Would you rather spend $138 and get 360 brand-new objects, or spend $130 and get 269 used objects?

What is this, asks the reader, a trick question? 

Not to the New York City Housing Authority, but perhaps to those whose willingness to believe and trust has been incinerated by many years of unfulfilled hopes.  As reported in the New York Times [February 6, 2010 – Ed.]:

Philadelphia tore down 21. Chicago leveled 79. Baltimore took down 21 as well, and when 6 of them came down in one day in 1995, it threw a parade.

IMPLOSION–The implosion of a large housing project in Newark in 1996. Many cities have moved toward smaller-scale housing that does not carry the stigma of despair and poverty.

Since the 1990s, public housing high-rise buildings have come tumbling down by the dozens across the country as cities replace them with smaller suburban-style homes that do not carry the stigma of looming urban despair and poverty.

Not just in America.  London has torn down some of its council high-rises.  Paris should tear down its.  Even as increasing density means cities must go vertical, going vertical is the prerogative of the wealthy.  The poorer you are, the more important it is for you to live on or near the ground floor – despite theoretical architects like Le Corbusier, the only people who can live happily in a high-rise are middle-income or rich.  Very low income high-rises become the slums inside.

New York City has long been the great exception, and red-brick towers still dominate the skyline from the Lower East Side to East Harlem, from Mott Haven, in the Bronx, to Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Dents in the sign notwithstanding, a wonderful community?

New York is exceptional for many reasons:

• It has long had the nation’s most capable large public housing authority
• As the cradle of apartment and high-rise living, it’s got a granite backbone uniquely suited to high-rises.
• NYCHA has been searching the sofa cushions (to scrape up extra operating money) and selling the family silver (disposing of non-core assets) to stave off the evil day.

Yet, as we saw only a few weeks ago, rehab deferred is rehab denied, and New York City, under the capable direction of Michael Kelly, has finally reached the inevitable conclusion for this property:

But now, for the first time in its 75-year history, the New York City Housing Authority wants to knock down an entire high-rise complex, Prospect Plaza in Brooklyn — a move that has surprised and angered a number of former tenants and advocates for low-income housing.

In the past decade, the authority has chosen to renovate rather than tear down its aging housing stock, often at great expense. Its decision to demolish Prospect Plaza was not the result of a sweeping policy shift, but of the failure of a renovation project that became bogged down in years of administrative, financial and legal problems.

The failure of Prospect Park’s HOPE VI renovation – a failure over a decade in the making – is a classic story.  Visions of sugar plums brought to the party far too  many cooks, all angling for their own piece of the pie.  As profiled in a story I discovered from City Limits, July 1, 2001, the inevitability effect doomed the Prospect Plaza HOPE VI transaction:

Here are a few snippets from the tragedy:

A consortium of community groups and churches, which joined with project tenants to jointly administer the funds, are now [July 1, 2001 – Ed.] duking it out for control of the money.

While they fought over the financial ice cream cone, it melted away.  Here’s a representative snapshot from a story so dreary I cannot bear to quote it:

Early on, when Abdur-Rahman Farrakhan became chairman of the PPDC, the group quickly descended into a nasty war of words. Farrakhan accuses other nonprofits–in particular the Brooklyn Interborough Community Network (BICNet)–of manipulating Prospect Plaza’s tenants in the hopes of getting large contracts for job training and technical assistance. “Everybody is looking to position themselves as best they can to be able to take advantage of this,” he says. Farrakhan says that Shelton Jefferson, who heads BICNet, “wanted a guaranteed contract and went to the tenants to stir shit up.”

Jefferson says he’s astonished by Farrakhan’s charge. “I doubt if Mr. Farrakhan would say something like that,” he says. “I have become involved in this project only because I was asked. I was asked by NYCHA to be an adviser to the tenants.”

For several years, NYCHA and its preferred developer, a very capable organization khown as Michaels Development, pursued HOPE VI, but that too collapsed.  Meanwhile – rehab deferred is rehab denied – the buildings became progressively more empty, more decrepit, and more expensive to renovate.

Prospect Plaza today: derelict and fenced off

Don’t let the windows fool you – the ground floors are boarded up

Prospect Plaza — three 12- to 15-story towers in Brownsville — is plagued by neither despair nor poverty: It has been vacant since 2003, when the last tenants were moved out with the promise they could return to refurbished apartments.

So why are we keeping an outmoded shell?  Nostalgia?  Or political expectation?  Or something simpler – like distrust of the alternative?

Agency officials say they want to tear down the 35-year-old buildings and erect new apartments in their place. Officials initially planned to leave the towers standing and reconfigure the apartments, by eliminating some units to create bigger living rooms and bathrooms, but those plans were scrapped by the authority’s new leadership because demolition made better financial sense.

It often does.  Buildings become obsolete, the more so when they fail to receive periodic upgrading and repositioning.

Ilene Popkin, the agency’s assistant deputy general manager for development, said the three buildings had deteriorated from vandalism and exposure to the elements, and were out of context with the neighborhood.

She said it would cost $481,000 to renovate each of the 269 apartments. Demolishing the structures and building 361 new units would cost $381,700 per unit.

If you do that arithmetic, renovation will cost $130 million and deliver 269 existing apartments; new-build will cost $138 million and deliver 361 – 92 more apartments for only $8 million more.

Mo’ money, mo’ housing

Moreover, because they’re new-build, with no resident relocation challenges, the construction will go faster, with far fewer unknowns or temporal risk factors.

The new apartments — including public and private housing, not only for the poor but also for low- and moderate-income families — are likely to be built in low-rise buildings.

Prospect Plaza originally included four towers housing 1,200 people.  [Not units – Ed.]

One was torn down in 2005; the plan was to use that space for a new community center, shops and additional housing. But today, the building’s old footprint is just a fenced-off lot.

Many public housing properties suffer from excessive density, particularly if the apartments are designed for families.  Babies have the annoying habit of growing up into toddlers, then into children, then into adolescents, and all these increasingly animate and rambunctious small people

That building was the first high-rise the authority demolished. In 2007, the agency also knocked down a number of two-story buildings as part of the redevelopment of the Markham Gardens complex on Staten Island.

The authority has completed the first two phases of its Prospect Plaza redevelopment plan, involving not the actual housing project itself but 37 two-family houses and 150 rental units in four-story town-house-style buildings that were constructed on nearby lots formerly owned by the city.

It’s a start – improving the neighborhood surrounding the public housing property.

The new Prospect Plaza: not a project but a neighborhood

The ribbon-cutting – always a happy moment

Several former residents of Prospect Plaza and groups that represent public housing tenants said they did not support the demolition, in part, because it was unclear to them that the authority intended to replace the old units with the same number of new public housing units.

While I understand about residents’ fear of losing apartments, there is a vast difference between losing a judicial unit – an apartment that is contractually or legally obligated to be affordable, irrespective of whether it is inhabitable – versus losing an actual unit. 

Do we count the unit as here or lost?

Even as the three towers sit vacant on Prospect Place near Saratoga Avenue, they continue to be a costly expense for the cash-strapped authority, which has paid a security firm $25,000 a month since 2005 to keep watch over the buildings.

At $25,000 a month for five years, that’s $1.5 million – which could have meant five more brand-new apartments after the rebuilding.  A large fraction of our public housing stock has decayed beyond salvageability, and – as we saw in Atlanta – it takes an executive with some courage to say so.

Agency officials have not decided how many of the new apartments will be public housing, but they said that former residents and community leaders would help make that determination.

“We are committed to being shoulder to shoulder with you,” the agency’s new general manager, Michael Kelly, told former tenants and others at a community meeting last week [Late January – Ed.] a few blocks from the vacant buildings.

Michael Kelly, general manager of the New York City Housing Authority, tried to reassure former tenants at a public meeting.

As I’ve previously posted, Mike Kelly is one of the good guys.  I trust him.

The cost of demolishing the towers and building the new apartments is estimated at $138 million. Part of the financing will come from a $21.4 million federal grant the authority was awarded in 1999 to revitalize Prospect Plaza, of which about $17 million remains.

The other $4 million got spent in the ill-fated Michaels HOPE VI effort.

At the meeting, Mr. Kelly said it was too early to say where the rest of the financing would come from. Agency documents describe the project as “mixed finance,” meaning it will be paid for with public and private dollars, with some of the money coming from the sale of federal low-income housing tax credits.

Doctoral candidate Laura Tach likes income mixing

Meaning income mixing, meaning LIHTC residents and so on.

The demolition, which must be approved by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, is planned for this fall, with construction scheduled to start in 2012.

If one cannot finance the renovation, one has no choice but a teardown and rebuild.

Preference for the new public housing units will go to former residents, many of whom were relocated to other public housing in Brooklyn.

Milton Bolton, 50, a former resident and the president of the still-intact Prospect Plaza Tenants Association, held up a thick draft of a 1998 application for the federal grant and said, “It’s hard to have trust.”

Milton Bolton, the tenant association president of Prospect Plaza, at the vacant buildings where he used to live.

There comes a time when buildings have to go somewhere to die; when that happens, it is a kindness to get rid of them.

Ms. Popkin and Mr. Kelly acknowledged “bumps along the road” for the project in the past, but they stressed their desire to rebuild the neighborhood. “I understand that folks here are frustrated,” Ms. Popkin said. “There is a new management at Nycha. We have a commitment to these towers. This is a top priority to move forward.”

Initially I was skeptical of Mr. Bolton’s distrust, until I found these paragraphs from nine years ago:

Even residents who say they’d welcome higher-income neighbors are running out of patience. Milton Bolton, the president of the Prospect Plaza Tenant Association and once a big booster of the plan, is now [July, 2001 – Ed.] ambivalent. He’s distressed that the social service programs are not established yet–particularly the homeowner training workshops, since he someday hopes to buy a house. Bolton, a soft-spoken bear of a man, sits in a straight-backed chair and bounces his 2-year-old son [The boy is now 11 – Ed.] on his lap as his seven other children scoot in and out of the room. “We welcome the changes,” he says. “We welcome the impact if it’s done right. But no matter what we do, it still feels like we’re fighting a losing battle.”

Bolton, who has put in countless hours on the Prospect Plaza deal, believes that he will not be allowed to return to the project once the renovations are complete. He has been unemployed for a while and admits that there have been many times that he has fallen behind in his rent. He’s even been put on probation for the problem. “What they’re telling me is once I leave, I’m not coming back,” he says. “We just have to hope they bring at least some of the people back.”

I sometimes forget that those residents who have the most time to devote to public housing advocacy may be those who have the fewest economic resources.  I respect and admire Mr. Bolton’s patience and commitment in the face of uncertainty and disappointment.

Bolton keeps hoping

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[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

– Oscar Wilde

In the first two parts of this post, we encountered (via a Los Angeles Times article) Los Angeles‘ Jordan Downs public housing property, and the ambitious (if sketchy and idealistic) plans for its comprehensive redevelopment, a plan that requires resident input and consent.  Understandably, like their counterparts in Mumbai’s Dharavi, who squat over equally well-located land that is proposed to be an equally inspiring and revolutionary urban redevelopment, they are skeptical.  Even distrustful.

Selling the new vision: is you is or is you ain’t buying?

And it is the job of John King II, executive director of the Housing Authority of the CIty of Los Angeles, to earn their trust:

“Until they see it, it’s hard to get people to trust,” he said. “We’re trying to build that by delivering on what we say.”

Because the solution is its salesware, the best proof will be the development itself, fully completed, and that lies in the future, where it is unknowable.  So the planners are doing the next best thing – taking them to meet their peers in other properties:

Planners have worked hard to generate tenants’ support. They took a team of locals on a national tour of similar redevelopment projects –

Peer-to-peer works.  Not just the properties – the people.  Actually, it’s the people who are more important, because they have been through the experience, and they know what the Jordan Downs residents do not.  If the Jordan Downs steering committee is wise, it will make peer-to-peer exchange not a isolated event, but an integral ongoing process.  If they’re really smart, they’ll fund these exchanges in the project budget, and encourage peer-to-peer interactions with no one else present.  Get out of the way.

Community Barber.  Resident Andre Powns gives a haircut to his son Alijah, 3.

There’s an essential element of trust that the project leaders need to show their residents.  Not the money, not the trips, but the chance to talk to peers while no one else is watching.

– and have offered free lunches for tenants who sit through the marathon presentations and focus-group sessions.

SDI leadership, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Wrong dynamic: free lunches and marathon presentations and focus groups aren’t what builds trust.  Trust builds trust.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes Watts, has promised to protect residents’ interests, and they trust her. She and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa plan to meet today with residents at Jordan Downs.

Trust can be misplaced when public-choice risk is involved.  But then, I’m naturally skeptical.  A better peer is someone who’s traveled the same roads you have. 

They count on ambassadors such as Richard Alford, who lives a few blocks away but grew up in Jordan Downs; his grandmother, aunts and sisters still live in the projects. He visited Seattle, Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Atlanta with the team of architects designing the project.

“I whip out my pictures and [say] ‘Wouldn’t you like to get brand new pipes?’ ” he said.

Trust is not won by weight of evidence.  Trust is won by immediacy, and reliability of the messenger.

“Touch my wound”

Trust requires vocalization; fear hides in silence.

He tries to push tenants to ask for what they want, and assures them they won’t be shipped out to Lancaster and forgotten. “I tell them I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Though Lancaster is not the end of the world – I’ve been there, and my company handled the recapitalization of a property there – it is on the far side of the San Gabriel mountains. 

85 miles, 3 hours 10 minutes in traffic, a lifetime in experience

A long way from the neighborhood.

“Toto, I think we’re not in the ‘hood any more”

Communities are cryptobiotica – the web of living people stronger than the web of physical structures.  Disperse them like dandelion seeds and they may be new people, but they will not be the same community.

But even its biggest cheerleaders worry that the project might be undone by its homegrown web of challenges.

A community develops its own ethos, and that ethos becomes stronger even as the physical community becomes more isolated.  The ethos may be strong – and it may resist improvement.

“Jordan Downs is the most extreme case I’ve seen, by a long shot,” said San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon, who heads the project’s planning team and has redeveloped other city projects.
“The project’s size, the sense of isolation, the horrible statistics about crime and public health . . . the sense of entrapment people feel there,” Solomon said, ticking off the consequences of a “history of abandonment” in South L.A.

We are rational creatures who make sense of the world around us.  The world around Jordan Downs forgot Jordan Downs, dumped its poor there, left them to fend as best they could. 

High School Graduates.  Michael Jerod Adams, 17, hugs fellow graduate Vanna Briattany Colbert after high school graduation ceremonies at the housing project. The graduation was held for the Los Angeles Computer Science Academy at Jordan Downs.

The world didn’t necessarily mean to do them harm; harm just happened.  That makes it no less harmful.

To a stranger, Jordan Downs feels like a world unto itself. Stand in almost any spot on the 50-acre property and you see row after row of identical two-story buildings that look like barracks, distinguishable only by an occasional rosebush near a front door or the size of shirts on clotheslines crisscrossing every backyard.

A barracks it was, and a barrack it is … just a different group of conscripts

Right now, ugly though it may be, Jordan Downs is low-density: only fourteen apartments to the acre.  That is proposed to triple, plus there will be additional non-housing uses.  The place, when transformed, will be unrecognizable; all traces of the old Jordan Downs will have vanished.

If it happens.  Count the recursive cycles of deprivation and poverty that block the residents’ trust.

I believe only what I can prove

1.  Failure is comfortable because it is familiar

But the bunkered uniformity that ties down residents also gives some comfort; there’s less shame being out of work or on welfare when almost everyone around you is as well.

If everyone fails, then my failure is no failure, and we can all be comfortable; indeed, the only risk is in trying.

No HOPE in sight

2.  Trusting only those one knows

“There’s an amazing sense of community there, and they don’t want that dismantled,” Solomon said. “These are their homies, and they cannot imagine life without them.”

If no one I do not know has helped me, then I can trust only those I know.

And I don’t want to know you

3.  Fearing those who are successful

They also cannot imagine life alongside the middle-class families the project plans to lure.

That they cannot is the most severe indictment of public housing imaginable.  People so isolated they cannot imagine themselves living with others.  For the redevelopment to succeed, the developers will have to enable people to change what they expect to see.

“Upscale people are not going to move over here, to the heart of the ghetto,” said Smith, of Parolees for Change. “They’ll be, like: ‘Where are the gas stations? Who are all these dudes hanging around? Why did that guy take off with my car?’ “

Gas stations can be brought.  Stores can be added.  People will come if the community is comprehensively transformed, including its policing.  Such strategies have worked in Atlanta; they’ve worked in Boston.

How do you overcome the unvoiced belief, Yeah, but it’ll never happen here?

Public housing: before, Mission Hill being demolished

Public housing: after, Mission Main as built

4.  Failure shrinks horizons

At the meeting last month, one resident panned what planners figured would be a welcome draw: new businesses on-site and more frequent bus service. “Don’t you want a grocery store closer to Jordan Downs?” asked the architect.

Genevia Penny shrugged him off. The Food 4 Less is close enough, she said, and a 20-minute wait for the bus is no trouble.

Close enough for the housing project?

Prisoners kept in long confinement are psychologically manipulated by offering them hope of imminent release … they snatching it away at the last moment.  Disappointment is so powerful we build up defenses against hope, and those defenses create the death of hope.

A trip to the market is a good reason to get dressed and go out; the bus stop is a good place to catch up on neighborhood gossip.

Talk about your rationalizations.

“They want to make it so we don’t get out in the world,” Penny complained. “What’s the senior citizens like me supposed to do — just sit around and watch TV?”

Self-destructive … but self-reinforcing.

Born of the public housing: Grape Street Crips, project in the background

5.  The community self-polices … because no one else does

When force passes for law

Smith took Solomon on a walking tour of the projects — an eye-opener for the architect, who realized “they think we have a Pollyannaish view of their lives.” And “they” are right.

“Their daily experiences are so different from what anybody who doesn’t live in that environment can imagine,” Solomon said, recounting his introduction to a place where nobody blinks when the front-office receptionist explains that she is late because her seven-year-old son woke up to a dead body on their front step.

All the world’s landscape character and typologies will not change that. 

Policing has to start now.

And it takes force

6.  Trust requires the powerful to give first

At a community meeting last month, a middle-aged Latino man limped to the microphone, leaning on a walker, to present the suggestions from his group of neighbors.

“I know we can’t demand anything,” he said, his voice rising over the interpreter translating his Spanish. “But I would like to make a request. We have a lot of vandalism in the area, and we are devastated by that. So we would like to have an inspector. Right now. Today.” He pounded the handle of his walker, and the women and children at the table behind him applauded.

A fair idea.  One I hope the designers immediately implemented.  I wonder if they did.

I trust you means that I risk letting you hurt me even when I cannot retaliate.  You are trustworthy when, presented with that opportunity, instead of hurting me, you help me – usually at risk to yourself.

But if some sentiments have surprised the consultants, some suggestions have surprised the residents.

What about a health club, where elderly residents could exercise, one of the consultants offered. Or a computer center, where senior citizens could learn to use technology?

Penny stared at her with raised eyebrows, uncharacteristically silent. Twenty-four years in the projects and she had yet to consider all of its possibilities.

Community center, Cement Factory redevelopment, Cape Town

Will Jordan Downs make it?  Will the residents come to trust?  Will those they trust tale critical risks in return?

Another Oscar Wilde quote

A phrase quoted to me by my friend Andrea Titterington, who for the last several years has been building trust in Liverpool’s Anfield neighborhood as she struggles to secure all the approvals, and all the funding, for a state-of-the-art new stadium complex:

Nothing about us

without us

is for us.

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[Continued from yesterday's Part 1].

“Who are you going to believe: me or your lying eyes?”

– Groucho Marx, Duck Soup

To redevelop Jordan Downs, one of Los Angeles’s largest and worst public housing properties, requires gargantuan capital – the figure $1,000,000,000 has been bandied about – and that, in turn, requires massive political capital, including the legitimizing vote of confidence from Jordan Downs’ current residents.  In yesterday’s Part 1 we discovered, as shown in this Los Angeles Times article, that many earnest well-educated folks are trying to persuade the residents not merely to endorse but also to engage.  All this takes trust, and trust is a commodity sorely lacking at Jordan Downs.

Trying to survive.  Some residents are just too busy trying to survive to worry about the rebuilding project. Only about a dozen of Jordan Downs’ 700 families turn out consistently at architects’ planning sessions.

Many have spent their whole lives in the projects — long enough to remember when a similar renewal proposal 20 years ago crumbled –

More significantly, long enough to have forgotten any other world.

– amid political resistance and tenants’ complaints.

Change and slum redevelopment always have two powerful and self-reinforcing enemies: residents and politicians.  The reasons are complicated, and not always noble.

As I’ve written before, many groups ‘win’ from a slum:

Slums are economically rational, they are a wealth-extraction machine, and they are places where private investment (usually in housing) has outpaced municipal infrastructure.  They cannot be bulldozed out of existence, much though some try.  That they are durable proves that not only are they rational, they also have a systemic robustness, which means they self-repair, and that means there are people who want the slum to endure – those who are slums’ winners.

We don’t like to think that slums have winners, but they do, and like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, they come in varying shades of need, desperation, and culpability.

Though I wrote all this about informal settlements in the global south, it applies equally well to decrepit public housing.  

Los Angeles public housing: Imperial Courts

People who believe they are winning tend to resist changing the status quo.    Some of them use the slum, or the public housing property, as a place to hide:

2.             People who cannot live formally.  Some people live in the shadows.  They are illegal immigrants, fugitives from the law, those whose income is not merely informal but also illicit.  They cannot take the risk of living legally, so they find the shadow apartments, the slums inside.  They will rationally pay a surcharge (in terms of too much rent for the quality of housing received) to a landlord who won’t turn them in to the authorities. 

Alaye Ba, a 46-year-old Senegalese immigrant shows stacks of dried wood in the basement of his building, filled with African families waiting to be placed in public housing, in Paris, Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005.

Some demagogues see these places as vote banks:

Plenty of votes down here … if you’ll grub for them

9.             Politicians seeking vote banks.  Slum dwellers are people too, and in genuine democracies, they get to vote, and their votes matter.  Rich or poor, all votes are equal, so elected officials doing their political calculus realize that slums represent vote banks. 

Our votes can dig your political grave

Though many a populist has arisen from the slums, slum dwellers get used to disappointment.  [Snip]  Slum dwellers are often disempowered, and deceived by political vaporware: promises made with no intention of their being kept, or even the best of intentions and the worst of commitments. 

The residents of Jordan Downs – that is, those brave enough to come out to task force discussions and community meetings – are justifiably skeptical.  They’ve heard promises before. 

Many suspect that this project is an excuse to kick them out of their subsidized apartments, where rents are based on family income; some say they pay less than $100 a month.

Utterly nonsensical, I wrote in the margin when first I read this, yet now I’m rethinking it, because of this:

1.             City-dwellers who have minimal rent-paying power.   People move to cities to earn cash money (because city economies run on cash, not barter).  Because urban land’s value rises with the city’s median income, the population’s bottom decile can never afford anything remotely like market quality. 

Boston’s South End, late nineteenth century

Those who can pay the least move to slums.

(This also suggests that the most hideous slums will occur in the richest cities, because the gap between median income and bottom income will be the largest.)

The cynical affordability of slums has a flip side: the economic unaffordability of market housing.  Because of the cost-value gap, ‘voluntary market eviction’ is a genuine phenomenon, whether in new-construction mid-rises of Sao Paulo’s Cingapura properties or rebuilt post-redevelopment HOPE VI.

After HOPE VI: Orchard Gardens, Roxbury, Boston

If urban land is valuable, perhaps it is too valuable for the poorest?

But we are promising you’ll have the right to return, said those in power.  Look at all the evidence of our commitment.

What evidence is proof if you doubt all evidence?

Conspiracy theories.  A crackdown on lease violators has fueled conspiracy theories, particularly among blacks, who have watched the population in the project shift from virtually all-black 40 years ago to more than two-thirds Latino today.

Others are weary of broken commitments, among them the city’s promise three years ago to install Internet access if tenants dropped objections to security cameras.

This bizarre dynamic – the offering to give one benefit if the residents stop objecting to another benefit – only makes sense when you deduce the existence of people who cannot live formally.  It’s easy enough for them to rouse their neighbors into voicing what they will not – political shields, if you will.

And some are just too busy trying to survive to worry about abstractions like “landscape typologies,” or choose between rooftop decks and community courtyards. Only about a dozen of Jordan Downs’ 700 families turn out consistently at architects’ planning sessions.

The only thing worse than having community participation, said Oscar Wilde, is not having community participation. 

“Always forgive your enemies.  Nothing annoys them so much.”

“The projects ain’t feeling this right now,” explained longtime resident Fred “Scorpio” Smith.
Aside from 13 years in the penitentiary, Smith, 37, has lived in Jordan Downs his whole life.

The community voice?  Fred Smith, ex-convict and spokesperson

Telling, isn’t it, that Mr. Smith has spent one-third of his life incarcerated?  Perhaps Mr. Smith has friends who’d prefer the absence of change.

He ticked off a string of tenants evicted for penny-ante transgressions, like elderly “Miss Lewis,” kicked out after 53 years, Smith said, when a project employee saw a set of clothes belonging to her 47-year-old son.

Oral histories are always melodramas.  Good is represented by the teller and his friends; bad by those both powerful and evil.  Inconvenient facts are conveniently omitted.

Somehow, I find myself certain that this 47-year-old son is serious bad news. 

“He lives in Riverside. Showed them his address.”

Then perhaps Miss Lewis’s apartment is his place of business.  Perhaps that business is illegal.  Perhaps he terrorizes his mother, or perhaps she is too old to know what is going on.  Using an innocent as a rental front, hiding behind the elderly, behind women, behind children, is a preferred technique in houses of crime.

Still, Lewis was accused of violating her lease by harboring a tenant not on the lease, Smith said. “It’s like they got a secret list. You blink twice and you’re out.”

Not possible.  Not with legal aid.  Not in Los Angeles, America’s homelessness magnet.

Such stories fuel conspiracy theories, particularly among blacks who have watched the population in the project shift from virtually all-black 40 years ago to more than two-thirds Latino today.

Garage Sell.  Many residents suspect that the renewal plan is an excuse to kick them out of their subsidized apartments, where rents are based on family income; some say they pay less than $100 a month.

When people do not know, they imagine.  When fearful people imagine, what they imagine increases their fear.

I don’t feel good about what they’re conjuring up

King concedes that there has been a crackdown on lease violators by a new staff installed to remedy years of mismanagement.

‘Concedes’?  I’d be touting it.  Rules you don’t enforce are worse than useless.  Living in public housing is not a birthright; it demands lease compliance.

Evictions are up, he said, but blacks are not being targeted.

“We’re just holding families accountable for what they should have been doing all along,” he said.

Is that proof good enough for you, reader?  Or are you skeptical?

Every tenant “in good standing” will be allowed to remain and return when the new homes are done, he added.

Experience in other HOPE VI properties suggests that only a minority of public housing residents who relocate off-site during HOPE VI actually move back.  Some find new lives elsewhere, and shake off their public-housing mentality as if it were a bad dream.  Others are, in fact, not lease compliant, a condition tolerated in the shadows of pre-renovation operations, but intolerable in the bright light of a comprehensive redevelopment.

King, who grew up a few miles away, understands why Jordan Downs tenants don’t fully trust planners and public officials.

And what it will take to win them over.

I’m from the projects: show me

[Continued tomorrow in Part 3].

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– 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 Watts most of his life.

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 Watts. So when the tenants were asked for their opinions, he raised his hand: “How come I don’t see no bars on the windows?”

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: Los Angeles, Watts, Jordan Downs

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 Watts, a neighborhood whose very name evokes racial rioting.

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 Los Angeles, transforming Watts is vital.  It’s a huge neighborhood, a blot on the civic landscape, and a name conjuring urban failure.  Yet it’s also home to these families, who are living in housing that, like so many properties, began life as ‘temporary shelter’ and only gradually turned, like petrified wood, into the permanent landscape:

Bounded by Grape Street to the west, 97th Street to the north, Alameda Street to the east, and 103rd Street.

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.  Oak Ridge Tennessee sprouted out of the Blue Ridge Mountains; less honorably, California hosted Japanese internment camps. 

A city cut from the Blue Ridge, to create a nuclear laboratory

Los Angeles, one of America’s arsenal of factories, gave birth to Jordan Downs.  Then the war ended, and the housing should have been scrapped like so much other war surplus, but it survived:

In the early 1950s, the Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles converted it to public housing; it was among the last of the public housing projects in Watts to be opened for that purpose.

In the 1950s, Watts was going from white to black (memorably depicted in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress), and while I have not researched it, I suspect there was more than a little good-enough-mentality in the decision. 

Back from the war, and back in Watts: Easy Rawlins, Devil in a Blue Dress

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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