Near the beginning of the semester, when we were first exposed to Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, many of us expressed thoughts about combining their two opposing ideologies to help improve the way urban planning fits the needs of both the people and major corporations. Chapters 5 and 6 of Scott Larson’s Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind introduce two real-life models, the Regional Plan Association’s Third Regional Plan and Mayor Bloomberg’s planning and redevelopment agenda, that try to do just that. Yet even though these plans aimed to incorporate both Moses’ and Jacobs’ ideologies into urban planning, they’ve ultimately exacerbated New York City’s affordable housing crisis and encouraged gentrification and the displacement of poor, minority communities.
So what happened? A lot of the problem has to do with something we’ve seen come up over and over again in our discussions of NYC development: whoever has the money and the power controls the direction with which urban planning is conducted. The merging of Mosaic and Jacobsian ideals in urban development is indeed a powerful method that can both encourage city growth and preserve neighborhoods and small communities (if executed in the right way). Yet for planners and developers involved with the Third Regional Plan and the Bloomberg administration’s redevelopment agenda, the underlying motive frequently seems to be solely economic development. Larson repeatedly mentions the influence that real estate and the wealthy have on urban development; such projects are almost always geared towards “enhancing real estate values and attracting the sophisticated, highly compensated workers needed to keep New York City’s information-based, globally oriented economy humming.”
Larson presents zoning as a clear example of this phenomenon. Through the regulation and separation of land uses, zoning regulations often aim to raise the value of the land to encourage redevelopment and economic growth. Such regulations also boost real estate prices and generate numerous economic opportunities for the real estate industry, which profits tremendously from these development projects. As a result of increased land values, housing prices and rents continue to rise, thus making housing even more unaffordable for many New Yorkers. Even inclusionary zoning, which tries to increase the number of affordable housing units available to the public, is subject to the discretion of developers and appears to favor wealthier, upper-class families, who quickly occupy these “affordable housing” units and contribute to increased gentrification in developing neighborhoods. Hence, the New York affordable housing crisis, gentrification, and the displacement of poor families who cannot afford housing can be interpreted as an adverse effect of the real estate industry’s influence on modern urban planning. Even though urban planning tries to incorporate both Moses’ and Jacobs’ ideals (in fact, zoning actually seems to contradict Jacobs’ principles of mixed land use and neighborhood preservation), its methodologies and executions are becoming increasingly more predisposed to fit the preferences of the real estate industry and upper-class, wealthy communities.
Discussion: How can the government, city organizations, and individuals weaken the real estate industry and the wealthy’s influence on urban planning? How can urban planning be changed to fit the needs of the hundreds, thousands of people who cannot afford housing because of inflated real estate prices?
