Is blight, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

Houses to be condemned to make way for Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Look blighted to you?

Or is blight just a planner’s word for a city’s natural messiness?

Does this look blighted to you?

Though the question is metaphysical, the answer is anything but.  On that finding of judicial ‘fact’ hinges the most contentious issue in eminent domain for economic development (ED4ED) today, as explored in a protracted City Journal editorial essay by Nicole Gelinas.

Spot the blight: Atlantic Yards

Indeed, what seems an intractable policy problem – when is ED4ED permissible, and when must it be prohibited? – can be reduced to a problem of boundary –what is blight?  In turn, the entire problem, over which so many hours of legal wrestling have been held, can be solved easily – the fuzzy boundary has to be construed against the party with power, so either define blight objectively and observably, or eliminate it as a valid reason.

To see why, we must descend the rabbit hole of current jurisprudence, in particular the way ‘blight’ has been redefined out of all observable meaning (Part 1 of this post), and then resurface elsewhere to see how ED4ED is requisite for urban improvement (Part 2), and hence how to reconcile the competing pressures.

1. If property is ‘blighted,’ government can take it.  Lost in the political uproar that followed the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London 5-4 decision is that the jurisprudence on ED4ED is half a century old, as laid down in a landmark 8-0 decision in 1954 [Same year as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, another landmark – Ed.], Berman v. Parker.  Under Berman, a Supreme Court enraptured with the promise of economic development allowed the District of Columbia Redevelopment Authority to demolish and rebuild a large chunk of southwestern Washington, based on the finding of ‘blight’, which in the 1954 decision was concluded to exist because:

“64.3% of the dwellings were beyond repair, 18.4% needed major repairs, only 17.3% were satisfactory; 57.8% of the dwellings had outside toilets, 60.3% had no baths, 29.6% lacked electricity, 82.2% had no wash basins or laundry tubs, 83.8% lacked central heating.”

I think anyone today would agree that even in 1954, properties without indoor plumbing, central heating, or running water, constituted blight.  Indeed, under today’s laws – absent in 1954 – those buildings could be condemned as unsanitary. 

 The court that gave us Brown v. Board of Education also gave us Berman

As Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the unanimous court, put it:

Miserable and disreputable housing conditions may do more than spread disease and crime and immorality. They may also suffocate the spirit by reducing the people who live there to the status of cattle. They may indeed make living an almost insufferable burden. They may also be an ugly sore, a blight on the community which robs it of charm, [p33] which makes it a place from which men turn. The misery of housing may despoil a community as an open sewer may ruin a river.

Unfortunately for Justice Douglas’s defenders, the greatest blight now inflicted on many northern urban communities are the slums inside, the high-rise public housing properties such as the French banlieues, all of which should be torn down, and many of which have been torn down or are being torn down.

We’re not sorry to see you go

Justice Douglas was doing more than penning a manifesto.  (No one ever accused Justice Douglas of lacking in legal imagination, as when in Roe v. Wade he found that a right to privacy ‘emanates from the penumbra of the Constitution’ – in other words, that were was no Constitutional language to support it.)  Here he was grounding the decision in an expanded concept of ‘public health’ so as to argue that blight goes beyond the optical:

In the present case, the Congress and its authorized agencies have made determinations that take into account a wide variety of values. It is not for us to reappraise them. If those who govern the District of Columbia decide that the Nation’s Capital should be beautiful as well as sanitary, there is nothing in the Fifth Amendment that stands in the way. ["Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation," the 'takings' clause. -- Ed.]

Berman proved to be the opening salvo in a half-century of ever-expanding municipal authority and judicial deference to local findings.  In 1984 the Supreme Court even expanded municipal discretion through the Midkiff decision, so that when in 2005 the court upheld New London’s taking of Suzette Kelo’s house, the remarkable point was not that the city won, but that it won ‘only’ 5-4, and in winning provoked an impressive and sustained voter backlash.  As the City Journal essay put it:

In 2005, in Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court decided that these “public purposes” could even include economic development. But New York’s constitution theoretically holds the state to a higher standard. In 1967, Empire State voters voted not to add a “public purpose” clause to their constitution, preferring to stick with the stricter requirement of “public use.”

2. Once ‘blight’ is found, the state can flip property to a private developer.  In parallel with the thread of government having a police power to take small parcels and aggregate them into more rational urban uses ran another thread, that the state can contract these basically technical functions to a private third party.  Here too it was the supremely confident Douglas who wrote the sweeping apologia:

The firebrand justice: William O. Douglas

Here, one of the means chosen is the use of private enterprise for redevelopment of the area. Appellants argue that this makes the project a taking from one businessman for the benefit of another businessman. But the means of executing the project are for Congress, and Congress alone, to determine once the public purpose has been established. See Luxton v. North River Bridge Co., supra; cf. Highland v. Russell Car Co., 279 U.S. 253.

The public end may be as well or better served through an [p34] agency of private enterprise than through a department of government — or so the Congress might conclude.

We cannot say that public ownership is the sole method of promoting the public purposes of community redevelopment projects. What we have said also disposes of any contention concerning the fact that certain property owners in the area may be permitted to repurchase their properties for redevelopment in harmony with the over-all plan. That, too, is a legitimate means which Congress and its agencies may adopt, if they choose.

Now enters the worm of self-interest, for if the state can gobble up small parcels from small and politically unconnected holders, and bestow them in a bundle on a politically connected private redeveloper, then both the redeveloper and the municipality have a selfish interest in doing so.  Land that is redeveloped becomes more valuable.  Land that is rezoned becomes more valuable.

Raise the height, raise the value, raze the incumbents

None of this bothered Douglas, taken as he was by a vision of the city council as philosopher-kings:

Subject to specific constitutional limitations, when the legislature has spoken, the public interest has been declared in terms well nigh conclusive. In such cases, the legislature, not the judiciary, is the main guardian of the public needs to be served by social legislation.

Evidently they trusted their government more back then.

3. By now, the practical definition of ‘blight’ has been diluted into ‘economically underperforming’.  If finding a word translates into giving someone more money, then the word is increasingly found.  With ‘blight’ the key to unlock potent government power to take property from A and then to give it to B, why then will develop, in short order, an active marketplace in finding blight.  [The same thing has happened, on a multi-billion-dollar global scale, in the counterfeiting of certified emission reduction (CER) certificates, otherwise known as carbon credits … but that's another story, about which I may post in the context of India. – Ed.]

You cannot outreach the long arm of the law

Kelo highlighted this and empowered other opponents of ED4ED, such as in Brooklyn, with its billion-dollar battle over Atlantic Yards, which has been going on for more than half a decade.  As City Journal puts it:

Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, industrial and forlorn for much of the late twentieth century, was looking better by 2003.  Government was doing its proper job: crime was down, and the public-transit commute to midtown Manhattan, where many Brooklynites worked, was just 25 minutes. That meant that the private sector could do its job, too, rejuvenating the neighborhood after urban decay. Developers had bought 1920s-era factories and warehouses and converted them into condos for buyers like Daniel Goldstein, who paid $590,000 for a place in a former dry-goods warehouse in 2003.

My $590k says my home isn’t blighted

These new residents weren’t put off by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s railyards nearby, and they liked the hardwood floors and airy views typical of such refurbished buildings. They also settled in alongside longtime residents in little houses on quiet streets. Wealthier newcomers joined regulars at Freddy’s, a bar that predated Prohibition. Small businesses continued to employ skilled laborers in low-rise industrial buildings.

Two questions are entangled here:

1. From an urban-vibrancy perspective, would we ‘like’ to see redevelopment?

2. Is the neighborhood ‘blighted’ today?

It’s entirely possible to answer Yes to the first question – making us wish we could assemble the land – and No to the second, meaning we cannot do it, tempted though we may be.

I can resist everything but temptation

Except that it is all too easy to substitute “I am entitled to” for the phrase “I want to” – especially if one is adjudicating for oneself.

The state hasn’t let this inconvenience derail its plans for Prospect Heights, however. For seven decades, courts have let New York seize and demolish slum housing if it’s blighted—which New York State defines as “substandard” and “unsanitary.” So the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a public entity of New York State, decided that the “public use” of Atlantic Yards would be blight removal. The city had already designated part of the neighborhood as “blighted” 40 years earlier, long before its resurgence. As for the rest, the UDC commissioned consultants—previously employed by Ratner—who soon returned the requisite blight finding.

I applaud the commission’s consultants

4. When courts confront a blight dispute, they tend to defer to the public agency.  Judicial deference to legislative or executive decision-making is generally a sound principle for separation-of-powers. 

Property owners have looked to the judiciary to check the overweening grasp of the legislative and executive branches.

Yet the courts seem to have difficulty grappling with the municipality’s economic conflict of interest:

In Brooklyn, Goldstein and his neighbors have lost their lawsuits—most recently, in New York’s highest court, the court of appeals. In November, the court decided 6–1 that “all that is at issue is a reasonable difference of opinion as to whether the area in question is in fact substandard and insanitary. This is not a sufficient predicate for us to supplant [the state’s] determination.”

Goldstein’s got his dander up

Except that the harm is unbalanced, because either way, the decision is irrevocable.  If a court finds blight, then owners are dispossessed of their property – uprooted.  With that dispossession goes their entire way of life.  I’m especially sensitized to this by all my global South experience, where slum dwellers are routinely dispossessed of land, once it has become valuable.  The slumdwellers lack legal title – they gained their occupancy rights by squatting – so their claim is weaker, but the principle is the same: occupancy vests political legitimacy.

The court essentially abdicated its duty to protect property owners from the governor and the Legislature.

I choose to abdicate my duty

That’s City Journal’s conclusion, not ours, but it’s in line with the factual record.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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Can you count the times you’ve moved?  Remember how much fun it was?  How long it took you to unpack the final boxes?

Got everything?

Most of us hate moving – and we understand that moving is a sunk cost that yields nothing but emotional, temporal, and economic entropy, so we try to stay in one places.  Landlords know this, which is why they like to push the rents up just below the threshold where moving becomes worthwhile. 

That makes the landlords rational, and us rational too.  Then there are some who are irrational, at least when it comes to moving, as revealed in this oddly sympathetic New York Times article:

In the nine years since he came to New York with $500 in his pocket, Martin-Christopher Harper estimates that he has moved at least 40 times.

Four times a year?  I’d say what Mr. Harper has is an obsession.

Make sure you label whose is whose

“Martin-Christopher Harper, right, at home with his roommate, Eli Schmidt, has a steady mover. (Image Michelle V. Agins/ The New York Times”

When he lists the neighborhoods he has lived in — in chronological order — he sounds like a bartender reciting a long list of microbrews: “Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel for a moment, Bronx, Carroll Gardens, Crown Heights, Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Greenpoint, Chelsea, Crown Heights, Carroll Gardens, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, East Williamsburg …”

Don’t necessarily start with this dude.

Mr. Harper, 32, a hairstylist, moved to New York from Los Angeles, where he still has a share in an apartment.

Mr. Harper evidently has sufficient disposable income to maintain living accommodations in several cities.

Happy to be paid each time the insecurity strikes: Mr. Harper’s mover, Mark Ehrhardt. (Image Tony Cenicola/ The New York Times)

He says he moves a lot because he is always looking for a better deal, a better space, a better neighborhood. He acknowledges, though, that moving is something of a compulsion, and that after tackling the issue in therapy and connecting his feverish relocating to his moving frequently as a child, he has begun to cut down. He has lasted more than a year in his current apartment in East Williamsburg, a record for him in New York. These days he has a roommate, Eli J. Schmidt.

All right, we will stipulate that Mr. Harper is unrepresentative of anything to do with real estate, and will move on to more practical moving issues:

Whether one moves frequently or almost never, moving is an intensely emotional experience. The underlying psychological issues involved in real estate decisions are of great interest to therapists and psychologists, because housing and moving are filled with symbolism, the hope for new beginnings, crushing disappointments, loss, anxiety and fear.

As I’ve posted before, we associate change in living accommodations with change in sexual relationship: we move in with someone, live together, set up house (or set up light housekeeping, nudge nudge) or move out.

You move around a bit, eh? Move around!

And we know that more bedrooms means more babies, so it’s no wonder that Jung interpreted the house in dreams as an expression of the self.

I pray for security of tenure

 “Panic can really set in around your home and your apartment,” said Ronnie Greenberg, a Manhattan psychoanalyst. “It’s a matrix of safety, so moving is incredibly stressful and people don’t realize it — they mainly talk about the packing and the external part of moving.”

Perhaps it’s understandable that people pack in a great flurry, and then unpack at leisure.  (My new office, the one I’ve occupied for only a year, still has an unpacked box or two.)  Perhaps it’s our way of closing a chapter of our lives and then opening it in layers, like peeling an onion, reinventing ourselves by what we choose to revive and what we choose to hide.

Mr. Harper and others who choose to move frequently are likely to be risk takers, psychologists say.

Try rootless and unable to commit?

Some therapists, borrowing a term used in Alcoholics Anonymous, call frequent moving “pulling a geographic,” seeking external changes to change internal problems.

If your environment displaces you, run away from it.

But as Elizabeth Stirling, a psychologist in Santa Fe, N.M., who specializes in helping people make life changes, said, “No matter how much you move, you still take yourself with you.”

“No matter where you go … there you are.”

On the other hand, those who never or rarely move can be frozen by a fear of change, psychologists say.

Those psychologists – they miss nothing, nothing!

The prospect of leaving the place that is the center of your universe or the one constant in your life can be frightening.

Perhaps, on a more serious note, this arises from the same phobias that lead to hoarding.

Even finding a new dry cleaner, deli or coin laundry can stir up deep worries of impending isolation and loneliness.

Just like hoarding.

“For the longest time, moving was a bitter consequence of making money when you were selling real estate,” said Michael Moshan, a real estate lawyer and a partner in Gold Scollar Moshan in SoHo. “If I was selling my apartment and buying another one, I was making money. I had to swallow the pain of moving because I was banking something significant. Now people are moving and the moving aspect becomes much more bitter.”

Loss of home = loss of place = loss of self.

Packing and sorting through a life’s worth of belongings — especially, say, if the move is the unhappy result of a divorce or other trauma — can be gut-wrenching.

We define ourselves by what we leave behind.

For Stephen Klein, 43, a renter, a single father and a librarian at the City University of New York, the process of moving is “very emotional.”

Stephen Klein would very much like to move from his rental in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, because he needs more space. (Image Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times)

Renting is a much more flexible tenure, and is therefore associated with more flexibility surrounding our personal relationships.

Mr. Klein has moved nine times in the last 14 years, often as relationships — including a marriage — began and ended.

Move = change in household configuration.

Now, he would very much like to move from his rental in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, because he needs more space. He wishes his 10-year-old daughter had her own room instead of the loft he built for her above the kitchen.

That’s the thing about children – even if your conjugal relationship sunders, your parental one survives.  I wonder how Mr. Klein’s daughter feels about his peripatetic lifestyle.

I’ve just got happy moving feet!

He said he would like to stay in Prospect Heights, where he has friends and a sense of community — all the more important because he is single.  [Currently – Ed.]  But the apartments with more space that he can afford are in far-off neighborhoods.

Mr. Klein, all living accommodations involve choice.  You can drive (or commute) until you qualify, or you can live in town in less space.  Just as markets are places where people tell the truth to each other about what they value, living choices are the tangible expression of what we value, and how much.  You are what you live in.

“I feel like I’m a refugee,” he said. “I really feel like I wish I could have a sense of home. I feel like I’m floating out there.”

Either buy something or accept what you have. 

 “If you say you are trapped,” said Linda Sapadin, a Long Island psychologist and a motivational speaker, “that’s like the trapping of an animal. It’s a pretty shocking visualization. It’s better to say, ‘I can’t move right now,’ and ask what can you do to make your environment safer, more pleasant. Adding the two words ‘right now’ is a tremendous liberator psychologically.”

Psychologically, renting is transitory, and what we will accept if “this too shall pass” can be so much less than we will accept if we have convinced ourselves it will be forever.  Conversely, ease of moving influences the dynamics of market pricing.  In equilibrium markets, where vacancies are plentiful, renters have the advantage; when they are scarce (thanks for nothing, rent control), property owners have the upper hand.

Will Cox’s apartment on Riverside Drive and 92nd Street has been a constant in his life — too constant. He has “walked down the same block 10,000 times,” and longed to leave the neighborhood.

Mr. Cox, 38 and the owner of a television and film post-production company, has lived in a rent-controlled apartment that he took over from his parents, who now live in Connecticut.

SHAKE-UP Will Cox and his wife, Lynn Van Lith, prepare to leave his childhood home. Their daughters, Margot, left, and Matilda, help out. (Image Rob Bennett for The New York Times)

Allow me a moment to become infuriated.  Even assuming that one finds rent control justifiable in the abstract – to protect some deserving group – by what reasoning does Mr. Cox qualify? 

He took over the apartment from his parents, so in effect inherited wealth from a non-property right.

He is in no sense indigent, as the owner of a television and film company.

He has not needed the money for living expenses, instead saving it (see below).

He has never lived anywhere else, except for the four years he was away at college in California.

The inherent subsidy of Mr. Cox’s apartment has reduced labor mobility – look how long he has stayed – and not coincidentally, transferred wealth from the property owner to Mr. Cox and his family:

The place has allowed him and his wife, Lynn Van Lith, who have two daughters, ages 1 and 3, a bit of a financial cushion.

But in some ways it has also been a burden: Giving up a $1,200 two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is not an easy decision, even if you are eager to go.

Such a burden, being weaned off the subsidy teat at 38.

You’re too old for this, junior

“I have all these memories of the neighborhood, these sorts of ghosts that follow you around,” he said. “And for me, it doesn’t at the moment feel entirely like my own life. I still feel like I’m under the shadow of my parents. That rite of passage of finding your own place to live in New York, that experience, I had never had it.”

It was always available to you, sir, had you chosen to pay market rent.

The logjam broke when Mr. Cox was offered an incentive by his landlord.

Yes, I can see where being paid would knock the sentimentality right out of your head.

He is moving today to an apartment he and Ms. Van Lith bought in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And beneath the financial calculations of the move, and the uneasiness that comes with putting all of their savings into the apartment, they have complex feelings. One is excitement: They are off to start “a new history,” he said.

When you move, you choose.  Choice = life. 

I chose to drop it

Drop a pebble in the water

And the wave will reach the shore

Light a candle in the darkness

Someone somewhere finds a door

Turn your eyes away from people

And they’ll turn their eyes from you.

It’s a lesson hard to learn that

What you are is what you do.

– Shadowfax, What Goes Around

Whatever choice you make, you cannot make the same choice again.

You’re not the same reader/ and it’s not the same blog post?

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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 preceding Part 1.]

In using the New York Times’s superficial examination of the Ingersoll and Whitman public housing properties in New York City to bring out the challenges facing not just these two large properties but the entire legacy public housing inventory, we have so far listed:

If only we could see them that clearly

Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman

1. Illegitimate birth.  The properties were temporary housing turned over to New York by the Navy after World War II.

2. Decades of non-reinvestment.  Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.

3. Warrant-of-habitability risk.  A landlord that rents a substandard apartment is liable to the resident for damages, and housing authorities are uniquely vulnerable to such litigation.

4. Brass-ring capital planning mentality.  Scarcity of funding prevented incremental improvements over time, leading to obsolete apartments needing a comprehensive and expensive overhaul.

5. Funding cuts after housing authorities’ plans were made.  Funding promised at one time would be unpromised later, necessitating painful reductions in scope even as costs rose.

Ingersoll and Whitman face three additional challenges:

Getting out of these bond covenants is just the first problem

6.         Resident-relation complexities

Public housing residents are government customers.  Years and decades of observation have taught them to expect promises from their government, and then to be disappointed. 

Anxiety remains high at Whitman and Ingersoll, tenants, elected officials and community advocates said, because unoccupied units have been used by drug dealers, vandals and squatters, and so many apartments have sat empty for so long.

Public housing residents have unusually powerful political voices:

They attributed the delay to … the complicated process of relocating hundreds of tenants with different housing needs at different times.

It’s always easier to renovate a property if the residents are moved safely off-site, but so powerful is the distrust and paranoia within the public housing community that most authorities have long ago acquiesced to the enormously more tortuous procedure of rehabbing with the residents in place, by shuttling them about on the same site:

New Orleans public housing tenants: maybe wrong, never silent

The first tenants were relocated years before construction started. Residents could transfer to other apartments in their developments or elsewhere in the city, or receive a federal voucher that would allow them to move into subsidized private housing.

One would think that a generous offer – move out of a crumbling, decrepit apartment to other public housing apartments (that you approve), or receive a portable voucher and move to an apartment that will take a voucher.  But wait, there’s more!

Lynn Godfrey, a Housing Authority spokeswoman, said the agency had tried to minimize the disruption, in part by paying moving expenses.  “Given the huge mass undertaking and what we will accomplish at the end, the hope is that people will feel that it was well worth it,” she said.

All of this is entirely for the current residents’ benefit, but as we know no act of generosity goes unquestioned:

Yet skepticism — and a lingering suspicion — remains. “It looked more to me like they wanted to get the people in an exodus, to move them out of here as quickly as they could,” said Edward Carter, 76, a longtime tenant at Whitman.

Activists from Community Voices Heard, New York City

That’s utter nonsense, of course.  The property is encumbered by a permanent deed restriction that can be lifted only with HUD consent.  Nevertheless, paranoia strikes deep, fostered by the enemies within.  Here, for instance, is a comment about Ingersoll from August, 2007:

There is a HUGE rumor mill about anything regarding these projects (or any projects). A real estate broker trying to sell a desperately overpriced building across from projects told a friend that, “It was okay to speculate because the Jews had bought the projects and everyone was going to be moved out.” This is a freaking quote.

Seventeen years ago when my daughter was born, my hospital roommate lived in the Whitman houses and she told me – in all seriousness – that Chase was buying out tenants but they were trying to force people out and she knew people who refused to move whose windows had been shot out by the bank.

Another friend, who lives in projects out in Coney Island repeated the same rumor – almost word for word – several years later about the buildings she resides in.

It’s a scary rumor mill anywhere else.

These rumors are ineradicable.  As the Times notes:

An area on the rebound: Fort Greene, Brooklyn

[The renovation plan] has fueled rumors, repeatedly denied by the agency, that low-income residents are being pushed out to convert the buildings into private luxury housing as Fort Greene gentrifies.

Where Fort Greene’s upwardly mobile want to live

Even long-delayed good news barely makes a dent:

Residents received some good news last month, when the Housing Authority held a ribbon-cutting for a $7 million community center on Myrtle Avenue. It had been expected to open in 2004.

7.         Promises made before funding was rock-solid

Confronted with the brass-ring challenges mentioned before, NYCHA elected to proceed with some of its plan:

So far, 611 units have been renovated and are occupied, with construction under way in some buildings but not yet in others.

A 2006 report by the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., found that thousands of apartments at Whitman, Ingersoll and five other developments remained empty longer than necessary because the agency removed units from the rent rolls “well before it had a clear idea of how or when it planned to proceed” with construction projects.

Comptroller Thompson speaks after the fact

That’s easy to say after the fact; I have a more sympathetic view.

People are not numerate; they hear financial changes but have no tactile convertibility between the numbers and the changing scope and expectations.  Thus, when NYCHA promised to do such-and-such provided so-much money came through, people heard only the dish, not the price.

The project was announced in 2002, and work began in 2006. 

More than likely, when NYCHA started, it thought the money would be there. 

The Housing Authority told residents in October 2004 that the renovations were expected to be completed in five years. This past April, officials said the project was instead scheduled for completion in February 2012.

When bad things happen to good economies, the result is scope shrinkage, something residents and the general public want not to hear.

I’m sure I don’t want to hear what you’re saying

Apartments awaiting renovations at both complexes have been vacant for an average of four years, according to the housing agency.

That’s what happens when funding is interrupted.

8.         The pure-public ownership model

We know who should fund it; who should own it?

I’ve written extensively before about the essential housing authority, into which today’s housing authorities should evolve:

Effectively a publicly accountable charitable institution, a housing authority receives public subsidy, via the indirect collection agent of government — if it doesn’t, the system breaks down completely — and deploys it for the public benefit of affordable housing and healthy low-income communities.  That’s the essential function:

We can expand this single goal into a short menu of activities:

Everything else is a technical function, which means it can be contracted, and if it can, it should.

Thus the essential housing authority is a holding company:

Yet today’s typical housing authority is anything but a holding company.  Instead it’s an insular expanding universe unto itself. 

I am a universe unto myself; everything is encompassed within me

The future essential housing authority will be a publicly accountable Mission Entrepreneurial Entity, one that can finance its own improvements, buy and sell its own properties, and contract with private entities to do things at which private developers excel – like construction:

The agency is spending more money to renovate the two low-income complexes than a developer recently spent building a $152 million condominium tower nearby known as Toren.

Much of this difference is explained by the handicaps under which NYCHA operates – an argument to contract out those functions.  It’s much easier to avoid picking up unfunded mandates when you have restricted the government’s role to its essential functions, and outsourced the rest to the private sector.

Michael Kelly, the housing agency’s new general manager, said it had “turned the corner” on the project, which is being accelerated with $108 million in federal stimulus money and which comes at a time when public housing authorities across the country have chosen to demolish, rather than preserve, many of their buildings.

“This level of reinvestment suggests that NYCHA is committed to providing public housing resources for folks for generations to come,” Mr. Kelly said.

If anybody can move NYCHA out of its legacy of command-and-control functions toward its future essentiality, it’s Mike:

Seeing corners around the bend? Mike Kelly, new general manager of NYCHA

He has his work cut out for him:

Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman

1. Illegitimate birth.  The properties were temporary housing turned over to New York by the Navy after World War II.

2. Decades of non-reinvestment.  Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.

3. Warrant-of-habitability risk.  A landlord that rents a substandard apartment is liable to the resident for damages, and housing authorities are uniquely vulnerable to such litigation.

4. Brass-ring capital planning mentality.  Scarcity of funding prevented incremental improvements over time, leading to obsolete apartments needing a comprehensive and expensive overhaul.

5. Funding cuts after housing authorities’ plans were made.  Funding promised at one time would be unpromised later, necessitating painful reductions in scope even as costs rose.

6. Resident-relation complexities.  Public housing residents’ fears about being relocated or gentrified cannot be placated except by rehabbing with them in place – adding to the costs.

7. Promises made before funding was rock-solid, leading to painful and poorly understood reductions in rehab scope.

8. The pure-public government ownership model, instead of reinventing into the essential housing authority.

Eight challenges are enough, aren’t they Magic 8-Ball?

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