Distrust me just this once? Part 1, the need for trust
“Trust me just this once.”
– from Great Lies in Real Estate, Volume 3
“Trust me, I’m on your side”
Slums persist in part because they have defenders. Among those defenders are many slum residents themselves, for whom a lifetime’s experience has taught them, Trust no one, especially any well-dressed or well-spoken newcomer who claims, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” That makes any slum upgrading program a hard sell, as illustrated by this Los Angeles Times article about the obsolescent and miserable public housing property Jordan Downs:
Fred Smith, left, 37, has lived in the Jordan Downs public housing project in
Ronald Perkins and his neighbors were nearly outnumbered by the consultants and architects who showed up at the Jordan Downs community center.
Planning session for Jordan Downs
Resident participation is a cornerstone of HOPE VI, as slumdweller control is a cornerstone of SluM Dwellers International’s Urban Poor Fund. But as Yogi Berra said, if people don’t wanna come to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop ‘em.
“Which is worse, apathy or ignorance?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
– High school joke
The public housing system is structured around dependency. Just as public housing’s financial schema makes housing authorities dependent on an autocratic HUD and behind that a fickle Congress, its residency policies – in particular, totally mean-tested rents and an allergy to evicting miscreants – promote resident dependency. It is poverty trap and also an initiative trap, and it engenders passivity:
For three hours, they listened as a procession of planners depicted their home as an “island of poverty,” and dissected it by “landscape character and typologies.”
I hear those quotes and wince. They’re hopelessly out of touch with their customers, and I can remember doing exactly the same thing. A quarter-century ago (heavens to Murgatroyd), I was briefly a consultant to HUD on the redevelopment of Academy Homes II, a dysfunctional concrete monstrosity in Roxbury that deserved to be torn down (and eventually was). I was brought in to explain to the residents how an equity syndication would work, and why the additional capital so raised was worth pursuing. The opposing alternative – one that the residents received more sympathetically – was a limited equity co-op. It sounded better; it offered them control. That it offered less money was impossible to convey.
Even as I described equity syndication, I think I knew I was failing. The residents weren’t buying what I was selling. Now, so many years later, I can see the same dynamics of persuasion failure in Jordan Downs.
To begin with, the consultants are speaking a language that makes them sound as if they lived on another planet. It’s hard enough to deal with people who have been nothing but betrayed. Don’t distance yourself!
But something puzzled Perkins as he studied the new homes that would replace their decrepit apartments in
Because you see the present, not the future.
Grilled Windows. The new Jordan Downs will take more than five years to complete. Current project residents will be moved into temporary housing across the street while their old homes are torn down and rebuilt.
And you have decades of experience on your side. As Laura Tach is exploring, people who have lived with repeated disappointment and dishonesty expect it in the future, and are often right.
The young architect in charge of Perkins’ group brightened at the observation, plunging into an animated explanation of architectural innovations that would make the neighborhood so safe, “you won’t need bars on your windows and doors.”
Perkins took that in, leaned into a whispered conversation with his wife, then looked back at the architect.
“I think,” Perkins said, taking pains to be polite, “that I would feel better with bars of some type.”
Not the third world:
Seeing the reality above, wouldn’t you?
Laura Tach’s research also highlights that people see what they expect to see, and they interpret what they see as confirming their expectations.
The bars on every window and door might seem like evidence of urban blight to architects. But to residents like Perkins, they represent the freedom to sleep with a breeze blowing through an open window, while thieves prowl the neighborhood at night. (The bars were added back onto a tentative list of amenities.)
Design should allow downstream configuration flexibility. [You're talking like a consultant again – Ed. Hey, these are blog readers – Auth.] Bars built into a renovation/ redevelopment plan can later be removed if they prove superfluous. But now, when the residents’ support is essential, the credible promise of bars is crucial.
Once again, the utopian vision of urban planners had run up against the gritty reality of project life.
Why are these things clashing? At a more basic level, what say do the current residents have, and why do they have it?
The new Jordan Downs will cost more than $1 billion –
Just as in our slum dwellers of the global south, the Jordan Downs residents occupy socially valuable real estate. Regardless of legalities, they have political squatters’ rights. Residents can spot this. You’re being nice to me, runs their undercurrent. You must want something from me. Until I know what it is, I won’t give it.
I can’t see the flow but it I know it’s there
– and take more than five years to complete.
A billion bucks? Five years? How big is this property, and where does it get the political clout to command that kind of money? Here’s the reason:
Los Angeles officials are embarking on a $1-billion plan to tear down the notorious Jordan Downs housing project and turn it into a “new urban village” — an effort aimed at transforming the Watts neighborhood that would be one of the city’s largest public works projects.
The heart of
The city wants to replace the project’s 700 dilapidated units, which were built more than a half-century ago, with taller “mixed-use” buildings that would house not just low-income residents but also those paying market rates. The new development could include as many as 2,100 units.
For
Bounded by
As Wikipedia condenses the property’s bleak history:
The complex was originally developed as semi-permanent housing for war workers during World War II.
Wars, like other emergencies, throw up tracts of housing.
A city cut from the
In the early 1950s, the Housing Authority of the
In the 1950s,
Back from the war, and back in
Even if this is basic, it’s better than they had, and good enough for them.
It opened in 1955, shortly after new mayor Norris Poulson ended all new public housing in the city.
[Editor's note: Housing programs are usually started by Democrats, usually suspended by Republicans. It may or may not be a bug; it's certainly a feature. – Ed.]
It takes a lot of paperwork to shut down a housing program
In other words, Jordan Downs is a stepchild.
It was featured in Menace II Society
Giving new meaning to “shot in the projects”: Menace II Society
Born in the 1940s as temporary housing, Jordan Downs began its affordable-housing life as solid lower-income housing: decent, safe, and sanitary, in the unforgettable 1949 National Housing Act promise. Time marches on though, and properties obsolesce even as most markets improvement and some neighborhoods decline. A half-century of inadequate resources, both economic and political, has left Jordan Downs dilapidated. If it is to be revitalized, the buildings must go somewhere to die, and the residents must relocate before they do:
Current project residents will be moved into temporary housing across the street while their old homes are torn down and rebuilt.
‘Temporary housing across the street’? Readers can well appreciate that while I believe the planners, current Jordan Downs residents, who’ve lived their whole lives in what was planned as temporary housing, may not:
Then, if things go according to the master plan –
And if the plans miscarry?
– they will move back into a new complex with middle-class neighbors, a bank of shops and businesses, and a cutting-edge high school campus next door.
Such transformations are possible. Atlanta has done it.
Hard Sell. They also cannot imagine life alongside the middle-class families the project plans to lure.
“I think because of the focus on the people and the programs and the resources that are needed, that it’s very much going to be a success,” promised John King II, a planning director at the city’s Housing Authority.
Full of promise? John King II and housing authority youth
So far, tenants are less than impressed.
It matters to understand why.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2].
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