Studs Terkel or Martha Stewart? The Entrepreneurial Neighborhood
by Mike Pyatok

Architecture Boston
Fall 1999

Urban neighborhoods, especially in older communities like the ring cities of Boston, often face a chicken-and-egg dilemma: Which comes first- the real estate or the job? Too often, fixing the real estate is the answer. Employers won't move into areas displaying severe physical sign of disinvestment, or so the argument goes. But improving the ‘stick and bricks’- as that may be sometime – is often a quicker and easier first step than importing businesses with decent jobs and revitalizing local schools to offer challenging and effective education.

We have already learned that the wholesale removal of people and their neighborhoods is an inappropriate response to urban decline; Boston's West End is the object lesson for us all. We seem, however to be doomed to lurch from one solution to the next. The latest mythic cure promoted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and many redevelopment agencies is to instead import people with higher incomes, particularly homeowners. (Importing businesses is apparently still an elusive goal.) Advocates assert that mixing income is healthier for a neighborhood than maintaining its low-income homogeneity. But the efforts of implementing this policy can be as devastating as the renewal strategies of the 60's. The social engineering associated with relocating the poor with rent vouchers (as HUD's Hope VI program is doing) and with even less sensitive one-time reimbursements in order to make room for people with stable, higher incomes, forces the same painful personal and economics costs on those who must move as it did 30 years ago. And for those who do remain as part of the ‘mix,’ new neighbors who are already gainfully employed do little to create real job opportunities locally.

In the same way that the implementation of this newer ‘mixed-income’ social policy has its flaws, so, too, does the architectural and urban design clothing in which it comes dressed today. The architects facing the design implications of these policies fixate on those picturesque architectural qualities that will attract people with discretionary income.

These architect sincerely believe that those who are unemployed or underemployed need domestic stage-sets from yesterday to feel that they belong with the higher income class of their employed new neighbors. Somehow, having their own home and front porch is expected to catapult them into the middle class-which this kind of domestic imagery purports to reflect. In this sense, the Martha Stewarts of urban design are intruding on the lives of disenfranchised people like those documented by Studs Terkel, insulting their cultures and ignoring their most significant economic needs.

Both the architects and the social planners believe that this strategy of ‘fixing’ real estate in order to attract affluent outsiders is the only answer. But they have forgotten a time-tested solutions that sustained many previous generation: the incubation of local home-grown businesses

If we make local, resident-initiated, entrepreneurial activity a prime social and economic objective, then certain urban design and architectural responses would naturally follow. The result would be a new type of live-work community that can accommodate home-based businesses such as repairing autos or appliances, making clothing or furniture, manufacturing home decoration, providing hair and nail care services. These kind of business are critical to economic survival, even if they may be somewhat untidy. In fact, to the Martha Stewarts of urban design, they may seem downright ‘grungy.’

As much as 25 percent or more of the population of today' inner cities lives under the same difficult economic circumstances as our 19th-century pioneers and immigrants. But economics opportunities that were available 150 years ago are now disallowed by modern zoning, building codes, lending guidelines, insurance policies, and property management practices. The residential block no longer also serves as an incubator of small manufacturing and repair workshops, and the neighborhood is no longer seen as a thriving, if messy, exporter of goods and services. Instead, our urban residential districts strive to be bucolic settings for retreat and home-based escapist consumption, relying upon local, cutesy retail centers to distribute goods produced elsewhere.

Public officials, developers, property managers, and lenders need to recognize that those struggling up from the bottom have little concern about the long-term ‘exchange value,’ or resale value, of their dwellings. Instead, they care about ‘use value’- how their homes can generate income now. Dwelling can be designed, without any appreciable increase in size, to permit a portion of the home to be cordoned off for either an income-producing business activity or for rent sublet (without necessarily adding a kitchen). Even at densities 35-40 dwelling units per acre, it is still possible to provide ground-floor entries with a front door maintaining the ‘proper’ street appearance and a separate back or side door for commercial use. The presence of alleys can further segregate the uses. If we need at all to look to our past for models, architect can find inspiration in early pioneers and urban immigrant communities. Models for such dwellings already exit in the Boston area. Even today's Third World offers examples of thriving entrepreneurial neighborhood from which we can borrow. And of course, many of us grew up in a time not long past, when such diverse uses were regularly integrated within urban neighborhood, blocks, and dwellings out of necessity, offering rich opportunities with little complaint or sense of impropriety.

There were good reasons at the turn of the last century for muckrakers and social reformers to see their factory districts as unhealthy, polluting, and disease-ridden neighborhood. But over the remainder of this century, the gradual and systematic purging of low-income livelihood from our neighborhood eventually became a means to separate classes and races. In progress of ‘sanitizing’ the city, not only were the poor relegated to their own zones, but those zones, but though zone were also denied their economic lifeblood. In their quest to ‘domesticate’ low-income neighborhoods, the architects know as the New Urbanists, in collusion with HUD and its HOPE VI program, are perpetuating the tradition of displacing the poor. Worse, they are imposing restrictive architectural and planning straitjackets onto those who are priviledge to remain, preventing them from engaging in forms of economic self-improvement. As we turn from the 20th to the 21st century, we need more sensitive policies that reflect today' cleaner means of manually producing goods and services, particularly at the micro-scales of the home, block and neighborhood. In this way we may be able to reinstate a stable foundation for working-class communities that allows them to raise their families with dignity, confidence, and greater self-reliance.