Largest Public-Housing System in the U.S. Is Crumbling

[Pedestrian]

By Mara Gay and Laura Kusisto
March 18, 2018 8:00 a.m. ET

New York City’s public housing is literally falling apart.

The sprawling network of 176,000 apartment units across the five boroughs needs an estimated $25 billion of repairs, up from $6 billion in 2005. Yet annual federal funding for the nation’s largest public-housing program hasn’t kept pace.

Residents of decaying brick towers battle leaking roofs and moldy walls, broken elevators and aging infrastructure. This winter, the housing authority’s ancient boilers gave out, leaving more than 320,000 people without heat or hot water . . . .

Housing authorities in other major cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta, now manage a vanishingly small share of their units. In some cases, cities have continued to own the land or buildings and they are run largely by private real-estate companies, while in other cases the original buildings are demolished completely . . . .

Preserving New York’s properties likely will require drastic measures . . . .

https://www.wsj.com/articles/largest...&page=1&pos=18

[Pedestrian]

Housing, Inclusion, and Public Safety

Crime is related in part to the built environment. The planning subfield of crime prevention through environmental design has developed a substantial amount of research on ways in which design elements such as lighting and opportunities for surveillance can reduce crime . . . .

The relationship between environmental design and crime suggests that the environment can be designed or altered in ways that reduce crime. One planning subfield, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), has developed a substantial amount of research on the relationship between environmental design and public safety. Increasing the level of surveillance over an area, controlling access, and establishing clear territorial boundaries with fences or landscaping can help reduce crime. For instance, by incorporating lighting and surveillance, limiting possible escape routes, and promoting high visibility in public and semipublic spaces, potential criminals have fewer opportunities to conceal activities or evade law enforcement. Increasingly, CPTED also considers the relationship between the built environment and social factors that influence crime, such as how a space can be designed to host festivals and cultural events that foster a strong sense of place and community. CPTED is complex and difficult to evaluate, raising research quality questions and precluding definitive conclusions regarding its effectiveness, but several studies find reduced crime and other positive outcomes in places that have implemented CPTED interventions . . . .

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/perio...ighlight1.html

CPTED principles can be translated into various planning and design strategies that would enhance security. These strategies can be categorised as follows:
1. allow for clear sight lines,
2. provide adequate lighting,
3. minimise concealed and isolated routes,
4. avoid entrapment,
5. reduce isolation,
6. promote land use mix,
7. use of activity generators,
8. create a sense of ownership through maintenance and management,
9. provide signs and information and
10. improve overall design of the built environment . . . .

PROBLEMATIC SPACES
Visibility should especially be taken into account when designing or planning spaces where risk to personal safety is perceived to be high, such as stairwells in multi-storey car parks, underpasses and lobby entrances to high-rise buildings.

CONCEALED OR ISOLATED ROUTES
• Can concealed and isolated routes such as staircases, passageways or tunnels be eliminated?
• Are there entrapment areas within 50 - 100 metres at the end of a concealed or isolated route?
• Is there an alternate route?
• If a pedestrian cannot see the end of a concealed or isolated route, can visibility be enhanced by lighting or improving natural surveillance?
• Are concealed or isolated routes uniformly lit?
• Is there natural surveillance by people or activities through various land uses?
• Is there formal surveillance?
• Is access to help e.g. security alarm, emergency telephones, signage and information available?

ENTRAPMENT AREAS
• Is there an entrapment area and can it be eliminated?
• Can it be closed during off hours?
• Is the entrapment area visible through natural or formal surveillance?
• Does design provide for escape routes?
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design Guidebook 31
APPENDIX A: CHECKLIST

ISOLATION
• Does design incorporate natural surveillance?
• Do areas of concerns such as isolated routes and parking areas provide natural surveillance?
• If providing natural surveillance is not possible, are emergency telephones, panic alarm and attendants provided?
• Can compatible land uses be provided to increase activity?

http://www.popcenter.org/tools/cpted/PDFs/NCPC.pdf

None of these design features preclude high rises but on a practical level, cities like San Francisco have found it easier to incorporate them in lower-rise structure that don't need elevators, interior hallways, lobbies and so on. Especially where there is sufficient land available between existing high rises to house the same number of people in lower rise structures without such features by covering a substantially higher percentage of the site with buildings, that has been found to be a way to accomplish the suggested design goals.

[the urban politician]

Housing should be privatized anyway.

It's a failed experiment

[mhays]

The bolded stuff sounds like the Trump administration -- all about policing and walling off people and neighborhoods. This is NOT the predominant theory.

The prevailing theory is more about integrating low-income people and neighborhoods with their neighborhoods and other people.

But coming from a right winger....

[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Housing should be privatized anyway.

It's a failed experiment

The world before public housing wasn't exactly a roaring success either.

Bayard Street tenement in New York, 1889:


Source.

Homeless camp in Seattle, 1934:


Source.

[jd3189]

Lack of public housing may lead to the tent villages and homelessness problem cities out West are currently experiencing.


NYC has a lot it needs to update. Mass Transit and Housing in particular. It can be done if the money needed is kept at a decent budget and things get done in a timely manner. The subway needs to be updated to have faster, more modern cars and tracks and the bus system may have to include light rail in major streets. Commuter rail should be updated to be faster and the outer communities should have better TODs. Public housing should be updated to reflect what's current today as well as affordable housing. If they focus on all those things in a reasonable timeframe, it would do wonders for the city and region. The Bay Area and Southern California have to do the same.


But alas, it's easier vsaid than done. I would propose that NIMBYs be relocated to either downtown, historically weathly neighborhoods, or on a small town/suburb outside the city but with good transit to the city center and is walkable and dense. Our cities need to be greatly updated and we need no more obstacles blocking that.

[Mr Roboto]

When did ayn rand take over this forum?

These threads reek of selfishness and hatred for fellow human beings.

[DePaul Bunyan]

......that's $142k per unit. Something seems a bit off.

[Crawford]

I know this was posted to somehow argue that highrises don't work, but NYCHA's current issues have nothing to do with the buildings.

NYCHA currently has a funding crisis because it has sustained a 75% cut in federal expenditures. Something like a third of public housing is in NYC, so the current crisis is basically akin to Washington going to war on orange production and then blaming Florida.

In any case, despite the massive drop in federal funding, NYCHA is still considered the model U.S. housing agency, with relatively low crime and social dysfunction. Notwithstanding the idiocy from Washington (which actually predates Trump), NYCHA isn't going anywhere, and there is no intention of demolishing even a single unit of NYCHA housing. In fact, new towers are being built.

[Crawford]

And actually NYC is small potatoes from a global perspective. "Only" about 650k NYC residents live in public housing units. In Hong Kong, 60% of residents live in public housing, and basically all public housing in recent years has been 40+ floors.

If there was something inherently bad about concentrating the poor in massive highrises, then Hong Kong would be a nightmare of dysfunction. Detroit, at least arguably the most dystopian major city in the first world, never built much public housing, BTW, and almost all of its subsidized poor are living in detached SFH with yards.

[eschaton]

A few years back, a post by a bloger (old urbanist I think) drove home the reason why public housing is needed in the U.S. system.

Essentially, the way housing used to work was it was totally unregulated, which meant that the market could provide for housing at any price. However, in the early 20th century, concern about the health conditions in tenements and shantytowns - which were fire hazards, harbored disease, and lacked any heat, electricity, or running water - led to a concern with setting minimum standards for habitability for residential buildings. The establishment of building codes did indeed make buildings safer. However, a side effect of it was that it was no longer possible to provide for new-construction market-rate housing for the poor, because the quality of materials and labor hours required were more than the poor could ever pay back in rent or a mortgage. And as time went on, building standards only got stricter.

In the absence of new construction market-rate housing, there are only three possible means to have affordable housing for the very poor:

1. Have a declining population in your metro or nation as a whole, which means there are excess units to go around. Hard to plan for of course, and the economic effects beyond the housing market are terrible.

2. Wait for older units to have their prices fall via depreciation. Basically, this is the plan that has deferred maintenance turn chopped-up old houses into tenements in ghetto neighborhoods. Even this only results in affordable housing in parts of the country with low population growth, limited immigration, and little economic dynamism. In the Northeast Corridor, for example, even the market-rate units in ghettos are not what people in most of the country would call "affordable."

3. Step in with some form of public subsidy of housing, whether directly run by the government, or just subsidized with government checks.

Note that I am, in general, a fan of the idea that we ought to loosen zoning restrictions in order to build more housing and drop the average price by increasing supply. But while "pro-market" reforms can help lower the price for the median renter, they will not do anything for the bottom part of the market, which is going to need some form of public housing in order to survive.

[dimondpark]

Originally Posted by Mr Roboto

When did ayn rand take over this forum?

These threads reek of selfishness and hatred for fellow human beings.

I agree.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by dimondpark

I agree.

Me too. Seriously.

[yankeesfan1000]

A lot of these wounds are self inflicted. Bloomberg proposed turning surface parking lots into mixed use towers to generate revenue to address this exact issue, and the residents said no, they wanted their subsidized housing and free parking in the city with the best mass transit in the country.

Lease the land to private developers who build new, denser, mixed use properties, and use the revenue to fix the subway. Boom. Two birds one stone.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by yankeesfan1000

A lot of these wounds are self inflicted. Bloomberg proposed turning surface parking lots into mixed use towers to generate revenue to address this exact issue, and the residents said no, they wanted their subsidized housing and free parking in the city with the best mass transit in the country.

Lease the land to private developers who build new, denser, mixed use properties, and use the revenue to fix the subway. Boom. Two birds one stone.

NYCHA is already doing this. DeBlasio is building mixed-income infill towers, more or less just as Bloomberg proposed.

The fact that the feds have decided to abandon public housing will only accelerate this process, because NYCHA has no choice. They have to build towers on any available patch of land, in order to cross-subsidize the existing buildings.

[yankeesfan1000]

Originally Posted by Crawford

NYCHA is already doing this. DeBlasio is building mixed-income infill towers, more or less just as Bloomberg proposed.

The fact that the feds have decided to abandon public housing will only accelerate this process, because NYCHA has no choice. They have to build towers on any available patch of land, in order to cross-subsidize the existing buildings.

I'm aware, Bloomberg just tried to get ahead of this issue years ago and was met with push back.

[austin242]

The future should be more public housing not less. As well we should mix it all in. In small doses spread out across the city people won't even notice it's there. With more people and less jobs for the future more people are gonna need cheap if not free housing.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by austin242

The future should be more public housing not less. As well we should mix it all in. In small doses spread out across the city people won't even notice it's there. With more people and less jobs for the future more people are gonna need cheap if not free housing.

Agree with this, segregated housing projects usually fail.

We can't just throw people in a come and go prison and expect everything to be fine, integration is essential.

[Obadno]

Public housing, at least in the tenement kind common from the mid-century was and is an absolute horrible solution to slums.

The decentralized voucher system seems to work much better overall.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by mhays

The prevailing theory is more about integrating low-income people and neighborhoods with their neighborhoods and other people.

.

Yes, I took an urban sociology course in grad school and underlying them throughout and highlighted why big public housing projects were such a failure. There's still a lot of push back when actually trying to integrate low-income housing into a more established area though.