ARCHITECTURE

1. This was encouraged among other things by the fact that certain welfare payments at
the time targeted single-parent households only, incentivizing fathers to stay away. This
is shown in several scenes of the 2011 documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth by Chad
Freidrichs. See Katherine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural
Education 44, no. 3 (1991): 163–171. The text provided the cue for the title of the aforementioned
documentary. The most recent publication to take on the persistent idea of
“failed architecture” is Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, ed.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale (Ithaca/London: Cornell
University Press, 2015) in particular D. Bradford Hunt, “MYTH #2. Modernist Architecture
Failed Public Housing.” A selection of essays dissecting the varied and multi-faceted
history of public housing, including design policies, was edited by Joseph Heathcott on
the occasion of its 75-year existence: Journal of the American Planning Association 78,
no. 4 (Autumn 2012).
2. The idea of an “easy” explanation of as well as an “easy” solution for problems is
borrowed from Jason Hackworth, “Progressive activism in a neoliberal context: the case
of efforts to retain public housing in the United States,” Studies in Political Economy 75
(2005): 46. Cited in James Hanlon, “Success by Design: HOPE VI, New Urbanism, and
the Neoliberal Transformation of Public Housing in the United States,” Environment and
Planning Vol. 42, No. 1 (2010): 92.
3. See Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York:
Collier, 1973).
4. In the case of New York’s Lincoln Center in the early 1950s, only one-third of former
residents found accommodation in public housing city-wide. This is just one example
that illustrates the pervasive problem of displacement. Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects:
The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford/New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 211.
5. For a history of this development, see Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in
Urban Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014 [1982]). For an anthropological
perspective on the reuse of buildings, see, Michael Guggenheim, “Immutable
Mobiles: Building Conversion as a problem of quasi-technologies,” Urban Assemblages:
How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, eds. Ignacio Farías and Thomas
Bender (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 161–178.
6. Prime examples are the work of Venturi Scott Brown starting in the mid-1960s, and that
of a wave of younger firms, founded around 2000, including London-based FAT (Fashion
Architecture Taste).
7. For a discussion of the changed image and value of a Brutalist high-rise in London, see
Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi, “The Trellick Tower: Rise and Fall of a Modern
Monument,” San Rocco Magazine #5 (Fall 2012) [‘Scary Architects’]. For a more general
description of the changing status of privatized council housing see: Jenny Gross, “Once A
Housing Project, Now Prime London Real Estate,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2012.
8. A good summary of the gradual implementation of building codes in housing is given in
the introduction to Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1992).
9. The requirements given here are exemplary and taken from New York City Department
of Housing Preservation and Development’s “New Construction Guidelines,” which are
applicable in all housing financed in part by the City of New York. Building and zoning
codes are typically regulated at the local levels, but are additionally affected by state and
federal guidelines, for instance those pertaining to accessibility. The International Building
Code (IBC) is an effort to standardize guidelines across jurisdictions, but does not
give a unified definition of “a bedroom” other than by referring to egress requirements.
10. This is the basis for the case study of municipalities in New Jersey discussed in Massey,
et al, Climbing Mt. Laurel.
11. The slow and halting proceedings have been well covered in the New York Times. For a
more detailed report, released by the group that filed the original law suit in 2006, see:
“Cheating On Every Level. Anatomy of the Demise of a Civil Rights Consent Decree,”
Anti-Discrimination Center, April 17, 2014, May 6, 2014 [revised], http://www.antibiaslaw.
com/sites/default/files/Cheating_On_Every_Level.pdf.
12. For more on this June 2015 ruling, see Supreme Court of the United States, Texas Department
Of Housing and Community Affairs et al. v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., et al.,
October 2014. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-1371_m64o.pdf.
13. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
14. Reactions to Making Room and the resultant pilot project to reduce the minimum
dwelling size have ranged from embracing a less consumer-oriented urban lifestyle, to
framing the proposals as “austerity measures.” See, for instance, Jan Hoffman, “Shrink
to Fit: Living Large in Tiny Spaces,” New York Times, September 21, 2012; Michael Sorkin,
“Little Boxes,” The Nation, July 29, 2014. For more on Making Room, see “Making Room,”
Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council, accessed June 15, 2015, http://makingroomnyc.
com. Report co-author Susanne Schindler, part of Team R8, was involved in Making
Room’s design explorations, cosponsored by CHPC and the Architectural League in 2012.
15. This is well laid-out in Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America. Policy Struggles in the
New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
16. For a comparison of the first and second iterations of urban renewal, focusing on Atlanta
and Chicago, see Lawrence Vale, Purging the Poorest. The Design-Politics of Twice-Cleared
Communities (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).
17. Numbers cited in Amy T. Khare, “Putting People Back into Place-Based Public Policies,”
Journal of Urban Affairs 37, no. 1 (2015): 49.
18. Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 196.
19. “Roosevelt Square, Chicago, IL,” Brook Architecture, Inc., accessed July 15, 2015, http://
brookarchitecture.com/gallery/roosevelt-square/. Progress did not proceed as projected
however, market-rate buyers walked away, and an entirely new plan for Roosevelt Square
was launched in 2014. An in-depth study of HOPE VI as implemented in Chicago is Larry
Bennett, Janet L. Smith, and Patricia A White, eds., Where Are Poor People to Live: Transforming
Public Housing Communities (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2015 [2006]).
For an example of both the type of coverage of and continued violence and tensions
between residents, see Chloe Riley, “Gun-Toting Gangbanger Video, Continued Violence
Trouble Roosevelt Square,” DNA Info Chicago, December 18, 2013, http://www.dnainfo.
com/chicago/20131218/near-west-side/gun-toting-gangbanger-video-continued-violence-troubles-roosevelt-square;
Chloe Riley, “Roosevelt Square: CHA Seeks New Plan
for Mixed-Income Housing Complex,” DNA Info Chicago, February 4, 2014, http://www.
dnainfo.com/chicago/20140204/near-west-side/roosevelt-square-cha-seeks-new-planfor-mixed-income-housing-complex.
20. David Harvey, “The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,” Harvard Design
Magazine (Winter/Spring 1997): 2.
21. Peter Marcuse, “The New Urbanism: The Dangers so Far,” disP - The Planning Review
36, no. 140 (2000): 4. Marcuse’s argument is based on Vincent Scully’s wording. Marcuse
cites Duany and Plater Zybek: “Simply put, we wish to improve the world with design,
plain old good design, that is. We believe that the physical structure of our envionrmnet
can be managed and that controlling it is the key to solving numerous problems
confronting government today—trafiic congestion, pollution, financial depletion, social
isolation, and yes, even crime. We believe that design can solve a host of problems and
that the design of the physcial enviornment does influence behavior.” Andres Duany and
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “The second coming of the American small town,” Plan Canada
33 (1991): 9.
22. Public housing stock in the United States has decreased by about 253,000 units, a loss
of 18 percent since its all-time high. Schwartz, Housing Policy, 194.
23. Amy T. Khare, Mark L. Joseph and Robert J. Chaskin, “The Enduring Significance of Race
in Mixed-Income Developments,” Urban Affairs Review, June 25, 2014, 1–30. This also reflects
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s phrasing of “changing the subject” to refer to liberal politicians’
not speaking about race, but purely about income. See “The Case for Reparations,” The
Atlantic, June 2014, accessed August 25, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.”
24. Geographer James Hanlon analyzes the award-winning HOPE VI project Park DuValle
in Louisville. Hanlon, “Success by design,” 2010. A thoroughly positive evaluation,
positing New Urbanism as the blending of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard, and emphasizing
its origins in the urban crisis of the 1970s, is provided by Robert Fishman, “New
Urbanism,” Planning Ideas that Matter: Livabiliy, Terriotriality, Governance, and Reflective
Practice, ed. Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence J. Vale, and Christina D. Rosan (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012), 65–90.
25. There are extensive studies on these questions by geographers and political scientists.
See the recent issue of HUD’s Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research
titled “Mixed Messages on Mixed Incomes,” 13, no. 2 (2013). For a more journalistic
reflection on the excessive restrictions placed on the public-housing residents of
82 83