Tag Archives: urban renewal

Reading Response

This week’s readings were David Harvey’s chapter, “The Right to the City”, and Susan Fainstein’s “Justice and Urban Transformation: Planning in Context”. Both of these articles elaborated the classes running theme of displacement of low-income families for urbanization of cities.

“The Right to the City,” an excerpt from Rebel Cities showed in depth analysis of the history and urbanization. Harvey, started the analysis with Haussmann’s plan to urbanize Paris in 1848, continued on to discuss the “mortgage and housing asset value crisis of 2008” and current urbanization in Brooklyn and in Harlem. The premise of the chapter focused on the capitalist societies’ need to produce “surplus product” in-order to continue to exist. The Housing market has done an excellent job of providing such a surplus. Providing a need for labor and the expansion of cities to accommodate the changing times. The ethical issue, that seems to be ignored throughout history, is “what is this urbanization costing?”. After reading this article, seems that whenever a city goes into financial instability and the unemployment rates rise, the government’s answer to the issue is “let’s build”. It is not surprising that history repeats itself and capitalist societies have to resort to amending past policies to supply the “surplus product” that is needed for the capitalism to function. However, the areas that are redone are inhabited by members of the community who are of low-income.  This urbanization is meant to increase the appeal of the city but it also seems to increase how drastically different the incomes and qualities of life are between the wealthy and middle-class, or even more dramatically the poor, of the city. Susan Fainstein’s chapter points out that urbanization is damaging to low-income and minority groups because it does not take the urban space that it affects into context.

“Justice and Urban Transformation: Planning in Context” focused on the belief of Karl Mannheim, which sought to give the power of urbanization to the members of the community through the efforts of elected officials. Mannheim’s theory stems from the idea of attempting to eliminate class bias. “Comprehensiveness,” which is Mannheim’s policy for planning, theorizes that values can be organized based on importance, and thus planning would proceed based on those values. The issues with the policy are rooted in the fact that values are hard to quantify and not everyone values things the same. As the chapter states, “values of democracy, diversity, and equity may pull in different ways”.  This belief is based on the idea that elected officials have a better understanding of what neighborhoods need when compared to organizations and the wealthy, like Yale University and others discussed in “The Right to the City” who currently hold an overwhelming amount of influence in planning.  When you are dealing with people and issues that affect “collective human rights” (Harvey 2013)  such as property, each individual situation contains aspects that require amending, adapting, and evolving policies so they are beneficial to that area. A policy that worked in South Jamaica in the past may not work in present day East Harlem; unless one is familiar with the needs and individuals of the area, one would not know how to adjust a policy to an area. If done correctly, where the needs of the community are the driving force (not capital and profit), this is a system which may work.

Discussion Question:  We live on a country that makes decisions through precedence and tradition; government is constantly looking to the past in-order make policies to improve the future. However, the negative aspects of the past, such as the displacement of communities, are often ignored if the policy showed promise, hence why there is a constant cycle of urbanization and resistance. Will New York ever see a policy that has not already been established in-order to benefit both the needs of a community and the needs of capitalism? Can an adapted version of “comprehensiveness” be the answer?

 

Reading Response

According to Scott Larson, New York is facing a great challenge. The State is unable support the increasing population. In his chapter, Larson discusses Bloomberg’s strategy to solving this issue, Urban Renewal. Samuel Stein’s article “De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan”, supports many of the points brought up in Larson’s Chapter and shows De Blasio’s approach to solving this issue.

Bloomberg administration agenda was to build big and fast. The chapter discusses how Bloomberg’s plan was essentially to provide incentives, such as tax breaks, to developers and was a voluntary option. He lean’s toward a Moses city plan instead of a Jacob’s city plan. The issue is that this is not benefiting the homeless and is not focusing on the people who already live in the City. His plan seems to be one that makes the city more commercialized. This pleases the rich and wealthy but does little to nothing for the poor, which is a constant problem. The needs of the low-income families are constantly ignores. This city seems to have a strong history of disguising projects that broaden the gap between the rich and the poor as something that would better the quality of life of low-income families.

De Blasio seems to have taken a stance that is a little too optimistic, his plan also seems to benefit the rich more than low-income families. The article criticizes the approach as a promoting gentrification more than it promotes affordable housing. De Blasio’s plan involves Developers buying properties below market price and incorporating it with luxury developments. This is meant to help encourage developers to keep rent low for certain communities. However, the issue comes with there is not enough incentive for developers to use their developments to help those people of lower incomes. The second issue is that majority of developers are using median income to determine the price of these new apartments, which does not properly reflect the income of the people in the neighborhood. The ultimate impact of this is that poor people are slowly kicked out of their neighborhood to allow room for a wealthier class of people; displacing families and possibly adding to the population of homeless people rather than helping.

In previous readings, we read about the constant displacement of poor, low-income families. This city has not fully healed from previous development plans, but is still making new wounds. The issue is that developers are more interested in turning a profit on their developments then helping those whom are not able to afford to live in an apartment. Plans that start off with good intentions, tend to drift to further widening the gap of the quality of life allowed to those of different classes.

Discussion Question: Can we force developers to provide affordable housing that is actual affordable to the people already in these low-income neighborhoods? What is a new system to determine a reasonable price for newly developed units in a low-income neighborhood?

Purpose of Urban Renewal

In the chapter “From Dislocation to Resistance”, the author illustrates how urban renewal gradually received a certain stigma. While the purpose of urban renewal is to improve underdeveloped areas in the city in order to produce a better environment and encourage economic growth, the urban renewal projects of the past produced different results. Most often, people in these underdeveloped areas were displaced with no compensation and no where else to go. Mostly African Americans got the short end of the stick in the process and urban renewal eventually became known as “Negro removal.” Displaced blacks led to the convergence of a lower class community creating the city of Harlem. The tipping point theory proved that the cities were subjected to this vicious circle, where urban renewal fueled segregated, colored communities and these underdeveloped communities fueled urban renewal. The purpose of urban renewal was never successfully achieved.

However, what seemed to work best for New York City was when “immigrant groups set up mutual aid societies that provided services to [their] communities…” An example of this was when Finish immigrant workers built limited equity cooperative apartments. The Housing Act was successful because it allowed for the involvement of the residents. I believe that we should take a deeper look at union sponsored housing developments. There is a lesson to be learned from the crisis of Coop City and organizing a detailed agenda answering questions about privatization, equity gains, and marketing of the projects seems to hypothetically solve the issues of the crisis. For many years, urban renewal has been influenced by the real estate industry and other large corporations, and thus creating a divide between race and class. Eliminating this influence and allowing communities to take control of their own progress and development might allow for a more successful outcome.

Discussion question: How plausible is the idea of union-sponsored housing projects?