Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from Part 1, posted yesterday]

 

Throughout Europe, up they went —

in Glasgow and London, in Paris and Lyon and Marseille,

in Milan and Brussels and Malmo and everywhere else. 

Council housing and what it replaced, Liverpool

 

Council blocks, Edinburgh

 

Some went up, some went out, but all were off by themselves.

 

Council housing, semi-detached, Liverpool

 

All were built on the European socialist model:

 

 

the state would provide, the state would own, the state would subsidized, the state would protect.  The welfare state.  From Le Corbusier on down, architects and urban planners were unanimous: we were going to live in regulated high-rise complexes.

 

Corbusier’s Unite d’habitation: a unit of habitation

 

Genetic imprint and the first demographic wave:

The persistence of city structure in post-WW2 America

 

America reacted differently to the post-WW2 auto boom: with few natural barriers bounding the city, mobility meant expansion (what many Euros sniff as ’sprawl’).  The great post-WW2 demographic wave tripled or quadrupled the aggregate urban footprint, as around every American city there sprang, like an asphalt rainbow seen from above, a ring highway.  Boston’s Route 128, “America’s Technology Highway” as it billed itself, became the visible expression of a different approach to development: thickly settled suburbs, office parks, shopping malls, are all American inventions.  With this expansion, Americans created the bedroom community and from those bedrooms came the baby boom generation (which, Time magazine reminds us this week, just turned sixty). 

 

Fueled by wide highways, cheap gas, and ample land, American manufacturing moved out of the old city centers, leaving behind … a void. 

 

As the jobs moved, the cities declined.  As they declined, the urban infrastructure they left behind, chiefly beautiful 1930s multifamily courtyard-style brick apartment blocks, became absentee-owner rentals, to a population that in the 1950 and 1960s became rapidly black (the famous ‘white flight’ to the suburbs). 

 

All this decay coincided with the two great initiatives, under Roosevelt (1937-40) and Truman (1948-52), to tear down slums and replace them with public housing.  America used the same models as Europe’s, no difference in construction or operating philosophy, but where Europe’s estates were built in greenfield, America’s were sited on land swept clean of legacy by the renewal bulldozer.

 

With the emphasis on housing, and jobs fleeing (north to south, east to west, inner city to suburb), this massive investment in physical change merely shifted the venue and locus of decay.  New buildings rapidly became old.  Mixed income rapidly concentrated.  Working class became welfare class. 

 

By 1965, the American cities had hit bottom, and between 1965 and 1968, many of America’s inner cities went up in flames: Watts 1965, Detroit 1967, Chicago 1968. 

 

Sixties’ architects, urban theorists and science fiction writers could imagine no future for the cities; instead the stories told of depopulated wastelands ringed by security to keep those people inside and us safely behind our gated communities. 

 

Detroit’s Renaissance Center, built 1972, is today the premier example of the eloi fortress: four shining bronze towers protected by a bi-level concrete bunker into which one may only drive, one could not walk.

 

If you walked here, you’d be barricaded now

 

(The 1980 movie Escape from New York — actually filmed in a decayed part of downtown St. Louis — graphically depicted that vision, with the entire island of Manhattan cordoned off by a thirty-foot high concrete wall, where the only sentence was exile into the city.)

 

The second demographic wave:

The post-industrial European city, new urbanism, and immigration

 

That same demographic gravity afflicted Europe but in a different locus.  The city centers never fully declined; instead they were besieged by very poor areas just outside the city center.  The city center is thus preserved as a glass menagerie of the past.  All the cultural heritage, all the history, is carefully and expensively restored, a gray-hair’s playground decreasingly frequented by locals and increasingly operated as a historic-preservation theme park.  But the city center is, in many cases, no longer the brain. 

 

[Even in Paris, much of the business is done in La Defense — ironic name, isn’t it? — a new-construction complex west of the Paris tourists see.]

 

La Defense, where the future speaks French

 

If today the vacationer travels into a European city center, the rule of thumb is, drive to the city walls and park just outside.  Inside one finds restaurants, souvenir shops, museums, corner bodegas … and no working Europeans.  Even making due allowance of the luxury of walking a European city center at eleven on a Tuesday morning, one is struck by the absence of a working-age adult population.  They are all elsewhere — as are their homes, their shopping centers, their offices, and the hum of commerce. 

 

The modern economic European city is divided, an upper-income enclave suburb at some point on the clock, the housing estates at another point, usually with the industrial estates buffering in between.

 

Where, then, does immigrant demand migrate?  The city center is too expensive to live, and offers few jobs.  [The only walled city that I can remember as having any poor quarter is Avila, and I remember it clearly because I was so dumbstruck by the oddity of seeing what was obviously government public housing in such a setting.]  The ring, the compound abutting the industrial estate, becomes the magnet. 

 

And so:

 

• Paris has Saint Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast at two o’clock on the city center dial

 

 

• London has Southwark, southeast at five o’clock on the dial.
• Birmingham has Wolverhampton, just north and west.
• Glasgow has its vast estates, prominently featured in Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl and Comfort and Joy.

 

Glasgow council housing, 2002

 

Tourists, their heads down in the Michelin Green, seldom see these places, because to wander into them requires an act of will and a dedicated navigation.  That too tells one something: for the ordinary European, these slums inside are truly out of sight, out of mind … unless you happen to be perched at a panoramic view.

 

The isolation-warehouse model never works.  We saw that in Watts 1965.  We are seeing it in Capetown 2005 and Paris 2005.  That is where the anger brews, where the violence has erupted.  That is the terrain.  Those are the physical places to be fixed.  But their fixing, though it involves housing as a core intervention, requires much more than just a box inside which to sleep. 

 

As Jim Hoagland writes in the Washington Post:

 

Hurricane Katrina helped Americans understand in sickening detail the failures of local and federal emergency-response bureaucracies.  France’s riots should illustrate to the French the dead-end nature of the physical and social architecture of building a tall fence around the country’s 5 million to 10 million Muslim immigrants and their offspring, and then pretending they are essentially not there.

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