In Chapter 7 of Public Housing that Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century, Nicholas Dagen Bloom describes the public housing projects built in New York City around the time of Robert Moses. These public housing projects were large and bland. Some of the buildings that were torn down to build them had been serving their communities well. The developments may have been more beneficial to the city if they had been designed to incorporate some of the existing structures for a more pleasing appearance.
Unfortunately, in order to cut costs for public housing, sacrifices must be made. In the case of the public housing projects during this time, the main sacrifice made by NYCHA was in the aesthetics of the buildings. Instead of making the buildings architecturally significant, they were all built as tall plain towers with the same bricks. I think the ideas that led to this trend made sense logically but I think the result was very unfortunate.
Another problem with the actions of NYCHA during this time was that they demolished many things that didn’t need to be demolished. In most slum areas, there were certain buildings that were in far better shape than others. NYCHA demolished these because they were not practical for the planned developments. NYCHA also demolished many businesses that were contributing to their communities in order to accomplish the goals for their developments. In some cases, stores were unnecessarily demolished simply to make life inconvenient for the people of the community so they would be more willing to leave. Although NYCHA was demolishing businesses, they did not provide much commercial space in their development because they didn’t want to compete with private enterprise. While this reasoning is logical, I think it was detrimental for the communities NYCHA built.
Perhaps NYCHA could have done a better job of building more pleasing buildings at lower costs if they had found ways to incorporate some of the older buildings into the projects instead of demolishing everything to rebuild. In some cases, renovation might have been a better option. I’m sure that in many of the cases, the only reason NYCHA determined that renovation wouldn’t have been worth it was because they couldn’t quantify the value of more aesthetically pleasing architecture.
I understand that there are certain constraints when building low income housing so I understand why the public housing projects were designed the way they were. The public housing projects that were built served their goals well. I do wonder, though, if it could have been possible to create better designs that would have benefitted New York City more than the ones that were built.
