NYCHA Plans First High-Rise Complex Demolition
This news hit late Friday, but it seemed too huge to ignore today: The Times reports that for the first time in its history, the New York City Housing Authority is planning to demolish a public housing project, Brownsville’s Prospect Plaza Houses. The three towers that make up the complex once housed 1,200 people but…
This news hit late Friday, but it seemed too huge to ignore today: The Times reports that for the first time in its history, the New York City Housing Authority is planning to demolish a public housing project, Brownsville’s Prospect Plaza Houses. The three towers that make up the complex once housed 1,200 people but they’ve been completely vacant for about 7 years, when NYCHA moved residents out and told them they would eventually be able to return to renovated apartments. Now, however, the agency says that it would actually be more expensive to renovate the buildings than to build new apartments, and it hopes to start construction on new, low-rise replacement buildings in a couple of years. Some former residents, of course, don’t trust NYCHA’s plans: “Several former residents of Prospect Plaza and groups that represent public housing tenants said they did not support the demolition, in part, because it was unclear to them that the authority intended to replace the old units with the same number of new public housing units.”
New York City Plans to Topple Public Housing Towers [NYT] GMAP
Photo from Property Shark.
“Several former residents of Prospect Plaza and groups that represent public housing tenants said they did not support the demolition, in part, because it was unclear to them that the authority intended to replace the old units with the same number of new public housing units.”
Sounds like a job for Daniel Goldstein.
No, I am not. I read it in the book I referenced above. The projects he described were de facto run by a gang – the police at best looked the other way, at worst they and the tenant leaders were on the payroll. It’s a whole different world and the usual middle class rules of living do not apply.
Kensingtonka, I presume you are kidding that public urination is used as a gang deterrent…although I have heard of using coyote urine to deter deer…
Ah, thank you, nsr.
If we avoid the inclination to generalize and universalize, the issue here is mostly a matter of incredibly bad capital project management. (See NYT article.)
Brenda, it’s not quite that simple. You know what happens if the homeless set a camp on your driveway, or the drug dealers decide that they like your stoop, or some prostitutes find your porch especially attractive… you’ll just call the police and they’ll come and protect you. Well, if you live in the projects and you can’t count on the police to protect you, you do whatever little you can and ask your kid to pee near your front door and the staircase near your apartment, so there wouldn’t be drug dealings, gang fights, etc. at least on your floor.
S.Venkatesh’s “Gang leader for a day” is an eye-opener.
Brenda from Flatbush,
Not to get all Officer Krupke, there are many factors which contribute to deviant behavior. My point is that while the built enviroment may exacerbate the violation of societal norms, it is not the root cause. Yet, ever since the days of Jane Jacobs, we’ve all been conned into thinking it is. There is some beautiful historic housing stock in ENY and Brownsville, yet there is still high crime and despair. And there are god-awful looking mitchell-lama towers in Coney Island, LeFrak City, Starrette City and even Brooklyn Heights, that are home to dynamic and safe communites.
“Still, your point about Peter Cooper, Stuy Town etc. carries weight. Why the fuck don’t they have these problems?”
They were never public housing — certainly not in the sense people mean when they talk about “the projects”.
Check the history of them sometimes. The were initially for WW2 veterans and families and later gave preference to police officers and fire fighters and their families.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cooper_Village%E2%80%94Stuyvesant_Town
Snippets:
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Stuyvesant Town was controversial from the beginning. It was championed by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who, at the behest of Mayor La Guardia, sought “to induce insurance companies and savings banks to enter the field of large-scale slum clearance”
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In the years after it opened, blacks were barred from living in the complex, with MetLife’s president, Frederick H. Ecker, stating that “Negroes and whites do not mix.”[
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Lawsuits were filed on the basis that the project was public or semi-public, and thus violated anti-discrimination laws for New York City public housing. In July 1947, the New York Supreme Court determined that the development was private and that, in the absence of laws to the contrary, the company could discriminate as it saw fit.
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Metropolitan Life was building a separate-but-equal housing project in Harlem, Riverton Houses. Some years later, the company admitted a few black families to Stuyvesant Town and a few white families to Riverton.
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Hope for Oro and Toren?
***Bid half off peak comps***