Neighborhood Development in a Democratic City: Toward a ‘Real’ Urbanism
by Mike Pyatok

Arcade, Design Journal of the Pacific Northwest
Fall 1996

Part I. The Context of Neighborhood Development

In the past three decades we have witnessed extraordinary changes in the global economy as many businesses either eliminated or drastically reduced labor to maintain a ‘competitive’ advantage and ‘acceptable’ compensation for investors, owners and CEO’s. As a result, we are experiencing massive social disruptions in our urban, suburban and rural environments. During this same period government policy has shifted to favoring business and its investor class, reaching extraordinary levels within the past two years as the social safety net was severely curtailed. Despite election-year government statistics, these are times of massive layoffs, with unemployment and underemployment at highs not seen since previous major efforts to automate and ‘rationalize’ production. At the same time that the unemployed are chastised for being lazy, established economists and the Federal Reserve admit that a market economy of our size must ‘naturally’ have 8 million or so unemployed at any one time as a check against inflation, the demon most feared by the investor class.

Any suggestions on how the American city can improve itself cannot be made without being aware of these larger economic forces: 1) continued global mechanization of agriculture, displacing rural First and Third World peoples into our cities, in turn expanding suburbs for the middle classes seeking to escape the consequences; 2) the cybernation of manufacturing in the First World or its relocation to the Third World, leaving behind stagnating communities of unemployed or underemployed, further spurring to the suburbs those still gainfully employed; 3) the more recent cybernation of financial and service industries, tossing aside white collar workers with its resultant impact on older suburbs.

Meanwhile, down in the streets of our cities, it has been argued that land development under Capitalism has always been engineered by more powerful economic interests manipulating political bodies and regulatory agencies. And while that may still be the case today, the process has become somewhat more complicated since the middle class during its Post WWII expansion claimed control over larger areas of urban and suburban regions. This was greatly assisted by several major government subsidies, not the least of which has been mortgage insurance and mortgage interest write-offs ($90 billion lost in potential Federal revenues in 1994). The subsidized expansion of the middle class continues with HUD’s new program called ‘Homeownership Zones’ for those whose incomes are just below what lending institutions are normally willing to accept. But the majority of the non-propertied class will not qualify for even this program, as was the case in similar federal efforts in the past because of requirements for acceptable credit ratings and stable incomes.

Federally-subsidized control of real estate by the middle class helped spawn both the positive side of the ‘neighborhood movement’ as well as its more destructive NIMBY side. While middle class homeowner neighborhoods have sought to check more rapacious speculative developers, their motives spring from class self-interests that often do not reflect the needs of the larger society. In fending off development from their own back yards, they often prevent job creation or residential choice for lower income households who must rent. Also, they impede the densities needed to support public transit, essential to lower income households. As long as the underclasses continue to grow in size and misery, buffeted by global forces and antagonized by middle class indifference or outright hostility, the nation suffers with higher social and economic costs shifted from the welfare state to prisons and police, higher insurance for property and health, and worsening impacts of suburban flight.

To make city-building more democratic, we are really discussing how to expand the opportunities of those who do not own property and do not have access to capital or subsidies in quantities that can make them a force in the political arena. Efforts to expand homeownership to this class, while politically acceptable, only serve the cream of the working poor. The question for architects and planners, members of the middle class, is what should our role be when serving non-profits and public agencies attempting to level the playing field for those who must remain tenants on the land of others during an era of shrinking job opportunities?

’Democratic’ Planning and Design

In a democratic planning process architects and planners as a first priority should assist those who are organizing the tenants of a neighborhood into a strong proactive force. The single, most important product of a redevelopment process, even more so than award-winning architectural symbols, is the local grass-roots coalition of the non-propertied and propertied classes created to invent, implement and maintain the products of redevelopment efforts. This approach recognizes that the reasons for social decay are not that people are living in poor physical conditions or lack a well-designed neighborhood. These conditions are merely consequences of lost jobs and disinvestment. While our efforts through organizations like the Congress for New Urbanism are important and necessary to better plan our neighborhoods, we have to be careful not to be like doctors prescribing pain killers for the symptoms of a more profound ailment. In short, rebuilding the human infrastructure should be the prime purpose, with rebuilding the physical structure as merely the excuse or the means to achieve that first priority.

Because the CNU is driven by architects and planners and not by a broad coalition of social change agents on a quest for economic democracy, it is not surprising that many now see us as using CNU principles to do nothing more than sugar-coat continued sprawl in the suburbs or disguise the same old destructive consequences of urban removal in the cities. At best we find ourselves producing for non-profits and public agencies award-winning housing and neighborhood designs for the deserving poor, packaging them in photogenic and politically correct architecture and urban design, but not at all contributing to the process of community organizing.

It should not be forgotten that families in the tenements of many New York blue-collar neighborhoods during the 1940’s, 50’s and even into the 60’s successfully raised children even through college on minimum wages, living in one-room apartments of only 600 square feet at 100 units to the acre, with very few of the physical ingredients prescribed by the New Urbanism. What made the difference was that industrial jobs, some even unionized, were plentiful at the time. It certainly helped that most retail, educational, recreational and transit services were easily available within walking distance, eliminating the need for auto ownership, a principle of the CNU. But it was also a period when most low-income families had two parents and only one parent could support the family even on modest wages and the other could tend to the homestead. Also, it was the pre-chain store era so there were many small shops locally owned, further assisting the neighborhood economy through the multiplier effect. Rent control was the form of government housing assistance at the time and tenants, paying only about 25% of their minimum wages for rent, maintained their own apartments and sometimes even buildings as an unwritten contract with landlords. Tenancies lasted 20 to 30 years, stabilizing whole neighborhoods as though they were owner-occupied with crime rates significantly lower than today. There were no homeowners within a half mile radius of these tenement neighborhoods yet they were strong, vital and wholesome places to raise children. The author is a product of these very conditions.

These conditions demonstrated that well-designed housing and carefully designed neighborhoods a la CNU principles are not as critical to wholesome family life as is a housing subsidy and an ample supply of decent jobs and strong social networks to compensate for the fact that in today’s economy both parents must work, if indeed there are two parents. Today, industrial jobs have been replaced with low-pay service jobs; federal housing assistance to tenants has all but evaporated and the gradual weakening of rent control in New York destabilized the decades-long yet delicate informal social contract that had grown between tenants and landlords; successful local shops in low-income neighborhoods are significantly fewer under the pressures of mega stores; families are reduced to having one parent because relationships are impossible under hopeless economic conditions; and cheap transit is a vanishing dream even in cities where it had a long tradition.

Under these conditions we have to be careful as architects and planners not to delude policy makers or the public into thinking that if we restore the physical structure or appearances of the good old days as a stage set that somehow our neighborhoods will resurrect the economic and social conditions that prevailed in the past. In fact, as members of the CNU we are often being asked to use our neighborhood planning principles to replace older neighborhoods occupied by renters with newer older-looking neighborhoods occupied by homeowners, thinking that a community like the good-old-days is being restored when in fact one is being eradicated.

Hence, genuine participation in the development process by the non-propertied residents of lower-income communities must be promoted as equally important, or perhaps even more important to community-building, than what the physical conditions will be like after redevelopment. Aside from creating some real immediate jobs, active participation fosters political savvy, economic entrepreneurship, self-confidence, and strong neighborhood organizations, all of which improve employability and the reputation needed by a neighborhood to attract investors and other entrepreneurs. Some of these community rebuilding activities by coalitions of tenants, modest homeowners and small business owners may include:

• reforming present zoning and planning ordinances which retard or prevent development in lower-income communities;
• demanding funds from public and private sources to fuel development;
• coercing local political bodies to favor policies that encourage development in lower-income communities;
• forming and managing neighborhood-based non-profit corporations to implement development, to provide training in development and to employ locals in the process;
• choosing and supervising professionals-- attorneys, architects, engineers, financial consultants, contractors-- to carry out community-driven priorities;
• working closely with planners and architects to give shape to plans and designs ranging in scale from neighborhoods to individual building projects.

We should not be romantic about the Apurity of the under classes and recognize that some grass-roots organizations suffer internal strife, nepotism, mismanagement, corruption, or incompetence. All of these have been part of inner-city self-help efforts but no more, and perhaps much less, than has been found in the practices of savings and loans institutions, the defense industry or the daily work of politicians. The only difference is that the petty foibles of self-help groups become fodder for conservative criticism of government programs for the poor, while the latter rather cosmic impacts on our economy are considered, well, the price we all must pay for over-exuberant businessmen. However, forms of redevelopment characterized by the protective paternalism of professionals--the Patrician Left--which also typifies some redevelopment efforts by non-profits and public agencies, suffers greater negative consequences from not having spread the educational and financial benefits of redevelopment among local residents, particularly the tenants. Award-winning architecture without a local human infrastructure of tenants to supervise, manage and expand the initial investments is a form of paternalism that simply stalls but does not reverse decay.

’Participatory’ Planning and Design

The actual process of designing a project with direct hands-on involvement by a coalition of tenants and property owners is an exciting and mind-expanding enterprise. It in no way needs to suffer from the ‘design-by-committee’ fears that ego-centric designers often cite. This is not the place to detail design methods which involve neighborhoods, sometimes with as many as 50 or more participants. Suffice it to say that the more successful methods typically divide a large group into several smaller work teams for more efficient and productive discussions. Each should have its own specially designed ‘modeling kits’ to help them simulate and evaluate a host of development issues including anything from strategic neighborhood plans to specific project site plans; from program arrangements within an existing building to new housing types for emerging new household types; from comparative financial analyses assessing the value of emerging physical designs to the architectural ‘character’ appropriate to a group’s cultural history or locale, etc.

This work can be accomplished in a series of weekly or bi-monthly workshops of 2-3 hours each. Using their models or other props supplied by the planner/architects, each smaller team of local residents can study and visualize its options and then elect a spokesperson to present their efforts at the end of each workshop in a plenary session to discuss, compare and seek consensus with other teams. The cohesion and sense of achievement experienced by lower income neighborhoods through a series of such workshops builds a solid experiential understanding of the issues. It also builds a sense of co-authorship and allegiance to the project that translates into a willingness to participate in lobbying efforts and public presentations necessary to gain support from local planning commissions, elected officials, lending institutions, etc. The success of a built project which they helped shape encourages people to continue to work for their community’s improvement on projects with less immediate rewards and slower time frames--school reform, drug busting, business retention, etc. And what emerges as a physical design from these workshops can be quite different from the formulas promoted by design professionals, housing specialists or public servants.

Projects which exemplify ‘Democratic’ Planning and Design

While much has been written recently about the New Urbanism, too much of this work has not been the result of grass-roots organizing in lower income communities by and for tenants. With an emphasis on neighborhood and regional scales, much of it still focuses on large-scale new communities and homeownership, requiring access to large capital investments where only private developers or government agencies can be players. Even the low-interest loan subsidies of HUD’s new AHomeownership Zones program, which promotes the use of the New Urbanism’s principles, requires a minimum of 300 units in order to apply. This will have little applicability to lower-income city neighborhoods needing micro-surgery or in-fill and do little for organizing tenants except to rouse them up against what could be another form of large-scale urban removal.

Some who espouse the positions of the New Urbanism are serving the interests of private developers and public agencies seeking to satisfy the culturally specific tastes of higher income residents. In a recent interview with Metropolis Magazine, architect Andres Duany, one of the CNU leaders retained by the City of Norfolk, Virginia, explained his plans for its East Ocean View neighborhood and why he was planning only 400 to 600 higher-priced new homes in place of 1500 rental units which are presently there in 350 buildings. He planned to bulldoze the existing neighborhood and displace the remaining working class families who still live there: A...affordable housing is not what cities need. Because they don’t pay taxes (not true, author’s comment). They bankrupt cities...The whole trick is to bring back the middle class@. So we not only subsidized the flight of the middle class for decades on the backs of the poor, now we feel it is morally right to subsidize their return on those same backs, since higher income homeowners are considered to be better citizens deserving more rights. On the new neighborhood mix, Duany explains, ANow it is 95% rental and 5% owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80% owner and 20% rental. On the question of who is to blame, Duany goes on, AThe whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because (the city council made the decision) before I got there.

APrinciples for Designing and Planning Homeownership Zones is a HUD pamphlet outlining 12 principles of the New Urbanism which HUD will be looking for among developments seeking assistance from this new homeownership initiative. Many of the illustrative projects are large new community plans or larger scale urban renewal projects redoing whole city blocks, commensurate with the 300-unit minimum limit of the funding source. Some are even high-end housing which can afford some of the more expensive ingredients of the New Urbanism. Only two projects are of the scale that most grass-roots organizations could undertake, and only one of these is rental housing for low-income families. While the pamphlet pays lip-service to the need for diverse neighborhoods, it does not explicitly encourage the mixing of rental housing, particularly for lower income families, with homeownership as a requirement for the funding, and certainly not in equal quantities. While the booklet stresses transit, reducing auto-dependence and the need for neighborhood-scale planning, there is an element of aesthetic elitism requiring more rigidly coordinated appearances, preferably with expressions of the ‘good old days’.

The New Urbanism’s recent efforts to expand its ideology into lower income communities is not at grass roots levels where most of its members have limited experience, but at the highest of centralized bureaucracies-- the public housing programs of HUD. It is not surprising that HUD’s public housing division has recently grasped the New Urbanism for help in face-lifting, and as some critics contend, in gentrifying many of its older public housing projects under the guise of ‘mixing’ incomes before selling them off and getting out of the business of helping those in most need. These latest prescriptions for physical design, while very useful and well-intentioned, repeat once again the design professions’ historic addiction to environmental determinism, proclaiming that a better physical design can overcome social ills created by decades of disinvestment, discrimination and de-industrialization, this time with the ingredients of neo-traditionalism.

Unfortunately, both HUD and the CNU subscribe to the erroneous assumption that concentrations of poor people are the major source of their maladies and that dispersing them and restructuring their former physical surroundings will make neighborhoods more functional and stabile. On the contrary, there are numerous examples in this country and in others of neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor people which demonstrate highly successful networks of political and social support to compensate for economic deprivation. Also, just as numerous, are examples of scattered site approaches to public housing that are devastating because of the residents’ isolation and discrimination by neighbors.

The literature of both HUD’s homeownership initiative and its public housing make-overs mention the importance of community participation. But these mentions are minor compared to the weight given to physical design mandates. Will the advocates for using the New Urbanism within existing neighborhoods or public housing projects demand with the same fervor from policy-makers that the work be done by the residents themselves through a participatory process as the most important community-building ingredient? That the outcome be allowed to emerge to suit local conditions, even if residents may disagree with some or much of the New Urbanism and do not want to follow a priori principles deemed best by the professionals?

Will the results be truly diverse, including rental housing for lower income families in proportion to the true need, perhaps as much as 50% or more of the total, or half-way houses for former substance abusers or group homes for the emotionally disturbed, or housing for people who otherwise would be homeless such as those with AIDS? Will they have covenants that allow accessory units with rents publicly managed to accept low-income renters, or home-based businesses that may even require home-made business signs planted in front yards and work vehicles parked overnight in driveways such as trucks, portable concrete mixers or air compressors, landscape equipment, and other tools needed by manual laborers? Will they allow the repair of appliances or vehicles as a business in someone’s garage, house or front yard? Or some backyard chickens, roosters and rabbits along with the vegetable gardens for family sustenance? Will they allow such families to run hair and nail salons from their living rooms like they allow some home-based therapists to operate in middle class neighborhoods?

Those of us who subscribe to the New Urbanism’s principles must be careful not to present only idyllic, anesthetized images of the ‘city beautiful’, counter to the needs of lower-income households who, for economic reasons, must organically link all aspects of their lives together into tighter--and to some, untidy-- geographic bonds which the middle and upper classes, along with their for-profit and non-profit developers, property managers and public planning bodies have not been willing to tolerate.

Projects which exemplify ‘democratic’ planning do have certain characteristics as varied as playful serendipity to a reserved historicism, depending on the goals of the local coalition and who they feel they need to satisfy. To summarize here:

• At the urban scale, this approach incorporates rich mixes of land uses, not just within the same district or block, but even the same building and dwelling. The intimate mix of these uses-- rental and homeownership, single family with industrial or light manufacturing, etc.-- is critical to the survival of lower-income households because the sources of income can be as much at the level of the family as at the level of the neighborhood or region. This mixing reduces dependency on the larger economy for employment, and on transportation to get goods and services, a critical savings for households with limited income.

• At the architectural scale, if a project allows for continual alteration or additions by tenants, then the architecture has transcended the tendency of our economy to attach ‘market-value’ solely to the contributions of the initial designers, too often using covenants and restrictions to freeze picture-perfect architecture and planning. This established tendency denies ‘use-value’ to people over time by disallowing their cultural and functional expressions as well. The alternative welcomes variety and the ‘untidy’ appearances of truly working neighborhoods which often look like they are forever in the process of becoming.

• With this push toward permissive diversity of land-use mix and serendipitous architectural expression, however, there comes a responsibility to require a higher degree of urban design order in the larger fabric of the city. This requires not more bureaucracy or mandates from design professionals, but an active citizenry of all incomes--including those who do not own property-- working closely with design professionals to devise the rules for structuring the public and private realms of their neighborhoods. Perhaps more attention should be given by design professionals not to appearance requirements but to those which expand tenant participation, encourage sustainable design practices, include a greater mix of uses needed to sustain lower-income households and encourage more permissive planning and building codes to facilitate self-help development.

• The critical ingredient here is the inclusive nature of devising these rules. The present process of planning review favors the ability of more affluent neighborhoods to represent their interests because they can hire consultants or use volunteer architects and planners living in their midst, or more recently, by simply relying on public servants to advocate their cultural cause with ‘neo-traditional design’ ordinances. More design professionals need to place the locus of their practice and residency within the hearts of those communities who most need but can least afford their services. The perspective from these locations will generate very different analyses, conclusions and physical prescriptions.

As design professionals, we must be open about the class biases that are often built into our favored urban design policies and admit that we are some of the worst carriers of the biases of the established classes because we often operate under the delusion that we are being neutral or universal in our outlook. A recent HUD circular urging the staffs of its public housing authorities to attend a HUD-sponsored workshop regarding the CNU, unashamedly asserted that the CNU’s principles Aare objective, codifiable, and can easily be adapted to a variety of situations. If we recognize that we are never free of class bias in our cultural preferences--including the discourse within design journals and schools of planning and architecture--then let us, our schools and publicists more openly admit to whose class interests we expect our careers and educations to serve.

Who is doing ‘democratic’ planning and design?

There are many architects and planners working in lower-income communities practicing democratic design but they are overlooked by the architectural press because the work does not generate photogenic avant garde images nor does it have access to capital in amounts necessary to achieve the scale of neighborhood intervention promoted by the CNU or to possess the charm of neo-traditional subdivisions. There seems to be tension within the CNU between those who wish to continue to focus on the issues of the suburbs with strict neo-traditional design guidelines and those who wish to extend its interests to the struggles of the inner city. Time will only tell which direction that an organization almost exclusively composed of planning and design professionals will take. But if history is a guide to the behavior of professional organizations, our membership may not veer too far from our own class interests unless we make a concerted effort to overcome the limitations of the organization’s origins and relinquish its leadership to people who are not architects and planners but who have long been on the quest for economic democracy.

However, many planners and architects who are members of the Planners Network and the Association of Community Design Centers qualify as practicing democratic planning and design because they are devoted as a first principle to rectifying the imbalance that exists between the classes in their access to our natural and built resources. These two organizations have been in existence for nearly 30 years, and their members include many seasoned warriors in planning and architecture addressing the issue of environmental justice. This does not seem to be among the first principles of the CNU, which seems more focussed on rectifying the form of the environment by ‘cleaning up’ its image so it has a more tidy, rational, if not picturesque functional quality. It is interesting that while the New York Times architectural critic reported on the fledgling CNU’s fourth annual conference in Charleston, North Carolina in May, there was no mention in the press of the historic joint conference of these two seasoned organizations held just two weeks later in Brooklyn, New York with over 400 people attending. The press’s own bias about whose class interests are most photogenic distorts the recording of history.

Part II. The Form of a ‘Democratic’ Neighborhood--Some Planning and Design Topics for Public Discussion

There really is no one preferred form or structure that better exemplifies a ‘democratic’ city. But public hearings for educational purposes, not just for specific project approvals, should be sponsored by local planning agencies to help communities continually reinvent their future. These can permit the continual, open examination of the assumptions that underlie patterns of development preferred by developers, by the various classes that make up the body politic, and by the design and planning professions. This can foster the necessary intellectual climate that admits none has a monopoly on what is best. The single-most significant obstacle to achieving the richness of the ‘democratic’ city is the belief that there are general, immutable rules for proper urban development which each of these groups or classes believes has the key to understanding. Perhaps the single, most important improvement that could be made to the process of building cities is for everyone involved, particularly those who have economic and political clout, to admit that economic class position clearly shapes cultural preferences, including what are believed to be appropriate planning and zoning guidelines.

But with that said about process, there are some directions toward which we should be pushing the form of cities in order to make them more functional for all classes. Outlined below is an abbreviated sample list of goals and topics intentionally posed as questions for public discussion in the spirit of facilitating a participatory city-building process rather than as prescriptive mandates promoting a manifesto. They are intended to steer city form to be more supportive of households living on modest incomes who cannot own property by the rules of the system.

1. Local Participation

Goals:
As noted above, economic development in lower income communities must be as much self-inspired as it is government-assisted. Ongoing participation by the tenants of a neighborhood in the real estate development process--including land acquisition, procurement of financing, choosing and working with consultants, shaping a neighborhood development strategy, designing a specific project, or managing properties and capital assets-- all contribute to a grass roots organization’s ability to understand how capitalism works--and doesn’t--or how to manipulate it to their community’s advantage.

• Should government-assisted rental housing programs require participatory planning and design strategies to qualify for funds? Should they specify some minimum expected forms of community organizing, hands-on participatory design methods, and outreach to those who do not own property, just as physical design guidelines like those of the New Urbanism are being required? Should federal and local agencies expand the availability of predevelopment funds to pay for this kind of ‘front end’ community organizing work as a basic component of design services?

• Should planning and architecture schools train planners and architects in methods of participatory design, group problem-solving, collective artistic creation, and the analysis of class bias as it effects individual self-expression? Should at least half of all design studios taught in schools of architecture be service-oriented, directly linked to disenfranchised communities to balance the ‘hidden curriculum’ of typical design studios which often unintentionally serve the economic and cultural interests of higher economic classes by defining architecture as a self-indulgent art form?

2. Comprehensive Neighborhood Planning

Goals:
Well-designed housing for lower income families, if built in a neighborhood without an economic development strategy and without supportive services, will deteriorate rapidly regardless of physical planning strategies. Neighborhoods must contain decent-paying jobs, good schools, easily available services, retail, and access to mass transit to support lower income families as they raise their children.

• Should we create a more complete geographic integration of land uses, even at the smallest levels of the city--the block, the building, the dwelling-- with isolation of only the most noxious uses, to facilitate the formation of small businesses and family enterprises?

• To create more affordable and extensive transportation, should we encourage neighborhood transportation cooperatives to rent bicycles, autos and vans in the absence of good transit? Should we liberalize licensing procedures to encourage more informal jitney services, gypsy cabs, even allowing less expensive three-wheeled or motorized rickshaws?

• Should we develop municipally-owned garages strategically placed in neighborhoods to relieve individual properties--residential or any other land uses--from having to supply their own parking, thereby lowering development costs and spurring the construction of affordable housing and local small businesses?

3. Neighborhood Services and Housing Opportunities

Goals:
Building housing in mixed-use areas not only can provide needed housing, but also reconstitute some of the services and retail opportunities that have fled a neighborhood. In the process they can re-build the urban fabric destroyed by either disinvestment or limited investment by outside retail chains. Vital economic street life with good residential supervision from the floors above is an important deterrent to street crime.

• Should we redefine zoning and building codes along with lending and insurance policies to make it easier to integrate housing, industry, retail, commercial and recreational uses into single structures and dwellings?

• Should we liberalize street vending regulations to permit more home-grown, low-overhead businesses?

• Can we create subsidies for small businesses--particularly light manufacturing--in depressed areas at the same scale we have supported the construction industry (spurring home construction via mortgage interest right-offs) or in the same way we have supported agribusiness?

4. Housing Design and Economic Opportunities

Goals:
Without an industrial base to provide decent blue collar jobs, housing design should recognize that many families must earn additional income from home-based businesses, in-law units, or by sub-leasing of their residential space for other uses. Planning agencies, developers and property managers should encourage home and apartment designs which can include income-generating opportunities.

• Should we reexamine our biases about residences as merely retreats and see them more as working homesteads, regardless of density? How does this concept differ between ‘lifestyle’ live-work lofts and the gritty realities of more manual trades?

• How can we spread some of the tax advantages of property ownership to tenants so they are willing to assume more responsibility in maintaining their residences, particularly if they are permitted to use them for earning income?

• What incentives can we give property owners to permit tenants more leeway in how they can use their residences to earn income? How can we design dwellings to allow for more creative ways by which people can survive as entrepreneurs in an age of downsizing corporations and plant closings?

• Should able-bodied tenants who receive housing assistance be required to demonstrate how they will use their homes to earn incomes if they are not employed in the larger labor market? In other words, should a housing subsidy be seen as a business incentive instead of a handout that nourishes passivity? If you are not employed but are able, yet will not put your home to productive use, then you simply cannot qualify for the subsidy.

5. Site Planning and Security

Goals:
Site planning must recognize the critical need to design for security to support a stable community life. The devastation of families caused by a grossly inequitable distribution of economic opportunities has created conditions where youth raised by other youth in gangs do not possess the social values necessary for a predictable public realm. This unpredictability does not mean we have to design prison-like housing enclaves, but rather socially active settings where neighbors are clustered into smaller groups so they can watch over each other’s children, keep out unwanted visitors and interact with and watch over the public realm. The public realm of a neighborhood is exceptionally critical to the lives of lower income families who often do not have the discretionary income to use the larger city or region for recreational purposes. The streets, centers of blocks and local parks are the primary places for recreation. But such site planning strategies are short-sighted if not accompanied by programs for youth tutoring, recreation, and job training.

• Should we discourage private rights-of-way, traffic barriers and diverters, which allow large developments and neighborhoods to close themselves off from each other, impeding fire, police, emergency vehicles and the general public’s movements? Will this not only make choice of direction more democratic, but ease the congestion on the few roads that are allowed to be links? Does a more open street grid improve the potential for connections between the classes or the opposite--create more opportunities for criminals to escape pursuit?

• How can we enhance the pedestrian quality of streets and their security? Front porches on single family homes and townhouses are obvious solutions, but should we also encourage multiple entrances and stairs to the dwellings on the lower floors of taller multi-family buildings, restricting the use of central lobbies, elevators and corridors only for use by residents of the fourth floor and above?
  

6. Fitting-in

Goals:
Every design for housing or other facilities in lower income communities, particularly rental housing, must carefully analyze the historic planning patterns in a neighborhood as well as the prevalent architectural character to insure that new developments ‘fit in’. Every development in a lower income community is a billboard of pride for the people who live there, and is an advertisement for all future developments that a community-friendly developer wishes to undertake.

• Should cities assist all of their neighborhoods to prepare their own customized guidelines for development and design to assist developers in understanding the local ground rules? If given this opportunity, should neighborhoods then face the following obligations and dispensations:

• Should neighborhoods receive increased densities if certain public amenities are contributed by proposed projects? Should neighborhoods which encourage lower densities pay a higher share per household for the infrastructure they are wasting? Should homeowner neighborhoods which host higher density rental housing pay lower taxes because there is a higher overall use of the neighborhood’s infrastructure?

7. Personalization

Goals:
Long-term tenancy and low turn-over are strong deterrents to crime in rental housing. Housing designs should help tenants personalize their residential settings, both indoors and outdoors, so they can ‘settle in’ like homeowners and be encouraged to stay for extended periods. The resulting neighborhood stability makes for strong tenant organizations inspired by their own cultural creations. This instills pride, encourages long-term upkeep, and neighborly vigilance against unwanted activities.

• Should developers of rental housing be rewarded by tax incentives or bonuses for how well their housing design encourages long-term occupancy, providing as many of the same ingredients that homeowners expect--the ability to territorialize and alter their own environments?

• To make housing more affordable with less subsidy, should we provide minimally-sized rental units designed to be expanded by tenants over time, whose labor investment can eventually be converted to ownership under a lease-with-option-to-buy?

• In spite of higher densities, can we design rental housing that encourages tenants to exercise their green thumbs so they can grow their own food, perhaps even raise certain animals for food, at the level of the unit or in common areas like roof tops or garage-top gardens?

Summary

The struggle by lower income renter households to maintain a geographic foothold within the city can be aided by architects using housing design and neighborhood planning as opportunities for community organizing and self-help development. The design, implementation and operation of specific projects by community organizations can be vehicles to help build organizational capacity and economic development savvy as well as meet the expected design goals of enhanced livability, security, and cultural pride in the resulting architectural symbols of self-help success. Our work as architects and planners might be better directed toward inventing creative public processes for lower income households to plan, design and build their own neighborhoods. This would be a kind of ‘real’ urbanism that reflects our shrinking resources and at the same time respects the great cultural diversity expected in our cities in the next century. Perhaps this should be done rather than, or in addition to, cataloguing prescriptive design guidelines, sometimes rather expensive, to fulfill what may be preconceived images held by professionals of the ‘city beautiful’ in an older Anglo-American urbanism.

Notes

1. The average CEO salary grew from 30 times the typical worker in the 1960’s, to over 100 times in 1996.

2. see When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 and The End of Work , by Jeremy Rifkin, published by G.P.Putnam = s Sons, 1995.

3. The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1994; p. 11

4. National Mortgage News, Faulkner and Gray, Inc.; May 1, 1995             

5. The HUD 235 program for affordable homeownership of the 1970’s experienced a high rate of defaults because households at or below 80% of median income, often with limited savings, have difficulty coping with financial crises like serious illnesses, lay-offs and slow-downs, or deaths in the family, which often lead to late mortgage payments, penalties and eventual foreclosures.  

6. Since the Reagan and Bush administrations HUD’s budget has dropped from $30 billion to less than $10 billion annually.   The present Congress is working to abolish it entirely and the Clinton administration is working hard to downsize it further.  

7. A When the New Urbanism Meets an Old Neighborhood and A Demolition Man @ , by Alex Marshall in Metropolis, May, 1995.

8. Federal Register, Notice of Funding Availability, July 16, 1996, page 37139 and A Principles for Designing and Planning Homeownership Zones @ , US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Community Planning and Development, July, 1996.

9. HUD memo regarding a New Urbanism Conference co-sponsored by HUD, The Housing Research Foundation, and the CNU at Harvard = s GSD in August, 1996.

10. As reported by Herbert Muschamp in the Sunday NY Times after the recent fourth conference of the CNU in North Carolina, June 2, 1996

11. The Planners = Network can be reached at: Planners = Network/Pratt GCPE, 200 Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn, NY, 11205; the Association of Community Design Centers can be reached at the Pratt Center for Community and Environmental Development, 379 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11205.

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