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  #81  
Old Posted Dec 31, 2016, 1:57 AM
memph memph is offline
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Slum should be removed for severe violation of the building code.





Lung Block, 1933. The street to the right of the island of tenements is Monroe Street. Hamilton Street, now gone, is to the left of the island. From New York Times photo archives.



Map with letters indicating reported cases of TB on Lung Block. a represents a reported case in 1894; b is a case from 1895, etc. Shaded areas are undeveloped land.

Read more: https://nyhistorywalks.wordpress.com...ocker-village/
The most overcrowded census tract in Toronto, and perhaps in urban Canada is a set of 5 tower in the park highrises in Thorncliffe Park.

62% of units are considered "not suitable" based Canada's National Occupancy Standard
47% of units have more than one person per room (that includes kitchens, living rooms and dining rooms)
Average household size is 3.64 with an average of 3.5 rooms per unit - so mostly 1-2 bedroom apartments with an eat-in kitchen and living room.

I'm sure that's still not as bad as Lung Block in 1895 but my point is that crowding has more to do with poverty and housing affordability than housing type.

The lack of windows problem I'd argue had at least in part to do with NYC's block sizes and street widths. The blocks were shallow enough that Euro style courtyard apartments were not ideal. However, the blocks were deep enough that if you had just apartments 1-2 rooms deep facing the street and interior of the block, combined with the wide streets, there would be too much unused space for a city where housing demand was high. That and highrises didn't exist yet as an alternative way of producing sufficient density.
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  #82  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2017, 9:32 PM
Gantz Gantz is offline
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Originally Posted by mrsmartman View Post
The concept only works in NYC but not other American cities...
Tower in the park concept doesn't work in NYC either....
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  #83  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2017, 3:06 PM
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Tower in the park concept doesn't work in NYC either....
Towers in the park are an integral part of the urban landform of modern NYC.



Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/blacksto...lex-1445293748
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  #84  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2017, 3:11 PM
JDRCRASH JDRCRASH is offline
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Towers in the park are an integral part of the urban landform of modern NYC.
Yeah even manhattan has these. But as far as interaction with the street and pedestrian walkability it's not ideal.
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  #85  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2017, 3:55 PM
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Some people like towers-in-parks. But in the urbanism and development communities they're generally seen as passé; the high-profile failures of towers-in-parks public housing led to an evaporation of market demand for that living type among the middle class.

The biggest problem with a tower-in-a-park is ultimately the park. Whether or not you are keen on the aesthetic, the design of these structures produces a lot of landscaping (i.e. the park) where it's obvious whether or not maintenance is doing their job. If the park looks decrepit, you can bet that the tower isn't in particularly great condition, either.

I am personally of the opinion that 1920s style courtyard apartments had the best balance of living space and open space. Much of the tower-in-a-park's green space is simply not usable, being essentially large lawns between the street and building, while the courtyard typology clusters open space towards the center of the site, yielding a workable and pleasant courtyard environment (as long as, of course, it is adequately maintained).
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  #86  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2017, 6:01 PM
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Yeah even manhattan has these. But as far as interaction with the street and pedestrian walkability it's not ideal.
They're also generally lower density than the neighborhoods they replaced, at least according to Jacobs.
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  #87  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2017, 7:49 PM
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They're also generally lower density than the neighborhoods they replaced, at least according to Jacobs.
This has been one of my pet peeves. Some, but not all, of the new developments are lower density than the buildings and/or neighborhoods they replaced. Especially in the super lux market where the unit is being used more as a "safety deposit box in the sky" than a permanent residence with occupants.
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  #88  
Old Posted Jan 5, 2017, 12:32 PM
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Residents prefer well-spaced high-rises to crowded tenements for better scenery. The development is walkable as long as transit options are provided within walking distance.
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  #89  
Old Posted Jan 5, 2017, 3:36 PM
mhays mhays is offline
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You do apparently. So far it's just your opinion, again and again.
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  #90  
Old Posted Jan 5, 2017, 8:19 PM
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They're also generally lower density than the neighborhoods they replaced, at least according to Jacobs.
Jacobs' thinking would fit in the era of stagnation in the 70s.

Towers-in-the-park development were Keynesian New Deal economics by artificially increasing housing supply. If you like public housing projects, you probably want towers-in-the-park developments because a large number of housing units can be built in one project. Stopping towers-in-the-park development, in reality, is stopping public housing development, which might not be necessary in some cities. You let market decide the appropriate price for housing.
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  #91  
Old Posted Jan 5, 2017, 8:22 PM
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Originally Posted by mrsmartman View Post
Jacobs' thinking would fit in the era of stagnation in the 70s.
Wait, what?
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Originally Posted by mrsmartman View Post
If you like public housing projects, you probably want towers-in-the-park developments because a large number of housing units can be built in one project. Stopping towers-in-the-park development, in reality, is stopping public housing development, which might not be necessary in some cities. You let market decide the appropriate price for housing.
"Tower in the park" has nothing to do with "public housing". One is a land-use/architectural typology. The other is a subsidized housing framework.

Yes, many public housing units happen to be "tower in the park" but that's largely because much of public housing was built concurrent with the Corbusian era.
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  #92  
Old Posted Jan 5, 2017, 8:59 PM
ChargerCarl ChargerCarl is offline
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Originally Posted by mrsmartman View Post

Towers-in-the-park development were Keynesian New Deal economics by artificially increasing housing supply. If you like public housing projects, you probably want towers-in-the-park developments because a large number of housing units can be built in one project. Stopping towers-in-the-park development, in reality, is stopping public housing development, which might not be necessary in some cities. You let market decide the appropriate price for housing.
Dude what? You're conflating a bunch of unrelated things. Governments built tower in the park developments because they mistakenly believed that high density, traditional urban living caused violent crime. We know better now.

Im ok with the government helping people with housing, but I'd rather them just give out vouchers than actually try and build it themselves. Governments tend to not be very good at producing consumer goods.

Last edited by ChargerCarl; Jan 5, 2017 at 10:37 PM.
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  #93  
Old Posted Jan 5, 2017, 10:35 PM
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Mid-century policy also talked incessantly about "light and air". This was a reponse to the smoky air of the time, and windowless tenements. Today's typical infill, at today's code, has neither of these problems, especially with a park down the street.
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  #94  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2017, 11:42 AM
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Originally Posted by hammersklavier View Post
Some people like towers-in-parks. But in the urbanism and development communities they're generally seen as passé; the high-profile failures of towers-in-parks public housing led to an evaporation of market demand for that living type among the middle class.


Source: http://thoughtcatalog.com/michael-ko...l-destruction/

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
KATHARINE G. BRISTOL, University of California, Berkeley

Quote:
This paper is an effort to debunk the myths associated with the demolition of the Pruitt-lgoe public housing project. In the seventeen years since its demise, this project has become a widely recognized symbol of architectural failure. Anyone remotely familiar with the recent history of American architecture knows to associate Pruitt-lgoe with the failure of High Modernism, and with the inadequacy of efforts to provide livable environments for the poor. It is this association of the project's demolition with the failure of modern architecture that constitutes the core of the Pruitt-lgoe myth. In place of the myth, this paper offers a brief history of Pruitt-lgoe that demonstrates how its construction and management were shaped by profoundly embedded economic and political conditions in postwar St. Louis. It then outlines how each successive retelling of the Pruitt-lgoe story in both the national and architectural press has added new distortions and misinterpretations of the original events. The paper concludes by offering an interpretation of the Pruitt-lgoe myth as mystification. By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems.
Read more: http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/temp/1991...t-igoemyth.pdf

New Deal Ruins
Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy
Edward G. Goetz



Quote:
Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impact of policy changes in three cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.

Goetz shows how this transformation is related to pressures of gentrification and the enduring influence of race in American cities. African Americans have been disproportionately affected by this policy shift; it is the cities in which public housing is most closely identified with minorities that have been the most aggressive in removing units. Goetz convincingly refutes myths about the supposed failure of public housing. He offers an evidence-based argument for renewed investment in public housing to accompany housing choice initiatives as a model for innovative and equitable housing policy.
Buy now: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/...80140100864770

Last edited by mrsmartman; Jan 14, 2017 at 6:16 PM.
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  #95  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2017, 7:18 PM
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Originally Posted by mrsmartman View Post


Source: http://thoughtcatalog.com/michael-ko...l-destruction/

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
KATHARINE G. BRISTOL, University of California, Berkeley



Read more: http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/temp/1991...t-igoemyth.pdf

New Deal Ruins
Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy
Edward G. Goetz





Buy now: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/...80140100864770


I wasn't talking about the policy issues at all. I was talking about the perception of such failures. While I agree that it's an unfair and simplistic characterization that the tower-in-a-park typology was directly behind public housing's failure (physical signs of decline in a tower in a park, as anywhere, is symptomatic of managerial neglect, and this neglect was the ultimate causor of public housing failures), there were actually substantial examples of towers-in-parks geared towards the middle class built during the same era. Tower-in-a-park public housing was so rare, in fact, that middle-class examples were much more common in nearly every major city. But they were only ever niche housing servicing a niche market, and zoning policy, then as now, made peripheral subdivisions and low-rise garden apartment complexes significantly easier to execute.

But -- because the market for such housing among the middle class was, even at its most robust, extremely niche -- outside factors could easily unmake it. Certainly, changes in what was considered desirable in urban housing that swung the pendulum back towards more traditionalist or neotraditionalist developments had a factor, but what really did it in were the failures of public housing. Myth or no, when you have a market segment that small and a majority of the laity believing that the type of housing was to blame, demand for such developments will evaporate overnight.
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  #96  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2017, 7:22 PM
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Mrsmartman, you're conflating all sorts of stuff.

Yeah, the U.S. has been horrible with public housing. Yeah, cities should have never demolished public housing; in fact they shouldn't have allowed the housing to get that bad in the first place.

But that doesn't mean that tower-in-the-park was generally good for cities. It's a generally anti-urban, pedestrian hostile planning style.
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  #97  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2017, 2:02 AM
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Mrsmartman, you're conflating all sorts of stuff.

Yeah, the U.S. has been horrible with public housing. Yeah, cities should have never demolished public housing; in fact they shouldn't have allowed the housing to get that bad in the first place.

But that doesn't mean that tower-in-the-park was generally good for cities. It's a generally anti-urban, pedestrian hostile planning style.
4 Public Housing Lessons the U.S. Could Learn From the Rest of the World

BY JAKE BLUMGART | AUGUST 26, 2014

Public housing in the United States is associated with failure and misery. The very words conjure up visions of concrete tower blocks, drug-related violence and concentrated poverty. But contrary to popular belief, public housing in the U.S. has not been an utter disaster: “In most cities at most times, public housing provides a better alternative than private-sector housing in poor neighborhoods,” Edward Goetz writes in his 2013 book, New Deal Ruins.

Many of public housing’s failures can be traced to the American political and economic context, especially easy to see when compared with the success of similar policies around the world. When the U.S. government became active in the housing market in the 1930s, Congressional conservatives in alliance with the real estate industry ensured that the Wagner Public Housing Act of 1937 restricted public housing to the service of the poor living in already impoverished areas (ensuring a weak political base), tightly limited funding per unit, and gave local governments near complete control over whether to accept federal funds for housing, where to place the sites, and how to administer them.

It is the straightjackets on public housing, paired with the intense residential segregation, that so badly disadvantaged these policies in the U.S. That there is nothing inherently doomed in the concept of public housing can be seen in a variety of international cities that have implemented sweepingly ambitious public housing programs. The details vary, of course, and they seem to largely be based within small city-states, where land is at a premium, or in areas with a strong social democratic tradition. Based on those success stories, here are the basic ingredients for a successful public housing program.

Read more: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/bet...ccess-us-world
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  #98  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2017, 7:33 AM
mhays mhays is offline
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I thought we were talking about the towers-in-the-park style. You're getting confused, or trying to make others confused.
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  #99  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2017, 9:00 PM
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Of course Kunstler has a point.

If we get to a point where people actually have to deal with a sustained power outage (through acts of god, terrorism etc) than living 20 stories up is goign to be a bitch. Or if the global food industry broke down, how many crops can you raise on your 100 sq ft balcony?
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  #100  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2017, 10:07 PM
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I mean, if society collapses it collapses. I'm not sure why we should organize economic activity around black swan events. We'll probably just die in nuclear hellfire. Oh well.
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