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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When people know what they are doing, they do it smarter.  That’s the principle behind biofeedback.

Now, as you can see, reading AHI blogs makes you happier

When people know what they are spending, they usually spend less.  Of the three main costs of sheltering a family – cost of occupancy, cost of transportation (to job and leisure), and cost of operations – people make big choices bout the first two, how and where to live, but the third is ruled by a host of small choices to which people are curiously indifferent, mainly because they cannot perceive that switching on this light or that boombox means thus-and-such amount of money. 

What if we gave homeowners real-time insight into their utility spending?  With smart meters, this is now possible, leading to unexpected consequences, as revealed in this Wall Street Journal article:

What Utilities Have Learned From Smart-Meter Tests…

…And why they aren’t putting those lessons to use

Utilities have learned a lot about how smart meters can compel consumers to save electricity. Unfortunately, too often they aren’t putting the knowledge to good use.

Do you really want to see the numbers scrolling red?

Let’s stipulate, for the moment, that tie Journal knows what ‘good use’ is …

Smart meters are more precise than traditional meters in that they send readings on electricity usage to utility billing departments throughout the day. Not only do smart meters provide customers with a clearer picture of how they use electricity on a daily basis, they also make it possible for utilities to charge more for power when demand is highest—in the afternoon—and less when usage falls off—at night.

Information is a two-edged sword – one edge cutting consumption, the other edge pricing up production.  So too is computing power – when one side gets smarter, the other can too.  All of us encounter this every time we search for airline flights, since it’s quite clear that the Web-based systems are an extended game of ELIZA where we ask, “What does it cost?” and the computer answers coquettishly, “how badly do you want to go?”

Rates are cheaper during the day

But really, it’s hard to argue that you shouldn’t pay more for power when it’s more expensive to produce, particularly if you can shift your consumption. 

By making variable pricing plans possible, smart meters are expected to play a big role in getting customers to reduce their peak-hour energy consumption, a key goal of utility executives and policy makers.

That’s the theory behind everything from the price of reserving a tennis court (which varies by day and week and demand) to the cost of a stadium seat on a stadium (it may be the same game and you may all have the same eyeballs, but not all seats are equivalent).

The better to heckle from

Equally significant, a host of small consumption-related and reversible decisions can collectively aggregate to a single production­-related and irreversible capital decision:

Electricity grids are sized to meet the maximum electricity need, so a drop in peak demand would let utilities operate with fewer expensive power plants, meaning they could provide electricity at a lower cost and with less pollution.

Small increments accumulate into big discontinuities.  The same moral reasoning behind recycling newspapers and plastic applied to the cost of LEDs and HVAC’s.

Utilities have run dozens of pilot tests of digital meters and found that people cut power consumption the most when faced with higher peak-hour rates.

Note the spike at 8:00 pm

People value what they pay for, and if you help them save, they will.

But utility executives and regulators have been reluctant to implement rate plans that penalize people for too much energy use, fearing that if customers associate smart meters with higher bills, they will stall the technology’s advance just as it is gaining traction.

Now we head into behavioral economics – saving $1 and being charged $1 surtax may be equivalent to an economist, but not to a human being.

Only about 5% of U.S. electric meters are “smart” today, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, but that figure is expected to grow to about one-third in the next five years.

I’m growing smarter, Dave

Two lines govern these innovations:

1. The cost of technology, which always declines.

2. The value of behavioral change, which always ascends.

“Efficient technology is like the flu: sooner or later everyone gets it”

In the office where I write this post, there is a motion-detector light switch.  First posited in 1938 by Robert A. Heinlein in The Man Who Sold the Moon (which also prefigured Richard Branson?), it only became commercially viable a few years back. 

Enough bucks, you can find Buck Rogers

And even more economically effective are setback thermostats for hot water heaters, motion-detector sensors in stairwells, auto-shutoff car headlights, and a host of on-only-when-needed devices.

So, many utilities are trying an approach that is less controversial, but also less effective: offering rebates to customers who conserve energy in key periods of the day.

Fuzzy boundaries are bad boundaries: a crude simulation that people observe is better than precision that people flout.  A simpler maritally-imposed decision rule I can remember (”use the Amex in this country, the Visa overseas”) will yield more savings than the more complex rule I’ll forget.

By doing things like turning off clothes dryers and adjusting air conditioners on hot summer afternoons, customers earn credits that can reduce their electricity bills.

Not a good thing

Somewhere I read that for a manager, the proper ratio of praise to blame is 5 to 1.  (For a spouse, it’s 20 to 1, if not higher.)  Something similar works for customer relations – offer people a cookie for doing something positive, and your customer pool will be much happier than if you penalize a sluggard for doing nothing.

“Most CEOs struggle over this issue more than anything else,” says Ted Craver, chief executive of Edison International, the Rosemead, Calif., parent of Southern California Edison, which is in the midst of a massive smart-meter rollout.

“You could have a real rebellion” if smart meters push up customers’ rates, especially if utilities’ other capital expenses are increasing, he says.

Fixation on rates is foolish but human, because people’s perceptions of expense relate to how a thing is priced.  It’s always seemed to me nonsensical that in the aggregate cost of driving a car, we fixate on gasoline prices to the exclusion of capital costs and depreciation. 

“Your Mileage May Vary”

The average price of an American car is $25,000 or so, and the average American car is driven 12,000 miles a year.  Say it lasts five years and is then traded in for $5,000.  That’s 33 cents a mile even before considering anything else – tires, maintenance, repairs, insurance, financing costs. 

At least we disclosed it

Conversely, even with gasoline at $3.00 per gallon, at (say) 25 miles to the gallon that’s 12 cents a mile.  In other words, gasoline is less than one-third as price as the car costs, yet the American public goes bonkers when gas prices go up.  Why?  A combination of the difficulty of equating the effective cost of the large-purchase choice versus the constant reinforcement that for gasoline, the only thing relevant is price at the pump.

How about, NFW?

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a unit of PG&E Corp., got a taste of the public-relations risk last summer when it installed smart meters in Bakersfield, Calif., as part of a broad upgrade in its Northern California service territory.

What do you do when your meter start tattling on you?

Especially not an electronic one

When customers—who weren’t participating in any sort of experimental rate plan—received dramatically higher bills shortly afterward, they blamed the meters for what they assumed was faulty billing.

When in doubt, blame someone else!

The San Francisco utility investigated and concluded that the meters were functioning properly. It found that the higher bills were simply a case of unfortunate timing: An increase in conventional rates had taken effect just ahead of unseasonably hot temperatures.

How then to get people to embrace a smarter meter without going ballistic on selectively higher rates?

We’ll just not tell you the score …

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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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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