundred years later, we’d call that an ‘unfunded mandate’ – and it suffered the usual fate of unfunded mandates:

 

 

The plan went nowhere, though, with only one brackish well completed. 

 

3.         New York reinvented the Basic Model

 

With water a strategic necessity, and the coercive mandate having failed, the New Yorkers reinvented the Basic Model:

 

In 1686, construction of eight wells finally got underway through a combination of public funding and financial assessments of families who would be serviced by the well.

 

As in the modern Basic Model, the capital cost was funded by government, with the operating cost paid by the neighborhood using the resource:

 

Local residents were charged with ensuring proper maintenance; indeed, some of the wells later became known by the names of these overseers.

 

New York solved the free-rider problem in a fairly direct way:

 

People refusing to pay the assessment were threatened with forced sales of goods to make up the shortfall. 

 

The Basic Model proved durable, lasting a full century:

 

Long into the 18th century, most New Yorkers relied on these wells and the “Collect” (the anglicized pronunciation of the Kalch-hook) for free drinking water. 

 

New York, 1763

 

4.         Urbanization outstripped infrastructure, leading to slums

 

New York kept growing, but its water supply was finite:

 

During this period, however, urbanization continued and further industrial and population growth were clearly in store.  Sanitation, an ever-present problem in British cities, was becoming unmanageable. 

 

A municipal definition : slums are neighborhoods where housing has outrun infrastructure.  And as we saw with Rome (Part 5), the solution to informality that has outgrown efforts to contain it is legalize and tax.

 

Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist visiting New York in 1748, in a remark Rodney Dangerfield would have loved, observed that the well water was so terrible horses from out of town refused to drink it.  Others noted that well water had become so brackish and hard that soap would not dissolve.  The Collect, once the best source of drinking water on Manhattan, had become polluted from the tanneries and slaughterhouses on its banks.  It was described by a writer of the day as a “very sink and common sewer.” 

 

As New York kept growing, capitalism moved, and as it always does, it started with those most able to pay:

 

To those with an entrepreneurial spirit, the poor maintenance of the public wells and the increasingly disgusting state of the Collect posed not a problem but a business opportunity.  People with means began to purchase water from springs outside of town and deeper wells. 

 

The water here’s much cleaner than in the big city

 

Just as in Rome, a two-tiered system rapidly emerged.  Municipal water was available free, and if you doubted its quality, you could buy your own pure stock.

 

Water sold from these sources became known as “Tea Water” and was either fetched by slaves or bought from “Tea Water Men” who purchased water directly from the pump owners and then carted it throughout the city for sale in buckets and barrels.  By the middle of the 18th century, presaging the rise of branded bottled water two hundred years later, sale of Tea Water had become the best source of good drinking water in New York and different pumps were favored over others.  Indeed, a cottage industry developed around a pump operated by the Hardenbrooks family, popularly known as the “Tea Water Pump,” which apparently was the Perrier of its time.  Not everyone could afford to purchase Tea Water, of course, and the public wells remained in use. 

 

The limitations of public wells and the Collect to provide clean water, growing dependence on Tea Water sales, and general concern over the availability of water to fight fires made clear the need for a serious re-thinking of New York’s water supply.

  

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 7.]

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