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NYCHA was NOT created to be temporary housing. It was created to provide decent housing to working class people who were, at the time, living in overcrowded and unsafe tenement buildings. Whole neighborhoods of tenements were razed for this purpose. It was part of the 1930s vision of the modern city and was absolutely intended to be permanent.
This idea that NYCHA was created as temporary housing is repeated CONSTANTLY but is false.
Yes - I have wondered why people hold that conviction as well. Where did it come from.
Interestingly, that vision of the modern city is changing. The project complexes are being broken up for that reason. Not demolished, but opened to the city grid, at least here.
Til this day, I don't understand this elitist attitude towards lower income people as if they don't work. Newsflash: many of them do. Working hard is only one element of a lot of people's successes. There are other things that are necessary, especially today, in order to "make it".
I doubt very much that anyone is talking about working- and lower-middle class people.
The question always remains, where to house and manage the generational welfare recipients.
Currently, a great deal of that happens in Harlem. As opposed to, say, Soho or the UES.
The UWS has also been hit quite often.
Your opinion that NYCHA was not created for temporary housing was main impetus for New York politicians to ignore the agency. You must think working families who took part in agency back in 1930s ONLY aspired to stay in these buildings forever. The agency originally wanted working ethnicities to use agency as alternate choice to tenements TEMPORARILY and save up money from work or social programs like G.I. Bill to progress economically. The fact that unambitious low-income "leeches" dominated this city system does not falsify fact that NYCHA was originally intended for temporary living. You thinking that NYCHA was created to permanently keep low-income and working class folk there is false and irresponsible. BB - don't be mad bro. You really don't believe everything you read in Wikipedia... DO YOU ?! peace
You are the only person here consulting Wikipedia. This information can be found in, among other places, the very popular biography of Robert Moses from a few years ago, The Power Broker.
I also read a contemporary source on this when I was in college years ago. It was a short book on New York housing policy written some time in the early 1950s. I wish I could track it down now, but it made abundantly clear that the projects were not intended to be temporary.
Interestingly, that vision of the modern city is changing. The project complexes are being broken up for that reason. Not demolished, but opened to the city grid, at least here.
Interesting. Is it leading to visible improvements?
If this plan takes root, we'll leave sooner rather than later. I don't pay this mortgage so my children can grow up next to scum with all the inherent risks involved.
If this plan takes root, we'll leave sooner rather than later. I don't pay this mortgage so my children can grow up next to scum with all the inherent risks involved.
Yeah and then I wonder whose pockets they'll look to drain to give to those who don't work.
Interesting. Is it leading to visible improvements?
It is happening as we speak, hard to know what will happen.
On St. Nicholas, the Frederick Douglass complex was opened to 128th Street in order to build a school (Geoffrey Canada) and ... well, I think because opening the closed complexes to the city is now a goal. No more isolated poverty. Increasingly, working residents are placed in the projects - same idea; integration.
Some of the residents (not all) had a fit about the plan, quite literally. I attended many of those meetings. They felt that "the city" had no right, none whatsoever, to take "their" parking lots and "their" green areas to build a school.
In fact. We had the bad fortune to live on St. Nicholas just above. Many times we observed that most of the open spaces were used for fights, drug dealing, and/or hang-out spaces for unsupervised adolescents who often shot at each other or similar. Having this experience made it hard to be sympathetic to their assertions that they needed the spaces for "parties and weddings and other important things." I never witnessed a wedding in process, but many of the parties became violent by the end of the day, and at least once in recent history an innocent bystander was killed.
It was also interesting that they felt entitled to the land - I am not unsympathetic to their plight broadly speaking, but ... In truth, it is taxpayer land, not that of their phantom entity "the city."
The angry residents brought a law suit - I believe they lost.
I recall reading that they then demanded that all spots in the school (against which they had fought, and mightily) go exclusively to project residents. Canada et al. stood their ground, I think.
I can add - specific to your question - that just about anything would be an improvement in that particular area. Don't know if you have experience.
Yeah and then I wonder whose pockets they'll look to drain to give to those who don't work.
If this plan does take effect, expect all of America to look like this by 2025.
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peace
