A New "Square Deal"

Abstract

New York is currently going through a construction boom as developers try to take advantage of rising land values and rents caused by economic growth, resulting in a lack of affordable housing available to middle-income families. The current Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, has made it a priority to meet the demands and challenges of the housing crisis by incentivizing private development through various methods, such as changing zoning laws and cutting red tape for access to abandoned lands, as a way to inject steroids into the housing market (Kaysen, 2018). This has unfortunately caused issues such as gentrification and speculative development, which has led to the disenfranchisement of low-income inhabitants in the city (Kaysen, 2018). These policies have marginalized people by either forcing the poor to either live in the periphery of the city, or be crammed into social housing projects that were built more than half a century ago. This is worrisome due to the fact that these aged dwellings display a variety of health and safety issues that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is having a hard time managing. The low-income families which rely on these projects have a hard time paying the minimum rent to begin with, and when you couple this with unacceptable living conditions, you end up with the spatial manifestation of an increasing divide between the rich and poor which now defines New York City. What is more shocking is that when you look back in history, the social housing projects were originally seen as a solution to poverty and slumification, but they ended up just being vertical versions of the slums which they took place of (Ferré-Sadurní, 2018). In order to help these disenfranchised people living in the projects, there must be an effort in place to help increase their quality of life. In order to achieve this, the monofunctionality of their public space needs to be made more functionally diverse. This is because the lack of diversity in both social and programmatic elements results in low public activity, which in turn leads to crime and vandalism due to a lack of self-awareness which tends to not exist in places of high public activity (Jacobs, 1961). In addition to this, the problem of public space is exasperated by the design philosophy that was used to create the projects. Planners used the International Style, which was a popular urbanist theory during the time that the dwellings were created. By clearing the tenement slums that were defined by a spatial hierarchy created by the street grid of New York City, he accused the planners of intentionally destroying the rich hierarchy and variety that existed in the contextual public realm (Kunstler, 2004). He also argues that the high-rises of the projects themselves destroyed any sense of human scale, which in combination of his other concerns, eradicated the inhabitants connection to the public realm (Kunstler, 2004). By looking at these failures of the social housing projects, a transformational framework needs to be produced that acknowledges these issues of monofunctionality, scale, and safety. This framework should also act as a blueprint of rehabilitation for all NYCHA projects, including what needs and characteristics need to be created in order to activate a public space that increases the inhabitants quality of life. By providing a framework that brings the “soul” of public space in these projects back to life, the original intent of the projects - or the promise it made to the people who would live in them - can be met and achieved.