In the past, New York City did not have many regulations for housing, which led to many slums filling the city. In the 1940s, Robert Moses began plans to clear most of these slums without using too much money. In order to clear out the slums, the NYCHA had started with vacant land sites. After building on these vacant land sites of their choice, they began their renovation of slums. However, these slum clearances did not seem too thought out in the initial stages.
Moses had strongly opposed vacant land projects, because his main goal was slum clearance. However, I think this was a critical step for slum clearance to occur. After the war, there was housing shortage. So, while clearing the slums, where would the tenants living there go? By beginning with vacant land projects, they are providing these tenants places to consider moving to, which would save the NYCHA some money and time. This is because while planning out slum clearance, the main problem of the program was moving the tenants of slums. By working on vacant land sites, the NYCHA would partially solve the problem of having to move tenants in slums before beginning their slum clearance. A possible step the organization could have taken was creating temporary contracts with tenants to allow them to stay in buildings from vacant land projects until the slum clearance is completed. Thus, I think it would have been better to focus or spend more time on vacant land projects before beginning slum clearance.
In the plan for slum clearance, the main focus was destruction of the slums and creation of better housing. However, when Moses and authority took action, they began pairing opposites: private housing and public housing, and low income neighborhoods and middle income neighborhoods. These pairs created a balance in the program, but I believe this balance would affect the people that build the neighborhood. It is in human nature for people to flock together with their own kind. This can be seen in low income families, in which they would form ‘ghettos’ in a neighborhood. Thus, if a low income neighborhood surrounds a middle income neighborhood, would there not be tension between the two neighborhoods? Herman Stichman mentions that these ‘ghettos’ prevent different income levels from meeting in neighborhood activities and fostering class feeling (134). Although the article does not mention an neighborhood tensions, I think the NYCHA should have considered the social aspect in slum clearance.
The success of New York housing after all the creations of new buildings appealed to many other cities. For example, St. Louis created high rise housing because Mayor Joseph Darst was impressed by New York’s skyscrapers and NYCHA’s towers (150). However, their development did not turn out the same way as New York, due to their lack of consideration of cost in the initial stages. When the city realized how costly the construction would be, there had to be major changes in the plans. Many of these changes involved making the rooms smaller and removing amenities. Along with other changes, the final creation of the public housing building was not any more different than slum housing (151). If these cities had thoroughly planned and spent more time working on these public housing, I believe they would have been successful.
The problems in past housing in any city was lack of regulation, which led to slum housing. To counter slum housing in New York, Robert Moses ‘created’ the plan of slum clearance. The main problem with the plan was moving tenants around for slum clearance to happen, which could have been partially solved with vacant land projects. Even though NYCHA began with vacant land projects, they only built a small amount of buildings for these projects before moving on to slum clearance. Regardless, there were certain aspects of slum clearance I thought would bring failure to the program, but in the end it became extremely successful.
