In Chapters 5 and 6 of his Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind, Larson presents two examples of real life development – the Regional Plan Association’s Third Regional Plan and the Bloomberg administration’s development plan. These plans both exhibited qualities that are in accord with Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs’s ideologies, but they ended up producing results that would have disappointed Jacobs, such as gentrification and the elimination of minority communities and neighborhoods.
The RPA sought to improve New York by emphasizing Economy, Equity, and Environment in order to increase the quality of life in the metropolitan region. By making the proper investments and policies that focused on all three of those qualities, they reasoned that they could create some long term solutions to many social problems and environmental threats, which were both ignored in the past due to the sole focus on Economy. This all sounds fine on paper, but in practice it resulted in the gentrification of neighborhoods, which was presumably what the RPA was hoping for in the first place. By privatizing public space in order to finance the changes that the RPA wished for, poor residents were gradually pushed out from their neighborhoods and eager real estate developers took their places. They were given free rein to develop to their hearts content, attracting wealthier citizens to the neighborhoods, and property values predictably went up. So in the end, the quality of life did go up, but only for those with the money to afford it.
The Bloomberg administration followed a similar plan, where they relied on rezoning to attract developers to certain areas. Developers were practically given carte blanche to develop as they saw fit, with the hopes that they would build with the public good in mind, but that ultimately did not pan out. Affordable housing never materialized, but at least the economy was stimulated.
Discussion Question: Should universities – such as Columbia or NYU – have governmental support as they try to expand their campuses?
