In Professor Larson’s chapter about Burden in the Bloomberg Era we see a thread of information throughout that leads us to the conclusion that Amanda Burden was, in fact, responsible for the “progression” of the city’s urban landscape and redevelopment in the 2000s. The Bloomberg Administration kept pushing a propaganda of sorts: “the quantity of Moses with the quality of Jacobs”. It’s interesting that while Burden seemed motivated by said mantra, that the way in which she went about the projects she oversaw contradicts it. Professor Larson, as well as the film we watched in class last week, gave us a broad set of events and comments on Burden’s process of getting projects approved and how she was a large part of that process. What is important concerning the issue of design in the city and how it relates to Amanda Burden’s tenure is what it did to the city? Or, perhaps more importantly, what it has set up the city to become in the future, long after she and Bloomberg are out of public office?
Burden was quoted at a City Lab Panel in urban expansion saying that she expected a decrease in the price of housing would be the result of the huge influx of housing supply that the city has received from many years of rezoning and rebuilding neighborhoods with more living space. Unfortunately, the prices had not decreased substantially and she said that to this day the issue of gentrification remains an unsolved thorn in the side of our great city. While gentrification may not be an easy issue to fix, we can observe the trends in Burden’s tenure to make some interesting conclusions about the city’s future.
It would not be an understatement to say that Amanda Burden has made the city look “prettier” and by doing so, attracted a larger tourist presence and a slew of private investments into the city, mainly Manhattan. However, by increasing the face value of the city’s global appeal her projects have made prices in redeveloped areas higher, thus pushing out the lower-income residents of these areas and attracting wealthier ones. While this idea of the disappearing middle-class in New York City was alluded to in the reading it cannot be overlooked. As we look at New York City and see it slowly evolve we must also recognize the fact that the same people that were here five years ago may be somewhere else now because they simply can’t afford to live where they used to. Is this the sacrifice for design…for aesthetic? Or is it true, as Whyte would agree, that “urban redevelopment equals economic development”?
At the end of the day we must observe the “redesigning” of New York City from an aerial perspective because if we look at it only in terms of Moses and Jacobs, then our tunnel vision would be worse than that of Burden’s sense of design. Did a lot of stuff get built in a reasonable amount of time? Yes. Moses…Check. Did the building projects take into account their accessibility in the social space around them and how they would affect the street lifestyle and economy? To a certain degree, yes. Jacobs…check. Now if we look at it from afar we can see it’s possible that the people that should have benefitted from those shiny new back-less park benches had to actually move to a lower-rent neighborhood because the influx of private investment in the following years drove up prices for the entire area. So now you potentially have a situation in which one shiny, new building comes up in a neighborhood of older buildings and instead of fostering a sense of community it could possibly create a whole new one by gentrifying the whole neighborhood and in five years it’s just another upper-middle class neighborhood.
I can’t say for sure that Moses wouldn’t have liked Burden or her projects; however, I can say that Jacobs may have found some fault in the pseudo-facelift that the city has received. All in all, the most interesting, crucial questions remain… Does urban redevelopment equal economic development? And if it does, at what cost do we, as a society, place on economic growth? Is it possible to grow economically and avoid the gentrification of the most diverse city in the world?
Extra Research Links:
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/what-we-havent-figured-out-question-gentrification/7166/
Antonio,
I agree with your view on how Jacobs and Moses would see the way Burden has redesigned New York City. I think Jacobs would have seen some issues, because to an extent I think that the way Burden is going about this is similar to Moses. Yes, she may be going through committees like we watched in the film “Rezoning Harlem” but she is using similar planning ideas as Moses. Such like Moses did super blocks devoted to one use, she is remodeling full areas to “affordable housing” but really just building condo building after upscale residential building. It may have its differences and Moses may disagreed with her ways of not making the new plans available to all, like his parks and such were, but in the bugger picture it is similar.
To answer your question, urban redevelopment does not equal economic development. Yes, the plan in the long run is to gain economic growth with urban redevelopment but that is not always the case. The new plans must be better than the previous use and has to be affordable to at least some residents and also turn a profit. There must be a balance between those two in order to have economic growth. Society as a whole always pays a price to gain this. The old residents of an area getting redeveloped must move if they are making it more upscale, like the examples we saw in the films and spoke about in class. Gentrification is a part of economic growth but is not needed to do so. The city began to flourish when Moses made more parks and such and yes he did displace people but he also did not make no areas affordable for them to live in. Again, there must be a balance because if every area becomes gentrified many will not be able to afford to live there and the city will change and may not be as diverse and flourishing as it is today.
When reading about Burden’s work as Chair of the City Planning Commission under Bloomberg, I also noticed a bit of an issue with Burden’s motived in improving New York City. While it’s clear that her work did wonders for the aesthetic value of certain parts of the city, some of these changes brought about changes to the potential residents of certain areas that can be seen (by people with a “Jacobsian” philosophy about how changes in a city’s infrastructure should be carried out) as detrimental and somewhat predictable. We saw in the case of Jacobs that she wanted to create a neighborhood life that fostered diverse communities, but these neighborhoods ended up becoming so desirable that the majority of people were priced out from being able to live there, creating very homogeneous communities. This of course is a hard line to straddle, but it’s important for the a person in power to try to deal with this aforementioned contradiction of having diversity with a neighborhood-type of community. In terms of Burden’s career, this issue seems to come to the surface when dealing with her work on the highline. Professor Larson’s comments that “During Bloomberg’s first term, Burden championed the revitalization of the dilapidated High Line…even after the mayor initially opposed it” (135). Professor Larson then relates that: “…a full year before the High Line’s planned opening, thirty projects were either planned or in construction nearby” (135). These projects included luxury apartment buildings and condominium towers in the vicinity of the High Line. So once again, we see that a public space that is aimed at creating a neighborhood type of community ends of fostering a community of only the wealthiest members of the city.
Another appearingly hypocritical move by Burden was shown in the film Rezoning Harlem. In it, she makes it her mission to build high rise apartment buildings in the heart of Harlem. Through this process, she would be forcing a lot of Harlem’s longtime residents to relocate, giving up their place of residence as well as restaurants that have been the heart of the neighborhood. Despite this, the New York Times, in a piece that was written shortly after Jane Jacobs’ death, quotes Burden as saying: “You can measure the health of the city in the vitality of the street life”. It’s interesting that she says this because the film shows that she was willing to forgo any chance at a vital street life by planning to build high rise apartments in its place.