ARSENAL

OFEXCLUSION

Public Housing

Architecture, Art, and the Open City Spring 2009

Becky Slogeris

ARSENAL OF EXCLUSION:

Public Housing

The purpose of public housing should be to act as an inclusive tool that provides

affordable options for people otherwise unable to participate in home ownership. In actuality,

public housing has fared much more exclusionary. Ultimately, the lower class residents they

contain are isolated even further from the lifestyle and standards of the city around them.

As Lawrence Vale, a professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, asserts, “The problem

we have as a nation is that policymakers and city offi cials tend to be better at mixing out the

poor than mixing them in.” To call this segregation a problem seems like an understatement.

Can we call it just a problem when the mass majority of Americans, most often white and

middle class, are completely ignorant of the conditions in these inner cities? (Even though

these conditions, albeit in a diluted way, impact their comfortable suburban homes?) Can

we call it just a problem when the Government would rather ignore the current corruption

deeply rooted in decades of de jure segregation? (Even though they have been skating by

on the occasional presentation to the public of polished plans for redevelopment and have

been avoiding actually getting their hands dirty and wrestling with the whole of the situation?)

Moreover, can we call it a problem when the people involved have been so grossly mistreated

that seemingly no solution exists to make up for it all? Within the past 10 years, the effects

of government intervention in the arena of public housing have proven so catastrophic that

completely clearing the slate through demolition has become the only option and a new

round of solutions are already being implemented. It is here, at a critical juncture in how

and where residents live in the city, that it particularly important to ask if we are doomed

merely to repeat ourselves with another round of exclusionary approaches.

PAST

Today, there are approximately 1.2 million households living in public housing

units sponsored by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Of

those units, an overwhelming majority are occupied by African Americans. This imbalance,

surprisingly, was not always the case. “There was a time, before 1900, when blacks

and whites lived side by side in American cities. Even Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and

Philadelphia – cities now well known for their large black ghettos – were not segregated

this way” (Massey, 17) Looking at Baltimore in particular, “… housing was not racially

segregated, and even following the Civil War, blacks lived in all of Baltimore’s twenty wards.”

While the majority of blacks did reside “in the city’s central, southern, and eastern sections,

1934Housing Division of the Public Works

Administration established under

Roosevelt

1910Baltimore’s city council passes an

ordinance establishing

separate white and black

neighborhoods

1922Le Corbusier presents his plan

for a “Contemporary City”

1856Otis invents the elevator

1866Tenement Act requires fi re escapes

and water closets for every 20 tenants

1890Jacob Riis publishes “How the Other

Half Lives” to draw attention to the

conditions of tenements in New

York City

1933New Deal begins counter-depression

measures

Home Owners Loan Corporation spurs

suburbanization

1865The Civil War ends

1914Outbreak of WWI

Becky Slogeris

Architecture, Art, and the Open City

Dan D’Oca

March 5, 2009

there was no Negro quarter or ghetto.” (Power, 290) In the early 1900’s, racial tensions

began to emerge in cities. Fear among white residents manifested itself initially with violence

as outright as riots and bombing, but eventually shifted to approaches more “civilized

and institutionalized” (Massey, 35) like boycotts and restrictive covenants. Early on, they

learned the power of using both de facto and de jure techniques to separate themselves

from the infl ux of southern blacks that had been moving north. In 1910, Baltimore City

Council passed an ordinance that, according to The Baltimore Sun, stated that “no negro

can move into a block in which more than half of the residents are white, no white person

can move into a black in which more than half of the residents are colored.” (Thompson,

299) In fact, the fi rst projects in Baltimore were created to “limit the Negro ghettos’ of East

and West Baltimore and stem black migration into white residential areas.” It was with this

containment in mind that the McCulloh Homes were placed so precisely between Bolton

Hill and the West Baltimore “ghetto”. In American Project, Sudhir Venkatesh describes the

ghetto as “ a separate place – that is, a quasi-independent city” – where residents were at

once removed from the rest of society, actively evading that society, and creating lifestyles

at odd with that society.” (Venkatash, 8) White avoidance of these areas was made even

easier with the creation of the suburbs. Federal initiatives like the 1933 Home Owners Loan

Corporation during the new deal offered whites in the city a way out. The public housing

that they were once a part of began to be seen as “a kind of coping mechanism rather than

as a form of reward. Many upwardly mobile white families who once would have applied for

public housing enjoyed new opportunities for federally guaranteed mortgages in the suburbs

and no longer needed to rely on the increasingly stigmatized resource of ‘the projects’” (Vale,

5) Differences become even more pronounced after World War II, as more opportunities

developed for whites outside of cities and blacks become increasingly trapped inside cities.

“After racial segregation was declared illegal, the defendants simply stopped building family

public housing in white neighborhoods.” (Thompson)

Under the guise of Urban Renewal, the federal government started removing urban

slums to make way for new housing complexes and cultural institutions in the modernist

vein. Although slum clearance meant to benefi t those living in the unsanitary conditions

of the slums, a new beast was born with their replacement, the high-rise housing complex.

“Public housing was now meant to collect the ghetto residents left homeless by the urban

renewal bulldozers.” (Venkatesh, X) While these replacement structures are being

built in the 1960’s, the switch from a predominately white middle class population to a

predominately black lower class population in our cities becomes complete. We see the

spaces that should be inclusive to all limited to stark pockets of homogeneity. While this

transformation is mystifying, it is not impossible to identify how exactly it all happened.

Probing the history of public housing, the role of the government is obvious. For instance, in

1949 Title 1 of the 1949 Housing Act ushers in the age of Urban Renewal through a slum removal program

1948 U.S. Supreme Court declares restrictive covenants unenforceable

1945 The end of World War II

1969, just one year after the Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination in housing, Congress

enacted the Brook Amendment to cap public housing rates at 25% of income. While this

intended to protect low-income tenants, the results were much more devastating, pushing

the economic diversity (and inextricable racial diversity) out with any residents whose income

exceeded the new limit.

In “Building Walls,” Gerald Frug writes about how “every level of government has

helped make city boundary lines a central ingredient in peoples lives. These boundaries

lines,” he asserts, “ not only determine which public resources are ours and which are

theirs, but help to defi ne who “we” and “they” are.” In the case of public housing, fear of the

other, with the poor black population as the primary target, has infl uenced all government

decisions in the city to some extent, both a consciously and unconsciously. Still, Frug

continues on to say that “no one has the power to control the nature of the other people

who also choose to live in the same city.” (Frug, 117) Despite his assertion, we have found

a way to by perverting the very promise of inclusion. If it is true that the government can’t

control who resides in a city, they can at least control where those unwanted residents live.

“The location of public housing projects in neighborhoods of highest poverty concentration

is the result of federal toleration of extensive segregation against African Americans in urban

housing markets, as well as acquiescence to organized neighborhood groups’ opposition to

public housing construction in their communities.” (Venkatesh, Ix) To make matters worse,

the housing built was placed in existing pockets of poverty.

Propelling the construction of the projects forward was, among other factors, the

unrelenting machine of Robert Moses in New York and the utopian visions of Le Corbusier,

both of whom subscribed to the modernist belief in the transformative power of high-rise

structures. If, as Alain deBotton asserts, “architecture is premised on the notion that we

are, for better or for worse, different people in different places” and that it’s task is to “render

vivid to us who we might ideally be,” the clean new construction surely was a beacon of

hope at the start. In Chicago, “from it’s inception, the Robert Taylor homes was more than

a residential complex. For the nations disenfranchised, the housing development would

serve as a stop on the way to property ownership, Thomas Jefferson’s cradle of American

democracy, as well as to an awareness of the rights that entailed. It signaled the commitment

of the federal, state and local governments to addressing the needs of all citizens black

and white, rich and poor. (Venkatash, 13) At the same time, these developments “lacked

the basic entitlements that the rest of society takes for granted. (Venkatesh, XI) The

systematized, cheap, and effi cient modes of construction didn’t take long to exhibit wear and

tear.

1954Brown v. Board of Education rules

“separate educa-tional facilities are

inherently unequal” and de jure racial

segregation becomes a violation of the Equal Protection

Clause of the 14th Amendment of the US

Constitution

1960Eisenhower stresses spending for

Urban Renewal

1963The world’s largest public housing

project, Robert Taylor Homes, containing 4,321 apartments,

completed in Chicago

As these pristine towers of concrete began to go to the gutters, one can easily

assume that pride in residency, which translates directly to an individual’s self-esteem,

followed. If where you live is a refl ection of how you see yourself, it’s no stretch to connect

the impersonal concrete structures of the projects, where the number on your door was

“the only way you could tell the difference between your place and your neighbors,” to the

loss of individuality. (Gilderbloom, 5) When looking at the psychology of an individual in

a city, Sennett is particularly interested in these simplifi ed forms of identity. Ultimately he

fi nds that they create a ‘a state of absolute bondage to the status quo’ and, as a result, limit

people’s lives. “A reliance on stability coherence, and order,” he writes, “inhibits openness

to experience: it undermines one’s ability even to absorb, let alone profi t from, the fl ux and

variety the world has to offer.” (Frug, 120) While this analysis is certainly more fi tting to the

homogeneity of suburbia, as it would be far fetched to say that a person constantly living on

edge in the danger zones of projects had achieved stability, the deprivation of experience is

the same. With the life of the projects in mind, the irony of Sennett’s philosophy continues

with his plea for “the experience of surprise, disorder, and difference in one’s life” with the

life of the projects in mind. (Frug, 121) At a certain point, the projects started to permit

and even help facilitate crime and violence. Living in them became a matter of survival,

and residents certainly got a daily dose of that disorder Sennett idealizes. “The exhaustion

on resident’s faces showed the toll that the violence had taken on their lives: their energies

were spent navigating safe excursions to the grocery stores.” After gang related incidents,

often with little police attention, “some took leaves of absence from work or rearranged their

schedules to help other families, and they were all faced with restless children they had

confi ned to apartments and areas inside the buildings.” (Venkatesh, 2) Imagine that when

a child living in the projects is isolated to only playing indoors, they are not just isolated from

the tattered plastic playground outside, but isolated from everything else the world has to

offer them one block, or two blocks, or a hundred blocks away. This hindering of mobility,

fi guratively and quite literally, is where the cycle starts. If one is unaware of something better

outside of their bubble, it’s probably pretty easy to be content living in the same cinder block

apartment for their whole life.

Now that opens up another can of worms. We can blame the immobility of people

living in the projects of ignorance, but that assumption in itself would be ignoring all the

different ways in which they have been held captive. Let’s say someone living in the roughest

of projects did realize that there was something better out in the world for them, would they

have the fi nancial means to even leave? Or the education to make it happen? Assumedly, to

leave the projects would not be instantly liberating. Simply put, for every one lap anyone else

runs, they will fi nd themselves having to do one more. There is certainly a ripple effect with

housing out into every other area of one’s life. British sociologist Ray Paul states that “a

1968 Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and fi nancing of dwellings based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, or disability.

1967 NAACP’s Legal De-fence Fund declares “negro housing projecgts not afford-able or livable”

1969 Congress enacts Brook Amendment to protect low-income tenants by capping public housing rates at 25 percent of income.

1965 The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) established

1964 Civil Rights Act outlaws segregation

person’s opportunity to secure adequate schooling, jobs, health care, and a safe

neighborhood are shaped by the spatial and social allocation of housing and transportation

services.” (Gilderbloom, 206) In the case of American public housing, the distribution has

clearly been unequal.

PRESENT

It wasn’t until the introduction of Section 8 in 1974 that HUD made an honest

attempt to move beyond default system of public housing to address these inequalities. As

a rent subsidy voucher, Section 8 allowed tenants chose a project based or tenant based.

In 1999, existing tenant based voucher programs were merged into the Housing Choice

Voucher Program, “now the primary means of providing subsidies to low income renters.”1

That same year, the federal government began the HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for

People Everywhere) program. It’s objectives were to change the physical shape of public

housing, reduce concentrations of poverty, provide support services, maintain high standards

of personal responsibility, and form partnerships. The overall effect was the creation of mixed

income communities through the demolition of failing public housing units. The biggest

problem with Hope IV to this day has been the lack of attention to what should happen after

the demolition of these units. In most cases, the number of units built to replace those

demolished have been signifi cantly less, even though waiting lists continue to grow in cities

across the nation. Perhaps even worse though, than inadequate replacements, is that the

units were often placed in areas that just reinforced the de facto segregation of the city.

In 1995, Barbara Samuels and the Baltimore ACLU brought the issue of segregation

to the forefront with Thompson V. HUD. In the landmark case, six individuals argued on

behalf of every public housing tenant in Baltimore that the “local and federal defendants

intentionally developed a segregated system of public housing in Baltimore city between

1930 and 1954,” and that “local and federal defendants failed to disestablish segregation

I Baltimore’s public housing after Brown V. Board of Education.”2 Their hope was that the

case would enjoin construction on the replacements for Fairfi eld and Lafayette before they

had the chance to continue in the same segregationist style. What makes Thompson so

monumental is that it hit HUD right at a turning point for the organization, and questioned

if their intentions had really changed at all. After seeing fi rst hand the effects of such

segregated housing conditions for the past forty years, the plaintiffs had the audacity to fi ght

against letting the same thing continue again for the next forty.

In 1995, HUD released a report titled: “Transforming Public Housing: Building

Community Pride” chock full of idealistic renderings of public housing redevelopments and a

1 www.hud.gov/offi ces/pih/programs/hcv/

2 http://www.povertylaw.org/poverty-law-library/case/51000/51012a.pdf

1974

1992

1995

1989

1972

Section 8 rental subsidies introduced

HOPE VI program created

Thompson v. HUD fi led in complaint

of racially discriminatory

housing policies inBaltimore

U.S. Congress enacts Department of

Housing and Urban Development Reform Act and established

the National Commission on

Severly Distressed Public Housing

(NCSDPH)

Dynamiting of Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis is a symbolic end of

modernist movement of planning

blissful avoidance of responsibility for any of the societal ills or segregation that plagued their

sites. “Most of the approximately 1.3 million units of public housing in the United States are

well-kept and well managed” they maintained. “Largely ignored by headlines and new stories

is the fact that public housing is primarily responsible for meeting this critical human need.

In most parts of the country, public housing represents the kinds of housing people want in

their neighborhood; it is decent and livable.” (HUD, 5) “Most” is the operative term here.

The pages that followed showed the very places not included under that umbrella, American

cities. Before and after shots of sites in St. Louis, San Antonio, Texas, Louisville, Detroit, and

Chicago boasted of demolition dates, slated or completed, with construction dates shortly

after. This was all part of an 8 year, $2.5 billion dollar campaign to demolish around 100,000

public housing units in cities across the U.S. It was as if all at once we realized just how

horribly awry the high rise and mega blocks approach had gone. Now those buildings, made

to house the masses, are being replaced with low-rise versions in relatively the same vein, or

their lots are left empty altogether.

Henri Lefebvre used the idea of social space to describe the active production of

places and the creation of their meaning through an individual’s everyday participation.

“The concept of social space captures a modern antagonism between the

administration of space for rational planning and economic accumulation,

and the use of space for everyday purposes, that is, the ‘inhabiting’ of space.

The institutions that make up the state are forever concerned with managing

space, planning and re-zoning, effi cient and rational use of territories, and so

on. Their logic – that of “abstract space” – runs counter to that of the people

who live in the space and who may value a particular territory for reasons

that have little to do with its planning or economic development potential, but

that have more to do with their connectedness to it.” (Venkatesh, 39)

On the eve of their destruction, many last minute feelings surfaced, especially from

residents who were about to be uprooted from the network of family and friends that had

developed. Aside from the glaring issues of crime and sanitation, and forgetting the basic

needs of health and safety that they inhibited, they questioned if the projects had really

been such a bad thing after all. For many of these communities, it might be safe to say that

the social space created within these projects was more vibrant than the often non-existent

relationships found in their white suburban counterparts.

The issue then, it seems, is more that they created the exclusionary enclaves where the

opportunity for African Americans to encounter people other than themselves was slim. It’s

not hard to see the downfalls of such extreme isolation. Encountering difference in others, as

Frug asserts, is necessary for personal growth and the progress of society. A healthy open

1998 Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago begin to come down

city needs exchange of ideas and residents who are tolerant of diversity. Within the concept

of an open city, the projects were a glaring thorn in the side. And in the ideal of the open

city, every piece matters. The failure of one segment effects the success of the whole, which

should be something that both the interventionist left and the hand-off right can agree about.

Unfortunately, the possibility is huge that isolation of the urban poor will become even more

ignored in the two story replacement homes scattered around our cities. Maybe we needed

the sixteen story eyesores to remind us of those being left behind.

With all of that being said, can we really blame the structures? Despite the impersonality of

their design and invitation of crime throughout poorly planned halls and stairwells, these are

structures that, under different conditions and with different bells and whistles, work per-

fectly fi ne. Just look at similar structures in mixed-income apartment buildings in the US, or

the successes of public housing in Amsterdam or even New York. In looking at the demise of

the American projects, what it came down to was the removal of choice from the equation.

The most important choice here was location, the ability to mix, if desired, with other races

and classes living in the city. Now, the crux of programs like Section 8 or Hope IV is the

ability to choose through mixed income developments. In 2007, an Inclusionary Housing

Bill was actually introduced in Baltimore “requiring developers to designate a certain portion

of new developments as affordable.”3 Chicago’s “Plan for Transformation” brags that even

though they are “rebuilding on the same land” they are “charting new ground” with contem-

porary town homes and low-rises in developments that mix equal parts public, affordable,

and market-rate housing.4 Looking at the glass as half full, “they may represent imperfect

or incomplete efforts, but they have succeeded in a total remake of some of America’s most

dangerously blighted neighborhoods, in the process creating quite healthy, new, mixed-use

communities.” (Gilderbloom, x)

FUTURE

Noting Paul Pierson’s idea of “lock-in effects” – that “once a choice of policy is

taken, the cost of adopting alternative solutions to the problem increases.” (Sidney, 13) – it

is necessary that we completely weigh the options at hand and their future consequences

before we jump blindly into another convincingly titled plan. This is especially important

now, before HUD starts throwing around its 10.1 billion dollar share of the stimulus package

signed into law last week.5 A solution should include more than the literal structure. Go-

ing back to Chicago, the CHA’s plan also includes partnerships with other agencies to help

residents with things like employment assistance and substance abuse counseling. When

possible, it is just as important that the intangibles of it all are taken into consideration.

3 http://www.planetizen.com/node/25064

4 http://www.thecha.org/transformplan/plan_summary.html

5 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29468159/

“This is not something that can properly be answered in the abstract or the aggregate. Indi-

vidual places matter. So do the particular residential communities that inhabit them.” (Vale,

5) The best solution is not to look at public housing in the U.S. as one solid entity requiring

one generalized treatment. That is precisely where applying Corbusian systems got us in

trouble. To create one blanket approach ignores the individual people of the community

that public housing aims to serve. Instead of throwing money towards impersonal formulas

with unforeseen results, our current situation requires specialized attention for each indi-

vidual community, if the actions taken are to be as inclusive as possible. With that being

said, current conditions are hinged on the analysis of past forces, a past where exclusion

rules the day, and the tear-down-try-again approach is acceptable. Can we afford to continue

gambling when there are actual people at stake? Now that a second solution is being sought,

and we are again disrupting the natural order that has developed in these communities, it is

necessary to ask ourselves if we are really fi xing the problem or just switching out the façade

of the same old exclusionary approach.

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