Intractable Democracy

Intractable Democracy FIFTY YEARS OF COMMUNITYBASED PLANNING

Edited by Anusha Venkataraman Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

John Shapiro – LETTER FROM THE CHAIR Anusha Venkataraman – NOTE FROM THE EDITOR Eva Hanhardt and Eve Baron – TIMELINE OF COMMUNITY-BASED PLANNING Tom Robbins – DEDICATION: RON SHIFFMAN

Page 01 02 06 12

In Pedagogy Jaime Stein – LETTER FROM ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT PROGRAM Eric Allison – LETTER FROM HISTORIC PRESERVATION PROGRAM Harriet Markis – LETTER FROM FACILITES MANAGEMENT PROGRAM Patricia Swann – THE CONTRARIAN: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR ZABARKES Rachel Berkson and Sarah Wick – THE ACTIVISTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CATHY HERMAN

AND BRIAN SULLIVAN Geoffrey Wiener – THE ACROBAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ZISSER Anusha Venkataraman – THE ARCHIVIST: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BOYER Sandy Hornick – THE BEDROCK: AN INTERVIEW WITH RON SHIFFMAN Steve Flax – THE AGITATOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM ANGOTTI Rachana Sheth – THE COMMUNITY-BUILDER: AN INTERVIEW WITH AYSE YONDER Jenifer Roth Becker – THE HUMANIST: AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURA-WOLF POWERS

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In Print Laura Wolf-Powers – INTRODUCTION: PRATT PLANNING PAPERS, STREET AND CITY LIMITS PRATT PLANNING PAPERS: Astrid Monson and Chester Hartman on Urban Renewal (1965-6) Edward Goetz – GOING NOWHERE: URBAN RENEWAL AND HOPE VI PRATT PLANNING PAPERS: “Problems of the Cities,” by Robert F. Kennedy (1967) Karen Chapple – TWO WALKS THROUGH BED-STUY: FORTY YEARS OF COMMUNITY

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STREET: “Brooklyn Lives” (1973) STREET: “Street Tips” (1973) STREET: “Save the Northside” (1973) Alyssa Katz – INTRODUCTION TO CITY LIMITS CITY LIMITS: “Back to Basics,” by Robert Schur (1982) Todd Bressi – THE PUBLIC REALM AND THE PUBLIC GOOD: REFLECTIONS ON

A DECADE AT PRATT, WITH A POSTSCRIPT FROM NANCY LEVINSON

Sabrina Terry - Elsie Richardson: Profile of a Community Hero

52 56 64 70 76 84 88 90 92 94 97

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In Practice Brad Lander – INTRODUCTION Eva Neubauer Alligood – 20 YEARS LATER: REFLECTIONS ON COMMUNITY-BASED ADVOCACY

PLANNING AT PRATT Michael Flynn – IDEALISM MEETS BUREAUCRACY

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Michael Epp and Anne Grave – THE GREEN AGENDA FOR JACKSON HEIGHTS: TURNING

“SUSTAINABILITY” INTO A PLAN FOR NEIGHBORHOOD ACTION Tom Angotti – RIGHT TO THE CITY VERSUS URBAN DIVIDE: TWO SEPARATE APPROACHES Vicki Weiner – A VALUES-BASED APPROACH TO HISTORIC PRESERVATION PLANNING

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Allison Richards - Frances Goldin: Profile of a Community Hero

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In Place Eve Baron – INTRODUCTION: REINVENTING PLACE BY REINTERPRETING

THE VALUE OF LAND Michael Rochford – PRATT PLANNERS AND THE CDC MOVEMENT Caron Atlas – TAKING OVER AND TALKING BACK: THEATER

AS A FORUM FOR GENTRIFICATION Edward Perry Winston – EAST NEW YORK FARMS! HARVEST TIME IN THE KILLING FIELDS Charles Wilson – REVITALIZING MYRTLE AVENUE Ira Stern – THE NEW YORK CITY WATERSHED: A COMMUNITY-BASED APPROACH Adam Friedman – TRANSFORMING THE CITY’S MANUFACTURING LANDSCAPE

Alexis Rourk Reyes - Yolanda Gonzalez: Profile of a Community Hero

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In Perspective Ron Shiffman – AFTERWORD

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CONTRIBUTORS

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Published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Pratt Institute City and Regional Planning Program in Brooklyn, NY May 14-15, 2010 Editor: Anusha Venkataraman Production Editor: Laura Senkevitch Assistant Production Editor: Geoffrey Dyck Faculty Advisor: Eve Baron Additional Faculty Support: Ron Shiffman Editorial Assistants: Dora Blount, Michael Fox, Tara Lambeth, Janice Moynihan, and Sabrina Terry Cover Design: Geoffrey Dyck

Published by Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development Pratt Institute School of Architecture 200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205 Š 2010 Most of the articles contained herein were written expressly for this publication. All material courtesy of the authors and the Pratt Institute Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development.

Previously published articles are used with permission of their authors and publishers. Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations reprinted from STREET magazine.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This publication was made possible by the support, enthusiasm, and hard work of many dedicated people from the Pratt community. Special thanks are due to Architecture Dean Thomas Hanrahan, Provost Peter Barna, Trustee Mike Pratt, Trustee Gary Hattem, and President Thomas Schutte for their support of the department over the years as well as for their participation in the Fiftieth Anniversary conference that took place in May 2010, of which this publication is a part.

As Intractable Democracy was a very collaborative project, the final product reflects the input of many individuals. Faculty Advisor Eve Baron put many long hours into guiding the editing process and was indispensable as a proofreader. Professor Ron Shiffman, beyond allowing us to dig through his goldmine of an archive, was always open to sharing his experiences and contacts, and correcting us when we were wrong. Laura Wolf-Powers and Alyssa Katz were of immeasurable help in framing the content of the In Print section of the publication.

The strong guidance of the individuals listed above as well as the support of GCPE Chair John Shapiro, staff Lacey Tauber, PIPSA (student association) leaders Jackie Bejma and Anna Peccianti, and the Fiftieth Anniversary planning committee, made it possible for this publication to be student directed, edited, and produced—in less than six months . Besides the Editors, many other students contributed in some way, whether it was by writing an article (Alexis Rourk Reyes, Allison Richards, and Sabrina Terry), painstakingly transcribing an interview (Dora Blount, Michael Fox, Tara Lambeth, and Sabrina Terry), or assisting in editing duties (Michael Fox, Tara Lambeth, and Janice Moynihan).

Finally, all of the contributors deserve recognition for the time they took out of their busy days to conceptualize, write, and, sometimes, patiently re-write their articles. You are the bearers of history, and the result of your effort will continue to educate generations of planners to come.

PRATT PLANNING is not the only city planning program to celebrate its golden jubilee this year. Berkeley and Ohio State do as well, and I am sure there are others. Something happened fifty years ago that is worth taking note of.

It was the 1960s. Robert Moses and other master builders were at their peak. People like Paul Davidoff (who founded Hunter’s planning program), Ron Shiffman (who co-founded the Pratt Center), and Jane Jacobs (who has inspired generations of planners) took up the good fight for communities that were being run roughshod over. Advocacy planning was one of a series of social movements arguing for a change from stodgy politics and top-down misinformation.

Fifty years later, we are again in a period of reform. A community organizer is president. Commissioner Sadik-Kahn has brought alternative transportation to the fore in our metropolis. The city is enriched by a slew of community-based organizations, local development corporations, and civic organizations. And Jane Jacobs is everyone’s patron saint.

That said, Robert Moses has been rehabilitated and reincarnated in grand plans, most particularly in Asia.

In our own city, the planning emphasis is still on zoning and projects, rather than livability and problem solving. The formal architectural style—with its emphasis on form and technology—is, in my opinion, akin to brutalism with nice materials, glass instead of concrete.

This publication takes stock of where we have been, and provides clues as to where we are going. New and distinguished alumni interview nine out of eleven of our past chairs, who chat about history and current events in planning; and demonstrate the richness of the Pratt planning approach. Members of our extended Pratt family provide other articles that demonstrate the breadth of our interests. Current students produced the publication, with support, supervision, and oversight from Professors Eve Baron and Ron Shiffman.

The publication is part of a larger story for the City and Regional Planning Program, with the formation of the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development (PSPD). The PSPD is an alliance of four programs with a shared value placed on urban sustainability—defined by the “triple bottom line” of environment, equity and economy. The four graduate Master of Science programs are: • City and Regional Planning • Environmental Policy and Sustainability • Facilities Management • Historic Preservation Each of the four graduate programs maintains its independence, degree and depth of study. Yet students can move within the PSPD programs, with the further option to follow specialized or cross-disciplinary studies. The PSPD at once supplants and expands upon the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE)—which is why, by the way, you can read the two as interchangeable in this publication.

These activities are all part of a fifty-year continuum in which we have, in my view, remained the most dynamic, mission-based, and innovative planning program in the City of New York, and one of the most unique in the nation. Here’s looking forward to the next fifty years.

JOHN SHAPIRO Chair, 2008 to Present

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NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

PLANNING AS POLITICAL PROCESS Community-based planning has emerged as a critical force for change in neighborhoods and cities across the United States over the past fifty years. Defined by its participatory process, the practice has moved from occupying the political margins to defining mainstream tactics for nonprofits, community-based organizations, planners, “citizen planners,” and even public agencies. During this half century, the Pratt Institute planning program—in its many incarnations (most recently, Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development or PSPD)—and the affiliated Pratt Center for Community Development (formerly the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development) have trained, guided and inspired planners, organizers, and policymakers who are committed to the ideals and practice of community-based planning.

Intractable Democracy consists of reflections on community-based planning as practiced and promoted by Pratt planners and partners. The purpose of the project is to appreciate the history of community-based planning through an investigation of the history of the Pratt planning program— with the intention of examining what community-based planning is becoming, and what the role of a planner’s education is in that transformation.

The publication includes original articles submitted by Pratt faculty members, alumni, community partners, and students, as well as reprints of historical documents and interviews with past chairs of the department. Some of the articles are more academic, while other articles are written by practitioners who do not often have the time or opportunity to reflect on their practice or put their work in a historic framework—at least in writing. By arranging and contextualizing articles from such a diversity of perspectives, I hope to have produced a document that can straddle what has often been characterized as the divide between theory and practice in contemporary planning.

We have also sought to move outside of the technical language of planning, and look broadly at planning as a democratic process. Intractable Democracy takes its name from the origins of community organizing and citizen movements in the 1960s—movements that formed to oppose the top-down decision-making—“intractable bureaucracy”—guiding the transformation of their cities and neighborhoods. Community-based planning emerged out of and alongside those social movements; indeed, as Cathy Herman and Brian Sullivan say in their interviews, their practice of community-based planning was indistinguishable from a broader social movement and trajectory of change. “Intractable” implies stubbornness and perhaps incorrigibility, summing up the paradox of grassroots action in a representative democracy. However, in the context of community-based planning, it can also entail obstinate commitment to shared values and insistence on transparent and equitable processes. It is this re-appropriated sense of the word—persistent, dogged, and unfazed—that I seek to evoke in the title of this publication.

On the eve of my own graduation from the program, it is important for me to remember that the career ahead of me will not always be easy. Democracy is maintained by tension, and planning as a political process is defined by conflict of personal, political, and discursive dimensions. While the tension of planning does sometimes exhibit itself in overt conflict—over resources, survival, ideas, injustices, and of course plans—it more often lurks behind every decision planning practitioners, communities, and other political actors make, and in the ways they weigh and articulate their values.

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Yet planning processes can just as easily make good with those conflicts and become enriched by it.

And community-based planning processes must recognize the multiplicity of agents, communities and actors in all their divergent needs and interests. Modernist planning—as typified by the schemes of urban renewal—failed because it assumed a singular notion of the public good and “attempt[ed] to be a plan without contradiction, without conflict.”1 Community-based planning recognizes the heterogeneity of the communities in which we live. Moreover, instead of glossing over, repressing, excluding, or resolving conflicts, the community-based planner is challenged to facilitate the creation of “plans” which legitimize and encourage difference in the public sphere—and in our local communities.

PRATT PLANNING….IN PEDAGOGY, PRINT, PRACTICE, PLACE, AND PERSPECTIVE The process of working on this publication has been its own travel through time and the geography of New York City. The cover of this publication, designed by Geoff Dyck, is an abstraction of the City; on the section dividers inside, you will see this image repeated—but with part of the whole subtracted.

The organization of the publication mirrors this design device. The sections In Pedagogy, In Print, In Practice, and In Place represent the complementary aspects of community-based planning practice—each distinct in their modalities, yet inextricable from each other.

The first section, In Pedagogy, retells the history of the Pratt planning program through interviews with nine of the eleven former Chairpersons of the department. As can be expected, this is an interesting and varied bunch. They are academics, activists, economists, educators, funders, and nonprofit directors. For all of them, Pratt played an important role in guiding their careers and outlooks as planners and, reciprocally, the program was shaped by their philosophies. The chairs were interviewed by outstanding alumnae; some of the interviewers were students during the tenure of their interviewees, others work in similar fields, and a few were chosen to elicit spirited debate and disagreement. Additionally, in this section the coordinators of planning’s sister programs in PSPD (Historic Preservation, Facilities Management, and Environmental Systems Management) disclose their unique pedagogical orientation and place their programs’ missions in relation to the “planning history” revealed in this publication.

In Print, with an introduction by former Chair Laura Wolf-Powers, features reprinted articles from Pratt Planning Papers, STREET magazine, and City Limits that were originally published in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In part, primary source documentation is a way we can reconstruct the history of a department and practice that was often more focused on doing than archiving.

Unearthing this history is relevant not only to Pratt planners and students, but to any planner or citizen who seeks to learn from the past. Debates that were lively and contested in the 1960s— such as the social implications of Urban Renewal—may feel settled now, but the underlying issues continue to resurface. Reminding ourselves of this history of print activism, as in the case of STREET, serves an important function: it legitimizes practices outside of the official story of planning. Even at the depths of disinvestment, New York City’s neighborhoods harbored agents of change who were constantly thinking, writing, and doing.

This “doing” that planners do is the focus of In Practice. Brad Lander, in his introduction to the section, points out that planning can often seem like a vague, indescribable thing—we know what it is, but often have trouble explaining it to others. The truth is, planning is an amalgamation of many different practices, and the task of describing and pointing out community-based planning is much easier. The practice of community-based planning has emerged from the traditions of advocacy planning, equity planning, and participatory planning, and it is with the history of bottomup community development—as described in Eva Neubauer Alligood’s article—that Pratt planning has long engaged with enacting. Every planner has faced the internal debates shared in these articles—summed up by the question of what it means to be a community-based planner.

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Community-based planning crystallizes as planning whose momentum is gathered through entrepreneurial activities outside sanctioned, state-level planning—but whose activities often happen in partnership with it. In Place shows the ways that community-based planners and citizen planners have effected radical, demonstrable, tangible change in local communities, on a variety of scales—from the block and lot level, to the scale of an entire watershed or regional economy.

Last, In Perspective uses the insight and long personal engagement of Ron Shiffman to speculate on the future trajectory of community-based planning. No other person could do this as well as Ron: as a person who has played a large role in shaping the Pratt planning philosophy and shepherding generations of Pratt graduates to community-minded pursuits, but—more importantly—as someone who continues to engage in critically questioning the politics of what we do. Ron looks back at what has not yet been accomplished not as failures, but as legacies bequeathed to the next generation of activists, planners, and citizens.

While taking these various forms, Intractable Democracy is unabashedly political in its messaging.

The personal politics of all of the contributors may vary, but each has chosen to take a political stance in their practice. Over are the days when the planner was an objectively removed technical assistant. Our place in the political spectrum defines who we are as planners—in content and process—and informs our notions of how change can take place. Despite their differences, virtually all of the contributors believe that citizens, both individually and collectively, have the power to instigate change. My own view, upon collating these articles, is that empowerment in the planning process is not only about enabling marginalized communities to effect change; it is also, on a more basic level, about re-envisioning human agency in relation to change—asserting that individuals in marginalized communities have the power to act. What we do is overtly political even if we may not always speak of our work as planners in these terms.

NOTES 1

James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History, ed. Leonie Sandercock, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 46.

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1916 New York City adopts the nation’s first comprehensive Zoning Resolution.

Timeline of Community-Based Planning

1910

1920

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1930

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1938 Congress passes the Federal Housing Act, calling for clearance of slums and creation of public housing.

1950

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JANE J

ACOBS

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1965 / 1 Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, in collaboration with the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED, formerly PCCI, currently the Pratt Center), completes a comprehensive plan for the revitalization of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the first community-initiated plan in NYC. / 2 The Architect’s Renewal Committee for Harlem (ARCH) is formed to provide planning and architectural services to Harlem and other low- and moderate-income communities. / 3 Planners for Equal Opportunity (PEO), the forerunner to Planners Network, is formed as a progressive national planning organization based in NYC. / 4 In Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning, published in the AIP journal, Paul Davidoff argues that planners should engage in the political process as advocates of the interests of government and other groups rather than solely acting as technicians. / 5 Paul Davidoff establishes the Graduate Urban Planning Program at Hunter College.

1964 President Johnson declares “War on Poverty.”

1962 / 1 NYC Charter revisions reflect call for “decentralizing” big city government. CPC is instructed to divide the city into community districts, each one governed by an advisory community planning board comprised of 5 to 9 local residents. / 2 Establishment of Pratt Center for Community Improvement (PCCI), now known as the Pratt Center for Community Development, the first university-based program in the United States to provide planning and architectural assistance to communities on a sustained basis. / 3 Defeat of Lower Manhattan Expressway Plan reflects mounting community opposition to autocratic planning and development of Robert Moses era.

1961 / 1 In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argues against the sprawling and inefficient government bureaucracies of America’s larger cities and recommends the creation of “administrative districts” as the primary subdivision of city agencies. / 2 The Cooper Square Community Development Committee and Businessmes Association submits its Alternate Plan for Cooper Square, developed by residents of the Lower East Side with help from advocacy planner Walter Thabit.

1959 Pratt Institute master’s program in City and Regional Planning is founded by Chair George Raymond.

1957 Congress passes Civil Rights Act.

1951 Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner establishes twelve “community councils” to advise him on land use and budget.

1950 NYC Planning Commissions (CPC) proposes the creation of 66 local planning districts.

1949 Congress passes the New Housing Act to enable urban redevelopment and give a role to the public.

1970

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1986 Manhattan Community Board 4 initiates the first community-sponsored 197-a plan, in response to rezoning and development pressured in Chelsea that threaten displacement and loss of neighborhood character.

1982 The “Waterfront Revitalization Program,” sponsored by the Department of City Planning (DCP), is the first plan to be adopted under Charter Section 197-a.

1977 / 1 City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) is established under a mayoral order, pursuant to the requirements of the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). / 2 Grassroots opposition to redlining in low-income neighborhoods results in passage of the Community Reinvestment Act.

1975 / 1 Substantial revisions to the New York City Charter introduce the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) under section 197-c and the possibility of officially recognized community-initiated planning under Section 197-a, establishing the advisory powers of community boards with respect to zoning and land use and providing the opportunity for local communities to adopt a proactive role in planning and land use in New York City. / 2 The revised Charter directs the mayor to draw up a new citywide map of 59 community districts and revives the concepts of “district manager” and “service cabinets” conceived by Mayor Lindsay.

1972 Report released by City Comptroller Abe Beame charges misuse of funds by the Office of Neighborhood Government.

1973 / 1 CPC takes steps to strengthen community boards and enable them to participate more effectively in the city’s decision-making process. Innovations include: publication of community planning handbooks; decentralized public hearings; and increased role in the capital budget process. / 2 Office of Neighborhood Government is disbanded.

1974 / 1 Model Cities program is terminated. / 2 Responding to growing community pressure and citywide civic support, CPC, under the leadership of John Zuccotti, proposes Charter revisions that would give communities a greater say in the planning process, while preserving a central voice to protect city-wide interests.

1970 / 1 Mayor Lindsay declares 1970 “the year of the neighborhood” and creates the Office of Neighborhood Government to improve delivery of municipal services. / 2 Also establishes eight demonstration districts—“Little City Halls”—headed by district managers and including “service cabinets made up of officers of city agencies” to encourage more local planning.

1967 CPC establishes borough offices to improve communication between City Planning’s central office and community planning groups. Borough office staff serve as liaisons to community boards.

1969 / 1 City Council passes legislation establishing staff positions for community planning boards and enlarging them to 50 members. / 2 Congress passes the National Environmental Policy Act, mandating an environmental impact statement for every federal or federally-aided state or local major action that would affect the environment.

1966 / 1 Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob Javits and Mayor Lindsay join with the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and PICCED to announce the establishment of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, one of the country’s first community development corporations (CDCs). / 2 Model Cities program is established by the federal government, aimed at alleviating poverty through the development of local plans involving maximum participation of the poor.

1990

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2004 At Community-Based Planning in New York City: Summit 2004, more than 100 representatives from community-based organizations, community boards, environmental justice organizations, academic institutions and city agencies come together at the Urban Center for a series of comprehensive workshops on the role of communities in New York’s planning process.

2003 Responding to grassroots calls for public access to maps and data, the MAS Planning Center launches the Community Information Technology Initiative to provide community-based organizations with maps, data and technical assistance to support local planning efforts.

2002 / 1 The MAS Planning Center and Hunter College organize Planning into Practice: A Conference for Community-Based Groups, Planners & Professionals, attended by nearly 400 participants. / 2 The Greenpoint and Williamsburg 197-a Plans are adopted with assistance from PICCED.

2000 The Community-Based Planning Task Force is founded by a coalition of community, environmental and professional groups.

1999 The “New Waterfront Revitalization Program,” updating the 1982 197-a plan, is adopted.

1996 The 197-a plans for Chelsea and Red Hook are adopted.

1994 Successive budget cuts over the next eight years reduce the number of liaison planners in the DCP’s borough offices. Centralized approach and focus on land-use regulation lessen the department’s role in community-based planning.

1993 / 1 The Melrose Commons Urban Renewal Plan is developed through a community-driven process led by We Stay/Nos Quedamos Committee and assisted by the Bronx Center. / 2 The “Civic Alternative to Riverside South” developed with support from citywide planning and civic groups including MAS, RPA, and Westpride.

1992 / 1 Bronx Community District 3’s “Partnership for the Future” becomes the first community-generated 197-a plan to be approved and adopted by the City Council. / 2 Development of the Bronx Center plan, a participatory initiative led by Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and facilitated by the Urban Assembly, Municipal Art Society (MAS), PICCED, and the Parodneck Foundation.

1991 CPC’s “Rules for the Processing of Plans Pursuant to Charter Section 197-a” are adopted by the City Council. Extensive public participation organized and led by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest helps focus the Commission on critical issues.

1990 / 1 David N. Dinkins takes office as mayor and appoints a progressive and diverse City Planning Commission which includes Pratt’s Ron Shiffman. / 2 Publication of “New Directions for the Bronx,” a broad-based planning initiative led by Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and facilitated by the Regional Plan Association (RPA). / 3 Congress passes National Affordable Housing Act, mandating support for construction of low and moderate-income housing by community-based groups.

1989 / 1 Revisions to the New York City Charter shift the burden of environmental review from community boards to DCP, removing a major obstacle for community boards engaged in 197-a planning, and direct CPC to adopt rules establishing minimum standards for form and content of 197-a plans as well as a procedure and schedule for review, similar to that of ULURP. / 2 “Partnership for the Future,” a 197-a plan for Bronx Community District 3 is submitted by the community board.

2010

A version of this timeline originally appeared in the Fall 2002 Livable City, a publication of the Municipal Art Society Planning Center. Written

by Eva Hanhardt and updated by Eve Baron. Design and graphics by Geoffrey Dyck.

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2010 / 1 Since the 1975 Charter revision enabling the City’s 59 community districts to draw up comprehensive plans, 12 community-based 197-a plans have been adopted; one has been submitted; one has been disapproved; and one has been withdrawn. / 2 The New York City Charter Revision Commission is formed to undertake “a top-to-bottom overhaul of New York City government.” Advocates push for greater municipal commitment to Fair Share, community planning, and diverse representation in neighborhood decision-making.

2007 / 1 Mayor Bloomberg releases PlaNYC 2030—a strategic plan to reduce NYC’s carbon footprint even as the city’s population grows and its infrastructure ages. The plan receives wide acclaim for its sustainability goals, although there is also criticism that the plan did not go through the city’s public approval process and did not directly engage communities. / 2 Responding to calls from the Community-Based Planning Task Force, the MAS Planning Center launches the Livable Neighborhoods Program; Tools and Resources for Community-Based Planners, to fill the need for additional training in neighborhoodbased planning.

2006 NYC adopts the Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP), based on principles of Fair Share and requiring that ultimately each community take responsibility for its own waste. The SWMP originated from a community-based plan put together by the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods, a coalition of groups in low-income communities of color overburdened by New York’s discriminatory waste system.

2005 / 1 The Community-Based Planning Task Force issues Livable Neighborhoods for a Livable City, detailing specific, realistic steps to improve the capacity of communities to make and implement plans that address their diverse needs. / 2 At the request of the Charter Revision Commission, the Task Force submits recommendations for changes to the City Charter to ensure diverse representation in local planning; give communities the tools and resources to plan; and to ensure that adopted community plans could be implemented. / 3 NYC Council adopts the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, one of the city’s most extensive rezoning actions. Although triggered by the 197-a plans, many neighborhood advocates involved in the creation of the plans feel the rezoning was insufficient in implementing community goals.

DEDICATION

RON SHIFFMAN

BY TOM ROBBINS

(718) 636-3486: For more than 30 years, this is the one phone number that a community activist has needed to commit to memory. The city’s old no-heat emergency line—(212) 960-4800—was another essential card in the mental Rolodex. But that only helped register complaints, and required steady re-dialing before action could reasonably be expected. The 718 number, on the other hand, was a hotline to effective community strategies. You dialed it and reached the desk of Ron Shiffman at Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, the softspoken leader of the organization with the hopelessly tangled name that he made into a one-stop shop for neighborhood hell-raisers looking to effectively channel their energies.

This was the number that working class homeowners on Brooklyn’s Northside dialed back in the early ’70s when they were faced with eviction from their modest rowhouses to make way for a paper plant’s expansion. It was the number that residents and a parish priest in a pocket of Brooklyn known as St. Nicholas dialed when they realized that they were being slowly strangled for lack of mortgage financing. It was the number that tenants in Red Hook dialed in helpless frustration when city bureaucrats were insisting they had to make way for a huge containerport that could just as easily have been placed at a nearby relocation-free site.

It was the number dialed by homesteaders of abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side, East Harlem, and the South Bronx who wanted to figure out how to rehabilitate the buildings themselves when they had little more than their own sweat to offer. It was the number dialed by a small band of tenants trying to hold in Borough Park after a campaign of fire and landlord harassment—with the blessings of the local establishment—had successfully driven hundreds of others away. It was the first number dialed by a generation of organizers who needed help analyzing those kinds of local crises, sketching out their architectural needs, and scheduling the crucial brainstorming sessions required to scheme out a game plan.

There is a shelf-full of books about how Jane Jacobs transformed the business of urban planning into advocacy for communities on a human scale. But the true award for the consistent application of that theory to the everyday needs of everyday people in New York City must go to Shiffman. He has always understood, as a matter of both policy and practice, that good planning and citizen activism march side by side.

“The community is not a laboratory,” he declared shortly after he launched the Pratt Center with George Raymond in 1964 as a way to bring academics to the streets. His goal, he said, was to offer “technical assistance and guidance for the gamut of urban problems that people face every day.”

But Shiffman and his brigade of planners and students offered so much more than that. Thanks to their expertise, they put ordinary New Yorkers—many for the first time in their lives—on an equalfooting with bureaucrats prone to talk to them like small children, insisting that they, and they alone, understood the problem and how to address it.

It’s hard to overestimate how meaningful that balancing of the scales was to people used to being pushed around. One of the most rewarding sights during the ’70s and ’80s, before they wised up,

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was to watch commissioners and their aides fall into stuttering retreat after being confronted by local residents well-versed in their own data and analysis thanks to Pratt’s planners.

Ron Shiffman in the early 1970s, while working on the Northside of Williamsburg.

Photo courtesy of Jane Eisenberg.

More often than not, Shiffman’s troops know the policies and regulations better than the bureaucrats. It was the Pratt Center that told the city exactly what parcels of property it owned in Crown Heights when the city itself couldn’t figure it out during a battle to win new housing and parks there. It was Pratt that waded into battle, armed with federal guidelines, to keep City Hall from squandering its new Community Development Block Grant funds on the usual patronage-laden sinkholes of government. When a new group called ACORN came to town in the early 1980s and launched a squatting campaign in foreclosed single-family homes in East Brooklyn, it was Shiffman who figured out a plan to move from police confrontation to a new mutual housing association offering affordable homes, cooperatively owned.

Like any good leader, Shiffman keeps his own demeanor mellow and low-key, encouraging others to take the initiative and to do their own speaking out. But it is a glory to see him enraged. When the head of the city’s housing development agency, a man named Roger Starr, announced in a series of articles and speeches that government should abandon its own poor neighborhoods in a staged withdrawal that he called “planned shrinkage,” Shiffman rose in the well of the old Board of Estimate to denounce him.

“It is clear the administration lacks the leadership, sensitivity, and administrative capability to address the city’s housing needs,” he said. “Until Administrator Starr, proponent of this genocidal program of shrinkage is removed from office, the city will be unable to make any progress with these problems.”

Heads of organizations who must deal with mayors on a regular basis do not generally tell them who to fire. Nor is this the kind of language employed by those whose budgets are even tangentially dependent on government approval. But this was just one more lesson learned from Ron Shiffman who knew a neighborhood bully when he saw one, and who understood that advocacy minus passion goes nowhere. Thanks to Shiffman and those he inspires and leads, a lot of New Yorkers are much smarter than they used to be, and much less afraid.

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Eric Allison Rachel Berkson Christine Boyer Steve Flax Cathy Herman Sandy Hornick Harriet Markis Jenifer Roth-Becker Rachana Sheth Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Brian Sullivan Patricia Swann Anusha Venkataraman Sarah Wick Geoffrey Wiener Ayse Yonder Arthur Zabarkes Michael Zisser

Todd Bressi Karen Chapple Edward Goetz Alyssa Katz Nancy Levinson Laura Wolf-Powers

Eva Neubauer Alligood Tom Angotti Michael Epp Michael Flynn Anne Grave Brad Lander Vicki Weiner

Caron Atlas Eve Baron Adam Friedman Michael Rochford Ira Stern Charles Wilson Perry Winston

IN PEDAGOGY

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LETTER FROM ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT JAIME STEIN, PROGRAM COORDINATOR As we reflect upon the past fifty years of planning at Pratt, it is easy to recognize the commitment to innovation and social justice leadership—a commitment which has, among many other accomplishments, fostered the creation of the Environmental Systems Management program (ESM). Environmental Systems uniquely couples urban environmental management and policy with the community-informed and socially just planning principles Pratt is known for. Students learn to foster sustainable development through command of environmental law, justice, economics and policy.

Environmental Systems grew out of the planning program in the 1990s, as many of the chairs attest in their interviews, and was led for many years by the inspiring Eva Hanhardt. As a relatively new program, Environmental Systems greatly benefits from the truly wonderful alumni and professional network Pratt planning has built and we aspire to generate a similar legacy. With the formation of the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development, the academic commitment continues, allowing students the freedom to seamlessly explore interests in historic preservation, construction and facilities management and planning, creating a richer and more diverse student body as well as an innovative professional development experience.

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LETTER FROM HISTORIC PRESERVATION ERIC ALLISON, PROGRAM COORDINATOR

The masters program in Historic Preservation (HP) is now part of the new Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development (PSPD) in the School of Architecture. This collaboration has been in the making for quite some time; in fact, the HP program was founded in 2004 by myself, a Pratt planning graduate, and other planners and preservationists who sought to offer an increased focus on preservation practice within the context of urban planning and sustainability.

Despite that entangled history, the new integrated approach of PSPD may give some people pause. The words “historic preservation” and “planning and development” are not usually heard in the same sentence unless there is some additional verbiage about conflict or opposition. It is fair to ask, then, how HP fits into the story.

This approch is only strange if we define “planning” and “development” narrowly. Too often, development, often phrased as “economic development,” is taken to mean only new construction and large scale urban change, both involving demolition of the existing built environment. But that’s too limited a definition.

Declining or underused neighborhoods across the nation have been stabilized and revitalized after historic designation removed the immediate threat of demolition. For instance, the brownstone historic districts that surround Pratt’s Brooklyn campus were once red-lined candidates for urban renewal. Today they are thriving communities created by existing and new homeowners alike who have invested in the rehabilitation and restoration of their own homes. This is only one example among hundreds. Historic Preservation works as a tool for reinvestment and renewal: in other words, for economic development.

Planning can also recognize the need to preserve historic fabric and neighborhood character.

For instance, zoning tools such as form-based codes and neighborhood conservation districts recognize that historic character is often precious and must be preserved. Main street revitalization efforts, which are often both planning and development projects, use historic preservation as part of their basket of tools. Historic preservation can even be part of cultural conservation: historic districts were and are part of the on-going efforts to promote and protect the famous downtown music scenes in both Austin and Nashville. As Vicki Weiner (a joint HP and planning faculty member) describes in her article on the Fulton Street Mall, historic preservation can be used to retain not only the quality of the built environment, but the character of the local culture as well.

Historic preservation has its part in both the livable cities and sustainability movements. Preserving the cultural heritage of cities, including their built environment, is high on the list for successful livable cities. As for sustainability, adaptive re-use and green retrofitting of existing buildings can generate equal or superior benefits to new construction, especially as life-cycle analysis has become more inclusive in what it measures.

Pratt’s historic preservation program deals with these issues and more, focusing on public policy issues and the role of heritage preservation in dealing with the problems of today’s world. Our students already take courses in all of our partners’ programs, and vice versa.

This publication chronicles an educational mission and interdisciplinary practice-oriented approach that the historic preservation program shares with the rest of PSPD.

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LETTER FROM FACILITIES MANAGEMENT HARRIET MARKIS, CHAIR

As chair of the Facilities Management (FM) program, I am pleased and honored that we are an integral part of the PSPD, a confederation of departments from the School of Architecture with compatible goals and shared values. The Facilities Management program’s mission is dedicated to effectively preparing graduates as critical and creative thinkers to assume executive leadership responsibilities in the management of facilities, people, projects, and contributors to a healthy bottom line.

Facilities Management has emerged globally as a new area of expertise as communities, corporations and institutions systemically plan for growth and change. Our department is meeting the high demand for a growing industry, by offering an integrated curriculum that students are tapping into to enrich their knowledge of and experience with today’s issues of sustainability, preservation, planning and development. Innovative approaches to emerging technologies, risk management, life cycle studies, sustainable practices, cost effectiveness and ethical values distinguish our alumni as they lead the field’s efforts to advance the quality of the built environment.

Our new home within the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development is encouraging greater collaboration amongst the other departments of Preservation, Planning, and Environmental Systems Management. This has opened the door for us to learn from each other and leverage expertise beyond our core skills, while placing shared value on urban sustainability— defined by the “triple bottom line” of environment, equity and economy.

This article was prepared with assistance by Ryan Grew.

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THE CONTRARIAN:

AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR ZABARKES CHAIR 1974-80

BY PATRICIA SWANN

Arthur Zabarkes is an architect, city planner and, most significantly, an economist with extensive experience and expertise in real estate development. He has served as Executive Director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council as well as the Rent Stabilization Association, is the former director of New York University’s Real Estate Institute, and is currently president of his own consulting firm.

Pat Swann: What was going on when you were the chair of the planning department?

Arthur Zabarkes: Well, I’ve told you about this a fair amount, and I must say there is an aspect of this discussion that is profoundly awkward.

PS: Just one?

AZ: Well, there’s probably a lot of ‘em.

PS: What were the issues of the day?…Well, first of all, what years were you chair of the department?

AZ: God, you’d think I would know that absolutely, wouldn’t you?

PS: We’re talking mid-seventies, aren’t we?

AZ: Give or take, 1974 to ’80. Give or take.

PS: That was the beginning of the “in rem” crisis, among other things, correct?

AZ: Yes, although the crisis was at the end of that tenure. In fact, I left it to be the executive director of the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council [after Pratt] and we were the big body involved in the midtown zoning change; special zoning districts were a major issue at the time, as well as the “in rem” program. And landmarks growth was the third major issue. But none of this changed much of the program. None of what was going on in the city [affected what we taught], except the projects and case studies used in the courses.

PS: Back to my first question…What was going on when you were the chair of the planning department?

AZ: The program was founded by George Raymond, who had a large planning firm and planning was a hot area at the time, with a lot of federal money in it. So it was a sizeable program, mean-

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ing…I know when I left we had about 200 students. The five schools in the area were all doing fairly well. I had formed a group of all the other chairs to discuss what we were all doing. As an aside, I called that group “Association of City and Regional Organizations in the New York Metropolis.” Why is that? Because what is the acronym for “Association of City and Regional Organizations in the New York Metropolis?” It’s ACRONYM. Nobody else thought that was as funny as I did…I thought [Pratt’s] comparative advantage was that we were a professional school.

Planning was a field that I felt didn’t have much underlying theory. Not that there was none, but there wasn’t a strong piece, anyway. So I thought it didn’t matter that we stressed professionalism because, either way, we got professionals teaching what they knew. I loved what we did then.

PS: So that approach that Pratt planning had, and the emphasis on practical skills and professionalism, was your stamp?

AZ: I don’t know if it was solely that. One of my biggest battles at the time was that it had become solely a physical planning school, organized around architectural principles of education. So when you took a studio, the studio became your obsession. I was an undergraduate architect, and understood that. I had a problem with that…It struck me, when I looked at what kids learned and didn’t learn, how they came out and what they were prepared for, that it was too narrow of an education.

So, my change was twofold: I did hammer home the professionalism, but I also tried to broaden the range of what was taught. I wanted the lecture courses to be of equal value. But it was a battle, and I was the villain big time.

PS: I was going to say, you were an outlier, politically. Did you feel that? Did you…

AZ: Yes, but it didn’t…

PS: It didn’t bother you?

AZ: It still doesn’t. Look, I just taught a course at Pratt. I just finished Tuesday. And I said to John [Shapiro] and some other faculty members, “You sure you want me to do this? ’Cause I’m really a market economist.” And my first cut of everything is as a market-oriented economist. And all of ‘em wrote back, “We want you to do this.”

PS: People respect that diversity of opinion, I think.

AZ: Yeah, but I took a lot of flak for that [over the years]. It hasn’t bothered me particularly, [but] I was disappointed in it, in a way. I was disappointed that it was not an intellectual debate. I had things I wanted to teach about the core items I thought [students] should know. There were certain concepts you had to get, even if you didn’t buy where I think it took you. So I was troubled by it only in an intellectual sense because I came from a family of academics.

PS: Have you changed your understanding of the profession and of the role of planners in the world, in the intervening years?

AZ: Let me put this in a little intellectual context. I took my planning degree at Columbia…and became interested in economics, which I eventually did my doctoral work in. It became the predominant way I looked at things. I loved being at Pratt, [but] I then started to need to make some money.

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My professional life moved more and more into the private sector.

PS: So, in my previous question, what I was trying to get at was at was whether you have changed in your market-based approach—especially given what has happened with the economy, and in the city in the past year and a half.

AZ: My answer is that…a lot of what government does is silly for it to do, counterproductive for it to do, and some of what it ought to do, it isn’t doing. Every institution has its own complicated history and dynamic, and so it’s a very complicated answer for me. It doesn’t change my fundamental precepts about what should be market, what should not be market. Some aspects of the economy that we did not think was very important 30 years ago, we now know is. Remember that Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins political scientist, wrote a book that was stupidly titled, The End of History. He thought that in 1996, when he wrote the book, everyone recognized the failure of communism, everyone understood the significance of Marx, everyone understood the virtues of democracy. There was no Hegelian debate about history. We were there. How long did that last? So, it’s a very complicated question with a very complicated answer.

PS: So the fundamentals of your view have not changed, but it’s too complicated to explain?

AZ: No, the fundamentals of my view have not changed…I try, in everything I do, to not be particularly ideological.

PS: I always thought you secretly enjoyed being contrarian.

AZ: Not really. I always taught according to the fundamental theory [of the market], and as far as I’m concerned, that’s not ideological at all.

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THE ACTIVISTS:

AN INTERVIEW WITH CATHY HERMAN AND BRIAN SULLIVAN BRIAN T. SULLIVAN, INTERIM CHAIR 1979-80 CATHY HERMAN, INTERIM CHAIR 2007-08

BY RACHEL BERKSON AND SARAH WICK

From 1974 to 2000, Brian Sullivan was the Senior Planner & Associate Director at the Pratt Center for Community Development, handling all administrative and technical aspects of the Center’s work. Currently, he is an independent consultant in housing and community development, providing assistance to nonprofit developers of affordable housing and community facilities for low-income and special needs populations. Brian is a 1974 Pratt planning graduate with a bachelors in engineering from Villanova University.

Cathy Herman is the Director of Housing at Goddard Riverside Community Center, a Settlement House serving Manhatttan’s West Side and Harlem. For many years, Cathy was the Director of Planning and Development at Los Sures Community Development Corporation on the Southside of Williamsburg. In her teaching at Pratt, Cathy has brought years of experience working to preserve and build affordable housing. Previously, Cathy worked at the Corporation for Supportive Housing and in the Housing Office of Brooklyn Catholic Charities.

Rachel Berkson: When were you Chair of the department?

Cathy Herman: I was at Pratt as Chair for just a year—from 2007 to 2008. Before that, I had not really been connected with Pratt—either the school or the Pratt Center—since the early ’90s. I still knew people there or at the Pratt Center that were peripherally involved with something that I was working on. Pratt was going through some changes; at that point, the economy was continuing—if it wasn’t growing dramatically, at least it was still expanding. And enrollment was up, I think, for Pratt.

The campus looked beautiful. Brooklyn had become a very desirable place to live and planning was becoming a much more popular and, perhaps, more economically secure profession. All of that had changed since we were in school at Pratt in the early ’70s. Fortunately, immediately before I became Chair, Laura Wolf-Powers had taken the department very far in academic terms. I was there to keep things running for a year, more or less.

All these changes seemed very dramatic—and positive—to me compared to when we were Pratt graduate planning students. Enrollment was up at the GCPE and everything was going well at Pratt Institute, which was expanding both physically and programmatically. For instance, they were finally starting construction on Myrtle Avenue. But there was still no heat in that one classroom!

Brian T. Sullivan: That classroom with no heat may be the only common element between your era and mine.

But, the other constant was the low-level friction in the relationship between the planning department and the larger school of architecture, which may be inevitable for a Department whose core

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social justice mission and cross-disciplinary approach has never fit comfortably within the historic framework of architectural education as a design discipline.

I was listening to Cathy describe the expanding economy and the enrollment being up at Pratt , and I thought, “Wow, that is a different era.” I was Chair during the transitional period in 1979 and ’80 between Arthur Zabarkes and Mike Zisser, who, together Chaired the Planning Department for 15 years or more.

It was a extraordinary time. Not only for planning and for planners, but for the City of New York itself, it was a very tough time. When people talk about how bad things in New York City used to be, they might as well be talking about ’79 and ’80. It was the worst year in terms of overall crime in the City of New York historically. It was the year that building abandonment hit its peak, which was the city’s famous in rem foreclosure crisis. The city had escaped bankruptcy only a couple years before. This was a whole different era.

To say it was an era of adversity would be understating it, I think. But on the other hand, it was a tremendously challenging and interesting time to be in planning because planning mattered to everyone in New York, not just Pratt grad students. There were visceral arguments on any corner or subway station about the future of the city—or if it even had one. Roger Starr—who may still have been nominally on our faculty at the time—was the coiner of the phrase “planned shrinkage.” This was a hotly debated issue among planners then. There were people who thought that just closing all the subway stations in the South Bronx so the trains would run express from 145th Street to 181st would be a viable planning solution for the foreseeable future.

These gut level planning issues were being debated all the time. I think, too, at that time the Planning Commission was playing a much more active role in those kinds of decisions. I saw a quote recently from [former Commissioner] Victor Romero that it was the worst time in the world to be involved in planning. It was like Rome was burning and they were pretending that they were planning. It was just awful.

CH: But it was still pre-Reagan. Interestingly.

BTS: Right, we were right on the cusp between an awful domestic scene right here in New York and then a bleak national outlook for the next eight years. So it was a tough era and a tough time. But as I say, the upside of that is that it was a tremendously interesting time to be in planning. The students were totally engaged in it, as were the faculty members. Our faculty then was virtually all adjuncts—practicing professionals. These were people who were dealing on a day to day basis with the reality of all this.

Sarah Wick: How has the field of planning changed? It seems that 20 years ago, planning was of a more activist sort. And now, I think about how everyone seems to be driven toward corporate planning. There seems to be a disconnect between social activism and professional planning now, and I feel like the program started out as a real activist program.

BTS: By the time I was chair, the Pratt graduate planning department’s reputation was that it was more oriented toward community-based planning and neighborhood-level solutions. We were known for that, and sometimes criticized for it, because we were a very nuts and bolts kind of program.

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But one of the things I always enjoyed is that our students knew what they were talking about. They knew how to analyze zoning. They knew what density meant. They knew what an acre was. Nobody in New York City knows what an acre is. But our students did. We also, frankly, had a great cohort of students moving through there at that time as well—Pat Swann, Mike Rochford, John Shapiro.

CH: The students were really the sharpest and most engaged. It’s a very supportive place to go to school, more than other places. It’s not a competitive environment, although maybe in a good way it’s competitive. It’s really a great place for people to find themselves, I think. However, I think Pratt kind of fell behind in terms of presentation and technology. That’s just something that we have to deal with—and particularly your generation has to deal with. What’s glitzy and what’s really subtantive? I still think Pratt’s ethos of being a good consultant to a client is always going to be the best thing about Pratt, but the technology is just something that I think they had to catch up with.

BTS: The incredible amount of data that’s out there now and the ease with which it can be retrieved and interfaced into a GIS presentation can really, as Cathy said, create an illusion of understanding that’s not very deep. And I still think there’s really no substitute for just going out and walking up and down a block at night, on weekends, during the day. See what’s happening on the commercial strips when the stores are closed and it’s dark out. That hands-on understanding of neighborhood is still essential and will continue to be essential no matter how glitzy the GIS presentation.

CH: Well, that’s interesting. It also reminds me—getting back to the idea of leadership—of the role of women in the planning world. There’s only a couple things I have really strong opinions about.

[Laughter] I think that it’s kind of an illusion that you have the male-oriented architecture world or construction world, hard science, spending money world. And then the female, initially in planning, operated in the neighborhood as an extension of her home and family.

But I think maybe, maybe, it’s that women and certain disenfranchised groups may look at things in a more realistic way or with a [greater] understanding of conditions [on the ground]. If you’re able to really understand how things work and have a very pragmatic view about getting what you want—not for yourself but for the program or community—I think that that’s actually an advantage. Also it’s more of a struggle. That may not relate to the planning program per say. But talking to a couple of young women, it’s an interesting thing to keep in mind.

SW: How has the student body changed since you were both students at Pratt?

BTS: Our year was very mixed. Still a majority male, I would say. But quite mixed, ethnically and racially.

CH: It was mixed because there were local scholarships that there were available—those Martin Luther King scholarships and a number of others. The Model Cities program was around that time as well; they offered scholarships to the Bed-Stuy community.

RB: So one question I have is—has Pratt planning changed with the issues, or have the issues changed Pratt? This history of New York City is so dynamic, that I imagine it’s a bit of both.

BTS: I think Pratt continues to grapple with the cutting-edge issues pretty well. But some issues have remained the same. How a city like New York can continue to be a place that’s both a world-

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class city that attracts the wealthy and the famous and the uber-creative, and yet still be a place where ordinary people can live and find an affordable place to live—that will always come back around and be a constant source of challenge to the next generation of planners. In the ’70s there certainly were all of the disparities, the income inequalities, that are even more exacerbated today.

I think those issues will continue to be a big challenge for your generation of planners.

CH: I think this is part of a battle you hear under the surface…What’s government’s role? Is big government the way, or is the government going to get out of the way of the private sector? [Especially in regards to incentive-based programs and inclusionary zoning,] how much control is government really able to have? That’s what planning’s about. What’s going to help the whole city? That’s the sort of battle that is always behind the scenes in planning, which makes it such an interesting field.

BTS: There is another thing that has changed and yet I still think is one of the pivotal issues for planners, that also goes back to the different eras in which we were chairs. In my time the whole debate around planned shrinkage and “triage” was about planning in a time of deprivation—how to apportion the pain, and what kind of short term decisions had to be made in order to keep this city alive while not totally foreclosing its options for the future. There were a lot of tough decisions for planners to make back then: Do we invest capital in infrastructure, or devote all the city’s funds to the schools to educate the next generation, or give it to police and fire because the Bronx is burning?

And everybody knew someone who had been mugged in the past two weeks. I mean, the city was just totally out of control.

These were very compelling real-time issues, on the one hand, demanding a response by the city.

And then there was the future: What’s going to happen to this city as we continue to lose our industrial base and jobs flee, first to the south and then completely overseas? What’s going to be the future of New York City’s economy and how do we plan for that? What kinds of investments do we need for that? This is what we were grappling with.

Then, fast forward to the ’90s and ’00s and we’re talking about how to more equitably distribute the benefits of the incredible economic boom that New York City enjoyed for the past 10 to 20 years.

Gentrification is just around every corner, and places where we used to go with some trepidation at night to meetings to rally people against urban renewal evictions are now written up in the Times for the quality of their restaurants. It’s a totally different world.

Nonetheless, planners are still in the middle of this whole debate about how resources are most equitably allocated. I think that’s going to continue to be a critical issue for planners in good and bad times alike.

CH: [I would add that,] if you are concerned about planning being a democratic process, then planners have to be mindful about how really low-income people are going to be brought into the process at all. I think we have to continue to grapple with how you make sure there is representation in some of these more disenfranchised communities.

BTS: We joke about this occasionally. When we started what we laughingly call our “careers” I don’t think we conceived of it as a career path or profession. It was more of a movement. We were part of a social movement, part of a very clear progression from the Civil Rights Movement, to Antipoverty,

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Antiwar, social change…Planning was just another step in the progression. If we could make a living that would be great, but that was never assured to us or even particularly important to us.

CH: Right. There was a very stark generational conflict when we were growing up and in planning school—it was a struggle of life and death. I’m not sure if it’s like that these days. Planning and social activism have obviously evolved now into very different things. But, that is for your generation of planners to figure out.

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THE ACROBAT:

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ZISSER CHAIR 1980-88

BY GEOFFREY WIENER

Michael Zisser, Ph.D., Chair of Pratt City and Regional Planning for close to a decade, is the Executive Director of the University Settlement House on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—a position he has held since 1988. He also serves as Executive Director for The Door, a youth development agency that is a subsidiary of the Settlement. Michael earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Zisser: Hi Geoff, thank you for this interview.

Geoffrey Wiener: Michael, can you first tell us when you arrived at Pratt and how you got there?

MZ: I began teaching at Pratt in 1979 as a direct result of Geoff Wiener and John Shapiro’s remarkable intervention. I began as chair in 1980, so I followed right after Arthur Zabarkes.

GW: You were basically chair during the majority of the 1980s.

MZ: Yes. For almost 9 years. When I got to the Institute, it was at its low ebb historically. It was underfunded, the campus was a mess, Higgins Hall was a mess, it was isolated. All of that is in contrast to the place now, which is private, the institute is private. It’s financially in better shape, it physically looks incredible, the neighborhood is different. In the early ’80s, the neighborhood was questionable, to give you some context.

GW: What was the larger social and political context at the time?

MZ: At the time, planning was still exciting politically. That was a boom time for community planning so Pratt had no trouble placing graduates in jobs. I was a recently minted Ph.D., so I was Pratt’s first experiment with someone that had academic or scholarly attributes as well as some professional experience. But I also had a social science background, like Arthur, so the physical orientation of the planning school was true then and remains true. The biggest difference between my teaching philosophy and Arthur’s—though for the most the faculty wasn’t substantially different—was that students should be introduced to multiple ideologies, and that the school was not supposed to have a prevailing ideology or theory. It was neither Arthur’s market-based approach nor the Pratt Center’s more egalitarian approach. Then and now, I believe in multiple approaches. I thought that the students would learn best from that conflict and I didn’t favor one or the other. I think that was more or less held up, which meant I had to prevent the school from being subsumed under the Pratt Center, but at the same time not change its traditions in community planning. I think that Pratt’s planning program still serves more or less that function.

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GW: Were you successful, in your view, in maintaining that balance?

MZ: From my position I think so. Pratt attracts certain types of students, irrespective of who the chair is. I think it still attracts a certain type. You don’t go to Pratt if you want to work for the Office of Management and Budget. You don’t go to Pratt if you have managerial interests. You go to Pratt because you’re a believer in community.

GW: That’s amazing. That’s twenty years ago, and it’s still the same.

MZ: It is amazing—the continuity and the stability.

The other recollection—I could be off in years—is that there was cooperation between urban design, headed by Stuart Pertz; the master of architecture; and planning—mostly personal relationships.

While I was there we started the construction management graduate program.

GW: Following up on this theme of how the department evolved, you initiated or reinitiated a publication called Pratt Planning Papers. Was that part of a larger strategy? [Hands Michael copies of the publication.] It seems that kind of effort to engage in planning thought in the larger academic community was uncommon at the time.

MZ: I believe the motivation for doing this was the 20th anniversary of the department, celebrated in 1981. The articles were from some of the well-known faculty people from that period, like Frank DeGiovanni, Brian Sullivan, and Harvey Schultz, who is now unfortunately deceased. The logic was, in part, that there really weren’t any periodicals addressed to this subject area. The other good planning programs were trying to figure out how to appear more scholarly. Pratt’s contribution was that we had practitioners in the field who could write; it was part of the prestige of a school to get beyond your own borders and to have things recorded. If I remember correctly we probably did this three, four, five times; I don’t believe it lasted the full eight years; it’s possible it did but I don’t think so. I think it had a certain lifespan to it.

GW: Looking over the list of articles, it’s clear that they were definitely practical and policy oriented.

MZ: These are all practitioners, and they were all people who were teaching in the department, either historically or at that moment in time. But going back to my earlier point, if you look at who contributed and you check their ideological identities— GW: They’re all over the map.

MZ: Yes, all over the map. George, who was really never a fan of the social science interpretation of planning, contributed. Frank, who was a scholar then and now. Brian, of course, who was a fierce advocate for community. This is a pretty good list.

GW: Yeah, it is.

MZ: So as a reflection of philosophy, this is about as clear as it gets.

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GW: Can you talk a little about the larger picture in New York City during the 1980s and how that affected your career and the program?

MZ: I’ve been in New York for so long it’s hard to isolate a particular number of years...

GW: What were the big issues, what were the hot issues, what were the debates going on?

MZ: There were a number of big projects in those days...42nd Street was in the early stages of land acquisition and that was fiercely argued, over whether you could use eminent domain to acquire property for those sorts of uses.

Also, back in the ’80s, gentrification was still focused on select neighborhoods. Park Slope was only partially the way through…Fort Greene and Clinton Hill were only starting. Special Districts and the Transfer of Development Rights debates were going on at that time as well. This was way before every neighborhood was gentrified; now there are no neighborhoods left that aren’t being affected in that way. Back then the fights were very targeted fights.

GW: And the opposition was probably more strident in many cases.

MZ: It depends on which opposition. Yes, there was opposition; now I’m not even aware there is opposition to gentrification, except on Geoff’s project [the Columbia expansion]…But I’m less involved with planning issues these days.

Now, I think people have favorable perspectives on gentrification as a way of improving neighborhoods, unless you’re involved in something like anti-eviction policies, which I am. Back then it was a battle.

GW: It was a battle.

MZ: Always lost, but at least it was a battle. And you always knew which side Pratt would be on.

GW: Community.

MZ: Many of the CDCs of New York were staffed by Pratt people. That’s where they went to work, whether they were community development groups or business improvement districts, that’s the kind of work, one way or another, that Pratt graduates went into. I remember I was at Pratt when the first version of the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Committee was formed, this was maybe 25 years ago, and I was Pratt’s delegate and the first two executive directors of that group were our students.

Nothing happened with that revitalization group for probably twenty years, but now the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Group is active, and the place has changed dramatically; it’s a real Business Improvement District. So it’s just a different era.

GW: Turning to your personal history, how did you decide to leave, where did you go, and how did your interests change as a result of your involvement at Pratt?

MZ: I left because I wanted to do things that I just couldn’t get through the institutional system, a caution that I gave to subsequent chairs. When I left Pratt, there were two different kinds of oppor-

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tunities—one was staying in the planning world, and the other opportunity, which was fortuitous, was to become executive director of University Settlement, which is a settlement house on the Lower East Side.

GW: The oldest in the country.

MZ: The oldest in the country, thank you Geoff. It just seemed like an exciting change. I spent the first year or two in that job talking to all kinds of people who were thinking of similar life changes. How do you go from being a director in academia to being a director of a not for profit? And my response then and now is that it’s not that much different. It’s all about communities, and working in communities, you just have different perspectives. I’ve always considered myself a planner running a social service not-for-profit. So my approach to issues is as a planner, so to speak, and not as a social worker.

I have been at University Settlement for 20 years, and in that time University Settlement has grown extensively and rapidly; it’s probably 20 times the size it was then. I think I’m still doing planning but some people might not consider it planning.

GW: Is that a path that you can recommend to other graduates? Has it been a rewarding one for you?

MZ: This has been an interesting conversation I’ve had with the current chair, John Shapiro, who has been a friend of mine for 30 years. I don’t think the planning profession as a whole has moved in that direction, as far as being interested in the questions with which I am engaged…As an example, we run extensive child care and after school programs, but they don’t run independently of what the community is about. I worry about what sites we are going to use, how are we going to program, how do we relate to families. I consider those planning questions, but you don’t get taught that in planning school. We don’t deal with that interpretation of social planning, meaning the provision of social services…Settlement houses are some of the more solid social infrastructures of many neighborhoods, but here are not many planners that go in this direction.

GW: Where do you think planning should be going?

MZ: To be consistent with what I would have said 30 years ago, I don’t believe there is one direction, I think Pratt has continued to serve a specific definition of planning extremely well. I still meet a lot of Pratt graduates and I’ve worked with some—they still have that ideological fervor and they stand out in what they do. Given the size of Pratt’s program, there will always be a demand function for those types of graduates.

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THE ARCHIVIST:

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BOYER CHAIR 1988-91

BY ANUSHA VENKATARAMAN

Christine Boyer is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. She is an urban historian who has written on diverse topics ranging from the history of city planning and physical planning to computer science and historic preservation. Her books include Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning, 1890-1945 (1983), The City of Collective Memory (1994), and Cybercities (1996).

Anusha Venkataraman: Why planning?

Christine Boyer: Why planning? Well, if I roll back to my childhood, what did I want to be? I wanted to be a fashion designer but I also liked mathematics. I met my first computer when I was very young as a mathematic aide or a high school aide or something like that. And so it was just charted that I was going to do something with mathematics and computers. Eventually I found myself at MIT in computer science and working for language translation programs at IBM. I just didn’t see any future in that because almost all of that was military funded and I didn’t want to take military funding. So I walked down the hall one day and knocked on the door in city planning and they said, “Oh, that’s wonderful you have all this mathematics ability.” I said, “ I don’t want to do that. I want to do physical planning.” The reason I went into planning was because I didn’t think I was going to be a great designer, but I was interested in physical form. I was interested in land use in particular and how cities developed around the world and so on. And I thought…Let me test it in planning.

AV: In Dreaming the Rational City, you approach history as reconstructed through the text. What drew you to exploring planning in that textual direction? What do you see as the relationship between text and practice?

CB: The ideology of planning is in the text. There are ideas in the text but it’s also a language, a discourse. The language has always been fascinating to me and so I’ve always looked at the writings of planners rather than their action on the ground or through interviewing them. I was influenced

by Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis [and]…the questions of power and knowledge. It’s always a criticism of the top-down approach and not the bottom-up. And that has been around for 50 years.

One of the major challenges of the 1950s and ’60s was to break down the physical process of planning from the top down and trying to get the communities involved, whether it was advocacy planning or self-help, sweat equity type of work. All this is nothing new. The problems may be new, the economics may be new, the people may be new and so forth but the language doesn’t change. And therefore, the ideology of the profession doesn’t change.

AV: Looking at one of the last chapters in Dreaming the Rational City, you were very critical of those participatory methods in some ways. Do you still share that view now?

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CB: You have to realize that book was written in the ’70s and published in ’83. That book came out of a time when community planners were asked to be the negotiators between City Hall and the community, other than allow the community to represent themselves. The advocate planner was asked to go into the community and come back. It was a very strange position and I was very critical of that… The original title of that book was “Planning a City of Capital;” that changed when we went to press. It certainly is dreaming the rational city and rationality but I also wanted to say planning bureaucracies are on the side of capitalism…I was very critical of the process of planning, but I wasn’t looking at community planning. I was really looking at the process of physical planning in America.

The book actually stops in 1945 but no one seems to realize that.

AV: Well, you do write about the 1960s.

CB: I do, I do. In the end. But I think you also have to put that book back into the time I was working on it to see what I was trying to say. In the sense of giving up the physical bases and going towards policy analysis. And going further and further away from any physical form I thought would be very destructive to cities. And I think it is. I think the process of planning doesn’t exist.

AV: It doesn’t exist today?

CB: No, it doesn’t exist today.

AV: I’m curious as to what you would describe as the Pratt pedagogy or philosophy at the time you were there.

CB: Well, I would have to make it up because I don’t think there was one while I was there. It was about survival. When I inherited the program, there were no files on any student. There was an answering machine on the floor. There was no money to buy anything. The first year, I had four part time secretaries. It was hell, it really was a hellish job. Except, I was really very pleased to hire a few wonderful people, including Bill Menking, and to work with Ayse Yonder. It was a time of build up in the graduate program. But I do think it was a very demoralized program. It was matter of picking it up and putting new energy into it.

If you want to create a philosophy out of the three of us, I suppose have to say it was working with the community people or folks. We were all very socially minded, politically minded. So there wasn’t a philosophy as such. I don’t think you have to have a particular platform to say who you are and do what you do. You speak and do whatever you do.

AV: I was told that you were tasked with bridging the school of architecture at Pratt and the department of planning to a certain degree. Is this true? Were you able to do this?

CB: That has always been the position that I held for myself. And it was relatively difficult because I’m the one planner who wanted to work with architects and not be autonomous so whether I was given that task or that was the role I have always given myself to work with architects and to try to bring back that physical planning component. It’s coming back in spite of me. [Laughs...] Architects wanted nothing to do with planners and planners wanted nothing to do with architects. One of the architects asked me, “Why is there so much antagonism with planners in schools of architecture?” I said, “Well, my answer is very simplistic: up until the 1970s, planners were the ones with the Ph.D.’s

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and architects did not.” So they felt that there was a great deal of intellectual distance between them. And no way of communicating. Today, in fact, Ph.D.’s have become far more important in the schools of architecture than in the schools of planning.

AV: In terms of pedagogy and education, do you think that planners or architects are equipped to address the issues facing our cities today?

CB: I don’t think anyone is equipped to deal with the crisis of cities at this moment. I think it’s a matter of relearning and maybe there is nothing besides the physical plan [to pick back up]. Maybe it’s just going back to where we were in the ’60s before we got rid of it all. Redoing it...I do think urbanism is on the agenda for the twenty-first century, I really do. I think our cities have gone for a long time without guidance, from whoever is prepared to offer it.

AV: I think planners are a little threatened by that.

CB: Yes, because planners have had an inferiority complex and they’ve had it for too long. They should get over it. Planners should take [the profession] back. We should be talking about educating the architects. Not them taking over something and reinventing the wheel.

AV: How do you do that?

CB: You get over your inferiority complex and start making noise. You are beginning to make noise.

There is no record of all the things Pratt has done. And you’re beginning to document that now.

What planning has not been good at is the institutional history of what it has done. I am beginning to work on an archive of post-war plans by American planners from places in the Middle East region such as Baghdad, Karachi, Beirut, Casablanca, Syria, Lebanon. What was proposed? Who funded it? It’s a history of that time, but it’s also an archive for architect-planners who are working without knowledge of what went before them.

Our whole conversation has been about misunderstanding. Miscommunication. Not having the vocabulary and the knowledge of what went before, and then reinventing the wheel. To be avant garde is always to be new, but the question is, “Can we ever really be new?”

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THE BEDROCK:

AN INTERVIEW WITH RON SHIFFMAN CO-CHAIR (WITH AYSE YONDER) 1991-95

BY SANDY HORNICK

Ron Shiffman is the inspiration of the Pratt planning community. His involvement with Pratt began in the 1950s, when he was an undergraduate student in architecture, and then a graduate student in planning. In 1964, he co-founded the Pratt Center for Community Development with George Raymond, the founding chair of the department. Since retiring as Director of the Pratt Center, Ron has taught full-time in the planning program and has continued to work closely with communities across New York City.

Sandy Hornick: Why did you come to be a planner, Ron? Ron Shiffman: The first reason was to avoid the draft. I studied to be an architect, but my real inclination was to work with people, and I was very much involved in the Civil Rights Movement very early on and felt much more committed to social issues. It was a natural segue from architecture into planning; I took some courses with George Raymond at Pratt and some courses at Columbia. Then I was drafted and decided, “Why should I go into the draft?”

I was able to get almost overnight admission to the Pratt graduate program, so I avoided going to boot camp and started on a career in planning. At first, I worked for an architect and got into a dispute with a client up in Haverstraw, New York, who was building affordable housing. He refused to advertise in the local press, and so I got very angry. The reason they refused to advertise in the Post or in the Daily News at that time, or the Daily Mirror, is they didn’t want African Americans. They didn’t want anybody who would challenge what they were proposing to build, which was an all-white community.

The firm I worked for in New Jersey refused to do anything about it, and so I just said I’m leaving. I walked out of the meeting and left. I started working in Westchester County with Sy Schulman, who was one of the sort of great urban regional planners, and worked there until George Raymond offered me a job working at Pratt, doing a study in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and that’s the rest of my life.

SH: Okay, we’re done.

RS: It was a life sentence.

SH: What was planning like, as a profession, when you started out?

RS: What I did at Pratt then was exactly what I do today. I started working with folks in BedfordStuyvesant, with a church group called Church Community Services—I think that was the name—made up of a number of young ministers that staffed it and a range of older ministers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, from very conservative churches to the more radical churches headed by Milton Galamison. I don’t know if you remember that name. He was very much an activist in trying to integrate the public school system in New York.

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I helped Church Community Services do a study together of how to retain the black middle class in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They were afraid, with integration on the horizon, that they would lose the leadership in the community. They’d gone to Rockefeller Brothers Fund for some money, and Rockefeller said they just gave some money to Pratt, but why didn’t they work together?

We began to work with the Fulton Park Urban Renewal Committee, headed by a number of people including Elsie Richardson, who I still see today and whose picture hangs on the wall in my office— she’s been a mentor to me. From there, we got involved with the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and planned a number of conferences in the community about how to rebuild it, balancing social, economic, and physical ideas. From there came a plan to totally rehabilitate the community; it was the beginning of the anti-poverty program. This was a period of great anticipation of what would come about.

Although the City Planning Commission was a little bit angry at us for this plan—they thought Pratt was raising the expectations of the community—we got a very good reception from one of the commissioners, Ellie Guggenheim, who subsequently assisted us in bringing Bobby Kennedy to BedStuy. The community was a little reluctant to just embrace the idea of his visit immediately. They had a set of demands for Kennedy; they were just afraid that it would be just another tour of an impoverished community, another visit from a politician, and nothing would come out of it. After Kennedy toured the area in 1965, he and his office came out and made a commitment to working with us and the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council. We worked for about a year and a half, and out of it grew what eventually became Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation, which was one of the first community development corporations in the country.

SH: In retrospect, what you were doing seems pretty revolutionary. Were you aware of this at the time?

RS: We were. We were really aware. Everyone involved—from Kennedy’s staff, to the people from the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council—was a very progressive thinker. How do you construct a truly community-based corporation? Some of the original ideas were: What if we had everybody literally become a stockholder in the corporation? We were looking at it from that model, to some of the theories of Louis Kelso, who developed the stock-ownership trend and employee stock ownership programs—to see whether or not we could use that mechanism of financing. [Over time,] it broke down into a more traditional model of getting grant money and trying to deal with economic development and other programs, and the Model Cities program, but the ideas were truly progressive. We also brought a busload of people from Bed-Stuy to visit folks in New Haven and Baltimore who were working on innovative processes and rehabilitation strategies, even before Kennedy came along.

A lot of work was done in those years, and we thought something was going to happen. If you asked me then what would happen, what the outcome would be, I thought it would’ve been a lot faster, and a lot more would’ve occurred than actually did occur. Looking back—a lot in the community is much better than it ever was then, but it was very slow in coming. We thought the winds of change would be a lot swifter, so maybe it was idealism speaking. We’re far more realistic today than we were then, but I think we did feel that something important was happening.

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It’s sort of like a tree growing that drops acorns. Some of the original organizations started wobbling, but then a whole group of other organizations began to develop, and you were part of that in a way.

SH: That’s when organizations like St. Nicks were founded—not in the same neighborhood but it was of that generation.

RS: St. Nicks today is as big as, if not bigger than, Restoration Corporation. By the time the second and third generation of CDCs came out, [Pratt’s] role was sort of set. We became the architects and the planners and helped facilitate and support a lot of the CDCs, whether it was St. Nicks, which we actually nurtured from its very beginning because Cathy Herman and Gary Hattem came from Pratt, or one of the many other organizations that sprouted during that time—such as Asian Americans for Equality in the Lower East Side, the People’s Development Corporation in the Bronx, Banana Kelly, Adopt-A-Building, the Renegades in East Harlem. So we had a really big portfolio, and it was a lot of fun with a lot of great people.

SH: So obviously, I hear it in your voice, there are a lot of things that you’re very proud of, and you should be. What about other things have disappointed you in these efforts, or things that you didn’t attempt because you didn’t think you could do them? Although that doesn’t sound like you...

RS: There have been a lot of disappointments. I think some of the things we had hoped and envisioned never came to pass. We really believed, in 1965, that by this year, by 2010, poverty would be abolished in this country. That’s a real disappointment, not only that it has not been abolished, but that it’s not in our vocabulary any longer. There really isn’t a strong set of social movements.

On the other hand, it may have been a totally unrealistic expectation at that point in time. There were other efforts to build housing for the homeless. Some of them did well, but a number of them failed and went to the wayside. But I’ve always tried to sublimate those disappointments—that’s how you avoid burning out.

I am awfully frustrated with your agency [the Department of City Planning] today. In 1983, we published a report on inclusionary housing. You and I fought on that one for many, many years. Now we have a form of inclusionary housing, but it’s not mandatory, and its percentages are low. That’s a great disappointment I have. On one level, it’s a very nice place to live—but on the other level, it’s becoming a bit more segregated than it should be, far more segregated than it should be, particularly around economic lines, and the lack of affordability is a big problem.

We did some things that I think were right. I wouldn’t wanna do anything over again, quite frankly.

Being around the students and the community people that we worked with, I stepped into shit.

It’s been a great life. I can’t in any way complain. I have known an amazing bunch of students.

They make you feel young. They have commitment. They renew that commitment in you. So I have absolutely no regrets.

I do think there are some things that we could have done better. We tried to start a number of new-vision schools. Some of those worked out well; some of them didn’t. We lost on the Columbia University expansion. Atlantic Yards is lost. That’s very painful. I’m very close to folks at ACORN, and yet we fought on this issue, and we fought in a way that still allows us to be friends. And I like

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that, but at the same time, I think that this whole idea of community benefits agreements is basically wrong, though I may have been a proponent early on.

I guess the other failing is that some of my students become adversaries from time to time. But I love you, I must admit. There’s a respect in the differences.

SH: What advice do you have for young planners?

RS: I really think that being a planner now, you’re entering planning at one of the most exciting times.

Exciting is probably the wrong word. It’s the most challenging time, and that challenge is both an excitement and an enormous obligation and burden. I do believe that the issues of climate change are very dramatic and that we’ve got a very short timeframe in which to turn this big ship around. It’s this generation of planners that will have the major burden of correcting our mistakes and addressing and setting a framework for future generations.

It’s an enormous burden, but it also, I think, a very creative time in which to intercede. There is one thing I really would like to get across to any young planner—you can really make a difference. You don’t have to be an expert, and you don’t have to be a genius; I’ve proven that. With energy—and working with people in teams and coalitions—significant change is possible.

I would also hope that you develop a value system that you don’t give up on. Be willing to fight for what you believe in, but also be willing to listen to others. I do think that there’s something really healthy that comes out of a constructive dialectic.

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THE AGITATOR:

AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM ANGOTTI CHAIR 1995-2001

BY STEVE FLAX

Tom Angotti, Professor in the Hunter College Department of Urban Affairs & Planning, has had an unusual trajectory in planning. After working for the NYC Department of City Planning for nearly ten years, Tom came to Pratt to 1995 before moving on to Hunter in 2002.

He is one of New York City’s most outspoken advocates for progressive community-based planning and is a prolific writer, contributing to a range of planning publications and the local press.

Steve Flax: How did you end up at Pratt?

Tom Angotti: Between 1986 and ’88 I was at HPD, in the planning division. I started at the City Planning Department in 1988. I worked in the Brooklyn office of City Planning during three administrations: Koch, Dinkins, and then Guiliani. And…things began to get a little strange in the Guiliani administration, from inside government; they were certainly strange to many people from outside city government. I heard there was a position available at Pratt, and I knew Ron Shiffman, so I applied.

SF: You had known Ron before then?

TA: Ron was on the Planning Commission at that time, and Ron was one of a small group of commissioners who I had deep respect for—for the positions that he took, for his willingness and interest to stretch the boundaries of what the City Planning Commission could do...And Ron really brought an enthusiastic, socially conscious vision to City Planning, and I really respected that. So, it was natural that when I heard about Pratt, I said well, this could be the right time and the right thing for me.

SF: So let’s take a step back. I can see how you identified with Ron, but what is it about your story, that led you to responsible, or progressive, planning?

TA: My history with progressive planning probably goes back to my years in college. After college—I graduated Indiana University in 1964—I went into the Peace Corps. That’s where I developed my interest in community development and community organizing.

SF: You’re from the Midwest?

TA: Nope. I was born in Brooklyn, but when I was seven years old my parents moved out to the suburbs. We lived in various suburban spaces until I graduated from high school in Connecticut.

Indiana was a pretty secluded environment at that time, but it was the developing years of the civil rights movement. After I finished college I actually went to work in the south, and got involved in the Civil Rights movement, then I joined the Peace Corps in Peru. I married my first wife—who was

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Peruvian—and we had our first child there. After returning here, I worked for a couple of years in the Cooperative Extension, working with young people in central city environments. I got involved in the War on Poverty… And then I went back to grad school. Urban planning seemed to me the most logical place where I could mix theory, practice, and social consciousness, while getting some real hard understanding of community development.

SF: So, why progressive planning? And what’s it say about you?

TA: Right. So when I came back to work with the city, I took with me my accumulated experience in radical community planning, organizing…

SF: Were you a red diaper baby?

TA: Oh no. No, not at all; both my parents were conservative Republicans…So, I don’t know entirely, how I ended up being a radical and a socialist, and interested in radical social transformation.

SF: What was the department like when you were chair, and what were some of the…salient features of the city during that time?

TA: I came to Pratt at a very difficult time, when the school was coming off of a financial crisis. It was just about at the bottom. A lot of the buildings were in poor repair. I hadn’t even finished moving into my office—I think it was the first month—when there was a fire at Higgins Hall. A lot of my files were destroyed, damaged; it took quite some time before we could go back in, and Higgins was renovated—years…

SF: What was going on politically and socially in the city and the country at the time?

TA: In the city, of course, it was the difficult Guiliani years. The most important thing going on in the neighborhoods and communities was the environmental justice movement. Through the graduate department and through the Pratt Center, I collaborated on several projects that brought in various people in the environmental justice movement.

Some of those projects were difficult politically, but politics is always part of the mix. But the problem that we have today with community planning is, in city government, there is no respect for the consensus reached in communities; it’s neither honored nor followed. After it has gone through this extensive process—a public process, an open and transparent process, that city agencies themselves engaged in…City agents even came out to the community on numerous occasions, participated in those discussions, and then there was a final plan put into place that everybody agreed with…

SF: …No easy feat…

TA: …No easy feat! And then, what happens with it is entirely behind closed doors at City Planning.

That is undermining community planning. And that is what the Bloomberg Administration has continued to do. They did it with the Williamsburg/Greenpoint 197-a plan, when they came up with a rezoning that undermined the plan. They did it with the Harlem 197-a plan, and undermined it by doing a rezoning at the same time and then ignoring the 197-a plan. That’s the problem we have.

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SF: I always thought Pratt did a very good job outlining power relations, as part of our studies. And yet, I guess 197-a plans are not as popular as they were when you were at Pratt.

TA: Times have changed, times have changed...Then, we were advocating for 197-a plans. Today, I would not recommend to any community board that they undertake a 197-a plan, because the city will manipulate them. I believe in them, and I believe every Community Board should have an opportunity to make its own plans, and I believe in the democratic process, but I believe it should be open and transparent. We don’t have that now.

SF: Do you think Pratt incorporates popular education in their training, or do you think we bring it as students from our respective organizations?

TA: Both. That’s been one of the great parts of the model and the history and tradition of the Pratt Center—that you bring in people and their experience and knowledge and ideology and there’s an exchange and a dialogue. And that’s so critical in education. There’s nothing so crippling in education than talking to students who don’t have grounding in some kind of social mission or practice.

But you’re in a field that is very practice-oriented, in which if you don’t have a social mission, you’re probably part of the problem: you’re probably exploiting the community in one way or another.

SF: So what are your current interests, what are you passionate about?

TA: I’m still involved in New York City issues. My book, New York For Sale, came out last year, and it’s opened up a lot more discussions and dialogues with community-based organizations. I’ve been working with groups in Chinatown and the Lower East Side who have fought the rezoning in that area, and with groups in Sunset Park, in Harlem, in other places where there’s been an increasing dissatisfaction with the way zoning is being imposed in neighborhoods, to stimulate gentrification—and protecting gentrified neighborhoods as well. I’ve co-organized a conference that’s coming up in a week called “No More Affordable Housing Scams.” It comes out of a lot of dissatisfaction that what we fought for—and Pratt was really instrumental in this too—was inclusionary zoning, but that’s not what we got. What we got was a very poor stepchild; it’s not mandatory, and it’s not truly affordable, because it uses the area-wide A.M.I.—area median income—instead of using the median income for local neighborhoods. So it’s been the Trojan horse that brings luxury housing to communities like Harlem’s 125th Street, the Lower East Side and so forth, and people are looking for an alternative, looking for a way out of these “scams.”

SF: So you’re now at Hunter. You’re the dean of the planning department?

TA: No, I’m not, happily. [Laughter.] I’m director of the Center for Community Planning and Development, which is an umbrella for a lot of the projects I’ve been doing, and for a few other faculty…

Sustainability Watch is a program that I started. When Mayor Bloomberg started PlaNYC 2030, I felt it was important to develop a critical analysis. We developed working papers with Gotham Gazette, published them, and solicited a whole range of articles, pro’s and con’s. Because I think the sustainability program was both good and bad. The good part of it was that it introduced the sustainability subject into city government for the first time, and it reintroduced the concept of long-term planning.

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The bad side of it was the process; it was done without communities and real community involvement; in fact it turned its back on the really good and hard work that’s been done by advocacy groups for years and years. It cherry-picked a few minor recommendations that people had come to over the years—like building public plazas and so forth—but took them entirely out of the context of people’s neighborhoods: there’s no neighborhood in the sustainability plan, there are no communities. It’s just City Hall and the Mayor—with all their spreadsheets and their budgets—and the 8 million people who make up the city of New York…

SF: …a top down approach…

TA: Right, a top down approach. And it’s gotten more top-down. It’s not gotten any better.

And what else am I doing? I’ve started the Prospect Avenue Farm. It’s still in formation. I think Urban Agriculture is an important priority for planning in cities all across the country, especially this country; it’s an answer to suburban sprawl, it’s also an answer to the food deserts in cites, and we still have to learn from the pioneering efforts of many who started community gardens, who have been producing food already in the city, people like Will Allen in Milwaukee, who has a five acre plot that’s producing food and involves a lot of people in the production of that food. There are just incredible things already going on that we haven’t opened our eyes to.

SF: Second to last question: What do you think is the biggest issue the city is facing now?

TA: [Pause] Wow. There are so many daunting issues facing New York City. New York is a bit different from other cities, because of its unique history, the way it’s developed, and the fact that it has such a vast mass transit system…I don’t think the biggest problem is dealing with growth or making way for growth; the biggest problem is sustaining what we already have in NYC, and improving the quality of life for people who live here.

We’re also going to have a serious problem consolidating the gains that have been made over the last thirty, forty years, reversing the tide of abandonment, consolidating the communities, improving the quality of life. We have new epidemics of obesity and diabetes and asthma: that has to be the priority. You can’t solve the asthma problem by building luxury condos with oodles of parking that are going to increase auto traffic. That’s why the 2030 plan is not sustainable, and its not going to improve the quality of life for a lot of people, because it’s following the old models of an unsustainable city, bringing in suburban style shopping malls, supermarkets with oodles of parking.

SF: Where would you like the planning profession to go?

TA: Planning is one of the fastest growing fields in the United States. Part of it comes out of a widespread sense that people are dissatisfied with the way we’ve built cities and communities. But is it going to translate into better practice? I’m not sure. I think the biggest challenge facing planning today is breaking with the old models, of suburban sprawl—which, by the way, the planning profession in the U.S. supported, and went for hook, line, and sinker. And it’s part of the fundamental economic weakness of this country: that we have such an old and expensive infrastructure system that doesn’t work, that reduces economic productivity. It’s unfair. It’s only exacerbated social and economic inequalities, racial inequalities…

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So planners are moving into a situation of crisis that they helped to create. And we have to break with it. I’m happy to see, among planners, interest in urban agriculture, pedestrian and bicycle planning in cities, alternative modes of transportation, mass transit, high-speed rail—a lot of things that for a long time weren’t even uttered. But this is still a minority—this is still a small portion of the planning profession. That’s our challenge, and one reason why I continue to work with Planners Network: to make our voices heard, not just in cities or in communities, but within the planning profession.

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THE COMMUNITY-BUILDER:

AN INTERVIEW WITH AYSE YONDER CO-CHAIR 1991-1995 (WITH RON SHIFFMAN) CHAIR 2001-2005

BY RACHANA SHETH

Ayse Yonder has taught at Pratt since 1989, and has held the department together through many transitions of chairs, faculty, staff, and students. Trained as an architect and planner, and with a Ph.D in planning from the University of California at Berkeley, Ayse is vigilant about bringing the perspectives of marginalized people into Pratt’s planning pedagogy and practice. She has done extensive work with grassroots women’s organizations, and continues to research, write, and teach courses on her primary interests including disaster planning and mitigation; arts, culture and community development; and informal land ownership in developing countries.

Rachana Sheth: When you came to Pratt and when you became the chair, what was the department like? What was your experience here?

Ayse Yonder: I arrived in the spring semester of 1988. I was teaching at the University of New Mexico, where I had come to from Berkeley. The first year was difficult… Aside from getting used to New York and Pratt, I was required to complete my dissertation during my first semester here.

Also as full-time faculty, I had to teach three new classes each semester. Michael Zisser was chair then, and the department was going through accreditation. In the fall semester Michael Zisser left Pratt. Frank DeGiovanni, the other full time faculty from the Pratt Center, became interim chair for a year, but he also left at the end of the year. They were both very good but with them leaving I had no colleagues around until Christine Boyer was hired as full-time chair. Michael had good relations with graduate Architecture and Urban Design Programs, both small programs. I taught a few courses there. Christine came full of energy, and was very supportive. She did a couple of important things.

One was establishing good relations with undergraduate architecture—all the architects loved her.

She developed a series of history/theory courses. Bill Menking was hired then. Several architecture students took these courses; it was a way of getting them interested in planning. The other was establishing stronger ties with the Pratt Center. We started the intensive program for people who had gone through the PICCED’s Community Economic Development Internship Program then…When Christine left for Princeton in 1991, Ron Shiffman suggested a new structure for the program, which was when the Graduate Center for Planning and Environment was born. The Environmental Systems Management (ESM) Program was integrated into the department then. It used to be in engineering, and Ron quite wisely brought it to our side.

RS: Why do you think so?

AY: He saw the relationship between the two, [and] had a sense of where the field was going. Around that time, Eva Hanhardt hired and mentored our few ESM students as interns at the Department of Environmental Protection. She joined the program later, during Tom Angotti’s time, but mainly

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to teach planning courses at first. We expanded the environmental program after 2001, thanks to Eva. She single handedly developed the whole curriculum for the environmental program. She once said Pratt is a wonderful place to apply the cradle to cradle concept to educational practice. And I said, “Why not? Let’s just try.” That’s how we started the campus-wide initiative that became the Sustainable Pratt group.

RS: While I was there I saw that the focus on sustainability increased considerably. But how did the program—and the students—change over time?

AY: Our focus was always on community-based planning. The influence of the Pratt Center was very strong, and people realized that this was a jewel of a program—once they were here. Christine Boyer had figured out a way of attracting non-traditional students through the Pratt Center Community Economic Development Internship Program. People who had gone through Pratt Center’s internship program would get 30 credits of advanced standing towards the planning degree; they would only have to take the required courses to get a degree. That meant we had all these fascinating people really. I still remember each one—some of them my age. Leaders, community leaders, you know, from different organizations—with a lot of practical experience and wisdom. I learned a lot from them; it was a mutual learning experience. They were all working full-time and had family obligations. They couldn’t come to school every night or even every week. So they would use their vacation time or their agencies would give them some time off to attend the program. It was a highly subsidized program because of the PICCED internship segment. After the first year, we made it more national in scope, though that only lasted three years. It was more feasible for PICCED interns who lived in the metropolitan area.

RS: Pratt is great because it has a little bit of both theory and practice—the faculty are all practitioners, but theory is a part of the curriculum.

AY: Definitely. There are planning schools that either only focus on theory or only on practice. You have to put practice in a broader framework. It wasn’t just practice for [practice’s sake]—not just technical skills. I do believe that we have to provide a good solid background in history and theory to understand why we are doing certain things.

Another thing that is rather unique to our program is the sense of community. I tried to continue that tradition by having as many faculty and student meetings as possible. That was a way of creating community. As you know, food can be an organizing tool. And I think people liked it. Also, social ties can make up for lack of material resources to keep things going, We also organized a lot of lectures and conferences that brought theoreticians and practitioners.

Bill and I organized the Margins of the City conference in 1993, which brought together very good speakers—Manuel Castells, Christine Boyer (who came back for the event), Neil Smith and Ron Shiffman, of course. We first organized a bus tour to some of the neighborhoods where community groups were doing interesting work, and then in the afternoon we had the panel. We had a good turn out from community-based organizations and students and young faculty from all over the metropolitan area. Also in the 1990s, Tom Angotti brought the headquarters of Planners Network to Pratt.

We staffed and supported it after he left. We organized with Tom two national PN conferences, and several lecture series. We also provided space and co-sponsored several events with ADPSR [Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility] and GreenHomeNYC after 2001. It was

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important to share our resources with like minded groups. Another major conference was Art in the Contested City [in 2006], because after we formed the Sustainable Pratt network, I had met artists and designers interested in community issues and social justice issues…

I think now everyone, even the American Planning Association or the AICP [American Institute of Certified Planners], seems to be interested in social justice issues. It’s in the APA planner’s code of ethics but now they are talking about it. They’re also talking more about environmental issues.

And they are talking more about physical planning—though we have a different take on it. These are things Pratt has been strong in all along. [For these reasons,] I think increasingly people are recognizing the importance of what we are doing and there is more interest in the program.

[Over the years,] I’ve continued to work with women’s groups. That was always very closely linked to what we are doing here. It’s about bottom up planning and community development. Women, mothers, you know, who are usually invisible. I’m writing now about how grassroots women’s groups use space to formalize their leadership and community development work. The women volunteering and working on improving their communities want their work to be recognized—as experts, every day experts. I’m also working with Jackie Leavitt from UCLA, on an article on planning through the perspective of the every day life. It’s basically about what planning can learn from these community based initiatives. And it’s about the right to the city—the inclusion of everyone in the decisions about their environment.

RS: I think this is really interesting because I think you have been around for the longest time here.

And I think your ideas about what planning should be, what students need, has shaped the program over the years. And that has been something that I think Pratt has benefited from.

AY: I believe in doing what you say in your everyday practice. Community-based planning is also about creating a community [among ourselves] and creating strong ties with community groups.

That’s how Pratt Center worked. It wasn’t just “helping” them. It was working with them as partners, friends.

So I think what is unique at Pratt is that sense of community. All the students have access to faculty.

We know all the students by name. There’s no hierarchy. We assume they are future practitioners.

They are our colleagues. And we enjoy being with the students because we all have similar worldviews I guess. And that’s a community—not just an efficient, cold academic environment.

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THE HUMANIST:

AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURA WOLF-POWERS CHAIR 2005-07

BY JENIFER ROTH BECKER

In only a few years, Laura Wolf-Powers immeasurably shaped the Pratt planning department before moving to continue her research career as Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. In her teaching, Laura focuses on economic development, urban labor markets, and the role of community-based organizations in urban politics and governance. Laura has published extensively, most recently in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (based on her research on STREET magazine), the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and Environment and Planning. In 2004 she was awarded the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for the best dissertation in planning.

Jenifer Roth Becker: Directly prior to joining the faculty at Pratt, you had been working on your Ph.D at Rutgers. What was your first impression of the program at Pratt?

Laura Wolf-Powers: There are two kinds of planning programs: one that comes out of a design tradition and one that comes out of a public policy tradition. Rutgers definitely was a policy school… and so it was a new experience for me to walk into a program where the built environment was paramount. It was refreshing to see that people who were teaching there and the students who were studying there were united in their concern for places.

The Pratt program was also very much grounded in New York and in the neighborhoods of New York.

And that’s not always the case. I could tell right away that Pratt was special because of its commitment to community-based planning, which was very much worn on its sleeve. Interest in improving the quality of life in low-income neighborhoods around New York had a very prominent place in the minds of the existing faculty and students.

JRB: You came to Pratt in September 2002—a year after September 11th. You could argue that, at least in New York City, the public awareness of urban planning was probably much higher than it had ever been before. There were citywide charrettes on what should take place at the World Trade Center site. How do you think that impacted the students and the focus of the program?

LWP: Several of my colleagues—notably Ron Shiffman and Eva Hanhardt—were very involved in the Listening to the City project that a number of institutions were collaborating on, [including] the Municipal Art Society, the Milano School of the New School, Pratt, and the Regional Plan Association.

The sense that New Yorkers had something to say about the future of lower Manhattan and were going to be listened to by elected officials and decision-makers was still very much in the air, a year after September 11th.

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That faded over time, as the project of rebuilding became more opaque to the public, more politically parochial. I remember, at the time, that in certain ways the city was still reverberating with the shock of that cataclysm. And part of that reverberation was a sense of opportunity and potentially a new set of opportunities for public participation in the planning process.

JRB: Do you feel that the student body of Pratt changed while you were there, perhaps because of September 11th and a renewed awareness of the role of urban planning?

LWP: I think there were a few things that drove students toward planning at that time. There definitely were several students who had become interested in planning because of Listening to the City, because of their heightened awareness of the role that urban design could play in rebuilding a neighborhood, and the role that social policy could play in rebuilding the neighborhood—because there whole aspects of the post-September 11th process that had to do with the economic impacts that the disaster had on lower Manhattan and surrounding, less affluent neighborhoods like Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

But there was another undercurrent that built during the time I was there, which had more to do with environmental awareness and the sense that climate change was, in its own way, as much of a catastrophe as a terrorist attack. I think that people saw city planning—urban policy and urban physical planning—as routes that they could take toward confronting some of the serious environmental challenges that cities and regions are going to be facing in the ensuing decades.

JRB: As you mentioned, Pratt has a long reputation of community advocacy and fighting for underserved communities. Looking back at what some of the big issues at the time that you became Chair, in 2005: Bloomberg was reelected for a second term, and the 2012 Olympics and the upzonings and down-zonings across the city were being debated. How did the program itself fit into the larger context of what was going on in the city?

LWP: There were definitely a number of issues associated with the growth boom that New York found itself in. There was a brief downturn immediately following the September 11th attacks, but then the economy picked up again almost immediately. New York was a sort of success story as a big city that had really gained population with a vengeance during the course of the 1990s. There was a sense that it was a destination for residents and that the outer boroughs were destinations for residents in ways that they hadn’t been in more than a generation.

When the Pratt planning program was founded, cities were being hollowed out; there was a lot of suburban and exurban migration happening. There was concern about what to do with vacant property in neighborhoods. Both the faculty and our colleagues at the Pratt Center for Community Development realized that this was a new age—what we were really dealing with was growing pains; the development pressures were enormous. Residential and commercial development pressures were beginning to impinge on the city’s inventory of industrial land. So there were some studio projects that focused on that issue, on how the city could rezone underutilized industrial land where it was appropriate but also cultivate new kinds of industry that had a reason to be in New York. Obviously housing affordability became a major issue, [and] there were several studios that took that on…

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The time that I spent as Chair was a period of hyperactive growth in the city. And it seemed that it would go on indefinitely. [With the debates concerning and eventual adoption of inclusionary zoning], this was a wonderful time to teach students about the tradeoffs in city planning, because there was a lot of community participation.

Some of it was participation by groups of people who wanted to see more affordable housing and wanted to take the opportunity to accompany densification with affordability. Some of the advocacy was on the part of people who prioritized open space and access to the waterfront. Some of the advocacy was on the part of people who felt that building as much as the administration wanted to allow on the Williamsburg Waterfront would irreparably damage the physical character of the neighborhood. And then there were people who were concerned about the manufacturing businesses who were in threat of being edged out by these waves of residential development.

All those different advocacy groups were talking to each other, but they didn’t always necessarily agree about what the right balance among these different priorities was. There was really the opportunity to talk about that, and use that to talk about the planning process. The political process was something that I remember very vividly.

JRB: So you left Pratt in 2007 to teach at University of Pennsylvania. Did your Pratt experience impact the way you taught or what you taught at Penn?

LWP: My experience at Pratt has really shaped me as a professional. It was the first job that I had after coming out of graduate school. I had the privilege and the opportunity to work with colleagues at Pratt who were amazing in the classroom and amazing in the field. That has definitely stayed with me.

I also had the opportunity to work with Bill Menking on a historical project where we looked back at previous eras in community planning through the lens of two publications: one called Pratt Planning Papers and the other called STREET magazine. We held a conference to look at some of the legacies of those publications and the eras in which they were produced. That had a big impact on me.

I continue to remain very interested in the history and sociology of city planning, and the origins of the community development movement and what it was about the fervor of that time that could breathe life into a planning profession that had prior been somewhat technocratic, somewhat focused on real estate and the built environment—and not particularly concerned with social issues or with politics. In the 1960s and ’70s, planning came to embrace a much wider set of issues, I think for the better.

Understanding the transition—of which Pratt was really an epicenter—that helped give birth to a new species of planning has really shaped me. Definitely, my teaching objectives are infused with the sense of importance of justice and equity that became a part of my DNA while at Pratt.

JRB: Where do you see the profession going? Or where would you like to see the profession of urban planning go?

LWP: [Silence]

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JRB: Maybe an easier way to ask that is: What do you see as the dominant themes for planners in the years to come?

LWP: I’m encouraged by some of the things that the Obama administration is doing, particularly in the area of Housing and Urban Development. I’m encouraged that there can be a federal role in city development again and that the federal government can be seen as a catalyst of innovation and change and experimentation on the local level.

I think that the future of the profession lies in combining the physical side of planning, the side that’s concerned with the character of the built environment, with the social side. I’m very happy to be teaching in a design school—as Pratt was a design school. I think it’s important that students who are going to be doing housing finance or working for community development corporations understand design and can cite examples of good livable neighborhood design and possibly work with those tools. I also think it’s also important that students who are going be doing design and physical planning have a sense of how to analyze a region’s economy, and understand the demographic changes and trends that are affecting the lives of the people in a place and take those into account when they’re making their physical plans.

The best of our profession figures out how to integrate the questions about built form with questions about what kind of society we want to live in, and how can we govern that society. How can we create structures at the state and federal levels that will enable local governments to plan and create environments of equality and opportunity for their citizens? I think that planning is really one of the only fields that links all that together in the same space. And I think if we can keep doing that, then our profession will succeed well into the next century.

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Eric Allison Rachel Berkson Christine Boyer Steve Flax Cathy Herman Sandy Hornick Harriet Markis Jenifer Roth-Becker Rachana Sheth Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Brian Sullivan Patricia Swann Anusha Venkataraman Sarah Wick Geoffrey Weiner Ayse Yonder Arthur Zabarkes Michael Zisser

Todd Bressi Karen Chapple Edward Goetz Alyssa Katz Nancy Levinson Laura Wolf-Powers

Eva Neubauer Alligood Tom Angotti Michael Epp Michael Flynn Anne Grave Brad Lander Vicki Weiner

Caron Atlas Eve Baron Adam Friedman Michael Rochford Ira Stern Charles Wilson Perry Winston

IN PRINT

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LAURA WOLF-POWERS

IN PRINT

PRATT PLANNING PAPERS, STREET and CITY LIMITS

In his classic 1979 book, Deciding What’s News, sociologist Herbert Gans laid bare the means by which our culture confers importance on certain features of the social landscape. Getting topics into print or on the air, he explained, while masquerading as the workaday activity of people in the news media, is an exercise in the assertion of values and the expression of power. City planning issues— let alone neighborhood planning issues—have rarely been considered significant among those who decide what’s news. But practitioners of community-based planning have been clever about finding ways to circulate alternative interpretations of the city and alternative visions for neighborhood renewal.

In 2004, my colleague Bill Menking and I decided to organize a retrospective on two such publications, the early Pratt Planning Papers (1962-68) and STREET magazine (1971-75). In its own way, each publication had influenced and reflected planning in its time—Pratt Planning Papers (PPP) by documenting and discussing struggles with issues like how to accommodate emerging communitybased voices in the planning process and how to strike an appropriate balance between social planning and physical planning; STREET by putting on full display the counter-cultural, “small is beautiful,” “do it yourself” attitude that was part of the planning zeitgeist in the 1970s. We digitized the publications (which are available at http://www.pratt.edu/academics/architecture/grad_center_planning_environment/gcpe_in_print/)1 and held a symposium, City Legacies, in October 2005 that drew scholars and practitioners from New York City and around the country to reflect on the contemporary relevance of the issues with which PPP and STREET had engaged.

Reprinted here with corresponding excerpts from the Pratt Planning Papers are two contributions to that symposium. The first, by Edward Goetz, updates a fierce 1965-6 debate between Astrid Monson and radical planning avatar Chester Hartman about relocation policy under the federal urban renewal program. Monson says criticisms of the program are misplaced, citing recent reforms, dismissing the idea that tenants might be better off “staying put,” and urging Hartman and his colleagues to stop complaining unless they can “find alternate solutions to the problems [urban renewal and public housing] were designed to solve.” Two issues later, Hartman responds, calling Monson’s article a “Pollyanna-ish apologia” and asserting that despite efforts to “prove that relocation simply is no longer a problem...we will not and cannot achieve truly adequate relocation results under the present urban renewal system.” Monson replies that it is easy to be critical of government from “university research institutes” and appeals to critics to “join with us in the struggle rather than help—in all innocence, perhaps—the very forces against which we should all be allied—greedy slum landlords, venal politicians, slothful administrators and even timid or incompetent planners.” Fundamentally, this exchange typifies the conflict taking place in the mid-1960s between planners who believed that the interests of the poor were well-served by existing government institutions and processes and “advocacy planners” who called for radical reform and even transformation in planning. As Goetz shows, echoes of the relocation debate (and the debate over whether the institutions of the state are benign or not) are heard in contemporary arguments about tenant displacement under current

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redevelopment programs, including the federal government’s HOPE VI effort to replace severely distressed public housing projects with privately owned mixed-income housing.2 Also reprinted here from a 1967 issue of the Pratt Planning Papers is a speech given by Senator Robert F. Kennedy after a famous 1966 walk through the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Senator Kennedy’s visit to Bed-Stuy had been carefully orchestrated, in part by the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, a community-based group that was at the time crafting a response to a proposed urban renewal plan for a section of Bedford Stuyvesant—with the assistance of the Pratt Center for Community Improvement (the forerunner of today’s Pratt Center). Karen Chapple points out in her paper that Kennedy’s speech placed unemployment at the center of the urban problem (and particularly the so-called racial crisis) and articulated a solution to that problem, “a Marshall Plan for the Cities,” that briefly took shape in a federal commitment to community development corporations including the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. But, Chapple argues, for a variety of reasons Kennedy’s vision of an employment program spearheaded by community groups never materialized. Chapple builds on her historical analysis to reflect on a major and persistent question in community development: what a strengthened community-level capacity to connect people with the social and human capital required for living-wage employment should look like in the 21st century. While Kennedy’s speech, “Problems of the Cities,” was read and heard in other places, its publication in Pratt Planning Papers represents the attempt to position it as “news” relevant to local planners and community leaders, not just federal policymakers.

STREET, which was also discussed at the City Legacies symposium, is pitched at activist citizens in addition to professional planners. With provocative illustrations and articles that run the gamut from public policy to “how-to,” this publication (issued irregularly in batches of 5,000, with 2,000 distributed through the mail to the staff and leaders of community organizations and the remaining 3,000 through local anti-poverty agencies and public libraries) was path-breaking in several ways. First, it anticipated the urban environmental movement, providing information about new federal and state policies governing air and water quality while at the same time offering advice on recycling, alternative transportation and urban agriculture that would not seem out of place in a planning magazine today. While keeping an eye on the legislative scene, STREET focused on the neighborhood and the household as sites for social transformation, publishing, for example, a set of “New Years Resolutions” for 1972 that included such advice as “keep a bottle of water in the refrigerator for drinking,” “use baking soda for a cleanser,” “combine errands,” and “bake your own bread.” The “Street Tips” feature offered guidance about how readers could get rid of junk mail, report oil slicks and tune up their bicycles.

Second, during a time of disinvestment in New York City’s working-class and low-income communities, STREET offered a defiant counterpoint to mainstream news reports of job and population loss, crime, and property abandonment. Notices of newly installed streetlights, local festivals, block beautification campaigns, and new housing construction testified to the loosely organized yet passionate community-building activity that persisted through decline. Throughout the early 1970s, STREET authors and photographers portrayed everyday activity and communal life in Crown Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, Red Hook and North Williamsburg—places that most media coverage of the time caricatured as decaying and pathology-ridden. In contrast, articles in STREET showed residents of these neighborhoods going to church, attending block parties, maintaining small businesses and caring for their families and front yards (an excerpt from the recurring feature “Brooklyn Lives” is reprinted here).

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Finally, the magazine covered and supported the emerging neighborhood housing movement. Features critiqued Federal Housing Administration policy, debated New York City’s allocation of Community Development Block Grant funds, applauded state representatives who had introduced antiredlining legislation, and chronicled the housing preservation efforts of community groups. “Save the Northside,” reprinted here, chronicled a successful anti-eviction fight in the Williamsburg neighborhood in which advocacy by Pratt Center played a pivotal role. Over the course of the 1970s, dozens of efforts like the ones documented in STREET convinced city government to embrace the role of community-based organizations in developing and managing low- and moderate-income housing and solidified these groups as important players in the system of social housing production.

As it became more directly affiliated with the neighborhood housing movement and other institutionalized community development efforts, the Pratt Center joined with the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers and two other sweat equity housing groups, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) and the People’s Housing Network, to launch a combined publication. They rolled STREET and the regular news publications of these partner organizations into the magazine City Limits, whose first issue came out in 1976. City Limits chronicled and informed New York City’s neighborhood housing and community development movement for the next 30 years. Later in this section, former editor Alyssa Katz reflects on City Limits’ legacy.

What is the enduring impact of the voices that made the Pratt Planning Papers and STREET magazine so interesting to read? Simply put, it consists in a continuing engagement of city planners with environmental justice and place-based community development. Ideas once marginal in the profession—such as the notion that planners should enable the informed and active participation of neighborhood residents in development decisions—are now widely accepted. Residential rehabilitation and infill development have a currency in the field now that they did not possess during the high modernist era of planning, in part due to the tireless work of community groups to publicize and document the value of an urban fabric that to outsiders looked merely “blighted.” The planners who produced STREET were forerunners of the professionals who today concern themselves with energyconscious design, regional foodsheds, and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

Today the variety and accessibility of the media makes “in print” activism even more feasible.

Though the sheer number of blogs and websites makes it hard to get and sustain people’s attention, community-based planners have a strong presence online. Reading Streetsblog’s trenchant critique of mandatory parking minimums3 or the Pratt Center’s own call for a Charter Revision process that revisits land use review,4 it’s impossible not to think of the shoulders today’s advocates are standing on.

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NOTES 1 See also Laura Wolf-Powers, “Keeping Counterpublics Alive in Planning,” in Searching for the Just City, eds. Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter and Justin Steil (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009) and Laura Wolf-Powers, “Expanding Planning’s Public Sphere: STREET magazine, Activist Planning and Community Development in Brooklyn, NY 1971-75,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 28:2 (2008), 180-195.

2 For further discussion of this issue, see Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and an exchange between David Imbroscio, Xavier deSousa Briggs, and John Goering and Judith Feins in Journal of Urban Affairs 30:2 (2008).

3 http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/02/19/the-next-new-york-how-the-planning-departmentsabotages-sustainability/.

4 http://prattcenter.net/issue-brief/city-charter-revision-where-land-use-fits.

IN PRINT | 55

ASTRID MONSON AND CHESTER HARTMAN ON URBAN RENEWAL

PRATT PLANNING PAPERS

The following articles are reprinted from two issues of Pratt Planning Papers. Astrid Monson wrote the following article in October 1965 (Vol. 3 No. 4), critiquing, in part, research published

by Chester Hartman. Mr. Hartman responded in a 1966 issue of Pratt Planning Papers (Vol. 4 No. 2), in which Ms. Monson issued a final rejoinder as well.

ASTRID MONSON

URBAN RENEWAL RELOCATION: A PLEA FOR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM “[H]e was a systematic reasoner, and like all systematic reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture everything in nature to support his hypothesis.”

Laurence Sterne Emerging from its theoretical phase after fifteen years of experimentation and cautious advance, the urban renewal program is finally beginning to have a major effect on the evolution of the nation’s urban structure. Though there have been mistakes and even failures, some of the projects which were earlier pointed to as failures have now turned the corner and are providing housing for all income groups and races, as well as schools, parks, public buildings, and major opportunities for new commercial and industrial development. As new buildings in modern settings replace the unlamented 19th Century residential and industrial slums, many of the arguments which die-hard opponents of any kind of public action to meet urban problems have been wont to use in their attacks over the years have been laid to rest. If what replaced the worn-out structures was often ugly, over-size, and graceless, it was generally no more so than other private new construction, not connected with urban renewal.

In recent years, however, assisted by the conclusions of various academic studies, the hard-core opponents of urban renewal have mounted a major new attack. In summary, they accuse the program of having forged its accomplishments at the expense of the families it displaced, with callous disregard of their rights. If true, this accusation, more than any other made so far, should suffice to put an immediate stop to the program. The basic law, as passed in 1949 and as amended since, unequivocally requires that any families or individuals displaced in the process be provided, “in the urban renewal area or in other areas not generally less desirable in regard to public utilities and public and commercial facilities and at rents and prices within (their) financial means...decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings...available to (them).” If, in fact, as dwellings are acquired and demolished, or vacated for rehabilitation purposes, the families which previously inhabited them are not being rehoused substantially in accordance with the law, then it would be difficult to defend the desirability of continuing, let alone expanding, the urban renewal program.

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Responding to this criticism, Housing Administrator Robert C. Weaver had this to say:1 “Urban renewal uproots people. True. It uproots them primarily from slums where they have been condemned to live for lack of better housing opportunities.

“Urban renewal is clearing slums on a large scale—as it was intended to do. In 700 projects2 now in advanced stages, more than a quarter of a million substandard housing units have been, or in the near future will be, eliminated.

“But urban renewal does more. It is the only major operation involving displacement of people that assumes both legal and moral responsibility for what happens to them. By law, urban renewal provides decent housing for displaced slum dwellers and financial assistance to help them and displaced businesses to move…

“In its treatment of people, urban renewal is humane. Yet the impression persists, with help from the opponents, that people are shoved out and forgotten. This was never completely true and it is definitely false now. …

RELOCATION IN PERSPECTIVE Two recent studies3 have attempted to assess the total past and impending impact of relocation due to public programs. Their findings indicate that in recent years average annual urban renewal displacements accounted for 34,000 of a total of 73,000 families and individuals displaced from their dwellings by all federal or federally-aided programs (highways, urban renewal, code enforcement, army facilities, public housing, and other public buildings and facilities). In the future, the annual average is expected to increase to some 111,000 families and individuals of which urban renewal will involve 66,000. These figures represent, respectively, 46% and 60% of the total residential displacement due to government action. In 100 cities of 100,000 population or over, urban renewal is expected to dislocate about 25,000 families a year out of 63,000 affected by all programs, or less than 40% of the total.

Though these figures show that the impact of renewal is not insignificant, they need to be considered in the context of a few other facts: Up to now, at least, displacement caused by urban renewal has amounted to between one-third and one-half of the relocation volume brought about by public action alone. …Though not all residents of renewal areas are poor and belong to minority groups, and not all families displaced by other programs are middle-class and white, the question inevitably comes to mind as to whether the concentration of attacks on renewal relocation is motivated exclusively by solicitude for the relocatees…

In terms of income and family composition or race, families displaced by renewal are indistinguishable from millions of other families living in slum or other inadequate housing, or forced to enter the

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housing market because of overcrowding, changes of employment location, family formation or expansion, termination of their rental occupancy by the owner, fire, or other casualty, or demolition of their home for highway or other public use or for completely private rebuilding without benefit of public aid of any kind. The solution would seem to lie not in the freezing of these people in the homes they have, but in providing an ample supply of better housing into which they could move.

THE HARTMAN RELOCATION STUDY Because it is public action that causes forced relocation, however, the community unquestionably has a peculiar and particular responsibility towards those families which it dispossesses—if not against their will, at least without their active volition. In addition, in urban renewal proper rehousing of displaced families is mandated by statute. For these reasons, and in view of that program’s importance to the nation’s cities, it is imperative that the actual experience with relocation be evaluated on the basis of facts rather than emotion, and in terms of realistic alternatives to renewal rather than an unattainable perfection of operation.

The critics’ case is to be found in a multitude of articles, pamphlets, and books. Many of the attacks can be dismissed as polemical. Others, however, purport to be objective studies of the relocation aspects of urban renewal. Among these, perhaps the most comprehensive is a study by Chester Hartman,4 a Research Fellow in Sociology at the Harvard Medical School, and a Samuel Sloaffer doctoral fellow at the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. Since his criticisms summarize those of many others with a similar point of view, a careful analysis of his facts and arguments would seem to offer a fair test of the case of the opposition.

Mr. Hartman bases his conclusions on a review of thirty-three studies of the actual practices and results of relocation in nineteen cities. Of the reports listed, four were published between 1933 and 1939, one in 1940, eighteen between 1950 and 1959, two covered the years between the early 1950s and 1960, two were published in 1960, four in 1961, one in 1962, and one in 1963. Many of the 33 studies pertain to relocation connected with programs other than urban renewal…

Though he points out that relocation results vary markedly for different projects and at different points in time, and that there has been improvement recently in relocation services and greater concern for displaced families, Mr. Hartman’s review of the studies listed leads him to the conclusion that “...on the whole relocation has made a disappointingly small contribution to the attainment of ‘a decent home in a suitable living environment for every American family. Given the premise that one of the cardinal aims of renewal and rehousing should be the improved housing welfare of those living in substandard conditions, it is questionable whether the limited and inconsistent gains reported in most studies represent an acceptable level of achievement...”

THE INDICTMENT AGAINST URBAN RENEWAL There is a good deal of statistical material in the article, which summarizes or extracts data from the thirty-three studies reviewed. No purpose would be served in repeating these here, but Mr. Hartman’s general conclusions are as follows: Although the proportion of families living in “substandard housing” is usually considerably lower

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following relocation, “substantial numbers of the relocated families continue to live in structurally unsound or overcrowded housing.” Forced relocation causes personal disruptions—”the deleterious effects of the uprooting experience, the loss of familiar places and persons, and the difficulties of adjusting to and accepting new living environments may be far more serious issues than are changes in housing status.”

Relocation has been “only an ancillary component of the renewal process,” whose emphasis has been “to effectuate certain land-use changes deemed desirable by the community” rather than “the resettlement of slum families into decent homes...Because “environmental considerations are virtually absent in the assignment and evaluation of relocation dwellings,” many families relocated in, possibly, better dwellings as such have actually been relocated in areas mapped for future redevelopment and for them, “relocation may mean no more than keeping one step ahead of the bulldozer.”

Relocation is most easily sustained by, and results in the greatest benefits for, the families with the most adequate financial, personal, and social resources, but “those least prepared and able to effect a positive change...appear to incur heavy costs in terms of severe personal and social disruption, failure to improve housIng conditions, and increased housing expenses that are difficult to absorb or unrelated to housing improvement.”

Non-whites, Mr. Hartman finds, have greater difficulty finding decent relocation housing and have to pay high rents even for poor housing. “Existing patterns of racial segregation have either continued or have become intensified” as far as non-white families are concerned, and “white families (have fled) into all-white neighborhoods after relocation.”

Finally, Mr. Hartman concludes that, even if current relocation policies are assumed to represent an improvement over the past, “it remains unclear whether the shortcomings described...are entirely things of the past,” since local operating agencies are slow to adopt federal policies and procedures… ...

Critics who condemn public housing and urban renewal because of their imperfections have a responsibility to find alternate solutions to the problems they are designed to solve, and if they cannot do this, to suggest ways of improving them so as to eliminate the abuses and failures they—often correctly—point out. Success will not come easily, and complete success may always elude us, ‘but if, as President Kennedy said, “the possible is not to wait on the perfect,” we must move ahead toward the still distant, but now so perceivable, goal of a slumless America. There have been problems and mistakes in our urban renewal and housing programs, but if we look back fifteen or twenty years, we can see how far we have come and where we would be if we had done nothing. Just when this most affluent society of all time is finally moving in the social field to raise the disadvantaged through a whole new set of techniques designed to help them solve their personal problems, it is unthinkable that they should be cast down again into a physical environment, such as, for example, New York City’s old law tenements, that was already considered intolerable two-thirds of a century ago.

CHESTER HARTMAN

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: MORE ON RELOCATION Astrid Monson’s article in the October 1965 issue of Pratt Planning Papers (“Urban Renewal Relocation: A Plea for Constructive Criticism”) does not strike me as having contributed much to the current debate over urban renewal. Her call for “constructive criticism” amounts to little more than a pollyannish apologia which dismisses cavalierly the valid and crucial points raised by concerned critics.

Let me just say at the outset that I was very disturbed by the underlying tone of [Ms.] Monson’s article, which is that critics of the urban renewal program are at best ill-informed and irresponsible, at worst (but more probably) insidious creatures out to destroy the program through crocodile tears about the fate of poor people and exploitation of the relocation issue, the weak underbelly of the renewal program. I am by implication included as one of the “ hard-core opponents of urban renewal,” about whom “the question . . . [can be raised] solicitude for the relocatees.” I do not deny that there are those who wish to destroy the renewal program and will use all tools at their disposal to do so.

But I do not think it is helpful to a discussion of the real problems raised by the renewal program to smear all critics with this brush.…That kind of self-righteous, snide dismissal or denigration of the program’s critics by the housing and renewal establishment is in the long run the least constructive stance of all.

Now to the substance of [Ms.] Monson’s article. It is her contention that: 1) all that I reported on the West End and the 32 other studies I located in various planning libraries is irrelevant to present realities; and 2) more than being just a historical irrelevancy, my article misled readers into thinking that these data of recent and not so recent years were unqualifiedly representative of today’s realities.

What in fact I did in my AlP Journal (November 1964) article—and I think there is little way the honest reader could interpret it otherwise—was: I) summarize the findings of all published ex post facto relocation reports and draw general conclusions about these findings; 2) present some new data on Boston’s West End; and 3) criticize the quality of relocation reporting for its incompleteness, lack of candor and bias toward favorable images. Up to this point I would think that few readers could quarrel with the approach and presentation, which was by and large straightforward and copiously documented. [Ms.] Monson, however, chooses to refer to this study snidely as one which “purport(s) to be objective” and charges that my evaluation of the West End project runs counter to the data I have presented, even headlining a section of her article with those charges (“Hartman Survey Findings Contradict His Conclusions”). Now this is a pretty serious charge: if true, the author is rightly to be censured and his future statements subjected to close scrutiny and skepticism; if not true, the originator of these charges is guilty of some rather irresponsible, sensational behavior. In fact, Mrs. Monson has in no way demonstrated her charge and has resorted to partial statements, statements out of context and sheer mis-statements to make her case. ...

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RELOCATION PERFORMANCE IN URBAN RENEWAL BEST My article was not a polemic against urban renewal, although [Ms.] Monson wants to treat it as such.

In fact, it was about relocation from all forms of government activity. Like the families displaced by these programs, I do not really care whether the impetus to displacement is a new highway, a renewal project, or an elementary school. My concern is that if a family must be displaced (in itself a decision that must be made in far less cavalier a manner than has been true in recent years) it will indeed be rehoused in a decent home at a rent it can afford. I think that the planners, housers and renewers ought equally to be concerned with these families, rather than primarily with defending their programs against attack. No one could deny that the urban renewal program has led the way in upgrading the standards and performance expected of relocation projects...[Yet] our standard for measuring the success of relocation under the urban renewal program should not be comparison with other programs (nor, I might add, with families who move voluntarily and families displaced by private action) but measurement against the standard of the National Housing Goal and the statutory requirements of the program itself.” The planners might do well to ponder whether the question really is whose data are better than whose. Rather the question should be in terms of who wants to do what in planning and renewal. The exaggerations and distortions which people like [Ms.] Monson and Mr. Logue must resort to in order to make a case for present relocation practices indicate that the issue we should be debating is not the adequacy of relocation but whether the various other goals and accomplishments of the renewal program—tax increases, “revitalization,” new civic centers and upper income housing, etc.—are more or less important than the goal of decent, low-rent housing for the city’s poor. This at least would be an honest debate…

ARE PLANNERS CONCERNED WITH HOUSING FOR THE POOR? I do not believe that most planners are all that concerned about the housing problems of lowincome families; they are primarily interested in the rebuilding and reuse phase of renewal projects, with family displacement and relocation merely a hurdle to be gotten over to permit attainment of these desired ends. How many persons in the urban renewal field would be prepared to call a halt to a major project or the city’s entire program if it were clearly demonstrated that relocation was not progressing satisfactorily or that insufficient resources were available to carry out a relocation plan? [Ms.] Monson says she would be prepared to do so, but from her failure to look honestly at present realities, I wonder. (And were she and others calling for “an immediate stop to the program” during the 1950s, when relocation practices were admittedly unacceptable?) At present I do not think that what is needed is a halt to the urban renewal program...I am suggesting, through my criticism of relocation, [an] alternative, the one presented by Charles Abrams in his new book…That is, a revolutionizing of the urban renewal program: rejection of present dependence on the private entrepreneur; a massive low-rent housing program; a new level of financial commitment to cities on the part of the federal government; a renewal program which reflects a holistic approach to urban decline, a truly comprehensive program to deal with all aspects of the city’s physical, social and fiscal decadence. Only if the planners will openly acknowledge the limitations and failings of the present renewal program, of which relocation is the prime symptom, and become serious advocates of the kinds of fundamental changes suggested above can the problems of the city be solved.

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ASTRID MONSON

[MS.] MONSON REPLIES: It is a temptation to write a long article answering Chester Hartman’s criticism of my criticism of his criticism of urban renewal relocation practices, but I will resist it. The victory will not be won in the professional magazines; as in the past, progress will come as the issues are slugged out in Congress, in legislative hearings, in city councils, and in the day-to-day decisions we make in our various roles as staff or consulting planners to the agencies or organizations in the field.

To clarify the differences between Mr. Hartman’s point of view and my own, let me state first that I am as critical as he is, of many of the urban renewal projects undertaken in the early stages of the program, and even of some now underway. I am referring here not to relocation practices alone but also to the basis of the selection of the sites themselves, to the decision to clear them when often at least partial rehabilitation would have been possible, and to the ugly new development-residential or otherwise-that so often replaced what was torn down. I am against monstrous, high-density developments, whether on urban renewal sites or elsewhere. Our failure to formulate and carry out plans by which our cities could develop and redevelop so as to be fit for human beings to live in with some grace and dignity needs no comment from either of us; in this respect renewal is just part of our over-all urban problem. No one is suggesting, however, that we stop all new construction as a result. ...

I see no point in prolonging the argument indefinitely. Let me set my protagonist’s mind at rest on one point, however. “Was she”, he asks, “calling for ‘an immediate stop to the program’ during the 1950s, when relocation practices were admittedly unacceptable?”

I sure was, Mr. Hartman. Let me quote from a pamphlet I wrote when I was on the (paid) staff of the Detroit Housing Commission, and the (unpaid) Secretary to the Detroit Council for Better Housing and Chairman of the Detroit A.D.A.’s Housing Committee. This was published in 1951 and became the program of a dozen or more militant groups in that city. “ “Detroit”, said the pamphlet, “should stop all further demolition for slum clearance projects until a realistic and workable relocation plan has been presented by the City for the rehousing of the occupants of the sites...

“The City’s expressway, slum clearance and other public works programs are causing the tearing down of thousands of homes and forcing their inhabitants to seek whatever shelter they can find elsewhere...

“Because of the Housing Commission’s rejection of vacant land sites (for public housing), the City of Detroit has been able to render almost no assistance in the relocation of thousands of families displaced by the expressway program...[They] have had to shift for themselves, often moving into already over-crowded rooming houses or doubling up with other families in slum structures no better than those from which they were relocated...

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“The present City administration’s insistence on a housing program confined exclusively to slum clearance is unrealistic in view of the difficulties of relocating slum area families and the urgent necessity of expanding Detroit’s total housing supply...

“Mayor Cabo’s program represents an abject capitulation to the real estate interests and to irresponsible neighborhood newspapers. In many cases neighborhood improvement associations have been subverted by these interests and have been used to block the development of decent housing in their communities, with undemocratic and un-American appeals to religious, class, and race prejudice.”

It was, I might add, a lot harder to fight for truth and justice in 1951, as an employee of the very agency you were criticizing, than in 1965 from university research institutes amply backed by foundation grants.

The incontrovertible fact is that things have vastly improved in the last 15 years. Relocation used to be very simple: gas, water, electricity, and heat were turned off; if the tenants didn’t get the message, the windows were broken, and when this failed, the recalcitrant’s furniture was unceremoniously dumped out into the street. Not only private redevelopers did this; even some public housing agencies could not understand why people were so uncooperative about moving, and made life miserable for them till they did. True, we still have a long way to go before the Great Society becomes a fact rather than merely a slogan. My interest in relocation, like Mr. Hartman’s, “is motivated by a direct and genuine concern for the poor and minority groups and what public programs are and are not doing to and for them.” So is that of many of the planners and housers I have known and worked with. All we ask is that the new generation of workers in the vineyard join with us in the struggle rather than help—in all innocence, perhaps—the very forces against which we should all be allied—greedy slum landlords, venal politicians, slothful administrators, and even timid or incompetent planners. If we spend our time fighting these, we will have less of it to write unpleasant articles about each other, which would probably be a very good thing indeed.

NOTES 1 “Urban Renewal is Dispossessing its Critics,” The Washington Post (April 5, 1964).

2 As of May 31, 1965, the total number of projects in varying stages throughout the notion had risen to nearly 1,600, located in some 775 communities. .

3 “Relocation: Unequal Treatment of People and Businesses Displaced by Governments,” Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (January 1965); and “Study of Compensation and Assistance for Persons Affected by Real Property Acquisition in Federal and Federally-Assisted Programs,” Committee on Public Works, 88th Congress (December 22, 1964).

4 “The Housing of Relocated Families,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners (November 1964).

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EDWARD G. GOETZ

GOING NOWHERE:

FIFTY YEARS OF DISPLACEMENT AND RELOCATION FROM URBAN RENEWAL TO HOPE VI

The contemporary debate about the demolition of public housing and the forced displacement of thousands of very low-income families through the federal HOPE VI program recalls the dispute that occurred almost fifty years ago at the height of the Urban Renewal program. How much have we learned in the years between the urban renewal controversy and the implementation of HOPE VI? How much has changed relative to the most contentious element of these programs, their use of demolition, displacement, and relocation in the service of large scale redevelopment?

URBAN RENEWAL AND HOPE VI The Urban Renewal program, enacted in 1949, was the first large scale federal attempt to revitalize urban areas that had begun to show serious symptoms of decline in the face of accelerating suburbanization and decentralization of economic activity. A project of urban-based land interests,1 Urban Renewal was designed to clear slum areas in inner cities to facilitate redevelopment by the private sector. There were debates early on about how much of the redevelopment area should be devoted to housing and how much commercial or industrial development could take place. Over time, the housing requirements were continually relaxed as redevelopment areas became increasingly oriented towards economic development.

The theory under which the program operated predicted that private sector investment would require large scale demolition and clearance, a physical clean slate in the inner city neighborhoods to which it was targeted. The program went about demolishing old, dilapidated structures, clearing the land for a new round of private sector development.

The pre-redevelopment nature of Urban Renewal project areas was fairly consistent over time. They were typically areas of very low-cost housing in central areas of inner cities, frequently inhabited by people of color. The propensity of the program to target African-American neighborhoods was the reason the program came to be know as the “Negro Removal� program among critics.

As the program proceeded it became clear to observers that Urban Renewal was demolishing much more low-cost housing than it was replacing. Martin Anderson estimated that in the first decade of the program it destroyed 126,000 low-rent units of housing and produced only 28,000, mostly high-end units.2 By 1967, the program had destroyed an estimated 400,000 units and built only 11,000 low-rent apartments.3

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Though the program was designed primarily to induce place-based improvements, the major criticisms of urban renewal focused on its “people” impacts. The use of large scale demolition and redevelopment necessitated the displacement and relocation of people and businesses. Critics argued that relocation benefits were not extended to all displaced families, and that many residents were ‘lost’ in the process and never received the benefits they were due. Especially in the first decade of the program, renewal agencies were often lax in providing families with the full set of relocation benefits that federal law required. Critics pointed to the greater problems faced by minority families in the housing market and how these families were disproportionately affected by the program.

Critics also pointed to the psycho-social impact of being displaced, the grieving for a lost home that residents were forced to endure. Families lost more than just their homes, according to the argument; they lost their entire community, their networks of support, or what current analysts refer to as social capital.

Reforms introduced by the Kennedy administration improved the record of relocation in the early 1960s though they did not quiet all criticism. In the end, opponents still objected to large scale clearance regardless of the quality of relocation. Critics such as Hartman (reprinted as part of this publication)4 simply maintained that the program sacrificed the well-being of low-income residents for the physical remaking of urban renewal neighborhoods. The articles on urban renewal published in Pratt Planning Papers (PPP) in 1965 and 1966 reflect the debate about the program at a point in time just prior to a significant upswing in political opposition and the resultant change in strategy by local renewal agencies away from large scale demolition and toward more rehabilitation.

In the late 1960s, Urban Renewal exploded politically in city after city across the nation. Residents organized to oppose their own displacement; they were able to delay and ultimately stop projects from going forward in a number of places. In many cities, Urban Renewal projects began to scale back from widespread clearance and demolition to more modest rehabilitation and re-use. Residents forced their way into decision-making and planning stages and curbed the worst of the displacement tendencies in the program.

In the end, Urban Renewal was folded into the Community Development Block Grant program in 1974 and ceased to exist as a separate program shortly thereafter. One legacy of the Urban Renewal debate was the provision of one-for-one replacement housing that Congress enacted in the 1980s, which applied to the demolition of low-cost housing funded through the use of federal funds.

We see one of the first expressions of the need for such a regulation in the 1965 PPP article by Nathaniel Parish.5 Parish laid out the rationale for adding the one-for-one replacement requirement to Urban Renewal in order to ensure that the program did not adversely affect the supply of low-cost housing in the cities in which it operated.

Congressional repeal of the one-for-one replacement requirement paved the way for the HOPE VI program (and renewed demolition) in the 1990s. In 1989 Congress created the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing (NCSDPH) to examine conditions in the nation’s worst public housing projects. The Commission issued its report in 1992 and Congress enacted the program that became HOPE VI the following year. The trajectory of HOPE VI was the opposite of Urban Renewal in that it began as a more modest rehabilitation program and turned into a large scale demolition strategy fairly quickly. From 1995 on HOPE VI relied on complete demolition and redevelopment in most projects. Similar to Urban Renewal, HOPE VI has demolished many more

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low-cost units than it has replaced and thousands of very low-income families have been displaced and relocated.

HOPE VI has produced the same forms of opposition as Urban Renewal did. In the 1990s and 2000s, one could see pictures of African-American protesters, picketing redevelopment sites, holding signs protesting the demolition of their homes by federally funded bulldozers.6 Quite reminiscent of the 1960s, these low-income families were objecting to their forced displacement and relocation, and demanding different solutions to the problems plaguing their communities.

While one is tempted to conclude that ‘nothing has been learned’ in the fifty years since urban renewal, I argue that the replaying of the political conflicts surrounding displacement and relocation is simply the continuing expression of unresolved political debates. Furthermore, advocates of large scale demolition and displacement learned a great deal from the Urban Renewal experience of the 1960s, and they used what they learned to fashion a strong justification for HOPE VI demolition and displacement.

THE CASE FOR LARGE-SCALE CLEARANCE IN HOPE VI The rationale for large scale redevelopment in the HOPE VI program stresses 1) the nature and scale of urban decay, and the effect of neighborhood conditions on the life chances of individuals, 2) the benefits experienced by low-income families through relocation, and 3) the community-wide benefits of redevelopment.

POOR EXISTING CONDITIONS. In the current debate, the dysfunctional, even pathological characteristics of high-poverty urban neighborhoods serve as the chief rationale for demolition and redevelopment. In this respect, the justification for HOPE VI directly echoes the arguments made on behalf of Urban Renewal (see the Monson 1965 PPP article reprinted in this publication).7 In the current situation, the problem of highly concentrated poverty and its attendant social problems are the impetus for efforts to redevelop large public housing sites. The extreme concentrations of poverty in public housing environments, and the sheer scale of the social breakdown are the justification for demolition and redevelopment. Concentration of poverty has been shown to produce a range of social pathologies and produce stressful and dangerous environments for low-income families.

Violent crime and gang activity contributed to the sense that conditions in the worst public housing were out of control. Large public housing developments, furthermore, were seen as an important cause of concentrated poverty in American cities, and so were implicated in the rise of this problem nationally. Clearly establishing emergency or extraordinary conditions in the target communities was extremely important for HOPE VI supporters. The history of Urban Renewal demanded such a compelling rationale for Urban Renewal-like clearance.

INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL BENEFITS. If life in deprived and dangerous neighborhoods was damaging to lowincome families, then it followed that moving to ‘better’ neighborhoods (what advocates have come to call “neighborhoods of opportunity”) will bestow a range of better outcomes on families. Access to better neighborhoods would increase access to jobs and access to social capital that could facilitate upward mobility. On the other hand, the stressors of living in dangerous environments would diminish if not disappear altogether. Thus, the argument for demolition and displacement focuses on how families can benefit from a changed environment; i.e., displacement and relocation are benefits of HOPE VI. In Urban Renewal relocation was the regrettable but unavoidable harm that

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must be endured. In the current policy environment, relocation is the very means by which families benefit from the program. It is not to be avoided, it is to be embraced. Advocates of clearance and relocation learned well the lessons of urban renewal. The current round of clearance makes a virtue of the very thing that was criticized by the opponents of Urban Renewal. The families in HOPE VI projects are given ‘the opportunity’ to move to better neighborhoods and to enjoy the benefits of those neighborhoods.

COMMUNITY-LEVEL BENEFITS OF LARGE-SCALE REDEVELOPMENT. Another justification for HOPE VI clearance and redevelopment that echoes the argument for Urban Renewal are the community-level benefits that will accrue. Neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are seen as “cancers,” home to a dependent population that requires a high level of public and social services, and is the center of crime and decline. The neighborhoods suffer from declining property tax revenues, and economic disinvestment that makes them a net drain on public finances. Worse, according to the argument, is that these neighborhoods tend to expand and engulf nearby areas in their downward spiral, spreading the disinvestment through other parts of the city, magnifying fiscal and social problems.

HOPE VI calls for a dramatic remaking of the physical environment to reverse this spiral of decline.

The hope is that brand new structures, better integrated into the fabric of the community surrounding it, will attract middle-income residents; revitalize commercial activity, bringing jobs and retail opportunities to neighborhoods that lacked both; and generate higher quality public services such as schools and parks. Over time, HUD began to emphasize the spillover benefits of HOPE VI by asking cities to demonstrate in their grant applications the potential of the redevelopment to generate further economic investment.

THE CRITIQUE The most serious criticisms of the HOPE VI program focus on the issue of whether the original public housing residents receive benefits from the program. The record shows, for example, that very few original residents move back onto the redeveloped site after the redevelopment is complete.8 A marked reduction in the number of public housing units on-site, and tougher tenant screening processes at the redeveloped site make the return impossible for the great majority of original residents.

For the majority who do not return, the question is whether they experience benefits in the neighborhoods to which they are relocated. Unfortunately, the research on the benefits associated with the dispersal of low-income families reveals a mixed and inconsistent record of modest improvements in some areas, and no improvements at all in others.9 The most consistent benefit of displacement and relocation is a greater sense of safety that families feel in their new neighborhoods. The most consistent failure of displacement is the lack of any economic benefit for families and the consistent loss of social support networks as the result of forced relocation.

For the most part, families displaced through HOPE VI and public housing demolition move to other racially segregated and/or poor neighborhoods.10 The neighborhoods that can provide the most benefits to poor households remain off-limits to them, either because these communities will not accept replacement units, or because prevailing rents make the use of housing vouchers impossible.

The evidence for individual benefits for HOPE VI families is similar to that which Hartman11 found for

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Urban Renewal displacees—thin. This is all the more alarming because the studies listed above are limited in tracking those families that remain in the ‘system,’ and ignore ‘lost’ families, those who leave before relocation efforts begin, or those who drop out of the assistance network. Hartman and critics of Urban Renewal worried about these families fifty years ago, and HOPE VI observers worry about these families today.12 WHAT ARE THE COSTS AND WHO BEARS THEM? Critics argue, as Hartman did in 1966, that the real question is whether the benefits that do occur outweigh the costs of large scale redevelopment and clearance. Concerns about the costs of displacement are unchanged from those expressed by critics of Urban Renewal. First there is the loss of community or the psycho-social effects of dislocation. Whether these effects are ‘grieving for a lost home,’13 the “root shock” described by Fullilove,14 or the loss of important social networks utilized by poor families to meet daily needs, forced relocation takes low-income families out of their communities. Disruption to social networks is a consistent finding in studies of HOPE VI.15 Hartman’s response to Monson in PPP also noted that displacement and relocation meant greater housing expenses for most families. This remains a concern in large scale public housing redevelopment. Families moving out of public housing and into the private market with vouchers often see an increase in housing costs. Insecurity in the housing market will be most problematic for families with poor rental, credit or employment histories, families with social problems, and racial minorities.16 Popkin et al. make the same argument about “hard-to-house” public housing residents who are least likely to experience benefits from displacement and most likely to suffer declines in the quality of their living environments.17 CONCLUSION In 2010, the Obama administration is proposing to expand the model of HOPE VI redevelopment beyond public housing to all forms of federally-subsidized housing. Called the “Choice Neighborhoods Initiative,” the proposal makes relevant again the legacy of the Urban Renewal program and the question of whether HOPE VI repeats mistakes of the past. There is more than a passing resemblance between the debate on relocation generated by Urban Renewal and the contemporary controversy over HOPE VI. With few amendments, the concerns of Urban Renewal critics can be leveled against HOPE VI. From the psycho-social costs of displacement to the quality and consistency of relocation benefits, the “lost families” who drop out of the system and whose fates are unaccounted for, the disparate impact of displacement on racial minorities, and the increased costs to displaced families, to the greater interest of local officials in the place-based benefits of renewal than in what happens to the relocatees and the overall loss of affordable housing units, HOPE VI has been a replay of Urban Renewal.

Does this assessment indicate that we have gone nowhere in fifty years? Is HOPE VI merely a depressing reminder of how little learning takes place in the policymaking and planning fields over time? I have argued that learning did take place in the years since Urban Renewal. That learning has resulted in a new discourse from the advocates of demolition and displacement. By emphasizing the negative environmental conditions in the worst public housing communities, the advocates of demolition and clearance hope to convert the Achilles Heel of Urban Renewal (displacement and relocation) into HOPE VI’s greatest benefit. Opponents of HOPE VI demolitions are thus put in the

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position of having to defend their contention that relocation imposes unreasonable costs on lowincome families.

The arguments that remain alive fifty years later do so not because we have not learned, but because the arguments themselves were never resolved. In 1966 Hartman suggested that “the issue we should be debating is not the adequacy of relocation but whether the various other goals and accomplishments of the renewal program…are more or less important than the goal of decent, lowrent housing for the city’s poor.” This is not the type of question that is answered with reference to data on the percentage of displaced families that experience economic benefits, or the percentage who suffer declining social capital. This is a question that requires a political resolution. In the 1960s neighborhood activists rose up against and changed the Urban Renewal program. Their triumph has been relatively short-lived. By the mid-1990s, one-for-one replacement was repealed and a new Urban Renewal program was in place.

The current political debate must take place as it did before. Today we weigh whether displacement and relocation is worth it to eliminate the worst conditions that prevail in public housing located in the poorest communities in our biggest cities. The core issues remain the same. Whatever accommodation is reached today regarding HOPE VI and the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, we might expect to see these same issues arise in another 50 years.

NOTES 1 Marc A. Weiss, “The origins and legacy of urban renewal,” in Federal Housing Policy & Programs: Past and Present, ed. J. Paul Mitchell (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1985).

2 Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964).

3 Weiss 1985.

4 Chester Hartman, “Letter to the Editor,” Pratt Planning Papers 4:2 (1966), 16.

5 Nathanial J. Parish, “Policy and operational improvements in the residential relocation process,” Pratt Planning Papers 3:4 (1965), 13-20.

6 US GAO, Public housing: HOPE VI resident issues and changes in neighborhoods surrounding grant sites. Report to the Ranking Minority Member, Subcommittee on Housing and Transportation, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: US General Accounting Office, 2003b), GAO-04-109.

7 Astrid Monson, “Urban renewal relocation: A plea for constructive criticism,” Pratt Planning Papers 3:4 (1965), 5-12.

8 Gerald P. Marquis and Soumen Ghosh. “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI): Who Gets Back In?” Social Science Journal 45 (2008), 401-418.

9 See the following review: Edward G. Goetz and Karen Chapple, “‘You gotta move’: Advancing the debate on the record of dispersal,” Housing Policy Debate 20:2 (2010), 1-28.

10 See, e.g., Deirdre Oakley and Keri Burchfield, “Out of the projects, still in the hood: The spatial constraints on public housing residents’ relocation in Chicago,” Journal of Urban Affairs 31:5 (2009), 589-614.

11 Chester Hartman, “The housing of relocated families,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 30:4 (1964), 266-286.

12 Larry Keating and Carol A. Flores, “Sixty and out: Techwood Homes transformed by enemies and friends,” Journal of Urban History 26:3 (2000), 275-311.

13 Marc Fried “Grieving for a lost home: Psychological costs of relocation,” in The Urban Condition, ed. Leonard J. Duhl (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1963).

14 Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).

15 Susan Clampet-Lundquist, “Moving over or moving up? Short-term gains and losses for relocated HOPE VI families,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 7:1 (2004), 57-80.

Alexandra M. Curley, “Draining or Gaining? The Social Networks of Public Housing Movers in Boston,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 26:2-3 (2009), 227-247.

Susan Greenbaum, Wendy Hathaway, Cheryl Rodriguez, Ashley Spalding, and Beverly Ward, “Deconcentration and Social Capital: Contradictions of a Poverty Alleviation Policy,” Journal of Poverty 12:2 (2008), 201-228.

16 Hartman, “Letter to the Editor,” 9-16. Parish 1965, 13-20.

17 Susan J. Popkin, Mary K. Cunningham, and Martha Burt, “Public housing transformation and the hard-to-house,” Housing Policy Debate 16:1 (2005), 1-24.

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SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY ON THE PROBLEMS OF THE CITIES

PRATT PLANNING PAPERS The following speech, “Problems of the Cities,” given as a statement before the Subcommittee on Exective Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations on August 15, 1966, was originally printed in Pratt Planning Papers, Vol. 4 No. 4 (1967).

...To say that the city is a central problem of American life is simply to know that increasingly the cities are American Life. ...Within a very few years, 80% of all Americans will live in cities—the great majority of them in concentrations like those which stretch from Boston to Washington, and outward from Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and St. Louis. The cities are the nerve system of economic life for the entire nation, and for much of the world.

Everywhere men and women crowd into cities in search of employment, a decent living, the company of their fellows, and the excitement and stimulation of urban life...Yet each of our cities is now also the seat of nearly all the problems of American life: poverty and race hatred, interrupted education and stunted lives, and the other ills of the new urban nation—congestion and filth, danger and purposelessness, which afflict all but the very rich and the very lucky.

To speak of the urban condition, therefore, is to speak of the condition of American life. To improve the cities means to improve the life of the American people. This is not to slight the importance of rural development. The very catalogue of problems that has accompanied the increasing urbanization of our nation bespeaks a need for renewed concentration on development outside the cities— both to ease the pressure of population growth on the cities, and to preserve the ability of our small towns and farms to contribute as they have in the past to our country’s healthy growth. Rural development, then, must have a place on the national agenda; today, however, I would concentrate directly on the problems of the cities themselves and on the issues which the urban explosion has thrust before us.

URBAN GOALS What should we expect from our cities? A great historian of urban life, Lewis Mumford, has written: “What makes the city in fact one is the common interest in justice and the common aim, that of pursuing the good life.” He drew in turn upon Aristotle, who wrote that the city “should be such as may enable the inhabitants to live at once temperately and liberally in the enjoyment of leisure.” If we add the objective of rewarding and satisfying work, we have a goal worthy of the effort and work of this entire generation of Americans.

Therefore the city is not just housing and stores. It is not just education and employment, parks and theaters, banks and shops. It is a place where men should be able to live in dignity and security and

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harmony, where the great achievements of modern civilization and the ageless pleasures afforded by natural beauty should be available to all. If this is what we want—and this is what we must want if men are to be free for that “pursuit of happiness” which was the earliest promise of the American nation—we will need more than poverty programs, housing programs, and employment programs, although we will need all of these. We will need an outpouring of imagination, ingenuity, discipline, and hard work unmatched since the first adventurers set out to conquer the wilderness. For the problem is the largest we have ever known. And we confront an urban wilderness more formidable and resistant and in some ways more frightening than the wilderness faced by the pilgrims or the pioneers.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM The beginning of action is to understand the problem. We know riots are a problem. We know that poverty is a problem. But underneath these problems and all the others are a series of converging forces which rip at the fabric of life in the American city.

By city we mean not just downtown, or the central city, but the whole vast sprawling organism— covering dozens of communities and crossing state lines. It is not a political unit, but a living social and economic body—extending into suburbs and beyond into tens of thousands of outlying acres, to be covered all too soon with homes and shops and factories.

One great problem is sheer growth—growth which crowds people into slums, thrusts suburbs out over the countryside, burdens to the breaking point all our old ways of thought and action—our systems of transport and water supply and education, and our means of raising money to these vital services.

A second is destruction of the physical environment, stripping people of contact with sun and fresh air, clean rivers, grass, and trees—condemning them to a life among stone and concrete, neon lights and an endless flow of automobiles. This happens not only in the central city, but in the very suburbs where people once fled to find nature. “There is no police so effective,” said Emerson, “as a good hill and a wide pasture...where the boys...can dispose of their superfluous strength and spirits.” We cannot restore the pastures; but we must provide a chance to enjoy nature, a chance for recreation, for pleasure and for some restoration of that essential dimension of human existence which flows only from man’s contact with the natural world around him.

A third is the increasing difficulty of transportation—adding concealed, unpaid hours to the workweek; removing men from the social and cultural amenities that are the heart of the city; sending destructive swarms of automobiles across the city, leaving behind them a band of concrete and a poisoned atmosphere. And sometimes—as in Watts—our surrender to the automobile has so crippled public transport that thousands literally cannot afford to go to work elsewhere in the city.

A fourth destructive force is the concentrated poverty and racial tension of the urban ghetto—a problem so vast that the barest recital of its symptoms is profoundly shocking: • Segregation is becoming the governing rule: Washington is only the most prominent example of a city which has become overwhelmingly Negro as whites move to the suburbs; many other cities are moving along the same road—for example, Chicago, which, if present trends continue, will be over 50 percent Negro by 1975. The ghettoes of Harlem and Southside and

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Watts are cities in themselves, areas of as many as 350,000 people.

• Poverty and Unemployment are endemic: from 1/3 to 1/2 of the families in these areas live in poverty; in some, male unemployment may be as high as 40%. Unemployment of Negro youths nationally is over 25%.

• Welfare and Dependency are pervasive: 1/4 of the children in these ghettoes, as in Harlem, may receive Federal Aid to Dependent Children; in New York City, ADC alone costs over $20 million a month; in our five largest cities, the ADC bill is over $500 million a year.

• Housing is overcrowded, unhealthy, and dilapidated: the last housing census found 43% of urban Negro housing to be substandard; in many of these ghettoes, ten thousand children may be injured or infected by rat bites every year.

• Education is segregated, unequal, and inadequate: the high school drop-out rate aver· ages nearly 70%; there are academic high schools in which less than 3% of the entering students will graduate with an academic diploma.

• Health is poor and care inadequate: infant mortality in the ghettoes is more than twice the rate outside; mental retardation caused by inadequate prenatal care is more than seven times the white rate; 1/2 of all babies born in Manhattan last year will have had no prenatal care at all; deaths from diseases like tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia are two to three times as common as elsewhere.

Fifth is both cause and consequence of all the rest. It is the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows. It is expressed in such words as community, neighborhood, civic pride, friendship. It provides the life-sustaining force of human warmth, of security among others, and a sense of one’s own human significance in the accepted association and companionship of others.

THE VALUES OF COMMUNITY We all share things as fellow citizens, fellow members of the American nation. As important as that sharing is, nations or great cities are too huge to provide the values of community. Community demands a place where people can see and know each other, where children can play and adults work together and join in the pleasures and responsibilities of the place where they live. The whole history of the human race, until today, has been the history of community. Yet this is disappearing, and disappearing at a time when its sustaining strength is badly needed. For other values which once gave strength for the daily battle of life are also being eroded. The widening gap between the experience of the generations in a rapidly changing world has weakened the ties of family; children grow up in a world of experience and culture their parents never knew. The world beyond the neighborhood has become more impersonal and abstract. Industry and great cities, conflicts between nations and the conquests of science move relentlessly forward, seemingly beyond the reach of individual control or even under standing. It is in this very period that the cities, in their tumbling spread, are obliterating neighborhoods and precincts. Housing units go up, but there is no place for people to walk, for women and their children to meet, for common activities. The place of work is far away through

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blackened tunnels or over impersonal highways. The doctor and lawyer and government official is often somewhere else and hardly known. In far too many places—in pleasant suburbs as well as city streets—the home is a place to sleep and eat and watch television; but the community is not where we live. We live in many places and so we live nowhere. Long ago de Tocqueville foresaw the fate of people without community: “Each of them living apart is a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he touches them but he feels them not...he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.” To the extent this is happening it is the gravest ill of all.

For loneliness breeds futility and desperation—and thus it cripples the life of each man and menaces the life of all his fellows.

THE PLIGHT OF THE NEGRO But of all our problems, the most immediate and pressing, the one which threatens to paralyze our very capacity to act, to obliterate our vision of the future is the plight of the Negro of the center city.

For this plight—and the riots which are its product and symptom—threaten to divide Americans for generations to come; to add to the ever-present difficulties of race and class the bitter legacy of violence and destruction and fear.

The riots which have taken place—and the riots which we know may all too easily take place in the future—are therefore an intolerable threat to the most essential interests of every American, black or white—to the mind’s peace and the body’s safety and the community’s order, to all that makes life worthwhile. None of us should look at this violence as anything but destructive of self, community, and nation. But we should not delude ourselves. The riots are not crises which can be resolved as suddenly as they arose. They are a condition which has been with us for 100 years and will be with us for many years more. We can deal with the crisis without dealing with the underlying condition— just as we can give novocain to a man with a broken arm, without setting that arm in a splint; but the end result will only be more pain, pain beyond temporary relief, and permanent crippling of our urban society.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that we go beyond the temporary measures thus far adopted to deal with riots—beyond the fire hoses and the billy-clubs; and beyond even sprinklers on fire hydrants and new swimming pools as well. We must start...along the road toward solutions to the underlying conditions which afflict our cities, so that they may become the places of fulfillment and ease, comfort and joy, the communities they were meant to be. ...

NEGRO UNEMPLOYMENT And here we come to an aspect of our cities’ problems almost untouched by Federal action: the unemployment crisis of the Negro ghetto. The White House Conference on Civil Rights placed employment and income problems of Negroes at the head of its agenda for action in the United States.

“Negro unemployment,” it said, “is of disaster proportions. Even in today’s booming economy, the unemployment rate for Negroes is about seven percent—more than twice the average for whites...

The gap between whites and nonwhites is even greater for married people and heads of households who are most in need of a job to support their families...In some areas, such as Watts in Los Angeles, the rate of unemployment among Negroes is as high as forty percent...“

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Any attempt to discuss the problems of the cities, and the ghettoes which presently threaten their future, cannot ignore the findings of commission after commission, student after student, public official after public official. The McCone Commission looked into the Watts riots—and said that the most serious problem in Watts is unemployment. The Wall Street Journal looked at Oakland—and said that the core of Oakland’s plight is unemployment. Kenneth Clark’s pioneering Haryou study looked at Harlem—and said that Harlem’s key problem is unemployment.

This should not be strange to us. In an age of increasing complaints about the welfare state, it is well to remember that less than 25 percent of those living In poverty receive public assistance. We earn our livings, support our families, purchase the comforts and ease of life sense, to be a father or brother or son, to have any identity at all. To be without function, without use to our fellow citizens, is to be in truth the “invisible man” of whom Ralph Ellison wrote so eloquently—the man who, John Adams said a century and a half ago, suffers the greatest possible humiliation—“he is simply not seen.”

The crisis in Negro unemployment, therefore, is significant far beyond its economic effects—devastating as those are. For it is both measure and cause of the extent to which the Negro lives apart— the extent to which he is alienated from the general community. More than segregation in housing and schools, more than differences in attitudes or life-styles, it is unemployment which marks the Negro of the urban ghetto off and apart from the rest of us—from Negroes who have jobs (including Negro leaders) almost as much as from whites. Unemployment is having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us. ...

EMPLOYMENT KEY TO URBAN PROBLEMS In my judgment, the question of employment and income is central to the solution of the problems of the city. But I do not stress it so strongly here because I believe it to be the only solution, or to be a solution by itself. There are and must be many other elements to any truly comprehensive defense (we are not in an attacking position) against the ills which afflict us. Rather I stress employment here for the following reasons: First, it is the most direct and embarrassing—and therefore the most important—of our failures.

Whatever people may feel about open housing or open schools—though I myself am deeply committed to both—still there can be no argument at all, no sense for even a committed segregationist, in the maintenance of Negro unemployment. Making sure men have jobs does not by itself mean that they will live with you, or that their children will go to school with you. It does not mean, in the long run, higher taxes or welfare costs; indeed, it means far less, and lessened costs of crime and crime prevention as well. It means the use of unused resources, and greater prosperity for all. Meeting the unemployment problem can only be to the benefit of every American of every shade of opinion.

But we have not done it.

Second, employment is the only true long-run solution; only if Negroes achieve full and equal employment will they be able to support themselves and their families, become active citizens and not passive objects of our action, become contributing members and not recipients of our charity. This is not to say that education, for example, is not critical to future employment and self-sufficiency; of

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course it is. But it is to say that unless we achieve employment, by whatever means or programs, we will never solve the problem. People with jobs can buy or people with jobs can mark out their own relationships with their fellows of whatever color. But without employment, without basic economic security and self-sufficiency, any other help we provide will be only temporary in effect. ...

ELEMENTS OF AN URBAN PROGRAM The [agenda for a program for the cities] must contain certain elements.

It must attack the fundamental pathology of the ghetto—for unless the deprivation and alienation of the ghetto are eliminated, there is no hope for the city. And it must attack these problems within a framework that coordinates action on the four central elements: employment, education, housing, and a sense of community.

This is not to say that other problems and programs are not important—questions of police relations, recreation, health, and other services, and the thousands of other factors that make life bearable or a thing of joy. It is to say that these other questions can only be properly dealt with in concert with action on the major problems. A police force, for example, can exert every possible effort, and imagination, and will to better relations with the community. But it still must enforce the law. And if the conditions of the ghetto produce stealing—for which people must be arrested—or non-payment of rent—for which people must be evicted, even if they have no place to go—then the police will inevitably bear the brunt of the ghetto’s resentment at the conditions which the police, through no fault of their own, enforce. For another example, recreation is good and necessary for all of us. But a donated swimming pool will not replace an absent father; nor will it produce income for that father’s son, who may have to steal a pair of swimming trunks to use the pool.

Libraries are for those who can read, and sports for those strong enough to participate in them. Each strand we pick up leads us further into the central web of life, coming closer to every other thread of thought and action. The web must be grasped whole...

These are but a few suggestions. They are neither complete nor comprehensive, but they do give, I believe, some idea of the staggering complexity and scope of the effort needed not merely to attack the obvious afflictions but also the entire urban condition. We do not only want to remedy the ills of the poor and oppressed—though that is a huge and necessary task—but to improve the quality of life for every citizen of the city, and, in this way, to advance and enrich American civilization itself.

To read the entirely of this speech, as it was printed in Pratt Planning Papers, visit PSPD “In Print” at http://www.pratt.edu/academics/architecture/grad_center_ planning_environment/gcpe_in_print/.

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KAREN CHAPPLE

TWO WALKS THROUGH BED-STUY: FORTY YEARS OF COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

In “Problems of the Cities,” published in the Pratt Planning Papers in 1967 and based upon a speech given in early 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy placed African-American (“Negro”) unemployment at the heart of the urban problem.1 While deploring the condition of housing and the schools, he pointed to unemployment as the policy failure with solutions that could garner bipartisan support.

Construction employment was to be the panacea, with community development corporations (CDCs) as the vehicle to implement this large-scale urban reconstruction and public employment program.

Shortly thereafter, Kennedy and Jacob Javits sponsored an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act, which included the Special Impact Program, the main source of funding to start the BedfordStuyvesant Restoration Corporation as the first experiment in rebuilding.

Yet, asked today about the central problem facing urban areas, few would mention African-American unemployment, although the problem remains as great or greater than it was 38 years ago—and even fewer would suggest a solution using CDCs to sponsor large-scale community reconstruction.

What has changed? The gradual dissolution of much of the ghetto—due in large part to the revaluation of central city land, the onslaught of gentrification, and the suburbanization of minority groups— has helped to shift the gaze of policymakers and the public away from marginalized communities.2 We might still look to construction jobs as the quickest remedy for unemployment, but the formula has changed: instead of turning over responsibility to community-based initiatives, alliances led by politicians, unions, and churches extract job concessions from large-scale redevelopment projects.

Further, several of the assumptions that underlie Kennedy’s solution are no longer valid. The feminization of the workforce and the decline of unionization place additional focus on income inequality. Despite the efforts of the Obama administration to resuscitate the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there is no significant federal urban policy, in part because of the devolution of social policy and in part because the explosion of sprawling metropolitan regions makes inner cities less relevant as a policy target. Perhaps most importantly, the primary actors in public life are no longer exclusively from government, but from across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

This new structure of metropolitan governance makes it improbable that the federal government could even launch a new urban policy, though HUD under Obama has piloted some small-scale initiatives.

Given these changes, is there still a role for the community development paradigm that so influenced Kennedy? I explore this issue, arguing that despite the new urban context, community-led initiatives remain one of our most effective tools to help inner-city residents enter the workforce, even if they fail to solve the “unemployment problem” completely. Forty years of experimentation in solving local unemployment problems have in fact shown little effectiveness for other, metropolitanscale approaches. This paper looks first at the RFK’s vision for community economic development and then turns to the evolution of urban policy related to unemployment. A final section examines

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promising community-based approaches to improving employment opportunity.

COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: RFK’S VISION “And it is Bedford-Stuyvesant that is the vanguard—Bedford-Stuyvesant that can take the lead.

If we here can meet and master our problems; if this community can become an avenue of opportunity and a place of pleasure and excitement for its people, then others will take heart from your example…But if this effort—with your community leadership, with the advantages of participation by the business community, with full cooperation from the city administration, with the help of the outstanding men in so many fields of American life—if this community fails, then others will falter, and a noble dream of equality and dignity in our cities will be sorely tried.”

— Robert F. Kennedy, 19673

Out of the inner-city riots of the 1960s arose a new public commitment to improve living conditions in the urban core, at an intensity level perhaps unseen since the Progressive era. Building upon this renewed interest, RFK argued that remedying the “problems of the cities” was critical to democracy and the pursuit of happiness. At the root of the problem was the “plight of the Negro.” Although rapid growth, environmental degradation, inadequate transportation, concentrated poverty, and the decline of community values all take their toll on cities, it is the issues of race and class—and the riots which enshrine them in violence and fear—that ultimately “threaten to divide Americans for generations to come.”4 Kennedy understood that federal urban policies were partly at fault for exacerbating the divides, even if their impacts were unintended. Urban renewal and interstate highway construction had dislocated millions of city residents, with disproportionate impacts on African-Americans.5 Public housing reinforced neighborhood segregation, and welfare rules created a new disincentive to keep families intact. Increased spending on urban education had little effect because of the complexity of the problem.

But if policy solutions had failed, it was in part because they were addressing the wrong problem, according to RFK. “More than segregation in housing and schools, more than differences in attitudes or life-styles, it is unemployment which marks the Negro of the urban ghetto off and apart from the rest of us—from Negroes who have jobs (including Negro leaders) almost as much as from whites. Unemployment is having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us.”6 Interestingly, Kennedy’s assessment of how unemployment alienates and isolates poor AfricanAmericans presages William Julius Wilson’s work on restructuring and inner-city decline.7 He saw improving employment opportunity not only as the key to democracy, but also the most pragmatic path: a solution that would be long-term and bi-partisan. Of course, Kennedy’s proposals would have done little to stem the economic changes of the 1970s and 1980s. However, had his focus on employment policy taken hold, policymakers might well have been better equipped to deal with restructuring when it occurred. Instead, federal involvement in employment policy has declined steadily.8

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To solve the unemployment problem, Kennedy proposed a large-scale reconstruction program (a “Marshall Plan”), rebuilding housing, public facilities, and parks. Community development corporations would play a major role in planning reconstruction, training the workers, and managing the projects. Local residents would have first dibs on the new jobs and opportunities for ownership, including affordable housing and shares of local cooperatives, whether worker-owned grocery stores or manufacturing plants.

So what happened? The Kennedy-Javits amendment that created the Special Impact Program resulted in some $90 million of funding for 23 CDCs in the first five years, with the Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation garnering the largest share (about $5 million per year).9 However, the Marshall Plan for the cities never materialized. Instead of focusing primarily on physical development, these CDCs, which were often called economic development corporations, took on a broad array of roles from small business development to social service provision to organizing and advocacy.10 By the 1980s, most CDCs had switched their focus away from economic development to housing exclusively.11 Moreover, several factors conspired to shift the federal government focus away from place-based community economic development to more people-based mobility strategies at a metropolitan scale.

The political context had of course shifted with the election of Nixon, the end of the War on Poverty, and the replacement of some dedicated anti-poverty programs with Community Development Block Grants that gave discretion to localities. But perhaps even more important were the urban riots that continued well after RFK’s initiatives, and the influential commission reports that emerged from the ashes to form the new direction for urban policy.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission report warned that U.S. metropolitan areas were increasingly divided between a poor, minority central city core and prosperous, white suburbs. Like the report of its predecessor, the McCone Commission, it identified a primary cause: the shift of new employment opportunities to the suburbs and the lack of federal policies to connect urban residents, particularly African Americans, to jobs. Thus, the commissions went beyond Kennedy’s focus on inner-city decline to pinpoint metropolitan growth patterns as the culprit.

Behind the reports lay the work of John Kain. Kain’s research on the relationship between the suburbanization of employment and high unemployment rates among nonwhites (later called the “spatial mismatch” hypothesis) circulated among the commissions and essentially framed the findings.12 In its simplest form, the mismatch hypothesis states that residential segregation, exacerbated by the decentralization of jobs to the suburbs, contributes to poor employment outcomes (in terms of high unemployment and low earnings) for African-American urban residents.13 As the Commission report reverberated through federal policy in subsequent decades, the idea of improving the physical accessibility of jobs had powerful effects. Of course, the confluence of many factors, including the increasing political infeasibility of building public housing, the gradual revaluation of center city land, and the new understanding of the effects of concentrated poverty, influenced policy.14 But the mismatch hypothesis had directly implied three policy approaches to deal with the economic and social isolation of the inner city: connecting disadvantaged urban residents more effectively to jobs in the suburbs through transportation improvements; helping them move to the suburbs by providing them with Section 8 vouchers and assistance in overcoming housing discrimination; and attracting new jobs to urban areas.15 As various government programs tested and

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implemented these three approaches over the following decades, RFK’s vision of an employment program guided by community-based organizations gradually disappeared from the dialogue.

THE RESULTS: AN UNFULFILLED PROMISE Over forty years later, the unemployment problem remains essentially the same, or even worse. At the time of RFK’s writing, the unemployment rate for African-Americans nationally was seven percent, more than twice the average for whites; similarly, in February, 2010, unemployment was at 15.8 percent for African-Americans and 8.8 percent for whites. Even before the recession hit, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 8.3 percent, more than twice that of whites.

Did urban policy fail? Arguably, the three policy approaches that supplanted Kennedy’s strategy were never fully funded or tested. But even implemented at a small scale, none have experienced much success in terms of improving employment outcomes.

Programs to deconcentrate poverty—termed “mobility programs” in Goetz’s comprehensive review16—typically target residents of urban public housing. These programs include the consent decrees, such as Gautreaux, which are offering vouchers to residents in segregated inner-city public housing projects; Moving to Opportunity, an experimental relocation program, and Hope VI, which has relocated some public housing recipients to the suburbs as it replaces public housing units with mixed-income developments.

Yet, relocating public housing residents does not necessarily have a positive impact on their employment outcomes, and may in fact worsen them. Participants in these programs have experienced considerable success in terms of education, health, safety, and even happiness, particularly for the second generation. Yet only one study of the Gautreaux program showed that residents relocated to the suburbs had greater success in employment than those relocated to the city.17 A steady stream of subsequent studies of relocation, mostly through the Moving to Opportunity program but also by Gautreaux or similar programs, has shown little or no improvement in employment outcomes.18 Why so little impact? One explanation emerges from the literature on differences in demand between city and suburb: suburban firms are more reluctant to hire minorities, and in any case low-skill job turnover may be lower in suburbs than in cities, reducing the number of nearby job opportunities for the deconcentrated residents.19 But the process of job search itself may also play an important role: newly deconcentrated residents often lose access to the workforce intermediaries and social networks that help connect disadvantaged jobseekers to employees. Many social services remain concentrated in central city areas,20 and the move may disrupt existing social networks without creating new ones that assist in the job search.21 In any case, it is clear that deconcentration alone will not improve employment opportunity substantially.

The second major approach to make jobs more accessible is to provide transportation to connect jobseekers to opportunities throughout the metropolitan region, essentially supersizing the labor market. Federal policymakers have sponsored a series of reverse commuting initiatives to link low-income urban residents to suburban jobs (for instance, through the Jobs Access and Reverse Commute program). Yet, historically, such programs have had little success,22 and recent vanpooling experiments also tend to fall short for those who are not job-ready. An evaluation of the Bridges to Work experiment, which provided job placement and transportation services to help urban low-

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skilled workers access suburban jobs in five regions, concluded that it was not an effective solution, since the program did not increase employment or earnings (compared to a control group); moreover, turnover at suburban jobs was high due to the availability of similar low-skill jobs close to home.23 The findings indicated that workforce development, in terms of recruitment, assessment, preparation, placement, and retention, is the major policy challenge in improving the employment chances of the disadvantaged.

The third broad policy approach brings jobs back to the inner city, dismissed by Kain & Persky as “gilding the ghetto.”24 The best examples are the empowerment zone programs and the subsequent “New Markets” initiative, both of which seek to develop new business and job concentrations in close proximity to existing urban neighborhoods. Both schemes reflect part of the legacy of RFK: not only did the Special Impact Program of the Economic Opportunity Act include provisions for “ghetto branch plants,” but also the “Kennedy Plan,” legislation that never passed Congress, suggested place-based subsidies for both outside and homegrown firms that created jobs in the inner city.25 Yet, empowerment zone studies over the last decade have failed to find significant benefits in terms of business relocation and resident employment and wages.26 New Markets Tax Credits do bring job opportunities, generally in the retail sector, for disadvantaged city residents, but the jobs often pay poverty-level wages, and the primary beneficiaries seem to be real estate investors rather than community-based entities: less than one-third are nonprofits.27 In any case, the funded projects are typically too small scale to have any effect on neighborhood unemployment rates.

Interestingly, Bennett Harrison, writing about “ghetto economic development” in 1974, predicted the failure of empowerment zones and other place-based economic development programs. In a review published just a few years after the Kain debate, Harrison discussed the spectacular failure of the experimental branch-planting program.28 Providing subsidies to corporations to locate in inner-city areas simply subsidized inefficient business practices, and in practice firms soon abandoned the branch plants.29 However, Harrison argued that the problem lay primarily in the lack of community involvement: “The branch-planting strategy precludes ghetto organizations from influencing—let alone controlling—what the development economics literature refers to as ‘project selection.’” 30 In other words, the problem was with the federal government’s failure to realize the broad scope of Kennedy’s ideas. Attracting business to inner-city neighborhoods was just a small piece of what RFK intended. At the heart of RFK’s proposals was the idea of community as key to democracy itself. In order to ensure that unemployed inner-city minorities “have something to do with the rest of us,” Kennedy argued for the importance “of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”31 To help “the ghetto become a community—a functioning unit, its people acting together on matters of mutual concern, with the power and resources to affect the conditions of their own lives.”32 the inner city would need to develop the capacity of its CDCs to “select” employment opportunities for its residents.

In its reaction to the civil disorders of the 1960s, the federal government expanded its place-based approach to employment to include people-based initiatives to improve access to suburban job opportunities. With policy attention increasingly directed towards mobility strategies that deconcentrated the poor from valuable center city land,33 it is perhaps not surprising that RFK’s vision for com-

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munity economic development disappeared from the policy dialogue. What is surprising, however, is that community-based efforts to solve the unemployment problem did not disappear. Rather, they flourished—in a new form.

THE SECOND WALK THROUGH BED-STUY In the late 1990s, David Rusk visited Bedford-Stuyvesant and declared community development a failure.34 Based on casual observations of Bed-Stuy and a simple analysis of neighborhood poverty rates over time, Rusk concluded that the Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation had had little effect on its surroundings. Arguing that the greatest policy success lay in increasing the mobility of inner-city residents, Rusk advocated a regional approach to poverty instead.

There are many reasons to critique Rusk’s findings. It is notoriously difficult to measure the outcomes of CDCs, not only because CDCs may benefit residents who choose to leave as well as those who stay, but also because aggregate quantitative measures may mask accumulated small-scale changes, and second- and third-order outcomes may be impossible to track. Second, Rusk also failed to look at the overall context of increasing inequality and poverty within which Bed-Stuy was operating. Likewise, a comparison of neighborhoods with CDCs to those without might have yielded significantly different findings. Finally, it might be argued that Rusk visited Bed-Stuy at the wrong point in the business cycle: had he stopped by just a few years later, he would have seen rapid gentrification and housing price appreciation, likely caused in no small measure by BDRC’s efforts to make the neighborhood more livable.

But perhaps Rusk’s most obvious failure was that he was looking for community economic development in all the wrong places. Perhaps the CDCs, absorbed by the fight to produce more affordable housing, had failed to solve the unemployment problem. But in the meantime, an astonishing array of nonprofit workforce intermediaries had stepped forward to ensure that opportunity remained.

Since the debate about community economic development intensified in the 1960s, the U.S. economy has restructured, the social bargain between labor and capital has come to an end, and networks have increasingly displaced hierarchies of production and control, pushing competition to a new intensity.35 At the same time, the policy context has shifted dramatically with the implementation of both welfare and workforce development reform in the late 1990s and the increasing reliance on the nonprofit sector for service delivery. In response to the new opportunities, workforce intermediaries have proliferated across the country, connecting jobseekers to employers in a form of social networking and also assisting employers with worker productivity in an effort to increase earnings.36 The universe of workforce intermediaries includes community-based organizations, unions, Workforce Investment Boards, business associations, and other organizations, for a total of almost five thousand organizations in 2004. Although there is still considerable debate over whether these efforts are effective at reshaping the demand side, evaluations suggest that the programs do engage employers and create new networks for local jobseekers to tap into.37 And the most successful efforts tend to be community-based.

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CONCLUSION Perhaps the most obvious lesson from forty years of urban policymaking related to unemployment is that there is no solution like the business cycle. In economic boomtimes, a rising tide does lift boats.

But which boats get lifted, and whether or not they will be stranded at the cycle’s trough, depends on community-based capacity—the “thousand invisible strands,” in RFK’s words.

Ironically, it was in part the backlash against RFK-era legislation, from the Civil Rights Act to the War on Poverty, that led the federal government to decentralize much of its social policy. In turn this has empowered a new networked form of governance that relies extensively on nonprofits, many of which are community-based. A new focus on measurement means that most must document outcomes in order to retain funding. Though the new accountability measures are often problematic, they arguably have strengthened organizational capacity.

The best community-based organizations—from the much-cited examples like the Center for Employment Training in San Jose, to the lesser known like Per Scholas in the Bronx—make a difference through their ability not just to form connections between the local residents and the regional economy, but also to create relationships with local schools and politicians. In the words of PICCED’s historic mission, they build “upon the vision, energy and aspirations of people who live and work in neighborhoods.” To RFK, we can say proudly: The Bed-Stuy experiment did not fail, and the others did not falter.

This paper was originally prepared for the Pratt City Legacies Conference and presented on October 14, 2005.

NOTES 1 “Problems of the Cities” reprinted Kennedy’s statement before the subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, August 15, 1966, based on two speeches given in January 1966.

Robert F. Kennedy, “Problems of the Cities,” Pratt Planning Papers 4:4 (January 1967a).

2 Most recently, this has been highlighted by Hurricane Katrina’s impact on the low-income African-American population of New Orleans: the real shock is not that Katrina and the official response had disproportionate impacts on marginalized groups, but that so many observers were shocked by the extent of poverty in the city.

3 Robert F. Kennedy, “If Men Do Not Build, How Shall They Live?” December 1966 speech given at the Third Annual One-Day Conference on Community Development in Bedford-Stuyvesant cosponsored by the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and PICCED, printed in Pratt Planning Papers 4:4 (January 1967b), 26.

4 Kennedy 1967a, 9.

5 According to Herbert Gans, over 90% of the dislocated were African-American.

6 Kennedy 1967a, 12.

7 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

8 M. Weir, Politics and jobs: the boundaries of employment policy in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

9 B. Harrison, “Ghetto Economic Development: A Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature 12 (April 1974), 1-37.

10 A. Von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block (New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2004).

11 Ibid.

12 J.F. Kain, “The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Three Decades Later,” Housing Policy Debate 3:2 (1992), 371-469.

13 J.F. Kain, “Housing segregation, Negro employment, and metropolitan decentralization,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82:2 (1968), 175–197.

14 R. A. Hays, The Federal Government and Urban Housing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy, first edition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985); C. Jencks and S. Mayer “Residential Segregation, Job

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15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

Proximity, and Black Job Opportunities,” in Inner-City Poverty in the U.S, eds. L. Lynn and M. McGeary (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1990); J. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

K.R. Ihlanfeldt and D.L. Sjoquist, D.L., “The spatial mismatch hypothesis: A review of recent studies and their implications for welfare reform,” Housing Policy Debate 9:4 (1998), 849-892.

E.G. Goetz, Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in America (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2003).

J. Rosenbaum and S. Popkin, “Employment and earnings of low-income blacks who move to middle-class suburbs,” in The Urban Underclass, eds. C. Jencks and P. Peterson (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1991).

S. Clampet-Lundquist, “Moving over or moving up? Short-term gains and losses for relocated HOPE VI families,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 7:1 (2004), 57-80; J. Goering and J.D. Feins, Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2003); E.G. Goetz, “Forced relocation vs. voluntary mobility: The effects of dispersal programmes on households,” Housing Studies 17:1 (2002), 107-123; L.S. Rubinowitz and J.E. Rosenbaum, Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); S. Popkin, J. Rosenbaum, and P. Meaden, “Labor market experiences of low-income black women in middle-class suburbs: Evidence from a survey of Gautreaux program participants,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 12:3 (1993), 556–573.

H.J. Holzer, What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996); O. Shen, “A Spatial Analysis of Job Openings and Access in a U.S. Metropolitan Area,” Journal of the American Planning Association 67:1 (2001), 53–68; S. Turner, “Barriers to a better break: Employer discrimination and spatial mismatch in metropolitan Detroit,” Journal of Urban Affairs 19 (1997), 123-141.

S.W. Allard, Access to Social Services: The Changing Urban Geography of Poverty and Service Provision, Brookings Institution Survey Series (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2004).

R.G. Kleit, “The role of neighborhood social networks in scattered-site public housing residents’ search for jobs,” Housing Policy Debate 12:3 (2001a), 541-573; R.G. Kleit “Neighborhood relations in suburban scattered-site and clustered public housing,” Journal of Urban Affairs 23:3-4 (2001b), 409-430.

K. O’Regan and J. Quigley, “Accessibility and economic opportunity,” in Essays in Transportation Economics and Policy, eds. J. Gómez-Ibáñez, W. Tye & C. Winston (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).

A. Roder and S. Scrivner, Seeking A Sustainable Journey to Work: Findings from the National Bridges to Work Demonstration (Philadelphia, PA: Public/Private Ventures, 2005).

J. Kain and J.J. Persky, “Alternatives to the gilded ghetto,” The Public Interest 14 (Winter 1969), 74-87.

Harrison 1974.

D.E. Dowall, “An evaluation of California’s Enterprise Zone programs,” Economic Development Quarterly 10:4 (1996), 352-368; A.H. Peters and P.S. Fisher, State enterprise zone programs: Have they worked? (Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute, 2002).

P.J. Armistead, New Markets Tax Credits: Issues and Opportunities (Brooklyn, NY: Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, 2005); United States General Accounting Office, New Markets Tax Credit Program: Progress Made in Implementation, but Further Actions Needed to Monitor Compliance, GAO-04-3 (Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office, 2004).

Harrison 1974, 1-37 Ibid.

Ibid., 152.

Kennedy 1967a,9.

Kennedy 1967a, 16.

J. Goering and J.D. Feins, Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2003).

D. Rusk, Inside Game, Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).

M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997); P. Osterman, Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market, How It Has Changed, and What to Do About It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); A. Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

R. Giloth, ed. Workforce Intermediaries for the Twenty-first Century (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004).

Ibid.

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STREET magazine, Issue 9 (1973)

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STREET magazine, Issue 10-11 (Summer/Fall 1973)

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STREET magazine, Issue 10-11 (Summer/Fall 1973)

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ALYSSA KATZ

INTRODUCTION TO CITY LIMITS

In 1976, New York City’s neighborhoods were facing crushing challenges unlike any they had seen before. The city’s fiscal crisis had left New York with few resources and an overwhelming sense of doom. In many neighborhoods, arson and abandonment of apartment buildings were becoming everyday occurrences, as property owners determined that their real estate was worth more in insurance proceeds than they were for their rental income. By the summer of 1977, more than 20,000 buildings in New York City would be abandoned. At the end of that year, the city owned 6,000 buildings and was poised to foreclose on 25,000 more.

Yet pockets of hope took hold in besieged neighborhoods. With the support of community groups, tenants were taking charge of their buildings as their landlords abandoned them. The earliest of these efforts had won the backing of the administration of Mayor John Lindsay, which created the city’s first nonprofit management programs for buildings that had been taken over by the city for nonpayment of taxes. An Upper West Side lawyer and community activist named Robert Schur was the official in charge of the program. Then Schur was fired by Mayor Beame’s deputy Roger Starr, the executioner of “planned shrinkage” of decaying neighborhoods.

Schur could have taken a profitable job in the private sector, as many of his government colleagues did. Instead, Schur helped found the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers (ANHD), a member organization for many of the community housing organizations he had worked with at City Hall. The private sector had virtually abandoned investment in maintaining and rehabilitating New York City housing, and ANHD member organizations did what they could, with minuscule resources, to fill that void.

Like any group looking to inform and motivate members, ANHD published a newsletter. It was called City Limits. It told ANHD members how to obtain funding for repairs or to hire community organizers, and explained the often impenetrable intricacies of government programs and the real estate business. It told members about important meetings. City Limits informed the tenants who were taking over abandoned buildings, or reclaiming their own, how to weatherize their homes, obtain low-cost fuel, tap into job-training programs, and secure loans. It helped those working to stabilize neighborhoods across the city to learn about what each other was doing.

In City Limits, the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED) saw an opportunity to build on the legacy of STREET, PICCED’s magazine about community development. Where STREET was a space to weigh big new ideas in urban planning for reclaiming urban neighborhoods, City Limits added a distinctly pragmatic edge, focusing on funding sources and political opportunities to rebuild ravaged neighborhoods. In September 1978, PICCED co-founder and Pratt planning faculty member Ron Shiffman, along with Philip St. John at the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), took the funds they had been spending on their own publications and

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merged them with ANHD’s. Each organization would contribute $5,000 each year to help support City Limits.

City Limits, PICCED, UHAB and ANHD agreed, would function as an independent enterprise, without editorial interference from its sponsors. That gave all three organizations political cover—if government officials or a bank objected to an article that appeared in City Limits, the sponsoring organizations could credibly claim that they were not responsible. The sponsors believed strongly that the movement needed its own watchdog.

“We decided that even if it attacked us, we wanted an independent voice,” says Shiffman, who is now retired as the PICCED’s director. “We wanted an advocacy voice that would hold us all accountable.”

From 1983 until this year, City Limits published independently, developing a reputation as exactly what Shiffman had hoped: a watchdog making sure the nonprofit sector, business and government were working in the interests of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, not against them. In early 2010, City Limits was acquired by the Community Service Society, which has invested its own funds and will soon spin the now-multimedia publication off as an independent entity. While City Limits has needed sponsors like PICCED at critical points in its history, its destiny is to remain fiercely independent.

Alyssa Katz was Editor of City Limits from 1999 to 2005 and is currently a consultant at the Pratt Center.

Some material reprinted with permission of City Futures, Inc.

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City Limits (January 1982) Reprinted with permission of the Community Service Society.

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TODD W. BRESSI

THE PUBLIC REALM AND THE PUBLIC GOOD: REFLECTIONS ON A DECADE AT PRATT

I My official affiliation with the journal Places began in 1989, a few years before it established a home base at Pratt Institute. Though I steered the journal through the decade that it was edited and designed in Higgins Hall, my connection to the journal began long before that.

As a cub reporter in York, Pennsylvania, I became intensely interested in preservation, planning, and architecture. I learned about how the design of streets and neighborhoods and civic and commercial buildings expressed the city’s understanding of its past and hopes for the future. I watched as developers, block leaders, architects and city officials tried to revive their city’s fortunes, and strengthen their city’s neighborhoods, through acts of design.

I discovered Places when I found the very second issue on a newsstand in a bookstore during a weekend trip to New York. I became a dedicated reader, convinced that if I were ever to undertake graduate studies in planning and design, I could only attend a school where there were people who could put out a journal like that. And I did just, obtaining my degree in city planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and quite by surprise was asked to help edit the journal.

Both Places and I arrived at Pratt Institute in 1991, through the vision of Trustee James F. Fulton, who saw quite clearly that there was a special affinity between the visions of Pratt and Places.

Places, though focused primarily on design, shared a broad commitment to advocacy for the public good with Pratt’s planning school and PICCED. As founding editor Donald Appleyard wrote, “The public has a right to shape the environment, and make it part of themselves.” The editorial that appeared in the very first issue stated: “Places will pay particular attention to public places in the shared service of society.” And years later, editor Donlyn Lyndon wrote, “The consequences of design are not bound by the ownership of a place.”

And Places, though located in the architecture school, always tried to be a citizen of the entire Institute: “Places is a journal that, in a sense, refuses to accept its place,” that first editorial noted.

Jim, and the editors, saw the potential of linking discourse about fine arts, graphic design, industrial design with architecture, planning, and preservation, and there were few schools where that could happen.

This essay marks important anniversaries—just over 25 years since Places was launched, and a half century since Pratt’s planning program was created. I have moved on from editing the journal, but as a board member, have been busy thinking about Places’ place in the ever-evolving worlds of academic, professional, and web-based publishing, and of the wide range of design practice that

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shapes our visual and physical environments.

As we explored a transition to web-based publishing, we returned to the fundamental question of what the mission and spirit and soul of this journal are, which must live on however and wherever it is published.

I’d like to focus that answer on the public realm. The mission—and soul—of Places is not focused solely on architecture, landscape architecture and other design fields. And the challenges that face Places are not only a function of the industry-wide migration of words from print to the digital realm.

Places’ spirit is embedded in the challenges that face the public realm—challenges that took on new dimensions, and a growing sense of urgency, in the years we were based at Pratt.

II Despite the ways in which our world is becoming interconnected, and the advent of the digital commons, we are constantly reminded every day that places still matter, and that Places should matter.

I am reminded of that when I visit Pratt’s campus, and see the rebirth of Myrtle Avenue, the architecture school’s stunning new wing, and the campus’s lovely sculpture garden. I was surprised to learn recently that nearly two out of five college students makes a final decision about what school to attend based on a site visit. Without a doubt, the character of Pratt’s campus and its environs matters.

I am reminded of that when I walk by the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. Consider how Apple has reinvented the idea of the store as a spectacle, as a public promenade; how the great glass cube has become a civic monument, and the store a 24-7 village square. Even an icon of the digital world, in the end, needs to be grounded in place.

I am reminded of that when I walk through north Philadelphia, and the gardens and gathering spots built by the Village of Arts and Humanities with the surrounding community. There, all sorts of rituals play out, from barbeques to movie nights, from weddings and memorials, to cultural festivals and civic discussions. The artistic embellishments are a persistent reminder not only of what the community is, but also that it is still there, very much alive.

I am reminded of that when I walk through the streets and squares of New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Toronto, or even the reinhabited postwar commercial corridors of Arlington, Fairfax, and Montgomery Counties outside Washington, D.C.: how place is the soil where economic and cultural innovation take root, where the vast socioeconomic changes taking place become visible, tangible, present in our lives.

Places are the settings where we experience discourse and engagement in its fullest human form, where people can find their fullest potential. At Pratt, the journal began to explore a powerful convergence, between advocacy for public places in the broadest design context, and advocacy for the public good in the broadest social, economic, cultural and political context.

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III The real challenge we face, in advocating for the public realm, is the sheer fragmentation and decentralization of decisionmaking, management, and even basic conceptualizations of the public good and public space. Close behind that is the challenge of prioritizing among many public goods— and public realms—as the political economy constantly reshapes itself, resulting in evermore competition for public attention and resources.

At best, this decentralization grounds us as practitioners and researchers, forcing us to research and analyze, to look and listen, to engage more fully with the world around us. This decentralization provides room for fresh voices to emerge, it allows for the possibility that creative conceptualizations, new ideas, can percolate into the conversation. Who could have imagined, over the past century, that the notion of “public infrastructure” would evolve from roads, canals, and rails to housing, education and health care, to information, food, and energy?

At worst, this fragmentation can lead to stasis, to approaches of the least common denominator, to the uneven distribution—and perhaps starvation—of resources directed to the design and management of the public realm. Who could have imagined, a half-century or a quarter-century ago, the degree to which the management of public goods and public spaces has been centralized private enterprise, and how difficult it has been for the public interest to assert itself?

More than most design journals and more than most planning schools, it seems to me, Places and Pratt have been as concerned about decision-making structures as we have been about reconceptualizing the nature of the public good and the public realm. As Pratt reached out to empower CDCs and community organizations, Places asked mayors, city engineers and those same grassroots leaders to consider the vital importance of the design of everyday environments. We sought, short of fomenting change, to enable more and more people to engage in the discourse necessary to assure proper attention to the public realm, and to understand the essential connection between public places and the public good.

IV What Places and the planning program have shared is a concern for the choreography of public discourse—the discourse that takes place beyond the confines of the studio, the ritual of the design critique, the boundaries of the campus.

We want to build a corps of seasoned professionals, exposed to the techniques of practice and the broader currents of thoughts that undergird what we do.

We want to build a corps of critical thinkers, who can draw on a diverse and dynamic range of theoretical context, historical precedent and empirical research to frame our reactions to the world and our understanding of what we are setting out to accomplish.

We want to build a corps of engaged leadership, who know when it is appropriate to guide and facilitate discourse, when it is appropriate to inspire and lead.

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Most of all, we want to choreograph a discourse that builds a stronger constituency for the public good, for the public realm, as it is experienced in the physical and visual world we live in, and as it provides for the social, economic and environmental sustenance that enables us to flourish.

As Places manages its transition from print-based to web-based communication, and as Pratt’s planning program contemplates how it will shape itself for the next half-century, this is a mission that is as provocative, urgent, vital—and challenging—as ever.

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NANCY LEVINSON, EDITOR 2008-PRESENT

POSTSCRIPT

PLACES: NEW FORMAT, NEW ERA

In 2008, as Places marked its 25th anniversary as a print publication, I succeeded Donlyn Lyndon as editor, and Places embarked on an exciting and ambitious transformation. In the fall of 2009 the journal moved from print to the web, and from limited subscription distribution to public availability (at no charge). In this respect—in choosing to cease the print edition and to commit to the Internet— Places is in the vanguard of design periodicals. Our decision was motivated by multiple factors. We realized that the dynamic and flexible format of the web would allow us to be topical and immediate, and in this way to participate in ongoing public discourse on critical issues. Interactivity would enable debate; multimedia functionality would support film and video. And the unprecedented reach and accessibility of the World Wide Web would allow us to reach many more readers, and to optimize a national and indeed international readership.

To strengthen our online presence, Places entered into a partnership with the Design Observer Group—which is dedicated to design as a catalyst for change—and we are published online as part of this larger enterprise. Since launching in October 2009 we’ve published dozens of articles, reviews, and slideshows by academic and professional contributors. We’ve been pleased to host videos by organizations with allied goals, such as the Center for Urban Pedagogy. We’re developing contentsharing arrangements with various publishers and urban design organizations. And we’ve dramatically increased our readership.

For Places the move to the web marks a new era. But our essential commitment to the public realm remains intact—as strong as ever, in fact, as we continue to respond to the unfolding opportunities of the most powerful communication medium of our time.

Todd Bressi’s essay is adapted from remarks given at a symposium celebrating the 25th anniversary of the journal Places, in May 2008, at the University of California, Berkeley. For many years, Bressi was executive editor of Places, which was based at Pratt from 1991 to 2002.

Nancy Levinson is the current editor of Places. More of Levinson’s work can be found at http://places.designobserver.com/.

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PROFILE OF A COMMUNITY HERO

ELSIE RICHARDSON

BY SABRINA TERRY

“Don’t do another study—take some action.”

In 1966, while leading Senator Robert F. Kennedy on his legendary tour through the streets of BedfordStuyvesant, Elsie Richardson made a brave assertion: while previous elected officials had made promises, what the community really needed was “brick and mortar.” Elsie’s candor heavily influenced the Senator, who then took an invested interest in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He worked with the community organizers to develop a federally supported strategy that would address community need; these collaborative efforts proved to be fruitful as they established The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), the nation’s first nonprofit Community Development Corporation (CDC). The joint effort also established Medgar Evers College, a part of the City University of New York system, as an easily accessible college for community residents to attend.

Elsie walked a long road of advocacy and activism prior to gaining the ear of the respected elected official.

She was born in 1922 in the San Juan Hill area of Manhattan, just a few blocks from what is now called Lincoln Center. She grew up in “El Barrio” of East Harlem and participated in the Marcus Garvey Movement—a Pan-African philosophy to rouse a global mass movement for people of African descent to “reclaim” Africa as their home. In Elsie’s experience and many others’, the movement “gave you a degree of strength… you knew you were supposed to speak out if you saw anything that was affecting you negatively.” Courage and the importance of advocacy were instilled in Elsie at a young age and led her to participate in further community initiatives such as the 1941 NYC bus boycotts led by Adam Clayton Powell.

At the age of 24, Elsie moved to the Albany Houses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn with her husband Victor Richardson and three children. As Elsie describes, “Every floor had three white families and five black families and we got along wonderfully. We were in and out of each others’ houses, we babysat each others’ children, we held meetings in each others’ houses.” Elsie collaborated with her fellow tenants to address the matters that affected them.

Such organization was needed as Bedford-Stuyvesant, like many other neighborhoods in Brooklyn at the time, was suffering from severe disinvestment. “White flight” in the 1950s and ’60s left the neighborhood with meager social services, declining schools and high unemployment rates. Residents of the community, Elsie among them, began to develop plans that would fill the void of services with community resources.

She co-founded the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC), a not-for-profit corporation, in 1952.

The Council included over 144 organizations and “was really a community effort” to address the needs of the community—physically, economically, and socially. CBCC held annual citywide conferences inviting all tiers of public service from city agencies to police precincts, to block associations with the purpose of identifying community needs and ideas for the council’s efforts.

Elsie is also very proud that CBCC assisted in the development of the Pratt Center for Community Development, and praises the Pratt Center for continuing to do the “excellent work in the community” that began many years ago.

“Our young people needed direction, so we made sure they had that.”

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Elsie, right, and her husband at the Pratt Center 25th Anniversary party.

Photo courtesy of Ron Shiffman.

Elsie looks fondly back to the services she helped organize for the youth of Bedford-Stuyvesant, including those launched by CBCC’s Model Cities program. A summer academy program sent youth to participating colleges and universities so they could experience higher education for the first time. The Model Cities program also helped to establish the Police, Fire, and Sanitation Academies that trained youth in the various trades, helping them to transcend barriers and secure public employment more easily. Elsie remarked that, finally, “they saw something for their future. It let them know it was worthwhile to go to school and it gave them something to look forward to.” She also sat on the board of the St. Johns Recreation center that provided a safe physical recreation space for youth and “from which many basketball stars were born.”

Throughout her career as an activist, Elsie maintained an equal commitment to her own education. She pursued her bachelor’s degree in Humanities part-time for 14 years and continued another four years at the New School to obtain her Masters in Management and Urban Professions.

“I just wish there was the same kind of activity today that we had those days. Now, people get up in their pajamas, complain on the computer and then go on about their day. Change doesn’t happen that way.”

Elsie is 88 years strong and still resides in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She keeps her “eyes on issues relating to the community,” and serves as a consultant to many community-based organizations. Despite the physical challenges of growing older, Elsie hopes to participate in the vast changes that Bedford-Stuyvesant is undergoing and is especially interested in exploring the transportation service cuts throughout Brooklyn.

At the end of the day, Elsie hopes that her story will encourage a more proactive and collaborative form of civic participation between organizations, elected officials, and youth to establish a united vision and force in tackling local issues.

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Eric Allison Rachel Berkson Christine Boyer Steve Flax Cathy Herman Sandy Hornick Harriet Markis Jenifer Roth-Becker Rachana Sheth Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Brian Sullivan Patricia Swann Anusha Venkataraman Sarah Wick Geoffrey Wiener Ayse Yonder Arthur Zabarkes Michael Zisser

Todd Bressi Karen Chapple Edward Goetz Alyssa Katz Nancy Levinson Laura Wolf-Powers

Eva Neubauer Alligood Tom Angotti Michael Epp Michael Flynn Anne Grave Brad Lander Vicki Weiner

Caron Atlas Eve Baron Adam Friedman Michael Rochford Ira Stern Charles Wilson Perry Winston

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BRAD LANDER

IN PRACTICE

What do (community) planners do?

Like most other people, I had hoped to be able to explain my job easily to my parents, and also to people that one meets at parties.

That’s gotten a little easier over the last few months, since I can now say that I’m a member of the New York City Council—although I confess that often brings a suspicious, puzzled, or pitiful look that implies unasked questions like: “Which two-bit scandal are you caught up in?” or “Have you passed any meaningless resolutions yet?”

But for the 15 years before that, I tried to explain my work as a community-based planner. For ten years I directed the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community development corporation; then for six years I was the director of the Pratt Center for Community Planning and an adjunct planning professor at Pratt.

My favorite thing to do was to dive into the explanation of a current project, as Michael Epp and Anne Grave do in their discussion of the “Green Agenda for Jackson Heights,” in which an effort to identify better access to open space and a collective approach to sustainability in an immigrant neighborhood also revealed deep insights: into new techniques for bringing diverse communities together (and getting far beyond the town-hall meeting or focus group), and into the need to combine top-down and bottom-up approaches if we are going to achieve a truly sustainable city.

Sometimes I tried to explain, like Mike Flynn, that planners were enlightened bureaucrats, channeling their prior work for Ralph Nader (ok, I usually left that out) into directing projects that turn our streets from unsafe autobahns into more livable places that balance the needs of motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists…in ways that dramatically improve the feel of our neighborhoods.

If I was in the mood to throw a curveball, I might try talk about my work with Vicki Weiner, who is pioneering new ways to think about historic preservation in deep relationship to community planning—building on a model of “values-based preservation planning” that assigns worth not only to at-risk buildings, but also to the people and communities who fill up our public and private spaces.

For Brooklynites, her project on Fulton Mall was truly eye-opening—pushing people to see a place in new ways, to look up to the buildings behind the billboards, but also to recognize anew the insanely diverse group of shoppers, workers, merchants, and immigrant entrepreneurs and value the place they are constantly re-creating. Largely as a result, plans to turn Fulton Mall into a more antiseptic space in the name of progress have been shelved, and a more thoughtful effort is underway.

For those few who were interested enough to read a Master’s thesis, I was thrilled to be able to offer Eva Neubauer Alligood’s history of community-based planning at Pratt (summarized and reflected

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upon in her contribution here), tracing the history of advocacy planning from its roots in Paul Davidoff’s work in the 1960s, through the founding of the Pratt Center by Ron Shiffman and George Raymond, highlighting both the concrete achievements and the way in which “it is a lens through which society’s inequities are constantly challenged and critiqued.”

I could point to an example of that duality—of concrete projects and radical critique—in the work of Tom Angotti, a professor and chair of mine while I was a student at Pratt. On the one hand, Tom’s work often led to on-the-ground improvements like the wonderful recent changes at Park Circle on the border of Kensington and Windsor Terrace, a project that makes open space more accessible, and connects diverse communities (not only immigrants, yuppies, and old-timers; cars, cyclists, and pedestrians … but in this case horses and equestrians as well). At the other end of the spectrum, his work on the idea of “the right to the city” offers one of the most ambitious attempts to redefine cities, with the billions who have been marginalized brought to the center, and their rights to housing, employment, clean water and air made into the basis for a new urban politics.

For those people who were active in the community and political life of the city, I could take an easier path, simply pointing to some of the remarkable department chairs and professors I have been blessed to work with—Brian Sullivan, Ayse Yonder, John Shapiro, Laura Wolf-Powers, Joe Weisbord, Michael Zisser, Frank DiGiovanni, Rudy Bryant, Lance Michaels, John Shapiro, and of course, the incomparable Ron Shiffman.

That would rarely help anyone with a concrete definition of what a planner is—did they build affordable housing? champion the struggles of low-income women around the world? run settlement houses? train grassroots leaders? do environmental impact statements? help us understand employment and development dynamics? zone the city?—but in most cases, you could tell quickly that people knew I was part of something deep and powerful, an effort to bring both technical knowledge and broad vision into partnership with communities, to make the city a better place on the ground, and to fight to make it a fairer place as well.

These days, I’m trying to bring that spirit to the City Council—of BOTH direct and tangible improvements (affordable housing, more complete streets, improved energy efficiency, preserving great places, public service transitional jobs) in diverse neighborhoods, AND a powerful aspiration for a more just and equal city, where all residents have genuine opportunities to thrive, and are invited to be co-creators of the communities where they live.

I’m still not sure I can explain to my colleagues what a planner does, but I feel blessed to do my best to build on the stunning tradition of planning at Pratt. As we celebrate 50 years, these articles help remind us not just of what we’re doing, but why. And that, I believe, will help renew our much-needed efforts for the next 50 years.

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EVA NEUBAUER ALLIGOOD

20 YEARS LATER:

REFLECTIONS ON COMMUNITY-BASED ADVOCACY PLANNING AT PRATT

IRA

Recently, when asked to contribute to Pratt’s special edition publication celebrating fifty years of community-based planning, I began to reflect on the education of planners at Pratt, and my experience in particular. What kinds of practitioners are produced by Pratt’s planning programs? My education in community-based planning at Pratt began in February 1989, the day I walked through the doors of what was then known as the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED; the Pratt Center), whose mission was to use the technical resources and skills of professional planners and architects to assist community-based organizations to bring about social, A STERN economic and physical development. Just out of college, I was eager to work for an organization committed to social change.

Ira Stern is an environmental planner who received his M.S. in City and Regional At Pratt, I found whatInstitute was one of last holdouts the dozensfor of NYCDEP university-based advocacy Planning from Pratt inthe 1985.

He hasof worked since 1995 planning and design centers that had sprung up in the 1960s, when “radical” students and faculty and is a Regional Manager of the New York City Water Supply.

He previously pressed their institutions to become more socially responsible. With my liberal arts background, I was didn’t Director of Watershed and Community DEPCo-founder where he led have many technical skillsLands to contribute, but I was thrilledPlanning that the Prattfor Center’s and Director Ron Shiffman and Architectural Hardenand werewas willingpart to putof methe to work. watershed protection efforts for more Director than aCindy decade core I ended up staying for six years, while earning a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning negotiating team that produced the historic 1997 NYC Watershed Agreement. through Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment in 1993.

He spent the previous ten years as the executive director of two land trusts in the Intrigued by theand origins planning of andthe development, I wroteAlliance my Master’s Hudson Valley is of a community-based former chairperson Land Trust ofthesis New on the history of the Pratt Center and the field of advocacy planning as a means of bringing about York. social change. I was interested in learning from the Pratt Center’s experience and drawing conclusions about how advocate planners can help bring about a more equitable and just society. To mark This the semester at Pratt, he isatteaching Contemporary Issues: for Water 50th anniversary of planning Pratt, I decided to revisit my thinking aboutPlanning advocacy planning, and examine whether my thesis conclusions and recommendations still appear relevant today.

Resources in the EMS program.

Advocacy planning was developed as a theory in 1965 by Paul Davidoff, a professor of city planning at Hunter College, who argued that planning is not value-free.1 Planners always base their recommendations or actions on their views about economic, social and political issues. Because planning is a matter of making choices about the distribution of resources in society, a planner’s prescriptions reflect his or her beliefs about equity and justice. This concept of values in planning was a departure from the traditional concept of rational planning, in which the planner is seen as a neutral technician who simply operates in the interest of the “public good.”

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One of Davidoff’s key concerns was the need for citizen participation in face of bureaucracies that inevitably mask their decision-making power. He contended that in order to be included in the process, people must have access to and knowledge of the technical and political rationale for planning decisions. What is more, using the analogy of due process in law, those who have been disadvantaged and marginalized must have their interests brought before public decision makers and bureaucrats in language that both sides can understand.

My research into the Pratt Center’s history demonstrated that its work in low-income communities throughout New York City was the embodiment of this model of advocacy planning. The Pratt Center was founded in 1963 with a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to help citizens become informed about the process for improving deteriorated urban neighborhood conditions so that they could take a constructive approach to renewal programs put forth by the City. While its initial purpose was community education, it quickly became a major force for bringing neighborhood constituencies together to press the City to abandon “slum clearance” urban renewal strategies in favor of approaches that recognized the importance of preserving the physical and social fabric of communities.

In 1964, the Pratt Center worked with a coalition of community groups in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to craft a plan for large-scale public investment in order to create jobs and encourage private sector activity in the neighborhood. Two years later, Pratt became a major contributor to the birth of the community development movement when Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured Bedford-Stuyvesant to inform his thinking about the kind of national legislation needed to address the problems of cities.

After his tour and participation in a community-wide meeting in which local residents and leaders had the opportunity to vent some of their frustrations with getting political leadership to become more responsive and accountable to their needs, Kennedy and his staff conferred with local community groups and Pratt on a new national community development model for improving urban conditions. Throughout the next four decades, based on this model, community-based development organizations across the country served to revitalize deteriorated low-income neighborhoods by creating affordable housing, fostering economic development and providing social services. Pratt continued to serve as a resource for bringing the tools of neighborhood planners and architects to disadvantaged populations, and for training “action-oriented” advocacy planning professionals who have a sense of responsibility for bringing about social change.

Advocacy planning is modeled on a pluralist view of society. According to this perspective, society is composed of many competing interests, including government, property owners, business, public bureaucracies, and low-income populations. Each interest has its own goals and needs. The role of planning is to mediate these disparate, competing interests. Advocate planners are needed because some interests are at a vast disadvantage over others. In face of public bureaucracies and the interests of the ruling elite, low-income populations are particularly powerless. Because government and business can use technical information and language to obfuscate their aims, they often have unchallenged power to achieve their goals, which are often in conflict with the interests of low-income and disadvantaged populations.

In major urban areas, for example, undesirable and sometimes noxious land uses such as waste transfer stations, incinerators, garbage landfills, and sewage treatment plants are often concentrated in areas inhabited by low-income, minority populations. This “dumping” of society’s burdens on disadvantaged populations is made possible in great part by the ability of government and busi-

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ness to mask and rationalize decisions through a complex, technical development process. The role of the advocate planner is to help translate or “decode” the technical information on which these decisions are made so that low-income and disadvantaged populations are able to participate in the process and have their interests represented. According to the advocacy planning model, planners have the ability and responsibility to achieve a more equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of society by helping people to have a voice in debates about policies that affect them.

In my thesis, I critiqued the pluralist model of planning because it is based on the assumption that the distribution of resources and power in society takes place through a competitive but open process in which interest groups are able to voice their concerns and influence decisions by building coalitions. I questioned the belief that the American democratic process functions in the interest of anyone who uses it effectively, and that society’s greatest social and economic problems, including poverty, can be tackled through local efforts to engage people in the process of change.

I asserted that while it is true that the history of community-based planning for social change is dotted with stories of battles that have been won on local fronts (for example, low income housing has appeared where vacant, burned out buildings once stood, and community centers have been built where prisons were once slated for construction) it has never truly addressed the underlying structural causes of uneven and inequitable development. I argued that one of the major conceptual problems with advocacy planning is that it focuses on local and decentralized solutions to problems that have national and global dimensions. In my conclusion, I lamented that advocacy planners and community development practitioners in the 1990s were no longer working within an overarching vision for winning the “War on Poverty.” It was time to develop a well-defined platform for reform at the national policy level, in addition to continuing to improve conditions at the grassroots, neighborhood level.

Since the time that I wrote this analysis and graduated from Pratt, I have worked with various nonprofit organizations, always with the aim of improving conditions for disadvantaged, low-income populations. For example, I worked for several years at the Corporation for Supportive Housing, a national intermediary whose mission is to create permanent housing with services to prevent and end homelessness, and I currently work at the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo), which helps families in the Bronx who struggle with the multiple challenges presented by poverty to gain access to affordable “green” housing, youth services and home-based childcare programs.

Through these experiences in working at the national and local level to bring about economic, social and environmental change, I have come to believe that while it is important to advocate for reform at the national level, it is equally critical to help make tangible improvements at the grassroots level.

My worldview as a community-based planner allows me to see the enormous value of bringing about change at the micro level, while pressing for more systemic reforms that are needed to bring about a more equitable and just society at the national level.

My experience in the field over the past twenty years reaffirms the view expressed in my thesis that one of the most critical roles for advocacy planning, especially at Pratt, is to continue to draw people into the profession, with a specific emphasis on recruitment in low-income communities, in order to ensure that there is a new generation of advocates who are critically attuned to the challenges of bringing about social change in the United States. An education in community-based planning at

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Pratt is first and foremost the acquisition of a worldview that values and aims to fulfill a set of fundamental principles of social equity, economic justice and environmental sustainability. It is a lens through which society’s inequities are constantly challenged and critiqued.

NOTES 1

Paul Davidoff, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners vol. XXXI, no. 4 (November 1965).

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MICHAEL FLYNN

HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BUREAUCRACY

As of January 2nd, I have worked for the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) for over five years. I think this might officially make me a bureaucrat. It certainly means I’ll be vested in the pension any day now. (Although the way things are going, I’m not so sure that such entitlements will even be solvent when I retire.)

The decent benefits, however, were not what lured me into city government. In fact, it was less a conscious decision than a matter of luck. I found out about an internship opportunity at DOT, working on pedestrian-oriented projects, through GCPE instructor Georges Jacquemart when I was enrolled in his transportation planning class. Having been active in transportation advocacy both as an undergraduate (when I served on the board of a local organization) and once I moved back to the New York City area, working to make the city more walkable seemed like a perfect opportunity. Fortunately, the Director of Pedestrian Projects felt positively enough about my dedication to sustainable transportation that she proceeded to hire me full-time. That, in a nutshell, is why I am there today.

Now, prior to entering the planning field, I was a relatively dyed-in-the-wool social and environmental activist. Heck, I was my college’s campus coordinator for the Ralph Nader campaign in 2000 (no hate mail, please!)—if that’s not idealistic, what is? When I decided to make planning my career and go back to graduate school, Pratt was my first—and only—choice. It seemed to be the only program firmly rooted in social justice and environmental stewardship. To me, government had always seemed to be the source of so many of society’s problems, not the solution. The Department of Transportation in particular was held in rather low esteem by the advocacy community in New York City back then.

Therefore, entering city government made for an interesting transition. After being an advocate critiquing government from the outside, I was going straight into the belly of the beast. As a fresh-faced idealist, I initially saw myself as more of an activist embedded in “the machine,” not a creature of it.

Working on pedestrian and bicycle planning in an agency that at that time was not very sympathetic to those causes, my colleagues and I felt almost like guerillas—working to enact positive change in spite of the system we found ourselves in.

However, a funny thing happened. As our projects moved forward one by one (never fast enough, it’s true), literally setting improvements to the city in stone, it became apparent that government can just as easily be a force for good rather than an enforcer of the status quo. And the longer I was there and the more projects I worked on, I realized that there really is no monolithic “government” at all—there is only a multitude of policies, processes, and protocols waiting to be revisited and minds to be convinced, and no shortage of incredibly competent and dedicated people supporting each other in their work.

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My shocking but inevitable conclusion from all of this was that there is a tremendous amount of opportunity to make a positive impact by being a dyed-in-the-wool cog-in-the-machine. Plus, if you’re lucky, you might get a DOT hard hat. I have taken on new positions and responsibilities in my fiveplus years at DOT, but no matter how far I have strayed from work as ideologically pure as pedestrian planning, one thing is a constant: there are always plenty of opportunities to change government, and the city, for the better.

But what about community-based planning? That is trickier. One thing that’s become clear to me over time (and I can hear the cries of “Sellout!” now) is that there is an interesting tension between the concept of community-based planning and the institution of government in general. It’s the same tension we’re all familiar with between the archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. We humans clearly organized ourselves into societies, and evolved governments to tackle problems that must be addressed collectively and to look out for the common good. As planners we understand from experience that some issues are too spread out, too interlinked, or too “acute costs, diffuse benefits” to be tackled at a granular level. Sometimes the good of the many must trump the good of the few, or the regional must trump the local.

On the other hand, what good is government if it’s not responsive to the needs of communities?

What good is power without a grounding in real hopes, real concerns, real lives? At least when it comes to local issues, who better to decide the fate of a community than the locals themselves?

The question is, where is the proper balance between community-based planning and getting things done for the greater good? For example, is it more important that the city have a citywide, interlinked network of bike paths, or should communities who don’t want bike lanes have the final say?

Should we price on-street parking higher because it’s been proven to improve turnover and reduce congestion, or acquiesce to local businesses who think cheaper parking will improve foot traffic?

These are questions that localities everywhere face, not just New York City. I sure don’t know the answer—like most things, it probably lies somewhere in between the extremes. I was, and still am, a true believer in community-based planning, and in all my work I think about ways to keep moving closer to that goal. I do think that DOT has become much better at notifying the public about our projects and how we do business. DOT is increasingly involving communities even earlier in project development: in identifying issues, envisioning solutions, and developing the overall project scopes.

I’m sure we could do an even better job, as could most governments, but we are moving in the right direction. Change comes slow in government, but when it does, the implications are great.

And so it turns out that working for the city might actually be the best place for an idealist to be.

Because for all of the challenges, all of the hoops, hurdles, and solid brick walls, it is still one of the only places where you can, occasionally, make a direct and lasting impact on communities and help communities achieve their goals. And at the end of the day, that makes dealing with all the bureaucracy worthwhile.

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MICHAEL EPP and ANNE GRAVE

THE GREEN AGENDA FOR JACKSON HEIGHTS: TURNING “SUSTAINABILITY” INTO A PLAN FOR NEIGHBORHOOD ACTION

Conceived and planned in 1916 as an ideal “garden city” for middle class workers employed in Manhattan, Jackson Heights, Queens, has since eclipsed its suburban beginnings. In 2009, the neighborhood of 166,0391 residents is the furthest thing imaginable from a bedroom community: in many ways, its densely built fabric, ever interesting and often messy streets and socially heterogeneous population embody the very essence of urbanism. This diversity and vibrancy is celebrated in Jackson Heights. The often cited statistic that Jackson Heights is the most diverse area in New York (with 63% of residents being foreign born, compared to 48% Queens-wide2 ) engenders a sense of neighborhood pride reflected in parades, residents’ active social lives, and community events.

Residents, visitors, and tourists revel in the wealth of cultural opportunities this diversity affords, taking the opportunity to eat and join in at one of the neighborhood’s many ethnic restaurants and festivals. Though there is indeed much to celebrate in this complex and varied environment, the pace of growth and change has left the neighborhood’s social infrastructure struggling to adapt: many residents lament the lack of interaction among neighbors, the few opportunities for immigrants to participate in neighborhood decision—making, and the growing environmental challenges the neighborhood faces.

Green Agenda for Jackson Heights, a partnership between Queens Community House, a Queensbased settlement house that provides new immigrants with leadership and job training skills, Friends of Travers Park, a parks advocacy organization, and the Pratt Center for Community Development, is an ambitious project developed as a response to the community’s unique social and environmental challenges. The severe lack of park space—the City Council district that includes Jackson Heights has just 1 acre of park space for every thousand children3—and poor housing conditions—Jackson Heights has a larger share of tenants living in severely overcrowded housing than any other neighborhood in New York City4—are two of the issues that the community has struggled with and which provided an impetus to create the Green Agenda.

From the project’s inception in 2008, participants realized that creating a singular community vision for a more sustainable future was going to pose significant challenges. The scope of the plan was huge, the diversity of opinions even greater, the fragmentation in the community apparent, and the budget small. If the Green Agenda were to succeed, it would have to go beyond standard-issue town hall meetings and surveys and create comfortable spaces for dialogue and a framework that would help discern and distill the varied opinions in the community. As it unfolds, the Green Agenda for Jackson Heights is becoming an experiment in community consensus building and for creating an inclusionary unity. When completed, it will be the first community-wide conversation on sustainabil-

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ity, and the process will forge connections between community groups that until now have worked separately.

THE GREEN AGENDA SUSTAINABILITY WORKBOOK If town hall-style meetings weren’t going to work, how would we effectively reach the community and get people involved in an active and creative discussion? Early on, the project partners sought to design a community engagement process that would reach and resonate with the many different groups in the community, in many different languages, and with many different values. The result was the Green Agenda Sustainability Workbook, a collection of five simple, self-guided activities designed to help participants identify their collective values and develop a vision for the future.

The workbook approach brought visioning directly to community members, and community groups.

Smaller forums are often more comfortable and more convenient, and these small group discussions can facilitate better problem-solving and more creative visioning than is possible in large community forums, where individual voices are often lost, activities hurried, and where creating a comfortable space for many different language speakers is hard to achieve. The small sessions reproduced a café atmosphere, which has so often been the locus for free discussion and creative, new ideas.

From December 2009 to March 2010, more than 200 Jackson Heights residents participated in these workbook sessions, which were facilitated by volunteers in living rooms, schools, church groups, seniors centers, and the regular meetings of community-based organizations. The workbooks are structured loosely: individual facilitators and groups are left to decide which activities will work best with their group. As a result, the visions for Jackson Heights’ future that have been articulated in these workbooks vary widely: some groups verbalized their ideal future in goal setting and vision development activities, while other groups indicated their desires on maps and in drawings. The information-gathering process used community strengths and individual grievances and remarks about the challenges of living in Jackson Heights as a starting point, following an issues- and assets-based approach. We recognized that community input had to go beyond a forum for registering complaints. The workbook activities were careful to guide volunteer facilitators in transforming issues into potential targets for action that enhance the community, both physically and socially. Participants were encouraged to think constructively about practical steps toward addressing their individual issues within a sustainability framework.

As the project moves forward, we are drawing upon these visions and inviting workbook participants to share their thoughts and ideas with other groups, honing in on a shared and collective vision for the neighborhood—a powerful tool for advocacy and neighborhood change.

DISAMBIGUATING “SUSTAINABILITY” The malleability of the term “sustainability” invites us to define it for ourselves. As many critics have charged, the term sustainability has become all things to all people, a void expression that is populated with multiple and divergent meanings in the minds of each individual. Supporters of development projects often justify them through the language of sustainable development, companies have evoked it to promote all manner of consumer goods, and local governments have been preparing sustainability plans for their communities. All of these actors have different ideas about the meaning and scope of the term. The Brundtland Commission (formally the World Commission

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on Environment and Development) produced, in 1987, the most commonly used definition of the term: “Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The ambiguity in this definition has been hailed as a successful strategy to bring together people and organizations across the political spectrum towards common cause—it is a difficult statement to disagree with and immensely useful as a rallying cry. However, other commentators, including Williams Reese, co-author of Our Ecological Footprint, have argued for greater specificity in defining sustainability, beginning with the premise that truly sustainable development strives to achieve a balance between social, economic and environmental aims and must be accomplished within known ecological bounds.

The amorphousness of the term “sustainability” opens up a healthful debate amongst those familiar with it. However, it can also serve to obfuscate an already complex set of issues for those who are not as well versed. It became clear throughout the workbook sessions that language and terminology were lost in translation at times. Words such as “sustainability,” “greening” and “quality of life” are not only tricky to define in English but even harder to render into languages such as Bengali, Spanish or Urdu, which, in some cases, have no equivalent terms. We sought to avoid jargon and rhetoric, and instead sought to focus on issues that people relate to readily. We brought the conversation to sustainability by focusing on the interrelationships among the constellation of issues that residents raised, and the long-term effects of these problems. In this way, the sustainability workbooks became a tool to connect the abstract themes and terminology of sustainability with participants’ resonant personal experiences, and to connect local issues to global ones. Anna Dioguardi, the Green Agenda’s lead organizer, points out that these connections were not always easy to make: “Working with immigrant populations with a diverse set of needs and priorities, it is at times challenging to help people understand the importance of planning now for a better tomorrow. When the ‘now’ for lower income communities embodies a sense of urgency and immediacy, there is little time for talking about the future. That said, what I’ve learned is that by approaching people within their comfort zones and expanding conversations about ‘green’ communities to incorporate a range of sustainability issues including affordable housing, safety, job creation, etc., residents open up and become engaged in discussions. At the end of the day, I think every individual has a vested interest in the future of their community, the process is in determining how best to engage them, do away with assumptions and meet people where they’re at. From there, they’ve been very willing and open to move forward together.”

One ready point of connection with participants is the neighborhood’s severe shortage of park space. Travers Park, a small paved neighborhood park with a playground and basketball court between 77th Street and 78th Street at 34th Avenue, is the neighborhood’s only park, and, with the exception of a few remnant spaces abutting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the neighborhood’s only green space. Despite being founded as a “garden city” whose private planted courtyards endure a century later, Jackson Heights today is New York City’s neighborhood least served by public parks. Naturally, Travers Park is well used: on a sunny day, residents compete for space. Community groups have developed rich programming for Travers Park, including a weekly summer farmers market and a ‘play street’ closed to traffic during the summer. Several community-based organizations, including Friends of Travers Park and Jackson Heights Green, have emerged to advocate for increased park space in the community. Nearly everyone agrees that this lack of park space is an

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issue for the future of the community, and the many relationships between park space, community health, food, air quality, and other issues make the lack of parks a useful starting point for a wider discussion of sustainability.

Alexis Rourk Reyes facilitates a visioning session in Jackson Heights.

Photo courtesy of the Pratt Center.

WHY DO WE NEED NEIGHBORHOOD DISCUSSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY? In PlaNYC 2030, New York City has outlined a visionary plan for “a greater, greener New York,” whose implementation is being coordinated by a new Mayor’s Office for Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. Many of New York City’s communities, however, are left wondering exactly what this vision means for them. As with the definition of sustainability, there is little to find fault with in PlaNYC’s vision, but many questions left unanswered about how, when and where the vision will touch the ground. The top-down nature of PlaNYC undermines neighborhood sustainability, since ultimately community residents and other stakeholders are the ones who understand their needs best. In the wake of PlaNYC, many city residents wonder what that document’s dozens of proposals for improving air quality, creating affordable housing, increasing green energy supply, and reducing emissions will mean for them. Already, through the Green Agenda process, we are finding that what “sustainability” means to the mayor’s team and what it means on the ground in New York City’s neighborhoods are different things.

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The primacy of economic and equity issues for many in Jackson Heights illustrates this difference in priorities. In Jackson Heights, economic conditions are becoming more challenging, and the dearth of jobs in the construction industry translates into increasingly limited job opportunities for many

A map of Jackson Heights, drawn on by local residents at a public workshop. residents. While these concerns echo the larger economic context, there is evidence to suggest that Jackson Heights is particularly impacted: the Community District that Jackson Heights is part of (CD 3) has a greater number of workers in service and construction jobs compared to the rest of Queens. Day laborers, who depend primarily on construction jobs with contractors, have been especially vulnerable in the economic downtown, and interviews suggest that many day laborers in Jackson Heights are at risk of homelessness.5 For the Green Agenda, this set of concerns brought the need for an inclusive definition of sustainability into sharp focus. Our task has not been to convince participants in the Green Agenda that these are important issues but that they are integral to “sustainability” and “greening the community,” terms some residents associate primarily with environmentalism and its affluent supporters. In a neighborhood where immigrants from South Asia and Latin America are a predominant presence, perceptions are widespread that environmentalism is someone else’s priority, one that excludes their nations and their needs.

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Many participants in the Green Agenda express their motivations in very personal terms—by wanting to cultivate a sense of belonging, actively respond to the neighborhood’s challenges, and contribute something beneficial to the entire community. That view has emerged across cultural and ethnic lines, and is articulated with particular strength among newcomers from Latin America and South Asia, who say they want to give something back so as to show gratitude for their inclusion into the community. Civic community groups serve as a platform from which new immigrants can reach out and into their neighborhood and create a feeling of rootedness—and empowerment. In one of the workbook sessions, a group of Bengali participants commented on how the Green Agenda process was valuable both in getting to know unfamiliar parts of the community, and in increasing awareness and understanding of terms and issues that they had not had opportunity to discuss as a group in the past. Though this discussion with Bengali community members began with an exploration of the term “sustainability,” with the group struggling to reconcile their varied understandings of the concept, this discussion quickly yielded to a deeper conversation about the community and the way each participant felt attached to and rooted in the district. In the interviews we conducted with residents of Jackson Heights, we found that many people drew this connection between being included and engaged in community activities and in planning for the future and feeling connected to the neighborhood. In a community as multi-cultural as Jackson Heights, many of the participants also emphasized the positive potential of the Green Agenda process to build community and create a foundation for collaboration.

CONCLUSION Jackson Heights not only resembles Jane Jacobs’ vision of cities as complex and multi-layered places, but is also a real example of many of today’s best practices in planning for sustainability. Its residents take public transportation, live in compact spaces, shop locally and exhibit many of the other behaviors that planners strive for in creating green neighborhoods. A lack of park space, housing quality, and a lack of community cohesion, however, are crucial issues that the community is still grappling with. With few opportunities for new development, greening the neighborhood will require small-scale interventions: identifying small spaces in the community that could accommodate pocket-parks, buildings that are suitable for retrofit, existing spaces that can be improved, and supporting or creating organizations that can implement these actions. Participants are rising to the challenges of identifying creative responses to these issues and uncovering innovative means of reimagining and retooling a neighborhood that is already built up that could never have been imagined without the intimate local knowledge that participants brought to the process.

In Jackson Heights, feelings of disenfranchisement and lack of inclusion in the planning process created an imperative to find a new way of involving the community—the project recognizes that a strong social infrastructure is a pre-requisite for further action in the community. In muddling through the Green Agenda participatory process, we developed strategies that offer a few simple lessons for other communities seeking to involve the ‘silent majority’ and pursue truly broad participation: 1) bring the planning process directly to the community, hosting visioning sessions and activities in a range of comfortable, familiar settings; 2) create a diverse epistemology for participation, recognizing the validity of input gathered through verbal, visual, or other creative means; 3) involve the community in the language of their choice; and 4) connect discussions of sustainability to issues that participants are already galvanizing around.

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With additional hard work, and perseverance, the Green Agenda for Jackson Heights will continue to offer lessons to other urban communities seeking to take leadership on securing a more sustainable future by providing a replicable model for proactive, neighborhood-scale sustainability planning that moves beyond traditional public involvement strategies such as surveys, interviews and public hearings toward creative strategies for input that are engaging and effective.

NOTES 1 2 3 4

5

“Queens Community District 3,” Nielsen Claritas Community Snapshot (Nielsen Claritas, 2008).

American Community Survey 2006-2008 3-Year Estimates.

New Yorkers for Parks, “City Council District Profiles” (2009).

Caroline K. Bhalla, Ioan Voicu, Rachel Meltzer, Ingrid Ellen Gould, and Vicki Been, State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods (New York, NY: Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York University, 2004); citing data from the 2002 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey.

Fernanda Santos, “In the Shadows, Day Laborers Left Homeless as Work Vanishes,” New York Times (January 1, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/nyregion/02laborers.html.

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TOM ANGOTTI

RIGHT TO THE CITY VERSUS BRIDGING THE URBAN DIVIDE: TWO SEPARATE APPROACHES?

There are many urban divides in the world, not one “urban divide,” and bridging these divides is much more difficult and complex than the phrase would suggest. There is the divide between the hundreds of globalized metropolitan regions and the hundreds of thousands of smaller cities, towns and villages. There are the divides between independent and dependent cities, rich and poor, secure and insecure, urban and rural, public and private. And within the globalized metro areas, new forms of exclusion and division are taking hold: gated communities, malls, ‘technopoles,’ and office parks, connected to one another by a public infrastructure overtaken by private vehicles and public transit serving the elite. This new paradigm for the division of urban land is growing with the expansion of global financial capital and its companion, globalized real estate. It is fostering the division of land for profit rather than using land to meet human needs.

Describing all of the urban divides in the world is an endless project and by itself does little to enlighten us about ways to address them. We can also delude ourselves with the myth that there’s something inherently wrong with “the divide.” Division by itself is neither “good” nor “bad.” All matter divides and all territories are divided. As societies and economies develop, they develop unevenly and differences among the parts appear. Division and uneven development by themselves are not the problem. The problem is growing inequality—when the divisions reflect deep economic and social inequalities. Division is a problem when it is exclusionary, when cities are divided up into spaces that heighten social and economic inequalities. This distinction between division and inequality is important because solutions for the developing world are too often geared towards ideals of homogeneity, harmony and consensus formulated in the developed world, in the centers of global capital. The ideal vision that dominates today is that of an “undivided” city that is comprehensively and rationally planned. This is deeply rooted in theories of Victorian urban planning that conceal difference, evade participatory democracy, and foster development in the interests of the powerful.

In this paradigm there is also an underlying assumption that at the heart of the problem of divided urban territory is the “problem” of “slums.”1 Traditional urban planning has sought to redevelop cities by targeting poor neighborhoods as the key symptom of the problem. The result has usually been destruction of viable communities—often occupied by members of ethnic minorities—to facilitate development in which the displaced populations are forced to live in similar or worse conditions. The problem is not “the slums.” The problem is not one of physical division. The problem is economic and social inequality, and this cannot be solved with physical urban planning. Solving inequality requires fundamental changes in economic and social policy. Otherwise, urban planning simply reconfigures the spatial distribution of inequality.

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What, if anything, does the concept of the divided city have to do with the Right to the City? The Right to the City concept begins by appreciating the conscious role of people who live and work in cities.

They experience the city in their everyday lives; they are in a position to understand the problems and to imagine solutions. Indeed, there are unrecognized urban planners in communities all over the earth. They often join collectively in struggles to save their communities from the traditional urban planners and the land development interests who claim to know what the problem is (the “slums”) and have the solution (new, planned “development”). They are not interested in the phony schemes invented by government and private developers that only allow for the public to participate in reviewing plans; they are more interested in doing their own plans. And when they do plan, they are invariably more concerned about how to improve the quality of their lives and not just how to encourage new development.

Improving the quality of life ought to be the starting point for urban policy. Instead, the people in “slums” are either ignored or subjected to attack by paternalistic philanthropists. They are usually the last to be engaged in discussions and debate, and are instead faced with projects to create an improved urban life that they had no role in shaping. Yet they are among the most experienced protagonists of urban life. Most communities throughout the world have been self-built, without the intervention of urban planners and architects. If we look closely, many communities—in countries as diverse as India and the United States, Brazil and Germany, South Africa and Japan—have generated their own community plans, seeking to improve quality of life while addressing fundamental issues of social equality. Their emerging utopias are often diverse, changing, and sometimes powerful; certainly not all are socially inclusive, but they are no more exclusive than others. The examples these communities present should be the starting point for planning and development—learning from the past instead of discarding everything for an uncertain future. Governments and international agencies usually start from the top: they attack the symptoms of territorial division, instead of starting from the bottom and seeking partnerships with effective agents of change. The result is increased displacement and re-segregation, growing inequality, and the rise of the new city of enclaves. Communities have learned collectively to address their problems in a conscious and incremental way, usually without the benefit of government help.

The Right to the City offers an alternative starting point grounded in equality and social justice. It is not an abstract ideal for the perfect city but a framework for empowering the majority of people living in cities to take control of the land, envision their futures, improve their lives, and redefine the very meaning and practice of urban planning. This inevitably entails conflicts within communities and between communities, and conflicts at regional, national and global levels. The question is then where do we fit in this diverse, chaotic, and dynamic urban world, not how do we turn it into some static creation translated from an investor’s spreadsheet into urban space? The focus on the rights of people to services that address basic human needs—the right to housing, food security, health care, clean water and air, for example—is part of the Right to the City. But the Right to the City also addresses something more complex: the right of all to engage in the contradictory processes of political and economic liberation, processes that are essential to securing specific rights within the spaces where people live and work.

This essay was originally prepared for a 2009 online UN Habitat debate in which Angotti was an “opinion leader.”

The original version may be found at The Urban Reinventors, http://www.urbanreinventors.net/.

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NOTES 1

In the United States, one of the victories of the Civil Rights movement was to expunge the use of this term from the official vocabulary. When our viable communities are called slums, they are targeted as unlivable, with residents who are objects and not subjects of history. The “slum clearance� program that started in the 1950s disproportionately displaced African American neighborhoods and re-segregated cities. The movement against slum clearance successfully forced the end of this program and changed the language to one that assumes parity with other neighborhoods even though full equality has yet to be achieved.

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VICKI WEINER

A VALUES-BASED APPROACH TO HISTORIC PRESERVATION PLANNING

Amidst New York City’s broad redevelopment plan for downtown Brooklyn, Pratt Center for Community Development’s work Fulton Street Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning sought to offer ideas for securing the future of Fulton Street Mall as a vital public place. Located on Fulton between Flatbush Avenue and Adams Street, the Mall is an active and successful shopping corridor that attracts as many as 100,000 shoppers daily. This has been an important commercial corridor since its development in the late 1800s as a destination shopping area for people from all over Brooklyn. In recent decades, Fulton Street—made into something of a pedestrian mall in the 1970s— has been most popular with a shopping constituency of African-American Brooklynites who live in the northeastern neighborhoods of the borough.

In 2004, the NYC Department of City Planning rezoned the area surrounding Fulton Street Mall to promote the development of new office and retail space and revitalize downtown Brooklyn as a business hub. In recent years, developers have used the opportunity for increased density to create thousands of units of new housing, much of it luxury. As surrounding neighborhoods have gentrified, interest has grown in bringing higher-end stores to the area, threatening displacement of local businesses and a change in character of this traditionally African-American shopping district.

Fulton Street Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning was formed as a collaborative project between the Pratt Center and Minerva Partners, an innovative cultural conservation organization; the goal was to examine the Mall from all angles and deliberately bring the voices of Mall users into the conversation about its future. Minerva’s Randall F. Mason and I developed the project using a “values-based” preservation planning approach, a new method for studying and planning the future of historic places. Values-based preservation planning recognizes that places—or spaces made culturally meaningful by use and users—are important to different types of constituents for different reasons. It also takes into consideration that meaning and value change over time. In order to fully understand the meaning of a place, and its potential for the future, one must examine the various ways in which the place is valued by different contemporary constituents. This requires looking at the economy, the built environment, and the culture of a place, as a whole, before determining what should be retained or transformed. And it requires deliberately bringing the voices of a place’s users—in this case, Fulton Street shoppers and business owners—into the conversation.

This type of planning process deliberately mixes preservation and planning strategies, when so often these are tackled as separate sets of activities, frequently at odds with each other. In a place like Fulton Street Mall, many traditional preservationists would see only the architecturally distinct buildings and would take the very narrow view that historic preservation is exclusively about protecting architectural value. The idea that there are multiple stakeholders—and multiple “values”—attached to important community assets was evident during some of the epic preservation battles of

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the 1960s and ’70s, particularly in the activism and writings of Jane Jacobs and other advocates who strove to protect communities from urban renewal. And addressing economic issues as well as architectural ones has for decades been the centerpiece of programs like the National Trust’s Main Street Program. But to many preservation advocates and practitioners in New York City today, historic preservation is not just a means but an end: a way to freeze historic contexts in time, and to prevent physical development from marring historic aesthetics.

We took a far broader approach to the preservation of Fulton Street Mall—one that embraced the notion that there should be some new development, of a type that emphasized an inclusive public culture and shared public spaces, and one that sought to identify what was deemed worthy of preservation by the African-American and Caribbean-American shoppers and immigrant entrepreneurs to whom the Mall was important.

PROJECT BACKGROUND The Fulton Street Mall project had its roots in the public review process for the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan, which sought to enhance office and residential development opportunities in areas surrounding the shopping corridor. While the plan did not propose significant changes to Fulton Street it was clear that the city’s intention to transform the area would have an impact. Several preservation organizations took an interest in the historic architecture of downtown Brooklyn including buildings on Fulton Street that they were concerned might be at-risk of demolition as new skyscrapers began to rise in the area. They began a campaign to protect these architectural gems by designating them as New York City landmarks.

While the use of landmark designation held the potential to protect a few architecturally distinct buildings, it seemed inappropriate for the protection of anything beyond that. Our initial observation indicated that while historic structures were a presence, the character of Fulton Street Mall was not derived from its architecture alone. It emanated from the businesses that inhabit the Mall’s buildings, and most importantly, from the people who flock to the area. This complex “sense of place” was not easy to define at first glance. But it was very clear that the environment of the Mall engaged large numbers of people, many of them African-American, and that some of the most popular businesses were based in an urban aesthetic that is generally associated with African-American culture in New York and other cities. Yet, while the economy on this stretch of Fulton Street was thriving, there was a prevailing sense among city planners and Brooklyn business leaders that it was a place that needed improvement—perhaps drastic improvement. Some people essentially called for a reinvention of Fulton Street Mall in order to entirely replace its cacophonous mix of businesses, people, and signs with a more calm and sanitized feel.

These observations inspired us to consider how we might contribute positively to the conversation about the Mall’s future. The impulse of the preservation organizations to vouchsafe the area’s architectural history in the face of pending change had already touched a nerve with the local business community and policy makers who felt the improvement of the downtown business environment might be thwarted by such preservation efforts. On one side, a handful of groups were speaking out against the potential demolition of important structures; on the other side, decision makers were saying the structures might in fact be standing in the way of progress.

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FULTON STREET MALL: A BRIEF HISTORY The Fulton Street commercial corridor evolved throughout the late 19th century as an elegant shopping street that featured the city’s most prosperous department stores and specialty shops stretching from the waterfront to Flatbush Avenue. The area shifted dramatically during the mid 20th century, when many complex forces—and the city’s fiscal crisis—changed the social and economic make up of urban centers. Fulton Street saw the departure of many of its department stores and movie palaces. The place was increasingly perceived as dangerous—a perception reinforced by a 1974 shooting at the Albee Theater.

But to low- and moderate-income African Americans in central Brooklyn, Fulton Street was not seen or experienced only in those bleak terms. Despite its problems, it was still where families shopped for school uniforms and shoes, televisions and housewares. Many main stay stores were replaced by smaller discount shops, and foot traffic remained strong. In the early 1980s, Fulton from Adams Street to Flatbush Avenue was given a makeover in the style of a pedestrian mall. “Fulton Mall” emerged as a central location in the emergence of hip-hop culture; hip-hop beat poet El-P reminiscences about the late 1980s on a recent album, when he was a teenager “playing Nintendo in the Fulton Mall.”

Today Fulton Street Mall is a thriving hub characterized by its most popular shops: “urban chic” sneaker and clothing boutiques, jewelry stores, cell phone stores, and entertainment outlets selling products such as CDs, DVDs, and other hip-hop related merchandise.

Our view was that both parties had valid opinions. But where, in this dialogue, was the voice of the large number of people who partake of the street culture and commerce of Fulton Street Mall? Who were those people, and what did they think about the Mall? What, in their view, would be worth preserving? What would constitute “improvement”? The opinion of Mall users seemed to us to be an important key to defining its character, strengths, and weaknesses. And yet it looked as if plans for the Mall’s future might be shaped without their input.

As the Downtown Brooklyn Plan began to spark new development in the area, there were big questions about Fulton Street Mall’s future, but its current value was being ignored in many of the public and private discussions being had about downtown Brooklyn. We deliberately designed our study to achieve an understanding of the whole significance of the place—looking beyond the particular, narrow interests of one constituent group or another, one aspect of significance or another. We set out to answer what we saw as the primary question: “What is valuable about Fulton Street Mall?”

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Fulton Street, looking west from Hanover Place, in 1964.

About 55% of stores on Fulton are small, independent businesses, many of which are owned by immigrant entrepreneurs. Looks can be deceiving—one storefront might contain up to ten small businesses. The built form of Fulton Street continues to be characterized by the old 19th century department store buildings, which retain rich architectural details, though many have been neglected and their details are obscured by signage.

THE STUDY AND ITS FINDINGS We approached the project as planners, as community advocates, and as preservation professionals. As planners, we were committed to rooting the plan for the future in data about the present. We collected a wide range of data using interviews, surveys, historical archival research, socio-economic analysis, reviews of government reports, field surveys and observational mapping. Because there were so many biases about Fulton Street Mall, and so many questions about the future development patterns in downtown Brooklyn, it was critical to ground our study in concrete data.

As community advocates, we were committed to addressing the needs of the wide range of groups with a valid stake in the present use and potential future of this place. For Fulton Street Mall, this

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is a broad and gregarious group—encompassing business and property owners, shoppers, workers, other Brooklyn residents, business groups, city officials, civic and neighborhood associations. Some of these groups had primarily economic interests, some primarily social and cultural interests, some historical or aesthetic interests; most individuals had some combination of them all. And many, such as the 300+ shoppers we surveyed on Fulton Street—in partnership with the Center for Urban Pedagogy—had never been consulted before.

As preservation professionals, we were committed to the past and what it can teach. Preserving old buildings, important stories, and significant memories creates richer built environments and richer lives. The real opportunity of preservation lies not in conserving a few lingering pieces of the past under glass, while the rest of downtown Brooklyn changes in ways incomprehensible to the past.

The real opportunity—also the real challenge—is to preserve the past in ways that make it relevant to the present and the future. The historic values of Fulton Street Mall should not be segregated and divorced from the other powerful contemporary values of the place. The history of the Mall is a continuum; important meanings and experiences are happening as vibrantly today as they did in the “heyday” of the downtown Brooklyn of the last century.

After conducting surveys and interviews with a broad set of stakeholders; land use studies; economic analysis; historical research; and policy exploration, we outlined our key findings. Through a year’s worth of research and consultation, we found that the Fulton Street Mall was an important place to many different groups of people who feel a strong stake in its future. Economically, the Mall was thriving. The place had long supported—and still does support—social activity and social bonds woven out of economic activities and cultural expressions. Like the Greek agora, Arab souk, or near-Eastern bazaar, the Mall is an economic marketplace that fosters many types of interaction, functionally serving as a public square that has considerable historical and cultural value. But despite its popularity among a diverse range of shoppers and visitors, and its profitability, it was often maligned by some who live or work nearby as a place in need of radical transformation. The headline conclusions of our work were: •The Fulton Street Mall is both a thriving commercial hub and an informal gathering place that supports vast social networks; •It functions significantly but poorly as a public space, having deficiencies in the quality and quantity of standard amenities, as well as foreboding side streets leading to and from Fulton Street; •Despite its popularity among a diverse range of shoppers and visitors (71% of our survey respondents described it as “an important place” and 52% said they shop here weekly or daily), focus groups and interviews revealed that it’s maligned by some residents and workers in downtown communities who harbor misconceptions about it based on race, class, and culturally derived “taste;” • Its historic buildings are past, present, and future cultural and economic resources, and many are poorly maintained or hidden from public view;

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• Changes to the Fulton Street Mall’s built environment, managed in ways that resonate with historical patterns and traditions as well as the wants, needs, and styles of current shoppers and merchants, can broaden the Mall’s constituency without displacing those who currently shop there.

We found through our examination that the Mall was by many measures a success. While by no means perfect, it was popular, profitable, and historically relevant to many shoppers who had long been coming to Fulton Street to socialize and shop. But at the same time, we unearthed vast negative perceptions of the Mall among non-users—perceptions that did not accord with our research.

These stood out as a significant challenge to preserving the culture of the Mall and nurturing its future.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE FUTURE To respond to these findings we developed five strategies intended to build on Fulton Street Mall’s strengths, address its deficiencies, and fill the gap between perception and reality. Given the level of user enthusiasm for the Mall, and its brisk commerce, the strategies were aimed at improving the Mall for its current users and broadening its appeal to workers and residents in the areas immediately adjacent to it. The solution to many of the short- and medium-term issues and opportunities of the Mall lie in the creative use, layering, or packaging of existing policies and programs.

Our proposals for action were designed to advance historic preservation, redevelopment, and community development goals in concert: • Address the physical appearance of the Mall with façade improvement, building conservation and new building design techniques that embrace the aesthetic theme of “old meets new.”

• Better utilize buildings by activating vacant upper stories and carefully planning a mix of uses (retail, arts/cultural, residential) that support the dynamism and diversity of the Mall and make it a 24-hour place.

• Promote and enhance the current retail themes found on the Mall: urban wear, Hip Hop fashion and music, and “uniquely Brooklyn.”

• Improve the public realm and enliven the side streets—through urban design, streetscape, and cultural programming—to enhance the experience of shoppers and visitors on Fulton Street, as well as workers and residents to the north and south.

• Engage a broad and diverse group of stakeholders in the planning process through a genuine community outreach effort to reach shoppers, business owners, and area residents and workers.

We published our findings and recommendations in a report distributed to stakeholder groups, city agencies and business leaders. The downtown Brooklyn business community, local civic organiza-

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tions, planners and economists for the City, some mainstream media outlets, and many bloggers read, criticized, debated, and embraced our final report in various ways.

Sometime after we presented our findings and recommendations to the Fulton Mall Improvement Association, a key property owner took our advice and developed retail in the vacant and boarded-up upper floors of several adjacent buildings, spanning a half block and significantly improving conditions there; the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership sponsored a streetscape improvement plan (now under construction) that adopted our suggestion to enlarge the public space at the heart of Fulton Street Mall by closing a small leg of DeKalb Avenue in front of the Dime Savings Bank building; and our research on billboards covering historic structures on the Mall fueled the effort of the Improvement Association to persuade property owners to remove them from several key buildings. Our recommendations regarding the inclusion of shoppers and merchants during the planning phase have not come to fruition. However, a strong community advocacy organization, Families United for Racial and Economic Equity (FUREE), has monitored development in downtown Brooklyn and taken up this outreach.

We were fortunate to receive funding for a second phase of the project, to explore strategies for developing historic buildings and preserving small local businesses displaced from other sites on the Mall. In May 2007, we began documenting six sites, analyzing their potential as models of preservation-oriented development. We surveyed business owners and managers about their experience on Fulton Street Mall, and explored vacant upper floors to gage their potential as active retail or residential space. We researched small business retention initiatives and commercial revitalization strategies from around the country and looked at each in terms of Fulton Street Mall’s planning context and the potential applications here. We surveyed shoppers about their attachments to certain stores, and their opinions about what type of retail they would like to see in Fulton Street Mall’s future.

These efforts culminated in the creation of preservation-oriented development models for several sites along Fulton Street. How can we retain the corridor’s historic and contemporary character, while reviving the vacant spaces, enhancing local retail businesses, and acknowledging the coming changes to the Mall’s surroundings? With the help of real estate development and architectural design consultants—and with the Mall’s users in mind—we are in the process of creating this vision.

Fulton Street Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning received significant support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and additional contributions came from the New York Community Trust, Surdna Foundation, and Pratt Institute’s Faculty Development Fund. The local business community generously encouraged the work, with grants coming from the Downtown Brooklyn Council and the Metrotech BID/Fulton Mall Improvement Association.

Rosten Woo of the Center for Urban Pedagogy provided invaluable support for our shopper survey. Pratt Center Director Brad Lander provided crucial guidance and input throughout the project and edited drafts of the final report. Pratt students, interns, and colleagues offered support, encouragement, and uncountable hours of research.

The full final report of Fulton Street Mall: New Strategies for Preservation and Planning, written by Vicki Weiner and Randall F. Mason, can be accessed at http.//prattcenter.net/.

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PROFILE OF A COMMUNITY HERO

FRANCES GOLDIN

BY ALLISON RICHARDS

“If you’re radical, and you care about the least of the group, about minority representation and leadership…. you have to be willing to get arrested and sit in jail, and you have to know that if the government says no to what you want, you have to up the ante.”

FROM THE GROUND UP It’s 1959 and the City of New York inches forward with Slum Clearance Plans in neighborhoods across the city. Fearful of losing their homes, the people of Cooper Square, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, formed the Cooper Square Committee to act as a counteragent against the City’s urban renewal machine.

Through this organization, leaders were born and radicalism thrived. The Cooper Square Committee (CSC) emerged to become the first community-based organization to successfully defeat the City of New York’s Slum Clearance Plan that would have displaced many communities located in the Lower East Side and other low-income neighborhoods.

In 2009, CSC’s indomitable organizer Frances Goldin was awarded the Yolanda Garcia Community Planner Award by the Municipal Art Society. Fran Goldin is a force to be reckoned with: she is the dynamic radical leader who fought for justice within the neighborhood, helped to found the Cooper Square Committee, and has set the standard for what it truly means to be “for the people.”

Fran Goldin was 21 when she came to the Lower East Side as the young wife of a socialist: she quickly joined the tenant council and her organizing career began. The socialist ideology significantly shaped Fran’s approach to activism: Fran never took a dime for her services rendered as an organizer, and always saw herself on the side of the have-nots. This vision informed a lifelong commitment to advocating for affordable housing in a neighborhood that was constantly under threat.

Today, to support a cause or a fight for injustice can sometimes mean wearing a wristband or a cool teeshirt. To Fran, being placed into the back seat of a police car in the act of protest was not only inevitable but also an essential way to emerge from struggle and into victory. Fran recognizes that every story like Cooper Square has not always been a success; that many in this struggle often lose the battle but we all are needed to win the war. We learn from Cooper Square that the perseverance of a preexisting radical community—the troops on the ground—can eventually solidify into success. The history of Cooper Square is a history of not only achievement but of struggle and sacrifice as well; a history of the poor where the community and radicals bridged the differences between their lives and needs to achieve one goal: the right to housing for low-income people.

The Cooper Square Alternative Plan, developed in response to the city’s Urban Renewal Plan, wove together the basic principles that would become the founding doctrine behind all of the Committee’s future endeavors. It was important for the committee to not stray away from the platform advanced in their alternative plan: people who live on the site should be beneficiaries, not the victims, of redevelopment and no member should be relocated outside of the community. These two principles were the bedrock of the Cooper Square Plan and are what sets this story apart from others: the sheer common will not to negotiate on core values.

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“We said, ‘We’re not going to give up our neighborhood for richer people,’ but every other neighborhood has done exactly that. There needed to be a guaranteed relocation and a piece of the pie.”

IMPLEMENTATION BY PARTICIPATION On February 13, 1970, the New York City Board of Estimate adopted the first community-based plan, created by the CSC. Following this momentous juncture, over 300 buildings were preserved for low-income individuals and those needing supportive services. The implementation of the plan was plagued by delays—throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Cooper Square Committee focused primarily on renovation, replacing shared hallway bathrooms with facilities in each apartment, thereby upgrading without displacing. Despite the considerable criticism he received, Mayor David Dinkins and his housing director Felice Michetti were two major actors in the advancement of the Cooper Square Alternative Plan, signing a historic Memorandum of Understanding with CSC enshrining many of the provisions of the Alternate Plan and setting in motion the creation of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association (CSMHA) in 1991.

CSMHA now manages over 350 apartments in 22 formerly city-owned buildings. “We stood in a blue room with about fifteen of our diverse leaders and Mayor Dinkins signed the document that stated that Cooper Square would move forward.”

The planning profession lent the community organization the technical expertise needed to continue.

“Had we not had professional planners with us from the start, we would not have succeeded. Pratt played an enormous role and still does today. Our screams were combined with technical expertise, professional planning skills, terminology, and documents.” As the Cooper Square Committee celebrated fifty years of community organizing and housing preservation at their 50th Anniversary Gala in 2009, Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, soon to be known as Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

YES WE CAN

“People needed a roof over their head, not a pair of suede shoes. We had the makings of a victory, which we took advantage of —and we succeeded.”

According to Fran, the Cooper Square community has a history of radicals, struggle, and political action that attributed to the community’s success. “Making change is very, very hard. If we spent a year or two or three and walked away, it would have never happened.” Cooper Square’s success was born on the backs of the “troops” who sought to preserve their affordable homes. For Fran, the people of Cooper Square simply “outlived the bastards,” and they understood that in order to partake in the fruits of the CSC’s labor, you had to be committed. Fortunately Cooper Square gave birth to other leaders including Esther Rand, Michael Ladin, and Carlos Perez; “these were the troops on the grounds that were ready to take action.”

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Cooper Square broke the cycle of government triumph over communities in the name of urban renewal and kickbacks; but such an accomplishment claimed the clean records of many. Having a public arrest record was well worth the 53-unit apartment building that provided supportive services, the senior development that was racially integrated, and the development of the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Area, completed in 2008.

When asked about the key elements of Cooper Square’s success, Fran listed five elements: 1) Having the troops.

2) Having the professionals that can put the meat on the bones of your demands.

3) Manipulating the media so that the people in the wrong are exposed.

4) Bringing in new people and celebrating victories.

5) Commitment: “Change doesn’t come that easily; you’ve got to be in it for the long haul.”

While Cooper Square is truly an urban renewal success story, Goldin believes that it could be replicated by other communities with the proper tactics. “We were so busy hanging on to what we got that we never spread the word that this process was possible and attainable. We never wanted to keep it a secret; we just weren’t blowing our own horn.”

Fran is as vibrant today as she was over 40 years ago, continuously reminding the unaware of the New York City housing paradox. Pratt’s very own Ron Shiffman says that you have to “knock on the people” to effectively impact the community and stimulate community participation; Frances Goldin has knocked on the people, led the people, and allowed the people to rise to their very own occasion. Frances Goldin believes in the people’s choice and that it is more important than the market-driven option. She believes that the struggle against social injustice must be inclusive, and that you can’t leave individuals out because they did not graduate from high school.

Fran’s hope for the future is that we will have a revolution where people reclaim their social rights and their stake in their own communities. “When I was 20 I thought I’d live to see it; now I know better.” Goldin understands that we have to have a revolution like we had when this country was born and that society is far from realizing that the people have the power to change a system that favors the rich and steps on the poor. Like a true activist, Fran marches on despite these challenges. She currently has set her sights on the Stuyvesant Town development: she hopes to one day assist residents in creating a permanent and equitable affordable housing property. Change comes in the most extraordinary times: for Cooper Square, change may have taken its time, but thanks to those that supported the organization’s endeavors, change came at just the right time.

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Eric Allison Rachel Berkson Christine Boyer Steve Flax Cathy Herman Sandy Hornick Harriet Markis Jenifer Roth-Becker Rachana Sheth Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Brian Sullivan Patricia Swann Anusha Venkataraman Sarah Wick Geoffrey Wiener Ayse Yonder Arthur Zabarkes Michael Zisser

Todd Bressi Karen Chapple Edward Goetz Alyssa Katz Nancy Levinson Laura Wolf-Powers

Eva Neubauer Alligood Tom Angotti Michael Epp Michael Flynn Anne Grave Brad Lander Vicki Weiner

Caron Atlas Eve Baron Adam Friedman Michael Rochford Ira Stern Charles Wilson Perry Winston

IN PLACE

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EVE BARON

IN PLACE

REINVENTING PLACE

BY REINTERPRETING THE VALUE OF LAND

Planning for place really means planning for the people who use those places. Planners are trained to identify and enumerate the strengths and weaknesses of a place. Plans made with people force us to re-examine how we think about neighborhood assets, and the process can uncover assets in places with seemingly the most intractable problems.

The City and Regional Planning program was born in an era when urban renewal busily uprooted neighborhoods and traded old for new without any questions asked, allowing for development of new housing and commercial services that existing residents could not afford. Then, as now, the program nurtured practitioners and scholars who challenged conventional wisdom about highest and best use, and imbued their teaching and research with new thinking about the role of the planner.

The impact of Pratt City and Regional Planning is felt at many scales—local, citywide, statewide, nationally, and even globally. But the program’s values-based approach to planning and development has impact on the paradigms we all use in the practice of planning, no matter what the scale. To me, the genius of the program is its ability to teach students to create plans that reinterpret the value of land, primarily in dialogue with communities—in order to establish an alternative to the notion of “highest-and-best use” determined solely on the basis of how much money can be made from it.

The aim is not to demonize profit, but to learn how to balance the pursuit of profit through the dollar value of the land with community-defined approaches to value. This pursuit of balance often puts the Pratt planning community into confrontational situations; sometimes we triumph, and that is when place begins to more closely resemble a community’s own definition of what it should look like and how it should function.

The articles in this section of Intractable Democracy describe instances in which the need for an alternative approach to defining the value of the land has become such an imperative that it has either resulted in a local transformation, as in the case of East New York Farms! or the New York City Watershed, or is so much a part of a cresting movement for change, such as is the case with the Green Agenda for Jackson Heights (in the previous section, “in Practice”) or the need to rethink our city’s manufacturing zones, that change is imminent. The plans described here are highly physical plans and activities, with an emphasis on implementation—meaning that change feels tangible; local civic action is affirmed, and re-energized.

Cities are centers of conflict among different groups with different perspectives on the value of the land. The articles in this section also point to a central tenet of planning: process matters, and finding new and creative ways of engaging people in neighborhood decision-making leads to creative planning. Rethinking the value of place often begins with an act of courage, such as the el Puente

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takeover of the local school described in “Taking Over and Talking Back: Theater as a Forum on Gentrification.” You’ll see that civic action—boycotts, demonstrations, protests, coalition building, organizing, participation—plays a role in regenerating the definition of land value, and that planners can take an active role in providing the information, perspective, and identification of opportunities to allow civic action to have maximum impact on policy decisions and self-determined control of land. Such is the unexpected outcome when, for example, residents and business owners in the Catskills region were allowed to enter into direct dialogue with the City of New York to negotiate local trade-offs and benefits to the protection of the watershed.

Re-admitting production as a critical land use—of food, and of products—allows new thinking about place. “Transforming the City’s Manufacturing Landscape,” for example, highlights the value of land redefined—reducing negative externalities of production separated from consumption; where land is imbued with the ability to create not only products, but employment. Urban agriculture, as described in Perry Winston’s article on the founding of East New York Farms!, allows us to overcome a false dichotomy of rural-urban, and re-examines Garden City precepts that the best way to ensure the health of urban dwellers was to remove them from dense urban areas.

All in all, the pieces in this section allow us to challenge conventional notions of place. Redefining value and even imbuing new value based on assets uncovered in the planning process allows communities to re-shape themselves according to their own vision.

IN PLACE | 139

MICHAEL ROCHFORD

PRATT PLANNERS AND THE CDC MOVEMENT

BROOKLYN WAS A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE In 1975, crime, widespread tax foreclosure, and building abandonment, coupled with redlining and population flight, were the trends that accelerated the near disintegration of neighborhoods like Williamsburg/Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The City of New York was in financial meltdown and halted construction for four years on a brand new 3,000 seat high school, finally opened in 1981 and today called the Grand Street Campus. The City failed to open the new Woodhull Hospital ten years after construction had been completed; the “state of the art” 20-story rusting Cor-ten steel structure cast a frightening shadow on the neighborhood. Still another calamity would hit the neighborhood that year—but this time the community response would be different.

In May of 1975, a spectacular fire destroyed an entire row of wood frame buildings on Powers Street, leaving 18 families homeless. Fires in rows of wood frame housing were common in the communities of North Brooklyn; in their wake were huge vacant lots that became dumps for garbage, stolen cars, and occasionally a murder victim. The pastor of the St. Nicholas Church, Father Walter Vetro, and his parishioners joined to help the destitute families. Shaken by yet another disaster in their backyards, people wondered how long they and their families could hang on. Nevertheless, there were always neighbors offering clothing, food and shelter to those in need. Neither businesses nor developers would invest, and government was frozen and mired in bankruptcy; only local residents were able to rise to the challenge and take action.

PRATT PLANNERS BRING SKILLS Local activist Jan Peterson understood the power of people once organized behind a common good.

She instilled in her neighbors an understanding of what ordinary people could do if they banded together. Jan Peterson reached out to Pratt Institute and asked Ron Shiffman to provide the technical help. As residents stared at the vacant land and an adjoining vacant, 9-story building (recently vacated by Catholic Medical Center), the possibilities began to emerge. Shiffman was joined by Brian Sullivan, Gary Hattem and Cathy Herman—all Pratt Planners—who came to help develop a plan for the site of the fire and the vacant buildings. They were energized by the determination and persistence of ordinary neighborhood people and joined to bring the resources, talent and energy of the Pratt Institute to support this grassroots community effort. Shiffman guided Father Vetro and the group. Reaching to their church roots, the founders chose the name St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation and Housing Rehabilitation Corporation. It was a mouthful; the group was simply called ‘St Nicks’ and today the organization and its affiliates are known as the St. Nicks Alliance.

The Pratt planners helped residents prepare a strategy. Their focus became development of housing on the site where the fire took place and they saw the 9-story abandoned building as a key part

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of the effort. Father Vetro was able to convince the Diocese of Brooklyn, through the intervention of Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Sullivan, to donate the old building called Jennings Hall for this development. Because the up-start group lacked a track record, Pratt Institute, St Nicholas Church, and the Pratt Center joined as sponsors to give the fledgling organization credibility. It was audacious that a group of volunteers would actually be able to renovate and develop a new 9-story building to house elderly residents of the community. With the visioning ability of Peterson and Shiffman, that notion began to take shape and residents and local business people began to believe they could make a difference.

JENNINGS HALL: A NEIGHBORHOOD TURNING POINT With assistance from Pratt, residents developed a preliminary plan, found an architect, put together the financing and began a mad dash to meet a deadline. Ultimately, Sullivan, Hattem and Herman would drive overnight in a beat up VW Bug, staying with friends, to submit a Section 202 application to HUD in Washington. They also needed to engage a Washington-based attorney to help in this effort; the attorney demanded fee in advance. Sullivan and Herman scrambled and raised the $3,000 necessary, pooling personal funds to pay the attorney. The application was approved and St Nicks had a mandate to re-build Jennings Hall and create housing for 150 seniors and generations of seniors for years to come. The innovative design weaved a new structure with the old building while creating a fascinating interior.

As planning for Jennings Hall moved ahead, the activity galvanized residents and inspired a renewed determination to stop the decline and preserve their neighborhood. Jennings Hall proved to be a major turning point for a community with “little more than a hope and a prayer”—a common refrain back in the day. Pride and confidence began to emerge, displacing despair. This was the first new development in a decade and it happened because neighbors took a stand and the young planners stood with them. Jennings Hall became emblematic of a fragile resurgence as the first new investment in housing the community had seen since the urban renewal era. A determination emerged that the community could be stabilized, and again be a place where families could thrive, children could grow, and businesses could provide jobs creating an active, vibrant neighborhood for working people.

PRATT AND THE CDC MOVEMENT The Pratt Center was co-founded by George Raymond (the Pratt graduate planning program’s first Chairperson) and Ron Shiffman, who became its founding Executive Director. The center was created as a vehicle to bring sound urban planning skills and architectural services to neighborhoods.

One of its first clients was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a community development corporation founded in 1965 as a vehicle to restore blighted urban communities. It became a model for locally accountable community development corporations. Much was learned about community redevelopment from that experience. St. Nicks and groups like it became the second generation of CDCs. Their leadership frequently sprung from churches and pastors who helped organize and support the community rebuilding process. Bed-Stuy Restoration was started with federal money and support; the second generation had few resources, but were scrappier, entrepreneurial, and possessed considerable determination and pluck.

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In time, community development corporations like St. Nicks sprouted up around the City and across the nation. Pratt assisted scores of CDCs with planning and design services. Most significantly, Pratt was there at the emergence of grassroots leadership and, like in the case of St Nicks, offered neighborhoods the assistance of planners and architects to develop the strategies that would preserve and revitalize their neighborhood. Pratt was there to assist Los Sures on the Southside and the People’s Firehouse on the Northside of Williamsburg. In the 1980s the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) and the Enterprise Foundation emerged as intermediaries for CDCs and expanded nationally to provide financing and technical support to a broad range of redevelopment strategies.

In New York City alone CDCs were responsible for the production of over 100,000 units of affordable housing, through the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

These grassroots organizations governed by residents and business people represent a third sector of the economy after government and business. They serve a clear social mission heretofore the purview of government. However, they are nimble like business and have local accountability to residents. This hybrid approach was envisioned to address the well documented flaws of the top down massive urban renewal experience of the ’50s and ’60s that left huge towers and in their wake and destroyed the fabric of communities. CDCs like St Nicks could be comprehensive in their approach, addressing everything from housing to the economy, as well as serve young people and the elderly.

They could tackle crime, education and the environment—any issue that threatened community life.

ST. NICKS LAUNCHES COMPREHENSIVE PLAN Although the group had no resources, Peterson helped secure job slots through the Federal CETA1 program and 20 unemployed neighborhood residents became the first staff of the new corporation.

Most were young, some were close to retirement, some had skills, and some had none. They all had ideas—they wanted to stop the spiraling decline of their community. They insisted that plans would not be imposed but could emerge only from participatory community involvement.

Father Vetro would provide the basement of his home, the church rectory. The new staff was cramped but soon maps were being drawn (literally by one of the CETA staff Stanley Weisnwolski, an unemployed artist) and community meetings were held to identify the next challenge community folks would face. Erica Forman, a young colleague of Shiffman with experience in government, was instrumental in forming the organization while Cathy Herman helped organize residents around issues and strategies.

Gary Hattem, a freshly minted Pratt planning graduate, was recruited as the first Executive Director. Hattem provided the leadership and with residents mapped out a plan and shaped a campaign that would revitalize Williamsburg. It focused on housing and then on economic development. The campaign sought to leverage human as well as financial capital, mobilizing people behind a vision of a new community. First they challenged banks and insurance companies to stop the practice of redlining its community and provide mortgages, financing for home improvements, and insurance at reasonable rates. The staff launched Greenline, Williamsburg’s own community newspaper—still published today.

Volunteerism became the laboratory of new ideas. The staff organized residents to look in on seniors; that experience became a model for high quality home care. Similar assistance with tenants

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became a highly effective affordable housing campaign and eventually led to developing the capacity to manage property.

Early on the group set its sights on arresting the cancerous spread of housing abandonment. The citizen-led effort would always ensure that local people—home owners, tenants, and business people—would be involved in launching each strategy. A particular focus was given to the housing stock, a hallmark of CDC revitalization efforts. As its reputation grew, the city began to invite St Nicks and the second generation of CDCs to rehab vacant, abandoned properties as well as those which were occupied. The former were rehabilitated as affordable rental housing while the residents of the occupied housing were helped to form co-operative housing and become owners. Co-op boards and resident councils were formed in each building. The leaders of affiliated governing bodies became St. Nicks’ Board of Directors and were later joined by business people and clergy, ensuring accountability and a sustained focus on the mission.

Many of the earliest development projects that St. Nicks undertook were based on design work and feasibility analysis provided by Pratt. Brian Sullivan worked with St. Nicks on tax Credit projects when very few understood how they worked or how to take maximum advantage of them. Hattem’s entrepreneurial approach to community development, combined with Pratt’s technical and financial expertise, made St. Nicks a city-wide leader in the second wave of CDC development projects throughout the ’80s and ’90s.

St. Nicks developed the capacity to finance housing, manage and preserve affordable housing, advise owners on how to keep properties affordable, and eventually built 1,800 units of housing within its community. St. Nicks cared for people with special needs, the frail and elderly, people living with AIDS, the formerly homeless, and the developmentally disabled; all would find a place in the new housing built by St. Nicks.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PRIMES NEIGHBORHOOD ECONOMY Next Hattem and the staff began to organize merchants, creating a partnership with business leaders to launch the Grand—Metro Commercial Revitalization project. The community’s commercial district was ravaged by fires and disinvestment. Over 25% of the stores were vacant and most were tired and dilapidated. New investment was nil and redlining blocked access to capital markets. This initiative led by St. Nicks brought new retail development, including a new 14,000 square foot shopping center, filling in another gaping hole in the streetscape. New sidewalks, street lighting, and matching grants stimulated redevelopment as over 125 buildings were spruced up for the first time in years. The signature elements of the commercial revitalization initiative were creative oversized styro-foam figures, hand carved by Stanley Weisnwolski, the CETA staff artist. The eye-catching art brought attention and distinction to the commercial district and made a great conversation piece that attracted shoppers.

After a five year campaign, over $2 million in public and private pump priming was invested. Business people began to invest without incentives; bank financing became available as a result of the anti-redlining campaign. New stores opened and vacancy rates declined to 5%. In 1986, St. Nicks organized the first neighborhood business improvement district (known as the Grand Street BID) to be approved by the City of New York. Today the Grand St. BID sustains the revitalization keeping streets clean, removing graffiti, and promoting the commercial district.

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As blue collar industrial jobs hemorrhaged from the nearby East Williamsburg industrial area, business people and local bankers who served the business community sought help. St Nicks responded and organized business people to strategize on how to stabilize the industrial economy and create jobs. This new entity was to be called the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corporation—another mouthful, simply called EWVIDCO. St. Nicks created a public-private model that brought together government and business in a collaborative effort to reduce crime, eliminate graffiti, and stop illegal dumping. This model was subsequently adopted city-wide. The campaign paid off as the work of EWVIDCO expanded to financing, business expansion, and job creation.

Ron Shiffman at the opening of Jennings Hall in Williamsburg.

RESTORING THE FABRIC OF COMMUNITY LIFE By the mid 1990s St. Nicks had rehabilitated all of the vacant, abandoned, and tax foreclosed properties in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint community. Rehabilitation of occupied, City-owned properties would continue until 2007. As the physical infrastructure of the residential sector was restored, new investment flowed to the industrial district and the commercial district rebounded. St. Nicks turned towards restoring the social fabric. Many challenges remained: failing schools, no activities for young people, large numbers of disconnected youth, elderly residents without access to nursing care or health care, and the open sale of narcotics. Over a third of residents of St. Nicks housing were dependent on some form of public assistance.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) made a three-year investment in St. Nicks to develop and roll out “second wave” strategies that met high-priority community need. The first of these strategies was a commitment to serve young people—to remove them from harm and provide opportunities that would ensure academic success and development as full self-sufficient citizens. Today St. Nicks serves 2,000 children in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, in partnership with 12 schools. The St.

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Nicks Alliance also operates two major community centers at the Grand Street Campus High School in Williamsburg, and at J.H.S. 126 in Greenpoint. More recently, through a strategic partnership with School Settlement Association Inc., St. Nicks began to operate Brooklyn’s oldest settlement house as a community center and offer a high quality after school experience.

Jobs were the next challenge. Today St. Nicks Alliance’s Workforce Center confronts the challenge of the recent economic decline and has opened a new workforce center doubling the number of people it places each year. In 2010, St. Nicks anticipates placing 620 people in permanent jobs, training 405 in skills for high wages, as well as preparing for new opportunities in “Green Jobs.”

The third priority addressed the needs of seniors and those most vulnerable within its community.

St. Nicks has built partnerships with health care providers to offer new innovative services at lower cost. Moreover, St. Nicks is about to open an Assisted Living Program at Jennings Hall which will provide enhanced health and personal care services to the residents of the facility, and fully achieve the potential set forth by the organization’s founders, its architects and designers.

THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS Beginning in the late 1990s, St. Nicks’ success in stabilizing its community began to take hold.

While new immigrants continued to arrive, they were now accompanied by artists who sought to live within the richness of ethnic communities and attempted to blend with neighbors. Towards the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, this trend changed. People moved to Williamsburg not only because they liked the diversity of the neighborhood, but also because the arts and culture offered an interesting dimension not found in other communities. The result was gentrification and the invasion of so-called “hipsters,” which brought great development pressures and a move to rezone land for upscale development. Initially the new arrivals were feared because they drove up housing costs and moved into buildings that were affordable, driving rents to levels working class people could not afford. It has become all too common for young people who grew up in Williamsburg and earned an education and a decent job to not be able to live in their own neighborhood.

In spite of these changes, North Brooklyn remains the home of a significant concentration of poor— low- and moderate-income—people including a large number of recently arrived immigrants. While high crime and physical deterioration have improved, many continue to face major economic challenges. Interestingly, some of the newly arrived professionals have offered to support the work of CDCs like St. Nicks and have come to represent a new community asset in the effort to eradicate barriers to opportunity for all.

Some of St. Nicks’ strategies have been adapted to find new focus, while others remain unchanged and highly effective. In the area of housing, community development corporations continue to protect residents from illegal evictions. Moreover, CDCs such as St. Nicks have begun to build new housing on limited publicly owned land and increasingly on privately owned land to meet the challenges of gentrification. Land cannot simply be manufactured; as communities like Williamsburg and Greenpoint are developed at greater levels of density, they also offer the opportunity for expanded affordability. Sadly, the current administration favors for-profit developers. However, CDCs offer a dimension not shared by private sector builders. The commitment is to keep housing affordable “in perpetuity” while maintaining economically and racially integrated communities that offer an enriching experience for all residents.

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The ability to adapt new approaches to society’s social challenges is another part of the future of community development corporations as they strive to become more effective at attacking the underlying causes of poverty. CDCs must do more than just “good things” and need to target efforts and limited resources at addressing the intractable problems that keep people from sharing in economic prosperity in measurable ways. St. Nicks is currently focusing on children, with specific strategies that will address the needs of children who struggle in school and fall short of a high school diploma or advanced education. Similarly, St. Nicks Workforce Development is devoting its resources to enabling people with the serious barriers to employment to find living wage jobs. This more intensive effort is critical if CDCs are to continue to fulfill the mission and purpose of community development.

The ability to innovate and become a laboratory of new ideas will continue to be an important role for CDCs. Urban communities like Williamsburg/Greenpoint are centered in some of the most industrial parts of the urban landscape. Today, smokestacks are replaced by garbage processing and waste process stations: Williamsburg/Greenpoint is one of the largest processors of waste of any urban neighborhood in America. Leading the effort to reduce pollution and “green” our communities is a priority. In the last several years, St. Nicks has invested $3.5 million in energy saving activities and new “green” technologies. Just as importantly, St. Nicks has launched several new green job training projects preparing residents for employment in environmental remediation, energy audits, and photovoltaic cell installation sectors.

Significant new development will take place within North Brooklyn in the future. Large tracts of publicly and private owned land are still to be developed. Planning skills and the technical help from universities like Pratt will be key to ensuring that new development is “green,” affordable, and inclusionary. Indeed, Pratt continues to play a vibrant role in community planning—working with communities to become both green and affordable. The collaboration between the Institute and its neighborhoods has transformed communities and will continue to profoundly improve community life in New York City.

CONCLUSION Pratt’s experiences working with St. Nicks, and dozens of other CDCs, on real-world problems of urban neighborhoods make it a unique model of an urban institution of higher education that embraces its role as an integral part of the urban fabric. Furthermore, the Pratt Center provides full engagement with the city and all its challenges. Pratt’s urban planning studios provide a symbiotic way to expose students to very realistic venues in which to hone planning skills and, hopefully, provide St. Nicks and other CDCs with invaluable research and planning resources that would otherwise have been unavailable to community-based organizations.

Few institutions ever figure out how to effectively merge the academic and real world parts of their institutional missions. Pratt is one of the few universities that can point to real brick and mortar development projects on which they have successfully collaborated. Pratt is a new paradigm for urban institutions working in partnership with its community.

NOTES 1

CETA was the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act which created jobs in low income communities across the country in the 1970s.

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CARON ATLAS

TAKING OVER AND TALKING BACK: THEATER AS A FORUM ON GENTRIFICATION

In 2008-2009 the Arts & Community Change Initiative, incubated at the Pratt Center for Community Development, co-sponsored a series of dialogues across New York in conjunction with Danny Hoch’s theater piece, Taking Over, and convened a cross-sector national conversation about the role of arts and culture in economic stimulus and community recovery.

I think that we’ve criminalized poverty in the United States and I think we need to have criminalized greed. I think if we were successful in doing that, it would change the entire dynamic in the conversation.

—Michelle de la Uz THE ALL CITY TOUR In the fall of 2008, Brooklyn theater artist Danny Hoch performed “Taking Over,” free of charge, in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, prior to its run at the Public Theater in Manhattan. The one-man show chronicles the state of gentrification and displacement in New York City, “how people take over neighborhoods and how absurdly funny and absurdly heartbreaking it is at the same time.”

Says Hoch: I find that if I put conflicting opinions within one character, the character becomes richer. It starts to make the audience question themselves, and ultimately, at the end of the day, that’s what you want people to do in the theater, is question themselves and not just point the finger.

Hoch wanted the people on the front lines of gentrification, including those in his own neighborhood of Williamsburg, to be the first to see the show in New York and talk back to it. His nine characters sparked a lively call and response with audiences—during the show and after. At the Williamsburg performance, sponsored by el Puente cultural center at a local high school, close to 1,000 people laughed, cried and actively engaged in Hoch’s stories. After the show, el Puente Founder/President and CEO Luis Garden Acosta told the story of activism in the community.

We led a boycott in this very building, to shut this school down and create the wonderful school we have today. I know that we changed this system. I know that where there were no trees, we reforested. I know we created parks in impossible places.…What I know is that our people have been courageous, and have struggled, and have maintained their dignity, have changed the school system, have created parks, have made it livable. And now we’re being chased out.

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Throughout the “All City Tour” people enthusiastically participated in post-show discussions, telling their own stories and talking about how they could stay in their neighborhoods and make a difference. These were no ordinary theater audiences: they were multigenerational and diverse in race and class, reflecting the demographics of the city.

And these were no ordinary times: The tour took place during a period of heightened politics and activism in the city and the country, one month before the 2008 presidential election and just as the New York City Mayor and City Council extended their own term limits without a public vote.

New York City’s economic narrative was shifting from one of economic prosperity with unequally shared benefits, to one of economic crisis. Wall Street was in the news, but the neighborhoods visited by the tour took some of the hardest blows. Lost jobs, low wages, foreclosures, cuts to already strained public services, high energy and commuting costs and still unaffordable housing combined to stack the odds against opportunity and shared prosperity. The skeletons of half-built high-rise condominiums would soon remain as ghostly reminders of a housing boom that offered most people no hope of housing.

Local organizing, such as an affordable housing campaign in Long Island City, Queens, brought immediacy to the dialogues.

We spend more than 50 percent on our rent, so how can we live? People cannot afford their medicine, their food and their housing.… When I first came here, I didn’t speak English very well. I couldn’t get a good job. So that’s why we lived in a basement and there was no heat … at that time, I also didn’t know how I could find a home. My husband’s income was very low. I was two months pregnant, and I lost my baby because I was so sick. So this is not only my story, as long as people are living in basements and shared apartments. Affordable housing in Queens has become a fight in my life, and I must win this” (Queens resident).

The Hip-Hop Theater Festival (HHTF), founded by Hoch in 2000, produced the All City Tour in partnership with the Public Theater. Clyde Valentin, HHTF executive director, explained the Festival’s motivation: It is clear that both destructive and beneficial consequences of gentrification do exist, but without a forum to resolve and negotiate them, New Yorkers can only play out their convictions in the political arena (where they are unlikely to be heard) or in the streets (where the outcome can be damaging, public, and made loud and clear, but ultimately ineffective). Perhaps in an era long-gone, such issues would be discussed in churches, town hall meetings and community centers attended by our lawmakers and politicians.

Since this is not the case, we aim to examine gentrification in the theater.

HHTF partnered with the Pratt Center for Community Development’s Arts & Community Change Initiative to develop and organize the community dialogues, working with local venues and sponsors: Laguardia Performing Arts Center (part of Laguardia Community College) in Queens, Hostos Community College and Bronx Council on the Arts in the Bronx, and el Puente in Brooklyn.

For Elena Conte, organizer of Public Policy Campaigns at the Pratt Center, the performances pro-

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vided a new opportunity to engage people in strategies to promote affordable housing. Speaking about the Queens performance and dialogue, Conte remarked: This is an opportunity to say: Here’s this piece of art talking about gentrification, and here’s a development project that is going to accelerate gentrification, in this exact neighborhood.…What can we do? How can we use these performances as a chance to come together as a community and say that everyone should have a place here?

BROADENING THE FRAME: ARTS, CULTURE, AND EQUITABLE DEVELOPMENT The arts have a complicated relationship to gentrification. While many artists are displaced, arts and culture can also be gentrification’s leading edge. One of Danny Hoch’s most nuanced characters in “Taking Over” is himself, an artist troubled by his complicity in gentrification.

In Williamsburg, newcomer artists can be polarized from long-time residents—with differences in race and class increasing the divide. There is both a perception and a reality of artists being disconnected from their neighborhoods. This was described in various ways during the dialogues: sometimes artists are transitory (or perceived to be transitory), they don’t identify their community by geography, or their activism is limited to the arts (and their advocacy for arts space may even pit them against potential allies). Or they may have good intentions but haven’t yet found a way to get involved.

In one of the dialogues, artist Radha Blank addressed the complexity of the topic, describing the generations of gentrification in Brooklyn, and raising the issues of intention and community engagement of the gentrifiers.

My parents were part of a group of black and brown artists that moved into Williamsburg in the late ’60s and early ’70s. So they were gentrifiers. But their intention was very different. I mean, it was a different type of presence. They were really interested in engaging the local community. So, there was this new energy but there was this investment in who was already living there. A lot of people don’t even know that some of the first artists in Williamsburg were black and brown, painters, jazz musicians.

When arts and culture are typically recognized in relationship to community development, it is often outside of a context of equitable development, cultural pluralism and social justice. Creative-economy models seek to generate economic growth, but rarely involve a critical analysis of who they serve and who they exclude, whose culture is valued and whose vision drives the development. On the other hand, many equitable development- and social justice-oriented approaches to urban planning fail to understand the importance of arts and culture, and in some cases have a knee-jerk reaction against artists that prevents them from engaging with creativity, meaning, and cultural vitality— essential components of community life.

In March of 2009, when the news was thick with stories of the economic crisis, the Arts & Community Change Initiative brought together a cross-sector national conversation about the role of arts and culture in economic stimulus and community recovery. This conversation included an extraordinary mix of people from such groups as the Service Workers International Union (SEIU), League of Young Voters, Center for Rural Strategies, LISC, Humphrey Center, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Policy

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Link, Jobs with Justice, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and Public Allies along with writers such as Jeff Chang and Arlene Goldbard.

We framed the conversation like this: In a time of crisis, there is a tendency to focus inward and circle the wagons to survive. Here we want to do the opposite: to expand and reframe the conversation about economic stimulus and national service, so that arts, culture and media are part of a greater vision for equitable, democratic, and culturally vital communities. Our frame is not the survival of the sector—be it arts or community development—but rather the role of cultural vitality in the survival and revitalization of our communities.

Roundtable participants spoke about how they could work effectively across sectors and with new allies. We discussed how arts and culture could become an integral part of policymaking on issues of concern, such as sustainable development, immigration and jobs, and what could be learned from the lessons of the WPA of the Great Depression, CETA in the ’70s, and programs following September 11, 2001, that incorporated the arts. How can we develop an affirmative framing for and articulation of the integration of arts and culture in community recovery and social change? How might this incorporate new stories and images that communicate what is possible and how to get there?

FROM DIALOGUE TO ACTIVISM AND FROM STORY TO POLICY CHANGE In his New York Times review of “Taking Over,” “Endangered Species in Gentrifying Williamsburg,” critic Ben Brantley described the show as “pulsing, seamless studies of character clashing with context, of people learning to sink or swim in suddenly unfamiliar waters.” Both the title and content of this review reinforce the idea of gentrification as a force of nature over which people have little control. This was often reflected in a play that powerfully illustrated how gentrification pushed out long-time residents, and in the painful stories of displacement that people told afterward.

However, while the community stories were filled with anger and despair, they were also about action: boycotts, coalition building, organizing, and civic participation. They reflected the recognition that policies support inequitable development, and policies can be changed.

A post-show discussion at the Public Theater during Hoch’s run there focused on what can be done.

It took place in early December 2008, just one month after the presidential election.

We introduced it as follows: People may feel like development or the economic crisis or policy-making is something that gets done to you, over which you have no say or control. This panel responds, “You do have a say in it. And some of those ways that you do are through community organizing, equitable development, and policy-making that’s accountable to communities.”

We invited people who represented both activism and policymaking to start the conversation. Policymakers included Joe Lentol, the state assemblyman for Williamsburg and a strong supporter of the arts, who has lived in the area all his life and experienced both the benefits and challenges of gen-

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trification. Melissa Mark-Viverito, a New York City Council member, was formerly a labor and community organizer. Activists included Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), which offers practical strategies for affordable housing and living-wage jobs, Demaris Reyes, executive director of Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), which organizes around housing, and Brad Lander, then director of the Pratt Center, who has since been elected to the City Council. They all found a place of recognition in the play, and responded to its powerful stories.

I’m council member Melissa Mark-Viverito. I represent East Harlem, part of the South Bronx, and part of the Upper West Side in Manhattan. And our community is very much living gentrification. And when you’re seeing it (in the show), from the perspective as an observer and through the characters, you really are sensing the turmoil, inner turmoil my community is living, of the constituents that I represent. We have to win the fight against some of these faulty policies that really do speed gentrification in a negative way to squeeze our communities. So you’re involved in that. But then, seeing it from an observer perspective, it’s very touching, very moving, very powerful and it just seems a little more real.

Demaris Reyes, an organizer on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a public-housing resident also felt a strong connection to characters in Hoch’s show.

We are not being gentrified, we are gentrified. We are literally fighting for whatever space is left. The very reason that many people want to come to our community is the very thing that’s changing. We find ourselves in this daily struggle where we’re trying to be true to the history and the heritage of this community, which was an entryway for people from all over the world. So, we feel very strongly that we don’t have a right to say that people cannot come to our community. But, we do feel that we have a right to say that we should not be excluded from that community.

Brad Lander named the challenge of moving from the powerful emotions of the play’s personal stories to building the power needed to shift policy, the “disconnect between the way I was hit in the gut tonight and what it would take to try to move these public policies forward.” At the Pratt Center he led public policy campaigns resulting in New York’s adoption of a new “inclusionary zoning” program promoting affordable housing in new developments in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and the West Side of Manhattan, as well as a citywide reform of the City’s outdated 421-a property tax program that closed loopholes that benefited developers but not communities.

While acknowledging that gentrification has some positive impacts, Lander described two “undeniable problems”: One, there are the cultural aspects of it: the ways in which the character of the neighborhood and the culture and identity of people that have been there a long time are erased. But a second, overlapping but different, problem is just the way in which it’s a fulcrum for inequality...It would be easier to feel positive about the up aspects of gentrification if you believed that the improvement in public schools actually served the diverse people in the neighborhood…but honestly, the schools micro-segregate so rapidly that I’m not sure there’s a moment when they’re as diverse as the neighborhood that surrounds them.

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Flyer for the “All City Tour,” Fall 2008

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I think it has to take a step beyond wanting to make the neighborhood better. There are a lot of great groups that want to improve their neighborhood and ally with others who want to improve it. But, I’d also like to figure out how to address together those deeper inequalities that are expressed through gentrification. And that is not easy. We’re going to have to build something a little more like a movement that has the power.

Lander noted that a demonstration was happening uptown that day where 1,000 people were calling for the repeal of vacancy decontrol, the main loophole that’s destroying rent stabilization in New York City. For him, rent stabilization is “probably the number one most important policy that makes it possible for people that have been here to stay here year after year.… New York is one of the only cities in the country where it’s left and we’re going to lose it if we don’t mobilize politically to save it.”

Assemblyman Joe Lentol raised the issue of politics,noting his excitement over the election of Barak Obama the month before and hopes for a newly Democratic state senate: I don’t want to talk about politics, but politics has to enter into the discussion, because you’re not going to get anywhere with change unless you have the right politicians in office.… So we can do some solid things in order to change the rent control laws in our city. We may even have a shot to save the artists.

Lentol was the co-sponsor of a bill in the 1990s to create a new loft/tenant law to benefit “the artists that came in the early ’90s and lived in the buildings that nobody wanted to populate.”

Until the artists moved in and then it became fashionable for everybody to want to move in, because it was cool in Williamsburg. And you know what happened? The people who owned those loft buildings kicked the artists right out so that they can get much higher rents for those apartments. And we were unsuccessful in passing a law for those artists, because we couldn’t get it past the state senate. I think this year we have a shot to do that.

Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito agreed about the importance of “having the right people in office” who support community-based planning processes that involve communities in decision making.

What I try to bring to the table is that the most effective public policies and legislations are the ones that are really deeply rooted, in this case, in community-based planning.

Where you really are involving the affected communities in the decision making.

Speaking about the need for “low-income communities of color to build power,” Demaris Reyes, GOLES director, described her organization’s holistic approach to organizing. As a neighborhood housing and preservation organization, GOLES is dedicated to tenants’ rights, homelessness prevention and community revitalization.

Try to think about the 120 million different ways in which we can make this city more equitable for real New Yorkers and make sure we’re just not this big tourist attraction.

So, it takes lots of resources and lots of ingenuity. Having your staff in three different meetings, working 75 hours a week, come on! Let’s be honest about that.

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The key here is how do we have equitable development in a way that really takes into account the needs of existing communities and makes room for new communities because that is what makes us so beautiful, that we’re ever-changing. We need to understand or figure out how to honor those traditions and how to embrace new ones.

Otherwise, we’re not New York. We’re not the Lower East Side, the place where we have Ukrainians and Russians and Polish and Italians and Chinese and Puerto Ricans and all of the folks that make that neighborhood a place I would want to live in.

So, can we figure out the magic fix? I don’t know that we can. But what I do think is we have to be really honest about race in this country, that oppression still exists, that money still controls so much, and that we have to really vote for really good elected officials that are going to promote effective public policies that are going to promote equity.

Michelle de la Uz of the Fifth Avenue Committee reflected: This entire conversation is about values. What do we value as a society, what do we value as individuals? And what are our intentions in terms of putting those values into focus through public policy and through the actions that we take as individuals?

We’ve had hyper-capitalism and hyper market-driven approaches and sometimes it seems as though it’s so overwhelming that it’s hard to pause. Certainly the economic downturn provides us all with the opportunity to pause and plan and to strategize.

Later in the year, writer Jeff Chang made a similar point, recognizing another opportunity: “The economic crisis gives us a chance to rethink the role of creativity in making a vibrant economy and civil society.”

Arts and culture demystify policy, making it accessible. Images and stories humanize its impacts and participation broadens inclusion. Creative action releases us from hopelessness and reaction. Critical perspective, empathy, and vision enable us to bring our whole selves to the challenges ahead.

Given what’s to come, we can’t afford to bring any less.

“This is the time when the country needs a new spirit. Artists can help us to imagine that new and different world.” - Claudine Brown A longer version of this essay was originally published on the Community Arts Network (http://www.communityarts.net) as part of the series “Critical Perspectives: A Publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project,” Vol. 11. (2009-10).

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EDWARD PERRY WINSTON

EAST NEW YORK FARMS! HARVEST TIME IN THE KILLING FIELDS

How can citizens, governments, and non-governmental organizations in general address broad issues of food security within urban areas? The East New York (ENY) Farms! urban agriculture project demonstrates the inter-dependency of civic and public sector groups and emphasizes the connection between human and biological environments which should be the basis for sustainable urban planning and development. It reveals the potential for urban agriculture not only as a catalyst for community development, but also as a significant element of sustainable urban planning ORIGINS East New York, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of Brooklyn, New York, became one of the most devastated, depressed urban neighborhoods in the late ’60s and ’70s. As Walter Thabit, a city planner who worked in the neighborhood during that time, put it, “deception, profiteering, negligence, criminality, and community-destroying behavior were practiced on a grand scale, unfettered by ethical, professional, or (often) legal standards.”1 However, by the mid 1990s, central East New York had already made great strides in turning around one of the most severe examples of urban decline in not only New York City but in the entire United States as well. Public funding supported the rehabilitation of hundreds of apartments in vacant city-owned two- and three-story buildings, and helped to build hundreds more new single-family homes that were affordable to lower-middle class families. An area that had lost approximately 30% of its population between 1970 and 1990 began to be repopulated.

Nevertheless, some of the decisions made regarding the allocation of city-owned land began to displace the surviving residents. It was evident that the planning process required greater participation from the local residents. At this time, the Pratt Center was awarded a Community Outreach Participation Center (COPC) grant by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to engage five neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including East New York, in community-based planning.

In 1995, residents and non-profit organizations from East New York started meeting with a project team from the Pratt Center (GCPE Professor Ayse Yonder, planner Sean Robin, and the author) to explore ways and means to broaden and deepen the neighborhood revival already underway. Forums were held in different geographic areas within the neighborhood and with different age-groups to explore what worked, what didn’t work, and what the participants would like to see happen within the next five to ten years.

Participants at the forums emphasized that needs beyond basic housing were not being met. The neighborhood’s reputation for high crime (it set the homicide record for any single city precinct in

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1993) had severely dampened opportunities for development of small, locally-serving retail enterprises. Residents literally had to leave the neighborhood to purchase a pair of sneakers. Access to nutritious, affordable food was especially limited, with only four supermarkets serving a population of 80,000 in central East New York. Several factors restricted retail development: the perception that there was little disposable income in the neighborhood; the poor condition of the surviving ground floor storefronts; and the more lucrative opportunities in the large shopping malls being developed nearby.

New digital mapping software was used to map the existing housing patterns, community facilities, public transportation, and open spaces. The analysis facilitated by this mapping tool revealed that East New York had the largest concentration of “Green Thumb” gardens in the city, 99 out of 900 total. These gardens are vacant city-owned lots assigned to neighborhood residents who commit to tending the gardens and keeping the lots clean. The city-funded Green Thumb program also provides soil and lumber for planter beds. The two-year process of resource assessment and visioning forums exposed a need for a project that would address some of the issues raised.

THE OPPORTUNITY Two events occurred in 1997 that would help produce a project proposal for the neighborhood. The first was the announcement by Mayor Giuliani’s administration of their intent to auction off all underutilized city-owned property. This included the Green Thumb Gardens, the approximately 900 vacant lots in all five boroughs licensed to neighborhood groups who had transformed tire-strewn lots into flourishing green oases amid the disinvestment of New York City’s low-income neighborhoods in the late ’70s and ’80s. Over ninety of these gardens were located on a few of the hundreds of vacant city-owned lots in East New York, cared for by groups of neighbors, many of whom had retained gardening skills from their former homes in the rural South or the Caribbean islands.

The second event was the announcement of the Hitachi Foundation’s RFP for “Conserving Local Resources.” Although the grant announcement made it clear that it was directed primarily at rural communities, the groups from East New York—now loosely calling themselves the East New York Planning Group—seized upon this RFP as an opportunity to preserve what they considered to be valuable local resources—the Green Thumb Gardens and the horticultural expertise of the local gardeners. After some discussion, five neighborhood organizations represented in the Planning Group (East New York Urban Youth Corps, Genesis Homes/HELP USA, the Local Development Corporation of East New York, the Pratt Center, and United Community Centers), two city-wide organizations (the Cornell Coop Extension/New York City and The Green Guerrillas), and ten East New York community gardens applied together for the Hitachi funding.

In the spring of ’98 the group was awarded the $250,000 two-year grant, the only urban-based group out of ten other grantees. The group then began the daunting task of coordinating the efforts of the group. The project—now know as ENY Farms!—was, and largely still is, structured as follows: 1. The Gardens and Gardeners: Over a dozen local Green Thumb gardeners commit a portion of their gardens to produce grown for sale at the local farmers’ market. Originally starting out with one gardener, Johanna Willens, and several crafts and prepared food vendors, the group has expanded to fifteen gardeners and several “backyard” farmers participating in the market. Besides staples of

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Volunteers construct a greenhouse at East New York Farms!

Photo courtesy of the author. collard greens, snap peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, they grow and sell hard to find ethnic crops such as calaloo.

2. Technical Assistance: Cornell Coop Extension’s urban gardening extension agent, John Ameroso, provides technical assistance to help increase the quantity and quality of the vegetables grown locally. In addition to conducting annual spring workshops for the gardeners on techniques for vegetable production, organic pest control, and market presentation, he has helped construct a hothouse for early-season seedling production.

3. Youth Interns: Each season, a group of approximately 15-20 local youth between 12 and 16 is recruited, trained, and paid a stipend to assist the community gardeners plant, water, weed, harvest, and prepare for market, as well as attend to customers at the farmers’ market. The interns also plant, harvest, and sell produce from their own garden.

4. The Market: The group was able to negotiate the use of a vacant city-owned lot at Barbey and New Lots Avenue, that was paved by the city with recycled asphalt, and used the initial grant to purchase several pop-up tents, chairs and tables, scales, and banners that transform this site (on a bus line and two blocks from a subway stop) into a busy public space every Saturday between June and November. The market grossed $900 its first full season. Since then, several organic farmers from Upstate New York have been recruited to sell at the market to provide the variety and quantity of produce necessary for a viable shopping venue. After eleven seasons, the market serves approximately 11,000 shoppers and grosses slightly over $90,000/season.

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EARLY YEARS ENY Farms! had to overcome several obstacles in its early years. The lack of previous organizational models for a multi-party project left the group to struggle to understand, follow through, and make functional the roles outlined in the original grant. Eventually, staff positions that had been spread out amongst the participating groups for political reasons were combined into the current two project coordinators and one part-time market manager. Regular meetings of gardeners and market vendors have broadened the decision-making process.

As a neighborhood with one of the lowest average family income figures in the City, the delay in obtaining authorization for the WIC2 Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) coupons hurt sales the first two years. Without these coupons, it was hard to recruit upstate farmers to drive the extra miles to east Brooklyn for such a small cash market. In 2000 ENY Farms! persuaded the State Department of Agriculture & Markets to allocate $20/family/month in Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) coupons to the 4,000 low-income families in East New York. As these coupons were redeemable only at registered farmers markets like ENY Farms!, this meant a potential market worth $80,000. The first season after obtaining the FMNP coupons saw a 400% increase in gross sales at the market.

The City government’s initial opposition to community gardens resulted in sensitive negotiations for the vacant city-owned lot at New Lots Avenue and Barbey Street. During negotiations with the local councilwoman, the organizers had to avoid any mention of “gardens” and emphasize the establishment of a “crafts market.” Even after gaining initial permission to the New Lots/Barbey Street site, the market was forced to open on another site since the City had previously licensed the lot for use by a construction company. Seven years later, the City assigned the New Lots/Barbey Street site for housing development and the market had to move again. Fortunately, the time between market relocation was enough to shift the City’s attitude towards farmers’ markets and ENY Farms! was permitted use of a site on Schenck Avenue, next to the UCC garden, that will be closed off for the market on Saturdays during the growing season from June to November.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS Over the past eight seasons, the ENYPG has been able to work collaboratively to achieve the following: • Establish the ENY Farms! farmers’ market on vacant city-owned land that provides fresh, organically-grown produce to over 11,000 local residents per season on Saturdays between June and November, with total gross sales of $90,000 for its participating community gardeners and rural farmers, and that helps close the loop between food producers and consumers.

• Engage the skills and hard work of twenty community gardeners by assisting them to sell their fresh, organic produce at the local farmers’ market. Last season, the community gardeners increased their total gross sales by 200%.

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• After a period when the City government actively sought to eliminate community gardens on city-owned land, several of the community gardens participating in ENY Farms! were put in the “preserved” category as part of the resolution of New York State’s lawsuit against the City announced in 2003.

• Provide paid, supervised work experience for twenty local youth each year working with participating community gardeners and in their own Youth Garden to plant, maintain, harvest, and market vegetables at the farmers’ market. The current Market Manager is a graduate of the internship program.

• Construct a rain-harvesting system in three gardens that utilizes rainwater runoff from the roofs of adjacent row houses to fill 200 gallon cisterns to ensure adequate water supply during dry summers.

• Initiate a bee-keeping program in one of the community gardens. The harvested honey is sold at the farmers’ market.

• Start a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program where neighborhood residents purchase a rural farmer’s produce in advance for delivery at weekly pick-ups during the growing season.

• Helped establish an East New York Food Policy Council and obtain grant funding from the National Institute of Health to cover start-up costs, to research food co-op models, and to complete a business plan for a year-round food co-op in East New York, which opened its doors in November 2006.

• Appear on “Bill Moyers’ Journal” a nationally-broadcast PBS program, in an episode focusing on nutrition and the local food movement, in November 2008.

INGREDIENTS Looking at the factors that enabled this “blue sky” project to take root and bear fruit, the following are key elements: • Access to City-Owned Land: The citzen-based Green Guerrillas group, the Dept. of Housing, Development, and Preservation (HPD), and the Green Thumb gardens, initiated an ad-hoc public policy, initiated to deal with the hundreds of vacant city-owned lots in the ’70s, opening a path for grassroots energy to flow.

The gardeners and support agencies worked together and forged alliances that hold together to this day.

• Dedicated individuals who delivered on what they committed to do. One such person is Johanna Willens, the first neighborhood Green Thumb gardener to sell produce at the farmers’ market, who saw the program’s potential and helped make it a reality. Liza Butler, another community gardener who attended early Community Board meetings in support of the project, and continues to grow

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and sell her produce at the market.. ENY Farms! Garden Coordinators like Aley Schoonmaker, Georgine Yorgey, and Sarita Deftary who not only got the food production and marketing operation off the ground but also created an exemplary youth intern program that emphasizes mutual respect, support, and service to the community. Market Managers like George Clark and Salima Jones-Daley who worked effectively with local gardeners and upstate farmers alike to create on new public space each Summer Saturday in East New York. Program Coordinators Ojeda Hall-Phillips and Jennifer Stokes obtained registration of the farmers’ market with NYS Dept. of Agriculture & Markets and arranged the paving of the Barbey-New Lots site with recycled asphalt paving by DOT. • Support Agencies: The Green Thumb program, sponsored by New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, provided free compost, lumber for garden boxes, fencing, and basic tools, as well as an annual starter plant give-away.

The non-profit organization Green Guerrillas helped organize the initial meetings of community gardeners around the ENY Farms! initial grant proposal. John Ameroso, the urban agronomist working out of the Cornell Coop Extension/New York City provided invaluable technical assistance and advice to improve the gardeners’ output and to gauge which crops would sell best at the market. The Pratt Center helped write the original grant and provided a series of architectural sketches for permanent structures for the market site that culminated in a winning mixed use building proposal for a HPD-spoonsored architectural competition.

• Neighborhood Organizations’ Complementary Areas of Expertise: United Community Centers and its directors Mel Grizer and Ana Aguirre had worked almost 50 years with East New York youth; together with Genesis Homes’ experience in working with youth, the ENY Farms! internship program became a success. The Local Development Corporation of East New York was able to negotiate with the City’s Deptartment of Small Business Services a license for the vacant city lot that became the initial market site.

• Progressive Funding Organization: The Hitachi Foundation’s “Preserving Local Resources” grant, awarded in 1997, enabled a unique funder relationship that supported on-the-ground work around social and environmental sustainability.

URBAN AGRICULTURE AND CITY PLANNING East New York Farms! is not only representative of a community development project, but is also a conscious effort at broadening the scope of urban land use planning. By becoming part of the urban food production system, the vacant lot gardens helped fight efforts to auction off the lots and preserved neighborhood open space. In addition, the gardens helped promote the idea of working open space.

The average food product on supermarket shelves in the United States travels 1,200 miles from production area to consumer. Bringing food production closer to large population centers can reduce energy consumption considerably. It also contributes to the overall closing of resource loops,

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Interns tending to the urban garden at East New York Farms!

Photo courtesy of the author. a strategy advocated by many environmentalists as the basis for a more sustainable economy. By increasing direct access by rural farmers to urban consumers at farmers’ markets, these food producers can increase their earnings and help stabilize their small farms. Preserving rural vegetative land cover helps sequester carbon, create oxygen, and cool and clean the air close to urban areas.

Food security, ensuring a safe, nutritionally adequate diet for all community residents, has traditionally not been the business of city planners. Food production and distribution has not been perceived as an “urban system” that could be affected by public policy and land use considerations, and food security has been left the exclusive responsibility of the private sector. However, as the advantages of urban agriculture becomes more evident and with sustainability becoming a significant criterion for planning decisions, securing access to productive land and built spaces for food production will become important matters for public planning bodies to consider.

East New York Farms! has dedicated itself to placing food security on the agenda of civic planning groups by starting an East New York Food Policy Council in 2005. They have also joined with three other Brooklyn-based urban agriculture groups—Added Value in Red Hook, Wyckoff Farms, and the Brooklyn Psychiatric Center in Flatbush—to form Brooklyn’s Bounty. This coalition works to help market their respective farmers’ markets, assist in obtaining cold storage equipment, and coordination of staff training. These groups are now able to serve as models for the increasing interest of urban youth and families in becoming engaged in urban agriculture. At the daylong Brooklyn Food Conference in May 2009 attended by over 3,000 people, the Program Coordinator and four youth interns from East New York Farms! conducted one of the 100 workshops offered on urban food production and its techniques, benefits, and relation to other areas of sustainable urban development.

The direction and future growth of Urban Agriculture is largely in the hands of these youth. Where they take it depends on regional factors, but also on what the field’s practitioners seek to gain from

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it. Some see it as a vehicle for promoting access to nutritious food to urban areas where access to fresh produce is very limited. Many tout its production efficiencies and lower input of fossil fuel as a path to a more sustainable economy. Others see it primarily as an economic opportunity. At a recent forum on urban agriculture in New York, one rooftop farming entrepreneur cited the lower fuel consumption and higher production efficiencies of the practice, but admitted that these savings would not be passed on to the urban food consumer in the form of lower prices. Instead, as “pioneers”, they expected to recover the cost of “innovation” through higher per-pound costs. No doubt there is great potential for urban agriculture as a business, but if it results merely in another cultural trend that venture capital exploits for short-term gain, a great opportunity will be missed to lay the foundations for a different food production and distribution system.

NOTES 1 2

Walter Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2003), 2.

“WIC”—Women Infants & Children—is a federally-funded and state-administered program whereby food coupons are issued to low-income families with young children.

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STREET magazine, Issue 10-11 (Summer/Fall 1973)

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CHARLES WILSON

REVITALIZING MYRTLE AVENUE BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

In the late 1990s, Myrtle Avenue had a reputation as one of the toughest streets in Brooklyn. The wide commercial corridor bisected two neighborhoods that had been showing signs of economic and civic revival: Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Yet despite work by existing community groups, Myrtle couldn’t seem to shake some intractable problems, including a high level of retail vacancy and gated storefronts littered with graffiti. The street had earned a reputation for crime and a nickname of “Murder Avenue.” “Just the name alone made people wary,” says Varlos Braithwaite, a community-affairs police officer for the New York City Police Department’s 88th precinct, which includes the avenue.

The Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project (MARP), a local development corporation that began with a small budget in 1999, has tried in the last decade to repair the struggling commercial corridor and to foster a safe environment on the avenue. Staffed almost exclusively with urban planners, the group has brought in new businesses, improved the appearance of existing ones, and cultivated relationships between business owners on the avenue. Using a collaborative relationship with the local police precinct, the organization has been an effective partner in addressing underlying factors that contribute to crime and easing the police’s burden in the neighborhood. Their collective achievements earned MARP and the 88th Precinct a first-place MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Award, administered by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, in 2009.

EARLY STEPS The problems of Myrtle Avenue in the 1990s were “social, economic, and aesthetic,” says Dr. Tom Schutte, the president of Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, and the chair of MARP’s board of directors.

Isolated from public transportation, the avenue suffered acutely as New York declined in the 1970s and failed to recover even as the neighborhoods around it rebounded. Schutte came into his role at Pratt in 1993. Myrtle Avenue was only a few blocks away from his campus; his students mentioned to him that they felt isolated and that they “feared going to Myrtle Avenue to shop for groceries, magazines or clothing,” he says.

More than one in five of the retail stores on Myrtle Avenue were vacant by the late 1990s. Most of the owners of these properties did not live in the neighborhood and the storefronts typically had closed metal gates that gave the neighborhood a foreboding feel. The retail that existed also did not meet the needs of the neighborhood’s 30,000 residents, who were a diverse mix of AfricanAmericans, Latinos and whites. “There was a bodega on every block,” says Michael Blaise Backer, the current executive director of MARP. “But not much in the way of services or food options to pull people there.”

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So while many residents of the neighborhood avoided the avenue, crime and the drug trade flourished. The high incidence of theft and robberies also discouraged businesses from taking a chance on the neighborhood. Schutte joined other stakeholders in the area, including Dr. Georgianna Glose of Fort Greene SNAP (Strategic Neighborhood Action Partnership) and Seth Edwards of JPMorgan Chase, among others, who were working on a strategic plan to move the avenue forward, given that the patchwork of revitalization efforts in the past had not been enough. They helped form the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project, or MARP in 1999. Its first year budget was $40,000. The organization could only afford a volunteer board of directors and a paid staff of one—an urban planner named Jennifer Gerend, who became MARP’s first executive director and lived in the Fort Greene neighborhood, just a few blocks from Myrtle Avenue.

“We wanted to create an environment in which the avenue could become more functional for the people who lived there,” says Gerend. But the organization had few resources to deliver on those hopes. So Gerend and her board focused initially on an aesthetic improvement that they felt could boost the street’s morale: the removal of graffiti. The avenue was covered with it—especially the abandoned storefronts with their solid metal gates. It contributed to the perception that the criminal elements of the neighborhood controlled the street.

After an initial volunteer-driven graffiti clean-up day, Gerend later provided a map of the graffiti in the neighborhood to a private outfit that began to do monthly clean-ups. Around the same time, she also started attending the local 88th Precinct’s council meetings. She decided that if her organization was going to pay for graffiti removal, it should also start keeping track of some of the distinctive “tags” and provide them to the police in the hopes of catching repeat vandals. This information- sharing ultimately led to the identification of some of the offenders and contributed to a sense that vandalism on the avenue would no longer be treated with impunity.

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES As MARP grew its budget in the early 2000s, it focused its attention on providing other physical improvements in the community. This work reflected a belief in the “broken window theory”—the idea that a sense of disorder begets more serious crime by signaling that criminal activity is likely to be unchecked. MARP sensed that improving the street aesthetically would not only change the reputation of the avenue, but could also increase its safety. When money became available from the city to plant new trees, MARP began a process to have the street reforested. In 2001, MARP board members and allies also convinced the Brooklyn borough president to provide more than $500,000 in the city’s capital budget to fund the installation of historic streetlights on the avenue. It raised money through sponsored streetlight banners to pay for a sanitation crew to remove litter from the sidewalk and street.

Gerend also knew that to attract new business owners to the neighborhood, she would have to try to help the businesses that were already there. She spent five days a week in her early days as the executive director wandering the avenue, getting to know the storeowners. Out of these efforts, she began to build trust. “One of the first things she did,” says Georgianna Glose, a board member and community leader who was involved in the founding of MARP, “was to work with a fish store owner who was moving from one storefront to the other. She reached out to Pratt Institute, and students there provided free help to design a beautiful store. It went from being this dumpy corner store to this lovely fish store that got a lot of press. It galvanized attention of what MARP could do.”

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This work became part of a wider storefront improvement program that had the goal of both improving the appearance of the streetscape as well as enhancing the security of the new and existing businesses. MARP leveraged existing private, state and city funds to help pay for these efforts. And the organization began to employ a part-time graphic designer to assist businesses in designing new signs.

The storefront of Gnarly Vines wine shop, before occupation and after assistance from MARP. To improve the security of storefronts, MARP also enlisted the help of the police. Gerend and others felt that the avenue’s solid metal gates—which were either rolled down at the end of each business day or had been closed for years—contributed to the sense that the neighborhood was in lockdown.

MARP tried to convince the storeowners to switch to open mesh gates to be placed either on the inside or the outside of the store. To help alleviate concerns about added crime and vandalism that these changes might bring, MARP collaborated with Crime Prevention Officers from the New York City Police Department. These specialists would visit merchants and provide recommendations to enhance security while at the same time staying true to the open, accessible feel that MARP wanted to cultivate on the avenue. The prevention officers would stress the importance of keeping a line of vision through the storefront to the street, for example, and the value of keeping storefronts lit at night. The officers would also help with the placement of security cameras as part of a business’ security system.

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The storefront improvement program has become a permanent part of MARP’s work. The organization currently issues roughly 10 matching incentive grants a year to Myrtle Avenue businesses, ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. More than 50 storefront improvements have been made on the avenue since the program’s inception.

EYES AND EARS As MARP began to show that it could improve the appearance and security of the avenue, it began to have some success in luring new merchants. In order to make way for new businesses, the organization researched and sent certified mailings to the existing absentee property owners. In many cases, MARP then played a key role in convincing the absentee owner to rent their property to a new business owner who was local and who cared to take a chance on the avenue.

To find new tenants who were willing to take a chance on Myrtle Avenue, “initially there was a lot of cold calling,” says Michael Blaise Backer, an urban planner who began as an intern at MARP and succeeded Gerend as executive director in 2004. “Part of the strategy was hitting up certain Brooklyn businesses that had perhaps one location and convince them to place a second.” Encouraged by the improvements on the street, local cousins Farid Assad and Ahmad Samhan agreed to open a second location of their Middle Eastern restaurant Zaytoons. Connecticut Muffin, a locally-owned coffee and bakery chain, opened up a location with an airy feel and large windows at the intersection of Myrtle and Clinton Avenues. Bergen Bagels, also a Brooklyn-born business, soon set up its second store a few blocks down.

MARP made efforts at every store ribbon-cutting ceremony to attract local press and to convey the sense that the reputation of the avenue was changing. Gerend and Backer also worked successfully to retain existing businesses that were already on the street. They took care to bring businesses to sections of the corridor that had attracted crime. To replace a large surface parking lot that was serving as a place for loitering, Tom Schutte, the president of Pratt, convinced his university to re-locate its art supply store there from its former location on campus.

In the early 2000s, MARP had been able to support the work of a threadbare staff of urban planners through a mix of private and public grants. But board members worried that funding of their work was not consistent and sustainable. As trust was built between the organization and local merchants and property owners, MARP decided to work toward the creation of a Business Improvement District (BID)—a private-public partnership in which commercial property owners on Myrtle Avenue would agree to pay an extra annual fee in order to fund improved services such as regular sidewalk sweeping and graffiti removal, beautification, and marketing of the retail district. The BID would also contribute to ensuring that MARP’s paid staff could continue to work full-time on improving the avenue. BIDs can be a hard sell; they essentially require all the property owners and businesses within a given area to agree voluntarily to a new payment that is above and beyond their property tax. Yet it was a sign of MARP’s increasingly strong relationships on the avenue that both commercial property owners and their tenants approved the BID in 2005. It currently provides $350,000 annually toward services in the 20-block retail district.

MARP soon began to help with law enforcement on the avenue in ways that were not anticipated. In 2005, Michael Blaise Backer started a listserv, an electronic email list, open to all merchants within the BID in order to allow them to communicate between each other and with MARP. Through the

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PUBLIC ART AS A COMMUNITY-BUILDING TOOL The reduction of crime on Myrtle Avenue is owed in part to increased cooperation among local retailers through the Business Improvement District. Business owners have shown that they share information and no longer operate in isolation. One subtle way of demonstrating this increased cooperation has been through the Myrtle Windows Gallery, a project shepherded by MARP that has storefronts showcase the work of local Brooklyn artists. The work of a single painter or photographer is hung for a month at a time in the windows of Myrtle Avenue stores as diverse as a grocer, a laundromat, a salon, and a Thai restaurant. A short description of the artist’s work is also visible, encouraging people to stop and peruse the storefronts.

The board members of MARP have shown a belief in public art as a community-building tool. Tom Schutte, the president of Pratt Institute and the MARP board chairman, has students and alumni from his university involved in a program to create artistic pieces of street furniture for Myrtle

mailing list, “a few merchants have played a leadership role in letting people know about a suspicious person or occurrence,” says Backer. Myrtle Avenue business owners used the listserv to help spread news, for example, about a man who was trying to sell fake radio advertisements, or about another man who attacked a delivery man in broad daylight. Backer and others at MARP relayed this information from the listserv to the police department; in both cases, the perpetrator was caught.

“We can’t be everywhere,” says Andrene Sergeant, a community affairs officer in the 88th Precinct.

MARP and the BID members, she says, “are kind of like our eyes and ears. If there’s a problem, they will let us know. And if we have a problem, and we want to get information out, we’ll use them.”

When local businesses noticed that the corner of Waverly and Myrtle Avenues had become heavily trafficked by drug users, for instance, they alerted the staff of MARP, who then relayed that information to the police. The officers set up an encampment to stake out the corner. In another instance, the owners of a local Chinese restaurant called the police directly about a group of African-American high school students who they felt were threatening. The young people felt that they were unfairly targeted. The police department in turn called on members of MARP to help mediate the situation, which was fraught with racial tension. Members of MARP’s staff were able to talk to the owners, with whom they already had a relationship, and help to defuse the conflict.

MARP has also helped relationships between the police and the community in more subtle ways.

When a new business opens up in the neighborhood, MARP coordinates with the two community affairs officers assigned to the avenue to drop by the new owner for a friendly chat. “Sometimes people can see a uniform coming in,” says Sergeant, “and you feel you have to say ‘I come in peace.’” She credits MARP with serving to soften the police image and act as an effective intermediary between the department and the community.

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Avenue including a bench, a tree guard and a community bulletin board. In 2008, MARP brought the work of the “Tree Hugger Project” to the avenue, a public art project by Wiktor Szostalo and Agnieszka Gradzik that shows figures made of twine, branches and twigs embracing some trees on the avenue. The art is intended to foster a message of concern for the environment and a love for shared public space.

“Myrtle Avenue today is so much stronger from an aesthetic standpoint,” says Schutte. He feels that the physical improvements of the avenue, historic streetlights and the creative touches are not unrelated to the reduction in crime there, and experience has seemed to prove him right.

A RENEWED COMMUNITY MARP’s work has played a part in significant crime reductions on Myrtle Avenue. In the 88th precinct, which includes the avenue, crime fell overall by nearly 30% from 2001 to 2008—surpassing the citywide average. Robberies have been cut nearly in half. The reduction of thefts and violent crime on Myrtle Avenue has come even as the police have diverted their attention and manpower to cover areas that have emerged as more troublesome.

These changes have happened in large part because the community has taken some ownership and pride in a street that once seemed to have little hope of a viable future. Roughly 150 merchants now occupy Myrtle Avenue; more than three-quarters of them are minority- or woman-owned, and a full 97% are locally-owned. It was important to MARP that the business owners reflect the demographics of the neighborhood to avoid the uncomfortable tensions of gentrification. The avenue now includes a diverse retail mix that better meets the needs of the residents there; the presence of a hardware store, pharmacies, beauty salons, barbers, banks, pet stores and grocers means that people do not need to travel to Manhattan or other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The vacancy rate on the avenue has also been cut in half within a decade. The opening of new sit-down restaurants recruited by MARP has particularly increased foot traffic at night—a time when Myrtle Avenue used to feel the most foreboding.

MARP has sought to enhance the community’s pride in the avenue by starting an ad campaign in 2007 called “Home Grown & Locally Owned” that includes pictures and quotes from local business owners who have opened shops on Myrtle. These campaign images have been featured in advertisements in local newspapers, billboards, and subway platforms. They have also been printed on postcards distributed in the area. MARP publishes an attractively designed directory of avenue businesses as well that is circulated in the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill neighborhoods and online.

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This work has all been part of a larger effort to rebrand a corridor that is no longer referred to as “Murder Avenue.” The successes thus far indicate how good planning, aesthetic improvements, and the cultivation of a cohesive business community can effectively create an environment that eases the police responsibility. “Everything has changed,” says the 88th precinct’s Andrene Sergeant. “It’s more lively. You’re not seeing the debris in the street; there’s constantly somebody cleaning. I feel that Myrtle Avenue has come a long way.”

A version of this case study was written by Charles Wilson for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation in recognition of the MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Award given to the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project LDC and the New York City Police Department’s 88th Precinct in November 2009. These partners were selected from more than 650 applicants for the award which honors their achievements in improving community safety and spurring economic development through collaborative efforts.

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IRA STERN

THE NEW YORK CITY WATERSHED: A COMMUNITY-BASED APPROACH

Consider that the 2,000 square mile watershed that produces New York City’s daily water needs of more than one billion gallons a day comes not from a national forest or City-owned reserve, but from a land area that is predominantly privately owned. The watershed that fills City reservoirs is located within a 125 mile radius of New York City and is generally extends from the northern border of the Bronx through the suburbia of Westchester and Putnam, across the Hudson River, to the upper Catskill Mountains. This means that the eight counties, 60 towns, and 11 villages in New York State found themselves involved in the efforts of the City to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act and secure its future, whether they liked it or not.

Further complicating this situation, the 19 reservoirs that comprise the City system were created through eminent domain starting in the early 1800s and completed in the late 1960s. Condemnation of the land that produced the City’s reservoirs was a transformative experience for the displaced communities. Some of the broadest and most fertile river valleys of the Croton, Hudson and Delaware watersheds were inundated by billions of gallons of water displacing farms, homes, schools, churches, cemeteries, mills and entire communities. “Told they must leave their homes, uproot their dead and see their lands inundated, they cried, they howled in protest, and then many hired lawyers to argue for the best deal they could get from the City.”1 As with many exercises of eminent domain, just compensation was difficult to swallow for the displaced, and unresolved claims against the City lingered for decades. As late as 1988, the Walton (NY) Reporter covered a hearing which was “a calendar call for 829 claimants whose cases have not been settled although the reservoirs have been completed for more than two decades, and some of the claimants are dead. Farmers, grocery stores, school districts, taxi firms, banks, doctors, bars, auto dealers, and other businesses and individuals are listed on the calendar call.”2 Shortly thereafter, the City would be back seeking changes in the same community to accommodate its water supply again.

The City’s search for water sources outside its boundaries began in 1838 when all the construction contracts were in place to dam the Croton River in Westchester. In 1905, the growing City took 22 years to construct the Catskill System in Ulster and Greene Counties and, soon thereafter, started planning the final piece of its vast water supply—the Delaware System. In addition to facing the same tumultuous condemnation process to create four more massive reservoirs, the City also endured legal challenges from the downstream states that shared the Delaware River. This conflict culminated in a Supreme Court decision in 1931 creating a water-sharing paradigm that generally remains in effect today. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the court’s decision, “A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. New York has the physical power to cut off all the water within its jurisdiction. But clearly the exercise of such a power to the destruction of the interest of lower states could not be tolerated.”3

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PROTECTING WATER FOR THE CITY In 1989, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued the Surface Water Treatment Rule (SWTR) of the Safe Drinking Water Act which required all surface water systems to be filtered unless the supplier proved that it could otherwise protect its water source and meet the water quality standards in the Rule. A filtration plant for New York City was estimated to cost between $6-8 billion to build and $350-500 million a year to operate. Blessed with the pure waters of the mostly rural and forested Catskill and Delaware watersheds, the City had a choice. Deciding to pursue a watershed protection plan rather than build a costly filtration plant, the pressure to comply with the new federal rule meant that democracy would face a severe test. Ironically, the City’s efforts to create a watershed plan would depend on the toleration and cooperation of the very communities that were displaced to make way for the reservoirs in the first place.

The City’s first attempts to protect its water supply under the new SWTR began with the issuance of a “Discussion Draft” of an update to land use regulations that the City had maintained since 1954 which primarily regulated on-site septic systems. The new draft regulations proposed setbacks for agricultural uses and created new standards for wastewater treatment plants and impervious surfaces and would restrict junkyards, landfills, car washes and cemeteries. The “discussion” became one sided very quickly as the residents of the watershed made it clear that there was very little tolerance for the City in their communities. “It should be that our management practices should be enough. Now they want to control life on the hills…Well, they moved us out of the valley. They put us on the hills in the first place,” stated Richard Coombe, a State assemblyman and beef farmer in the watershed at an information session held by the City on November 14, 1990.4 The City’s draft plan also included the purchase of more land in the watershed—up to 80,000 acres—which would almost triple the City’s holdings.

The City’s jurisdiction to promulgate regulations outside of its municipal boundary was challenged legally as was just about every attempt of the City to move its watershed protection program forward.

The sentiment of the community was summed up well by an editorial in the Sullivan-Democrat, a small newspaper serving Sullivan County, which suggested sardonically, “We could put up signs throughout the watershed areas stating ‘Welcome to the Catskill Mountains—Home of the New York City Water Supply, No More People Allowed.”5 WATERSHED ASSESSMENT A watershed assessment of the expansive 2,000 square mile watershed showed ownership patterns that were not particularly conducive to the City being able to control the future, but also a land cover that gave much hope. In 1993, the land ownership in the entire City watershed was predominantly privately owned. Tax parcels attributed to residential, commercial, agricultural and other privately owned land in the Catskill and Delaware watersheds, where 90% of the City’s daily supply comes from, comprised 76% of the watershed.6 Publicly held land accounted for 24% of the watershed with the City owning only 3.5% of that land. Another glaring challenge posed by the ownership statistics is that the future of the City’s water was dependent on the land use decisions of the 230,000 residents, farmers, businesses and municipalities of the watershed.7 Land coverage and land use of the watershed area shows a predominance of forested and vegetated land. The watershed is 68% covered in forest, 5% agriculture, and 2% wetland—perfect for clean

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water. The largest land use category is low density residential (<15 acres).8 Most of the impervious surface was concentrated east of the Hudson River in Westchester and Putnam Counties. Impervious surfaces—in the form of roads, roofs, and parking lots—increase stormwater runoff, flushing pollutants into water courses at a quantity and quality in excess of nature’s capacity to handle.

Another component of the City’s watershed assessment centered around data collected by its water quality monitoring program to indicate problems and challenges on a basin by basin basis. The water supply, while consistently meeting water quality standards, did experience reservoir specific problems that needed to be addressed by the watershed plan. Excess nutrients were found to impair the Cannonsville Reservoir and additional reservoirs in the Croton Watershed east of the Hudson River. Turbidity is a pollutant driven by large storm events in the Catskill system due to the glacial clay lakebed geology of the Esopus and Schoharie basins that feed water to the Ashokan Reservoir.

Point source discharges, mostly 105 wastewater treatment plants in the watershed, were identified and their effluent and discharging streams were analyzed. Non-point sources such as failing septic systems, stormwater runoff, and farm generated wastes were the biggest concern due to potential pathogen content and the expansive and diffused nature of the activities that create the pollution.

While the land cover and existing level of development in the watershed gave promise to efforts to avoid building a large filtration plant, guaranteeing the future of the water quality required a strategy that was comprehensive and effective.

A “SHOTGUN WEDDING” City and State politics also had an impact on the City’s pursuit of clean water. Mayor David Dinkins and DEP Commissioner Albert Appleton had the foresight to capitalize on the City’s excellent water quality and pursue filtration avoidance. However, a lack of communication and relationship building with upstate communities doomed the City’s initial overtures. One year after Rudolph Giuliani took over as New York City’s mayor, George Pataki became Governor of New York State in 1995. As part of his transition planning, Governor Pataki made solving the watershed impasse a priority of his new administration. Governor Pataki assigned staff from his general counsel’s office to spearhead an agreement that attempted to meet upstate and downstate concerns and needs.

By this point, Mayor Giuliani’s new commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, Marilyn Gelber, had already started to make some headway towards a new model of watershed protection. Ms. Gelber’s background in neighborhood planning and cooperative solutions in Brooklyn and throughout New York City compelled her to get to know the wants and desires of the watershed communities. She knew it was necessary to “change the landscape from hostility and distrust to one of trust, respect and credibility.”9 When it became known that the new Commissioner’s annual summer vacation camping trip took place throughout the Catskill Mountains, the watershed leadership took notice.

Commissioner Gelber was open to linking economic investment by the City in watershed communities to try to gain their acceptance of new regulations and a land acquisition program. If the City wanted clean water, it would need to support the suppliers of that water—the residents and businesses of the watershed—and pay for improvements to environmental infrastructure like upgraded septic systems and wastewater treatment plants. “It’s all part of trying to encourage sensible landuse planning,” Ms. Gelber said. “There is nothing wrong with a healthy small town.”10 While this new approach seemed to point to a direction that could show promise, the details of watershed regula-

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tions, and rules that would govern the City’s land acquisition program, as well as lingering historic insults, would need to be reconciled.

Governor Pataki’s mediation provided the structure needed to bring parties together in a setting that would keep them working together. The rules of engagement were that the parties were to keep their discussions out of the newspaper and in the conference room. “In a key move, negotiators were sworn to secrecy to keep both sides focused on goals instead of on how the talks would play in the press. Michael Finnegan [Governor Pataki’s General Counsel] said, ‘The current disputes in Washington are being negotiated with all the finesse of a 30-second spot, [and] that’s exactly what I feared could happen here.”11 This rule of engagement proved invaluable as a way to keep the discussion both frank and pointed and focused on mutually agreeable solutions as both sides engaged in a high stakes negotiation of their collective future.

The 250 negotiating sessions extended for a year and were conducted in locations from New York City throughout the watershed areas to Albany. Represented at the table were the US EPA, New York City DEP and Law Department, New York State Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation, the Coalition of Watershed Towns, Westchester and Putnam Counties and, later on in the negotiations, representatives of environmental organizations and the business community. Early in the process, each meeting was limited to a particular issue whereupon the City shared its data and alternatives were discussed. In between sessions, staff were given assignments to hammer out the details of various programs. Later meetings focused on punchlists of unresolved issues where compromises were forged in some cases and new ideas and proposals materialized.

One critical component of democracy in action in this case was that the very people who were at odds with each other ended up spending an inordinate amount of time together in these negotiating sessions. They started to understand each other better and acknowledge the history between the upstaters and downstaters. The relationships and air of mutual respect that began to develop enabled an agreement to be forged that was signed by every town in the watershed, met the requirements of the EPA and SDWA, and secured the approvals needed from the State regarding regulations and land acquisition.

The Watershed Agreement was signed on January 21, 1997 and clearly stated that “the Parties recognize that the goals of drinking water protection and economic vitality within Watershed communities are not inconsistent and it is the intention of the Parties to enter into a new era of partnership to cooperate in the development and implementation of a Watershed protection program that maintains and enhances the quality of life of the New York City drinking water supply system and the economic vitality and social character of the Watershed communities.” The agreement included state of the art land use regulations, a comprehensive land acquisition program, and partnership programs that direct City investments to water quality vulnerabilities in watershed communities.12 The Land Acquisition program was designed to use both fee simple and conservation easement purchases in a willing seller/willing buyer manner. The 80,000 acre goal expressed early on by the City was abandoned and replaced with a solicitation schedule and prioritized plan that was included in the Agreement. The solicitation schedule and a dedicated capital account satisfied the EPA that the City would use it best efforts to buy land. The acquisition program also called for hamlet designated areas—future growth areas—where the City was forbidden to buy land upon the exercise of

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this option by each individual town. Provisions for hiking and hunting on the newly acquired lands were provided.

The new regulations focused on limitations to impervious surfaces within the watershed, especially in proximity to watercourses. Wastewater treatment was increased to a tertiary treatment standard across the watershed which would address a primary point source of fecal coliform, pathogens, and nutrient pollution in the watershed. Key to acceptance of the regulations were that the City would supply the money needed for compliance and that the regulatory process be geared toward residents, businesses, and municipalities that had little or no professional planning staff available.

Partnership programs emerged that mirrored the landscape, society and economy of the watershed, addressed current and potential water quality problems, and reflected the new regulations that were put in place. Programs to replace failed septic systems, inadequate salt storage facilities, retrofit stormwater infrastructure, extend sewer systems, protect streams, and build new wastewater treatment plants were included. Funds were also set aside for public education programs and museum exhibits dedicated to telling the story of the water supply and the sacrifices made to accommodate it. One of the last pieces to the puzzle was the creation of the Catskill Fund for the Futureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a regional economic development fundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to be used for grants and loans to support responsible, environmentally sound projects that would facilitate job growth despite the regulations and land acquisition occurring in the watershed area.

Taking a page from the early success of the Watershed Agricultural Council, the Watershed Agreement established two new organizations designed to implement many of the abovementioned programs and to provide a forum for disputes and monitoring the progress of the Agreement. The Catskill Watershed Corporation was formed as a not-for-profit corporation whose membership was carefully designed to reflect the population and land area attributed to each county, one representative from the City, one from the State, and one person who represents the environmental parties.

The CWC manages the CFF and delivers most of the partnership programs directly to residents, businesses, and municipalities. The Watershed Protection and Partnership Council was also created with a broader membership that spanned East and West of the Hudson to mediate disputes and monitor the progress of the Agreement.

The Watershed Agreement combines state of the art watershed assessment and management techniques with proven democratic principles of implementation and governance. Source water protection, multiple barriers, remedial and preventative strategies, monitoring and evaluation were built in to protect water quality for the long term. Peer-to-peer implementation, multiple objective planning, building local capacity for stewardship, endowed funds under shared upstate/downstate control, and an information sharing and mediation entity with broad representation are elements designed to ensure a sustained effort towards the mutual benefits of watershed protection that is community-based.

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NOTES D. Galusha, Liquid Assets: A History of New York City’s Water System (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1999), 132.

2 The Walton Reporter, January 15, 1988.

3 State of New Jersey vs. State of New York and City of New York, No. 16, Supreme Court of the United States (decision May 4, 1931).

4 “Southern Catskill Residents Protest Watershed Plans,” Kingston Daily Freeman (November 15, 1990). 5. Coombe later became the first Chairperson of the Watershed Agricultural Council, Inc. a a non-profit organized to develop pollution prevention plans and best management practices to control farm pollution in an early partnership with the City.

5 “Our Most Important Product,” Sullivan County Democrat (December 28, 1990), 2A. 6 New York City Department of Environmental Protection, Envrionmental Impact Statement.

7 National Research Council, Watershed Management for Potable Water Supply (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000), 77.

8 Ibid., 83.

9 C. Calhoun, “A Town Called Olive: A Perspective on New York City’s Water Supply” (June 1997). www.catskillarchive.com/watershed/olive.htm.

10 A. C. Revkin, “Critics of Watershed Plan See Tilt Toward Upstate Evolving,” New York Times (July 5, 1996).

11 A. C. Revkin, “Chasing a Deal on Water With a Few Pitchers of Beer,” New York Times (November 5, 1995, New York Edition) 141.

12 New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement, Article I (1997).

1

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ADAM FRIEDMAN

TRANSFORMING THE CITY’S MANUFACTURING LANDSCAPE

Imagine that it’s a hot, steamy Sunday morning. You’re in bed looking out the window at a hazy, grey sky. You hear the low, constant rumble of trucks crossing the Hudson, laden with everything the city needs to survive.

You get up and drag yourself into your kitchen. You put a frozen bagel in your toaster and a spoonful of instant coffee in your cup. You want to go out to buy a newspaper. But instead you sit in front of your computer to read the Sunday news because nothing is printed any longer in New York.

You have a ticket to the last art gallery in New York, something you’ve waited months to see. You look in your closet through the newest Wal-Mart mix-and-match separates but nothing inspires.

You’re finally ready to venture out but you’re limping. There is no excitement, no anticipation of the unexpected, the newness, the edginess that city life once brought.

This is not my beautiful New York!

The smog, fatigue, environmental and cultural degradation just envisioned comes not from an over abundance of manufacturing and industrial uses, but from their absence. Imagine if everything the city needed to survive had to be trucked in—if every inch of our waterfront had been developed into luxury condos and we lost the capacity to barge in materials and the ability to make the comforts and quirky pleasures of urban life here in the city.

There are 7,000 manufacturing companies in New York City. You may not see them or the almost 100,000 people who work for them. But they are here, not only maintaining the basic necessities that every city needs, but adding to the diversity, creativity, allure and energy that is New York’s greatest competitive advantage, and helping to maintain New York’s sustainability.

If the city is serious about its commitments to reducing its carbon footprint, to increasing the use of recycled materials and to retrofitting its building stock to reduce energy consumption, then the city needs local manufacturers to create green products and transform its waste into usable resources.

Furthermore, if New York is to grow its creative engine, it needs to maintain the diversity of spaces, jobs and people that inspires creativity. If the city is to cut the income disparity that has come to characterize New York’s economy and offer more paths into the middle class, it needs to create wellpaying manufacturing jobs and offer affordable space for industrial entrepreneurs.

THE INVISIBLE MIDDLE CLASS SECTOR In the New York City of the 1950s, it was hard not to know someone who worked in a factory. There were more than 1 million manufacturing jobs in New York, roughly one of every three workers.1

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While there were factories in every borough, the greatest concentration was in Manhattan where office workers and factory workers crammed the subways together. The one- and two-family neighborhoods of Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn were built by, and largely for, workers who were making their way from the shop floor to production supervisor to manager.

Manufacturing is far less visible today in New York City. The drop in manufacturing employment and growth of other sectors has reduced the profile and relative importance of manufacturing. The geography of manufacturing has changed, with both market forces and numerous zoning changes pushing manufacturing out of view. Today, manufacturing jobs are primarily held by people of color, who make up 69 percent of the city’s manufacturing workers, and immigrants, who account for 66 percent.2 If there is any doubt of the veracity of those statistics, one need only observe the Greenpoint Avenue or 36th Street subway stations in Brooklyn at 7 a.m. on a weekday; streams of

15 9.4

10 5

3.6

0 -5

- 4.2

- 4.8

- 6.5

-10

- 9.2

- 3.6

- 7.7 -10.1

-15 Bottom tenth

Median

Top tenth

Source: One City, One Future (2008) National Employment Law Project, New York Jobs with Justice and the Pratt Center for Community Development. Analysis of data by the Fiscal Policy Institute.

FIGURE: NEW YORKERS’ INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PAYCHECKS

Latino and African-American workers come through these stations, heading to their manufacturing jobs nearby. The relocation of jobs to the outer boroughs, the shift in demographics, and the drop in employment, have combined to reduce the sector’s visibility.

The experience of physical work, of making a tangible product, and of being in industrial neighborhoods is now fairly limited among New York City’s population. Yet there are 100,000 manufacturing jobs, 120,000 jobs in other industrial sectors such as transportation, warehousing and utilities. And there are another 200,000 jobs in construction and wholesaling—a full sixth of the city’s private employment.

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These hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs are pathways to the middle class for many families, particularly for people who lack educational credentials. Manufacturing jobs pay $52,000 on average—49 percent to 121 percent more than the average retail and restaurant jobs.3 Yet 34 percent of the manufacturing workforce does not have a high school degree.4 Study after study rightly points to the drop in manufacturing employment as one of the root causes of New York’s growing income disparity and the shrinkage of the middle class. In addition, manufacturing provided an economic ladder that helped immigrants and low-income families climb into the middle class. And these studies have fueled the argument that the city must do more to preserve—and even grow—this sector.5 MANUFACTURING AND THE ECONOMY IN NEW YORK As 2008 drew to a close, New York and many other urban areas around the country and the world experienced the volatility of an economy driven mainly by the financial sector. By early estimates, New York has already suffered more than other cities because of our dependence on financial services. It is extraordinarily ironic that the city is now suffering because it has ignored the cardinal rule of financial management: Diversify. Don’t put your savings in any one investment. Urban economies are no different.

Across the country, there is growing public support for rebuilding our manufacturing base. It is a core component of the emerging federal economic policy that investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy should be used to not only improve the country’s basic competitiveness, but stimulate business and job growth in the industries that make the hundreds of component parts for renewable energy systems.

The green energy sector is only one area with the potential to generate production jobs. Cities throughout the United States whose economies were built on manufacturing are developing strategies for their industrial sectors. For example, Chicago and Los Angeles have emphasized the retention and attraction of manufacturing as a key economic strategy for economic diversification. But local production is not only a means to economic diversity; it holds environmental, cultural and social benefits to a city.

HIGH-VALUE MANUFACTURING IN NEW YORK In January 2003, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke about the high cost of doing business in New York City. “If New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart…It’s a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it.”

Some interpreted the mayor’s remarks to mean that New York was only for the rich and therefore city policy could disregard the middle class and their business and employment needs. But there is another interpretation that reflects what is already happening on the ground in our city and offers a chance to build upon our unique local advantages.

The truth is New York City will always provide a high-cost business environment. However, businesses in all sectors can adapt to New York’s high costs by producing high value-added goods and services to provide middle-class and decent entry-level jobs. This strategy is as true for manufacturing as it is for the arts, legal and financial services and other sectors of the economy. In manufactur-

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ing, value-added represents the difference between the cost of raw materials and the value of the final good due to how the materials have been transformed (for example, pieces of wood and metal worth a couple of hundred dollars are worth tens of thousands when they are made into a Steinway Piano). The good part is that high value-added businesses generally lead to higher wages because the workers are the ones adding a good share of that value to the end product.

New York’s manufacturers are the best in their industries. They have to be in order to survive. It is not cost-effective to manufacture low-value goods like staplers in a high-cost environment like New York City. In the diamond industry, New York jewelers cut only the largest stones and send the small diamonds to be cut abroad—who has time for a small diamond? New York apparel manufacturers work with the city’s designers to produce samples or couture that retails for $5,000 and more. The schmatte business is gone but the fashion business still thrives.

High-value means several things. First, workers’ skills in transforming raw materials into finished goods—typically learned on the job over many years—lead to high wages. Second, proximity makes direct face-to-face communications between customers, their design resources and the manufacturer possible. Proximity makes “quick turn” production possible—a good business model in a town that does not have time to add the word “around” to the phrase. Proximity is also freshness—nobody wants a croissant that has been sitting on a truck for more than one hour, two at the most. Third, high-value is design, care, craft or culture, which can include technology but is not necessarily high technology, as anyone who has purchased Der Dau boots, a Ferrara metal chair or a Scrapile wood table knows.6 The density, diversity and wealth of New York’s marketplace create a natural incubator for high value-added businesses. But this does not mean local manufacturers serve only the New York market.

The base may be here but they also export to niche markets throughout the country which in themselves may not be large enough to support an industry. For example, New York food manufacturers (which tend to be specialty producers nurtured by local immigrant markets) export $1.6 billion worth of locally manufactured foods (about 34 percent of total sales).7 The transformation of the New York City manufacturing sector into a smaller but very high-value added set of businesses may offer lessons for the city’s handling of the financial services sector.

The loss of larger manufacturing operations that made relatively low-design, commodity products like staplers (Swingline), electrical switches (Eagle) and pots and pans (Farberware) was largely inevitable. They no longer had a business reason for being in New York. Proximity to the market and design talent did not justify the cost of a New York location.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEED FOR MANUFACTURING The notion that a healthy manufacturing sector is necessary to promote New York’s environmental well-being may at first seem counterintuitive. Buried in our conception of manufacturing are images of dark factories belching smoke and pouring hazardous waste into our waterways while workers are abused below the heels of greedy bosses.

While the toxic remains of manufacturing’s past continue to contaminate brownfields around the city, today’s manufacturers are fundamentally different. The smokestacks that manufacturers previously needed to generate their own power are gone, replaced by modern utilities or their own

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renewable energy supply.8 Government regulation has largely forced manufacturers to clean up.

Low-road companies moved abroad to low-wage areas, which also tend to have minimal environmental protections.

Now, a new business model and culture based on sustainable business principles is emerging. This business model is often described as having a “triple bottom line” that measures not only profit but the environmental and social impact of the business. A sustainable manufacturer seeks to reduce waste not only because it reduces the costs of materials and disposal, but because it also consumes less of our planet’s resources and will help the manufacturers expand their markets to consumers concerned about the environment.

In the Brooklyn Navy Yard (an industrial park owned by the city), IceStone takes recycled glass and makes it into granite-like slab material that can be used as kitchen and bathroom countertops. Five years ago, IceStone employed five people and today it employs 50. “We’re going to double in three years” says Peter Strugatz, IceStone’s Co-CEO. “The crazy part of this business has been that we have had to buy our glass from the Midwest and truck it in. Local glass is collected, co-mingled, broken and mixed with rotting organics, which mixes the colors and makes it almost worthless for commercial uses.” To create a source of local glass for both the company and for other manufacturers, IceStone recently created IceGlass, which is attempting to establish a glass processing facility that will create glass of higher value that is color-sorted, cleaned and crushed. This glass would be made available for high-value products that can be reused.

Elsewhere in the Yard, a biodiesel company is setting up a factory to collect waste cooking oil and grease from restaurants in the City. The waste will be reprocessed so it can fuel diesel engines.

Another company is building a solar and wind powered streetlamp and designing extremely energy efficient light bulbs.

To attract these green manufacturers and to set an example for others, the Yard itself is greening its operations. New buildings are built to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards promulgated by the U. S. Green Building Council to assess the sustainability of a building.

The Yard is also installing solar and wind generators and looking for other ways to reduce waste and energy consumption to reduce its total carbon footprint. Finally, the Yard is developing approximately 1 million sq. ft. of new industrial space.

There are a variety of forces driving the growth of local green manufacturing and creating opportunities for a healthy green manufacturing sector. One of the most important factors is increasing and unstable energy costs. The other is the absolute imperative to reduce carbon emissions, which may soon be embedded in American law. These factors are combining to increase transportation costs relative to other cost factors. Historically, transportation costs have fallen continuously as people harnessed water and wind, then coal and rail, and then oil and diesel to move goods.9 The consumption of increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels and the almost unfettered release of carbon into the air are coming to an end, and that will lead to changes in transportation patterns and costs.

Shifts in public policy can also spur growth in manufacturing. Governments at all levels are increasingly supporting business practices that hold manufacturers responsible not only for the production but also for the disposal of a product—a product’s “life cycle.”10 For example, this past year the New

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York City Council passed legislation that will require manufacturers of electronic equipment such as computers, printers and cell phones to develop programs to retrieve and recycle their customers’ electronic waste. The European Union is already developing pilot programs and standards for the recovery and recycling of such “e-waste.” This may lead not only to product redesign to facilitate disassembly and reuse, but may impact how manufacturers choose a location for their businesses.

In the past, manufacturers only had to factor in the cost of transporting a product to the consumer.

Now, there may be the cost of a return trip. These forces are pushing the “point of production” to coincide with the “point of consumption.”

THE CHALLENGES TO NEW YORK’S MANUFACTURING SECTOR Study after study concludes that space is the primary challenge to retaining and growing the city’s manufacturing sector.11 The real estate challenge is really three interrelated problems: insufficient space for the number of industries that want to be in New York City; unstable real estate conditions fostered by antiquated zoning; and a mismatch between the needs of small companies and the space which was built for larger traditional manufacturers.

There are about 250 million square feet of industrial space in New York City, which seems like a lot. But the areas zoned for manufacturing in New York must also accommodate a variety of other extremely land-consuming uses essential to the basic operations of the city. This includes the city’s airports, subway yards, utilities, oil and gas storage tanks, as well as the warehouses that keep our food and other essentials in close reach. While the vacancy rate for industrial space is not tracked as carefully as it is for residential and office space, there is abundant anecdotal evidence: There is no vacant space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the industrial parks each report vacancy rates under 5 percent. Over the past 5 years, the city has rezoned approximately 20 million square feet of space and an additional 12 million are in the pipeline to be rezoned from manufacturing to other uses. Approximately 20 percent of the city’s industrial land will have been rezoned within a few years.12 Even in those areas zoned for manufacturing, the current Zoning Resolution permits other nonindustrial uses that can price out manufacturing. Manufacturing is a high-value added activity because a manufacturer’s major investments are in labor and equipment. They have little money left over to pay for land, which means manufacturers pay low rents relative to other uses, leaving them vulnerable to displacement.

Offices, hotels and most types of big box superstores are permitted as-of-right in manufacturing zones. As a result, there are now at least 52 hotels in industrial areas including twelve in the city’s industrial parks, areas that the city has designated to be preserved for industrial uses. The city is pushing to encourage development of supermarkets in manufacturing areas which could become the anchors for new retail clusters. The city definitely needs more supermarkets, just not in its manufacturing areas.

The result is not only direct displacement, but real estate speculation by the property owners which undermines investment by the tenants: If a property owner thinks he can attract a developer offering to buy his land for an office, hotel or superstore, the owner will set his asking price accordingly.

Real estate speculation makes manufacturers question the future of their locations as an industrial neighborhood and that uncertainty discourages reinvestment, thereby triggering a downward spiral.

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Allowing the remaining manufacturing zones to be destabilized or converted could have disastrous consequences both for neighborhoods and citywide. Industrial areas tend to be walk-to-work communities where local residents are also local workers—particularly in Sunset Park, Chinatown, North Brooklyn and the South Bronx. Converting manufacturing space to retail replaces well-paying jobs with low-wage, often part-time jobs. In the long run this process takes wealth out of the adjacent residential communities undermining the residential quality of life as well. And the mode of development is hardly sustainable—big box stores increase traffic and consume large areas of land for surface parking, a situation in part required by a zoning resolution that has parking requirements developed when the Studebaker and Packard still roamed our roads.

On the most basic level, New York needs cement plants, barge ports, food warehouses and other essential logistical support services to keep functioning. Above that, it needs bakeries, coffee roasters, apparel manufacturers, woodworkers, and glassblowers to keep it inspiring.

WHAT NEW YORK CITY SHOULD DO In 1961, New York City enacted its current Zoning Resolution. Gas cost 31 cents per gallon and John Glenn had not yet orbited the earth.13 It would be four years before the New York World’s Fair would open, nine years before the first Earth Day and 16 years before Ed Koch would be elected Mayor.

An awful lot has happened since then that was not foreseen, changing many of the fundamental assumptions underneath our zoning. In 1961, there were no superstores, front and back office operations were located together and oil companies gave away glasses, steak knives and cash prizes to lure people into buying more gas. Smoke and other harmful emissions poured out of factories.

Building highways was seen by some as the way to bring New York City back from a decade of population decline.

The Zoning Resolution was based on defining and separating incompatible uses to keep the thennoxious manufacturers from pushing into residential and other commercial areas. The underlying economics and environmental standards were such that residents and other businesses needed protection from manufacturing but manufacturing did not need protection from other commercial uses which today can push them out. The Resolution took such an extreme stance toward use separation that it sought to minimize the pattern of mixed land uses that then existed—and in some cases, existed comfortably—in many communities.

The City’s Zoning Resolution reflects a bygone era. New zoning tools should be added to create balanced mixed uses districts which would allow a variety of uses to coexist but not drive out any one use and tip a community toward homogeneity. This will benefit not only the sectors related to the “creative economy” but the growing freelance sector, many of whose members work at home.

Another principle is the need to preserve diversity of space because we are entering a period of dramatic transformation with unpredictable twists and turns. The next big growth sectors will probably reflect the need to adapt to a low-carbon economy. In the beginning of human society, energy came from people and animals. Then we harnessed the resources of our environment, particularly those that were carbon-based, starting with coal but rapidly changing to petroleum and natural gas. Now we need to develop clean energy sources, retrofit buildings and change some of the fundamentals of our society’s operating systems. It’s time for Society 3.0. But after that, who knows?

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The city we envision should be bursting with creativity and entrepreneurial energy so that whatever the challenge and opportunity, New York City has both the intellectual capacity and the industrial infrastructure to capitalize on it. It must keep its edginess and diversity and continually improve its environmental standards to attract and stimulate generations of entrepreneurs.

GROWING A GREEN SECTOR The most obvious opportunities for growth are driven by our transition to a low-carbon economy.

The Bloomberg Administration has articulated an extraordinarily ambitious vision for a more environmentally-friendly city through PlaNYC. The investment anticipated by that effort in everything from the retrofit of buildings to renewable energy generation to mass transit could be leveraged to stimulate a cutting-edge green industrial sector that creates living wage jobs.

First, the city should strengthen the supply chains that will provide the materials and goods for the projects stimulated by that investment. For example, it should identify the products and materials that go into retrofitted buildings, from energy efficient windows, doors and lighting fixtures, to motion sensors and smart meters. Then it should look at the local industrial base to identify how much of that could be locally made and provide the technology, engineering assistance and space local manufacturers need to compete for this work.

Second, the city has incredible buying power—$16 billion of procured goods in fiscal year 2008—a force that could be harnessed to stimulate local companies to reinvest and reposition themselves to capitalize on this opportunity. The city should create a modest 5 percent or 10 percent discretionary price preference for locally manufactured goods purchased by the city. For example, if a company is bidding on a city contract, will provide a product manufactured in New York along with living-wage jobs and is within 5 percent of the lowest bidder who is providing a product made further away, the city could award the contract using local manufacturers. The preference might sunset after several years to create a temporary transition period to provide companies with a chance to retool and reposition as part of the larger strategy to strengthen supply chains.

Local should not be limited to New York companies, a geopolitical standard, but to products manufactured within a certain number of miles (such as 100 miles or 200 miles) from New York. The rationale for this approach is that it reduces the carbon footprint by reducing trucking, allows companies within a large market to compete but still stimulates local production and the use of local recycled materials.

Fourth, in the end, all businesses have to be green, which will require a tremendous cultural shift within the business community. Routine business behaviors that encourage extravagant packaging ignore the availability of recycled and recyclable materials, use hazardous or carbon-based products when safer alternatives are available have to give way and be replaced by adoption of sustainable business practices.

The city can support this transition by weaving “green strings” and sustainable business practices into its economic development programs.14 Significant public support for companies should be matched by those companies adopting significant green upgrades. Businesses receiving low interest loans to acquire and construct buildings through the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) should be required to build to LEED standards. Renovations using IDA financing should include

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major energy conservation measures or renewable energy generation. Companies doing business or receiving more modest benefits from the City should be required to engage in more modest steps, for instance producing and regularly updating an “Environmental Policy Statement” that spells out each company’s plan to improve its operations and environmental compliance.

PROVIDING SPACE FOR GREEN JOBS It is pointless to invest in green jobs if they have no place to go.

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg took the first steps in 2005 by creating the Industrial Business Zones program which designated 16 areas of the city for industrial development. The strategy was to create “safe havens” in order to stabilize real estate conditions in these areas by declaring the City’s intent to keep them industrial. Unfortunately, the initiative did not include revisions to the Zoning Resolution. In Williamsburg, Gowanus, and Long Island City factories have been redeveloped as hotels, bowling alleys, and large retail. In Flatlands, a 500,000 square foot distribution site on a rail line is being turned into a Home Depot.

The city needs to plug the holes in the Zoning Resolution which currently allows hotels, offices and big box retailers in Manufacturing Zones and to bring it up to date with new city policy. The City should reinforce the Industrial Business Zone designation through Industrial Employment Districts,15 a new zoning that would not allow non-industrial uses in its industrial safe havens. This would stabilize the real estate market in those areas which would lead to reinvestment and job growth. The Department of City Planning has edged in this direction in two small zoning changes in the South Bronx and in Dutch Kills in Queens where it limited hotel and retail uses and offered density bonuses for expansions of manufacturing uses. It is time to make this policy citywide. Second, the city also needs to use zoning to reinforce its mixed residential/industrial neighborhoods such as Greenpoint and Williamsburg which are exactly the type of creative communities that attract and stimulate new ideas. For years, a special zoning district balanced industrial and residential development, preventing either use from completely displacing the other and preserving the diversity of spaces and uses that underlie creativity. However, the zoning was not effectively enforced during the 1990s and illegal residential conversions proliferated. The city subsequently changed the zoning to allow unrestrained residential conversion and development, leading to both the loss of diversity and displacement of both manufacturers and artists.

Third, the city should reverse its policy of selling off its industrial properties and should assume long-term management with the goal of creating high quality manufacturing space for job intensive sectors. In the past, the city has either sold off these sites to individual companies (both manufacturers and others) or leased them out with relatively low demands for industrial job creation or allowed them to lie fallow because the city lacked capital funding to renovate.

Fourth, the city should manage more of its industrial properties through mission-driven non-profit organizations such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) and the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center. BNYDC currently manages the 300-acre city-owned industrial park at the site of a former U. S. Navy base. Other city-owned industrial sites could be managed by BNYDC and other independent non-profits like the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center.16 The success of the BNYDC and GMDC non-profit model is in part their ability to focus on their mission, to allow senior staff to exercise discretion and take risks in developing strategies to advance

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that mission, and in being able to work directly with the individual tenant companies so that they understand their companies’ needs and can help capitalize on opportunities.

Fourth, in addition to transferring management of its industrial properties to these organizations, the city should use them to help address the mismatch between the existing building stock, which was originally developed for large manufacturers, and today’s need for smaller industrial spaces.

This could be done both through the acquisition of sites such as the recently shuttered Pfizer plant in Brooklyn, or through joint ventures and partnerships with private owners who are willing to maintain industrial properties but lack the resources to renovate and manage the space.

Finally, as part of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process the city should evaluate whether proposed land use change advances or sets back the City’s overall sustainability. For example, each barge that brings material into the city replaces 50 trucks. Continued rezoning of the waterfront for residential use could undermine the city’s ability to implement more environmentally responsible transportation practices.

The question “what keeps New York City attractive?” for people brings us full circle to the need to retain manufacturing to ensure the city’s diversity and creative vitality, its environmental well-being, and the employment and entrepreneurial opportunities that are pathways out of poverty.

Reprinted with permission of Drum Major Institute.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Stephen Kagann, “New York’s Vanishing Supply Side,” City Journal 4:2 (Autumn 1992). Available at http://www.city-journal.org/article01.php?aid=1514.

2006 American Community Survey PUMS via Infoshare.org. For production occupations, 79 percent of workers are people of color and 74 percent are immigrant. For production occupations in manufacturing, 82 percent are people of color and 79 percent are immigrant.

NYS Dept. of Labor QCEW dataset. Wages are annual average wages for 2007 and are based on total payroll costs, which includes costs of fringe benefits.

2006 American Community Survey PUMS via Infoshare.org. 38 percent of workers in production occupations do not have a high school degree, and 44percent of workers in production occupations in manufacturing industries do not have a high school degree.

The most recent report is Reviving the City of Aspiration (New York, NY: Center For An Urban Future, February 2009).

This analysis is not to suggest that some standardized products could not be manufactured in New York under the right circumstances such as having relatively low space requirements and using materials coming out of New York’s waste stream.

Adam Friedman, Jenifer Becker, Michael Freedman-Schnapp, James Parrott, and Brent Kramer, More Than a Link In the Food Chain: A Study of the Citywide Economic Impact of Food Manufacturing in New York City (paper prepared for the Mayor’s Office of Industrial & Manufacturing Businesses, New York, NY, by the New York Industrial Retention Network and the Fiscal Policy Institute, February 2007), 14.

An extraordinarily ironic role reversal is that today it may be cleaner and cheaper for factories to install their own solar roofs and gas-fired cogeneration systems then to take electricity from the grid.

Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase estimated that transportation costs dropped 95 percent in real terms over the 20th Century because of the truck and highway systems. See Glaeser and Kohlhase, “Cities Regions and the Decline of Transportation Costs,” (working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2003).

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10 This strategy has already been successfully applied under federal environmental protection law to the use and disposal of hazardous waste.

11 New York Industrial Retention Network, The Little Manufacturer that Could: Opportunities and Challenges for Manufacturing in New York City (report prepared by NYIRN, 1999). New York City Economic Development Corporation, Protecting and Growing New York City’s Industrial Base (reported prepared for the City of New York, New York City Industrial Policy, January 2005).

12 See Pratt Center for Community Development, Protecting New York’s Threatened Manufacturing Space (Pratt Center for Community Development issue brief, New York, NY, 2008).

13 U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Retail Motor Gasoline and On-Highway Diesel Fuel Prices, 1949-2008,” U.S. Department of Energy, http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0524.html.

14 The City already regulates the behavior of its purchasing agents and the companies with which it contracts such as by encouraging them to use minority- and women-owned businesses. Why not green businesses?

15 Industrial Employment Districts have been advocated by the Zoning For Jobs Coalition which includes more then 50 community groups, labor unions and economic development organizations.

16 The author, Adam Friedman, is a member of the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation.

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PROFILE OF A COMMUNITY HERO

YOLANDA GONZALEZ

BY ALEXIS ROURK REYES

“Grab your coat, I want to show you something.”

With that, Yolanda Gonzalez, Executive Director of Nos Quedamos, and I were on our way down the block to check out Melrose Commons’ newest addition—El Jardín de Seline. From the bamboo floors to low-flow bathroom fixtures, this brand new mixed-use apartment building is equipped with all the eco-friendly trimmings, earning it recognition as a LEED Gold certified building. Walking through the building and a few of the units, you first notice the sunlight streaming in from each unit’s many double-paned, high performance windows. Then, you realize what is missing—the smell of new paint and other toxic chemicals that often accompany the installation of new carpet, flooring, and construction is nowhere to be found. With Nos Quedamos as the building’s developer and manager, it is expected to stay that way in part through the provision of free non-toxic cleaning materials to all residents along with a required commitment from residents not to bring in harmful chemicals. As Ms. Gonzalez notes, the building management’s most important partners in maintenance will be the tenants. Nos Quedamos focuses on the practice of “building homes, not housing.”

Yolanda Garcia, Yolanda Gonzalez’s mother, with fellow Bronx residents in the early days of Nos Quedamos. Photo courtesy of Nos Quedamos.

The same was true nearly 20 years ago when Nos Quedamos got its start as a nonprofit community development corporation in the South Bronx. It began with Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer’s urban renewal plans for the Bronx Center, a 300-block area of the South Bronx which includes the neighborhood of Melrose. Motivated by a Pratt seminar in the summer of 1992 which compared urban disparities in the South Bronx to those in places such as South Africa and East and West Berlin, Ferrer’s appointed Bronx Center Steering Committee agreed upon a “top-down and bottom-up” planning process and enlisted the

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help of the Pratt Institute, the Municipal Art Society, and the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization formed in the early 1990s to address poverty. At the same time, the New York City Department of City Planning began development of Ferrer’s plans for Bronx Center, which were presented to current residents in 1992 at a series of community meetings. Overall, the proposed urban renewal plan would include displacement of up to 6,000 residents and over 500 businesses. With good reason, Melrose Commons neighborhood residents and small business owners Yolanda Garcia (Yolanda Gonzalez’s mother), Pedro Cintron, Rafael Negron, and many neighbors felt threatened by the risk of displacement and demanded a role in the planning process. Determined to have their voices heard by the Department of City Planning and in the media, neighborhood organizers invited reporters from major Hispanic newspapers—El Diario and La Prensa—to a community meeting with then-City Planning Commissioner and Pratt professor Ron Shiffman and architect/planner Petr Stand. During this meeting, the reporters remained unidentified and Pratt representatives validated the arguments of residents, acknowledging that their insights and experiences as existing community residents, especially ones who were not interested in leaving, made them natural and important partners in the planning process for Melrose Commons.

Nos Quedamos housing and community garden. Photo courtesy of Nos Quedamos.

This validation gave key political incentive for Borough President Ferrer and the Mayor’s office to delay approval of the existing plan developed by City Planning for six months, allowing time for Garcia and others to jump in to the development of their own plan for Melrose Commons. They organized their efforts through a new nonprofit organization called Nos Quedamos, or We Stay, founded in 1993. For nearly a year, Nos Quedamos worked with Magnusson Architects, Pratt planning students, and others to develop a plan that was ultimately submitted in 1994 and approved by the Department of City Planning. The plan is noted for its emphasis on several underlying principles, including: no involuntary displacement, creating public open spaces that are designed appropriately for the neighborhood, and provision of health and

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social services. In 2005, Ms. Garcia unexpectedly passed away and her daughter, Yolanda Gonzalez, has led the organization ever since.

Today, Ms. Gonzalez embodies the image of the hard-working, in-touch, and dedicated leader we associate with her mother, and with leaders of community-based planning efforts all over New York City. As Nos Quedamos and the Melrose Commons plan got their start in the early 1990s, Ms. Gonzalez was pulling triple-duty as a college student, part-time worker, and behind-the-scenes organizer of the Melrose Commons community. Central to her work is a continual process of learning and working with “technical people” that are willing to learn also. She stands firm on adherence to the principles of sustainability and planning with current and future generations in mind; her first love and major in college was environmental science and marine biology. The innovative housing developments created by Nos Quedamos allow her to continue work she is passionate about; she has only “switched biospheres,” as she puts it. Part of what makes Ms. Gonzalez successful, in addition to her growing knowledge of green building practices and air quality, is her commitment to the process of engaging, strengthening, and empowering her community.

Her emphasis on using layman’s terms, “telling the truth,” and “building it right and keeping it clean” are ground rules that all community-based planners can live by. Her dedication to the community—“her family”—is evident with thoughtful designs like laundry rooms with play areas for small children and open kitchens to host “family decision-making.” Because of conscious choices like these, Nos Quedamos’ newest building, El Jardín de Seline, is not only environmentally-friendly, but can truly be called “sustainable” in the most sweeping sense: • In the future, when the building might be ready for major renovations or to be replaced, Nos Quedamos has made sure that up to 95% of all the building’s materials will be recyclable.

• 20% of the building’s units will be affordable to residents earning 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), 10 percent will be affordable to residents making 80% of the AMI, and at least 10% will be reserved for families out of shelter, all to be awarded through a lottery system.

• Residents of Jardín de Seline and other Nos Quedamos apartment buildings are expected to contribute to the community through participation in community meetings and maintaining their rented apartments as they would if they owned them. They are supported by the many health and social programs offered by Nos Quedamos.

• The building is intended to provide safe, affordable, and long-term homes to families of the Melrose Commons neighborhood in the South Bronx, providing a place where families can achieve the stability they need to “imagine and realize a future that they did not think was possible.”

With new generations come new challenges and successes and Nos Quedamos keeps busy fulfilling their initial mission and advocating for citywide equity, health, and environmental issues. Just this spring, Melrose Commons became the first neighborhood in New York City (and second in New York State) to receive a LEED Stage II Silver Certification for Neighborhood Development by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). New challenges include the increased truck traffic in the South Bronx as a result of the relocation of the New Fulton Fish Market to Hunts Point, and Mayor Bloomberg’s recently initiated commission to

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re-visit the City Charter and the community-based planning process. With this process back on the table, Ms. Gonzalez hopes to see support for 197-a and community-based plans strengthened. Without them, Nos Quedamos, or any of the 17 affordable housing developments they have constructed since 1998, might not exist. In her pragmatic and straightforward manner Ms. Gonzalez puts it simply, â&#x20AC;&#x153;That, I mindâ&#x20AC;?.

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IN PERSPECTIVE

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RON SHIFFMAN

IN PERSPECTIVE AFTERWORD

This publication has briefly scanned fifty years of planning at Pratt, combining both the work of the Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) and that of the Pratt Center for Community Development. Both the department and the Center were the outgrowth of the efforts first started here by George M. Raymond in the spring of 1960. Those of us who have known George and worked with him, as well as those who have benefited from his legacy, all owe him a debt of gratitude. I have had the honor and the privilege of working with and observing the activities of both the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Pratt Center for all but a few of those years.

For that, I am particularly grateful.

The years between 1960 and 2010 were eventful years and span a period of time from the election of the first Catholic President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the first president of African-American descent. Kennedy was elected president during tumultuous times and he challenged our nation to address the plague of poverty and inequality. Kennedy brought hope and stimulated a generation to commit to public service, to redress the inequities that plagued our nation for far too long. He challenged us to think of social and economic change, to rebuild our cities and to go to the moon—both literally and metaphorically. His assassination, and the murders of a score of civil rights workers—Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, Medgar Evers, and others too numerous to mention—and the traumatic assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy, with whom Pratt was privileged to work, all sent tremors through our society. The War on Poverty—a war that we as a nation abandoned to engage in one we should never have waged in Vietnam—and the Great Society initiatives were set aside. The need to address those issues of inequality, poverty, the decline of our cities, and environmental degradation still persist today. Barak Obama’s election, like Kennedy’s, has once again challenged this nation to look beyond one’s self toward building on our collective assets and rectifying the injustices and the problems that have for too long plagued too many of our fellow citizens.

Over the past five decades, the GCPE and the Pratt Center were at the nexus of many of the progressive movements that have marked and influenced planning and development policies in the United States and abroad. We helped to frame the advocacy and participatory planning processes that were influenced by Jane Jacobs; carried forward by the activism of Ellen Lurie, Walter Thabit and Fran Goldin; and codified into planning theory by Paul and Linda Davidoff. We helped to launch the community-based development movement by working with Elsie Richardson, Donald Benjamin, Connie McQueen and others at the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council in founding the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Over the years we worked with the second and third generation of CDCs—from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, East New York, and Red Hook in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side, East and West Harlem in Manhattan and the mid- and South Bronx—in their efforts to save their neighborhoods and. in the process of doing so, revitalize the City.

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We watched with respect and admiration as communities of color began to address centuries of environmental injustice. They organized to address these devious planning practices and, when asked, we assisted them in their efforts.

Pratt worked with national and local organizations to address redlining and bank disinvestment as well as predatory lending practices long before others recognized the devastating impact of these policies on a micro- and macro-level.

The articles in Pratt Planning Papers, which George Raymond started as a labor of love; STREET magazine, which was targeted at a broader constituency; and its successor City Limits all attempted to tackle the key planning and development issues of its time. In the early 1970s, STREET addressed urban environmental issues that have continued to be a focus of the Pratt planning program ever since. Today the threat of climate change coupled with other environmental problems continues to be a major challenge facing our communities, our cities, and our planet. The recognition that we must move beyond being a carbon dependent society and address the inter-related problems of poverty, food security, rising sea levels and the environment, all within a discreet period of time, pose an ominous challenge to the next generation of planners. This challenge is made even starker by the inability of past generations of planners to succeed despite all we have attempted. The legacy and the challenge we pass on to you, the next generation of planners, is both a challenge and an opportunityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an opportunity to build upon what we have succeeded to do and a challenge, albeit an exciting one, to accomplish what we have left yet undone.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eva Neubauer Alligood is a 1993 graduate of the Pratt Institute Master’s Program in City and Regional Planning. She is currently Senior Director for Program and Development at the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo), a neighborhood-based nonprofit in the South Bronx that provides affordable, green housing, family support, home-based childcare training, youth programs and early childhood education to low-income women and families. She began her planning career in 1989 as Associate for Program Development at the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED), where she was responsible for program development, public affairs, writing and fundraising for over six years. Prior to joining WHEDCo, she held various positions at the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), and she spent nine years as an independent planning and program development consultant to nonprofit organizations in New York City.

Eric Allison is founder and coordinator of the Graduate Historic Preservation Program and Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Architecture. He has taught historic preservation and planning at Pratt since 1996, and is a graduate of the Program in City and Regional Planning. Dr. Allison’s research interests include the place of historic preservation in the creation and maintenance of livable cities; emerging concepts of heritage preservation; and the application of Complex Systems Theory to human society, including the future of cities, virtual communities, and the changing nature of the nation-state. For 10 years, he was president of the Historic Districts Council, a not-forprofit organization dedicated to New York City preservation.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of New York, and Director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. His book, New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, was published by MIT Press in 2008. He is Land Use Columnist for www.gothamgazette.com, co-editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and an editor for the journal Local Environment. He recently served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Bangalore, India; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Catania, Sicily.

Caron Atlas is a Brooklyn-based consultant working to support and stimulate arts and culture as an integral part of community development and civic participation. She is project director of the Arts & Community Change Initiative, the Arts & Democracy Project, and Fractured Atlas’ Place + Displaced project. She also consults with the Ford and Surdna foundations and teaches at New York University’s Art and Public Policy program and Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. Caron worked many years at Appalshop, the Appalachian media center, and was the founding director of the American Festival Project, a national artist coalition. Caron was a Warren Weaver Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation and holds a master’s degree in the social sciences from the University of Chicago.

Eve Baron, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning and Undergraduate Architecture at Pratt Institute, is the recent past Director of the Planning Center of the Municipal Art Society of New York. She has also taught in the CUNY system and at Hofstra University in Long

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Island. Her work focuses primarily around the principles and practice of community-based planning.

Working with the New York City Community-Based Planning Task Force, she helped build the city’s only collection of community-based plans into a web-based, interactive archive that now serves as a learning tool for students and neighborhood advocates. Eve also spearheaded the creation of the Livable Neighborhoods Program, a set of tools and training workshops to build communities’ understanding of how to use city, state, and federal programs to create and implement community plans.

Her current focus is legislative and charter reform: how to democratize neighborhood decision-making and ensure that planning is used to support community development goals.

Jenifer Roth Becker is Chief Sustainability Manager at the New York Power Authority and is responsible for developing and overseeing the implementation of a corporate sustainability action plan, coordinating sustainability efforts across all departments and identifying new opportunities to increase the level of environmental performance. Prior to working for NYPA, Ms. Becker was Vice President of Clean Energy and Sustainability for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the Director of Research and Policy at the New York Industrial Retention Network and an instructor at the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment. She received her M.S. in Urban and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute.

Rachel Berkson is a 2009 Pratt Institute alum with a degree in City and Regional Planning. On first arrival, the Chicago native was quickly acclimated to New York City by conducting public park surveys for the non-profit New Yorkers for Parks. After urban planning internships with the Manhattan Borough President’s Office and the Municipality of Jerusalem’s City Planning Division, she currently works for New York City’s Department of Transportation.

Todd W. Bressi is known for his urban design consulting with Brown and Keener Bressi, leadership of the design journal Places, and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He also leads an innovative design practice that explores the intersection of city design, place planning and public art (www. artfulplaces.com). He is based in Narberth, PA. Karen Chapple, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Chapple specializes in community and economic development, metropolitan planning, and poverty. In 2006, Prof. Chapple founded the Center for Community Innovation (communityinnovation.berkeley.edu), a “think-do” tank focusing on housing, community and economic development issues. The Center specializes in “strong market” regions and how their economic growth and physical development patterns can become more equitable and inclusive.

Chapple holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from Columbia University, an M.S.C.R.P from the Pratt Institute, and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. She has served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota and the University of Pennsylvania, in addition to UC-Berkeley. Prior to academia, Chapple spent ten years as a practicing planner in economic development, land use, and transportation in New York and San Francisco.

Michael Epp spent six years operating a small recycling business in British Columbia, Canada before he decided to apply his interest in tackling environmental challenges in other ways. Having completed certificates in Applied Planning, Urban Studies, and Community Economic Development, he began working for several municipalities preparing greenhouse gas emissions reduction plans. In his current practice, as a planner for the Pratt Center for Community Development and as a Master’s Candidate at Pratt, Michael is exploring methods of community engagement that recognize both the

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urgent need for action on environmental issues and the transformative potential of cross-cultural dialog on these issues.

Steve Flax is the Vice President of Community Development M&T Bank. Steve oversees all New York City community development lending for this Buffalo, N.Y. based institution. Steve was previously the Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a multifaceted community development corporation in Brooklyn, New York. Since 1984, Steve has held various positions at both the Fifth Avenue Committee and the St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corporation, another community development corporation based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He serves as a director and a member of the finance committee of the Brooklyn Arts Exchange and is actively involved as an advisory board member the Concerned Cultural Womens’ Collective, a Bedford-Stuyvesant based self-help organization. Steve received his Master’s Degree in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute and is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University. Steve and his family reside in Brooklyn.

Mike Flynn, AICP, serves as Director of Capital Planning at the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT). In this role he guides the planning and establishment of project scopes for NYCDOT’s street reconstruction program, ensuring that designs meet the goals of the City and the agency for safer, greener, more efficient and livable streets. In previous positions at DOT, Mike coauthored and coordinated the development of the New York City Street Design Manual; integrated engineering and environmental best practices into the agency’s work; and worked on the planning, design and implementation of street design projects such as pedestrian plazas, bicycle facilities, and safety improvements. He graduated from the University of Vermont and received a Master of Science degree in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute, where he also serves as an adjunct assistant professor. He is a resident of Brooklyn.

Adam Friedman is Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. He is one of New York City’s leading advocates in support of manufacturing and the employment opportunities it brings.

As founding executive director of the New York Industrial Retention Network (NYIRN), since 1997 he has led efforts to strengthen the city’s manufacturing sector and promote sustainable development.

Previously, Friedman served as executive director of the Garment Industry Development Corporation and director of economic development for Borough Presidents David Dinkins and Ruth Messinger.

He has also taught urban planning courses at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

Edward G. Goetz is director of CURA, the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, and professor of urban and regional planning at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. He specializes in housing and local community development planning and policy. His research focuses on issues of race and poverty and how they affect housing policy planning and development. His book, Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America (2003, Urban Institute Press), won the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 2005. He presented a version of his paper for this volume at the Pratt Institute City Legacies conference in 2005.

Anne Grave is an anthropology student from University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Currently, she is working on her master’s thesis centered on The Green Agenda for Jackson Heights, combining her longtime interests in urban planning, community building, cultural anthropology, and social empowerment. Her anthropological fieldwork was conducted over a period of four months and was conducted in close collaboration with The Pratt Center for Community Development and the Queens

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Community House, where she had hands-on experience conducting workshops and outreach for the Green Agenda. Her thesis will be submitted spring 2011.

Eva Hanhardt is a city and environmental planning consultant and has been teaching at Pratt since 1997. From 2004 to 2009 she was the coordinator of the master’s program in Environmental Systems Management. As a practicing planner, Eva has centered her professional activities around community-based and environmental planning. At the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, she directed a unit that assisted businesses in environmental compliance, pollution prevention, and sustainable development practices. She is the former director of the Municipal Art Society’s Planning Center, and she co-directed the ImagineNY project, which received an award from the American Planning Association for its facilitation of broad public participation in decisions relating to New York City’s recovery and rebuilding after the tragedy of 9/11. In addition, Eva worked for many years as a planner for the New York City Department of City Planning.

Sandy Hornick has worked as a planner with New York’s Department of City Planning for more than 30 years, including six years as Zoning Director, and has served for the last 16 years as Deputy Executive Director for Strategic Planning. At City Planning, he played key roles in preparing strategic policy plans in the Dinkins and Giuliani administrations, and was one of the initiators of Mayor Bloomberg’s Long-Term Sustainability Plan, PlaNYC 2030. He was integral to developing many of the city’s land use policies including loft conversion; contextual zoning; the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan and the waterfront zoning; affordable housing; and the strengthening of central and regional business districts. He has received numerous awards, including the Robert Ponte Award from the NY Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association for contributing to the region’s economic vitality (2004) and the Rita Barrish Award from the Department of City Planning for long-term, high level of performance and specialized expertise (2006). He holds an M. S. in City and Regional Planning from Pratt.

Alyssa Katz is a consultant for the Pratt Center for Community Development and a journalist who writes on urban policy and development. She teaches at New York University and Hunter College.

She was editor of City Limits from 1999 to 2005 and was a 2005-06 Revson Fellow at Columbia University. Katz has a B.A. in Arts and Ideas in the Humanities from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Brad Lander is a city councilmember representing the 39th district in Brooklyn. He has spent his career standing up for affordable, livable, and sustainable communities in Brooklyn and throughout New York City. Lander was executive director of the Pratt Center for Community Development from 2003 to 2009. Before joining Pratt, Lander served for a decade as executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nationally recognized, not-for-profit community-based organization in Brooklyn that develops affordable housing, creates economic opportunities, and organizes tenants and workers. Councilmember Lander holds an M.Sc. in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute, an M.A. in Social Anthropology from University College London, and a B.A from the University of Chicago. He teaches community planning, housing, and urban policy in Pratt’s graduate city planning department.

Nancy Levinson is editor of Places; she brings to the role experience in publications—as co-founding editor of Harvard Design Magazine—and urban design—most recently as director of Phoenix Urban Research Lab.

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Harriet Markis, Adjunct Associate Professor in Structures, has taught in the School of Architecture at both the graduate and undergraduate level since 1990. She has been Partner at Dunne & Markis Consulting Structural Engineers, PLLC since 1990. She has 30 years of experience as a structural designer in a variety of projects. She is licensed to practice Structural Engineering in the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. She has her Master’s of Engineering from Cornell University and her Bachelor’sof Science in Civil Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Allison Richards is a graduate student at Pratt Institute studying City and Regional Planning with a concentration in community development; she also has a background in public administration and public policy. Allison has experience working with the City of Coral Springs Community Development Department within the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) as well as the City of New York Human Resources Administration within job placement and the Section 8 Voucher program. Her professional background also includes work in housing advocacy, social justice organizing and philanthropic initiatives. She is an advocate for equitable redevelopment, fair housing, and sustainable practices in community development.

Michael Rochford earned a Master’s of City and Regional Planning from Pratt and an M.B.A. in Finance from Pace University through the Pratt/Pace joint degree program. Recently he completed the NeighborWorks Achieving Excellence in Community Development program at the Kennedy School of Government. He has served in a variety of posts at St Nicks Alliance and is currently its Executive Director.

Tom Robbins has been a reporter covering New York City for more than 30 years. He was editor of City Limits magazine from 1980-85, and has been a reporter and columnist at the New York Observer, the Daily News, and is currently at the Village Voice.

Alexis Rourk Reyes is a graduate student of City and Regional Planning at the Pratt Institute. Her interests include sustainable community development and participatory planning, particularly with Latino communities. She is currently working at the Pratt Center for Community Development as a graduate planning Fellow and will continue work with Pratt Center on various neighborhood-level projects about building retrofits and energy conservation. Alexis has a professional background in public health and has worked primarily on prevention of childhood obesity, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis through social marketing, community outreach, capacity-building, and other pubic health strategies.

Laura Senkevitch is a Master of Science candidate at Pratt in the Environmental Systems Management Program. She holds an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and biology from Pace University. She has worked in various roles in the production of four academic journals in the past four years. Currently, she is an environmental science instructor at an AOS institute and an intern at the Center for Sustainable Design Studies at the Pratt Institute.

John Shapiro is Chair of Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. Prior to his appointment as Chair, he was a principal of Phillips Price Shapiro Associates, Inc. He has instructed at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, in addition to Pratt. Mr. Shapiro previously worked for BFJ Planning and the New York Landmarks Conservancy. He holds a B.A. in Geography from Clark University and an M.S. in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute.

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Rachana Sheth currently works as an urban designer for Phillips Preiss Grygiel, LLC. With degrees in urban planning and architecture, she uses her multidisciplinary skills on projects ranging from community redevelopment to master plans with a focus on smart growth and sustainability. Ms. Sheth has a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture, Mumbai. She was awarded the Charles Correa Gold Medal for her architecture thesis and her master’s thesis on Illegal dwelling units in New York City was utilized by the Pratt Center and Chhaya CDC in an advocacy report that highlighted the key issues and policy recommendations.

Ronald Shiffman, FAICP, Hon. AIA, is a city planner with 45 years of experience providing program and organizational development assistance to community-based groups in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Trained as an architect and urban planner, he is an expert in communitybased planning, housing and sustainable development. In 1964, Ron Shiffman co-founded the Pratt Center for Community Development—the nation’s largest public interest architectural, planning and community development office in the country; he served as the Director until 2003. He served on the New York City Planning Commission from 1990 to 1996. He is now a full time faculty member at the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. He and his wife, Yvette Shiffman, live in Brooklyn in close proximity to their 3 children and 6 grand children.

Jaime Stein completed a B.S. in Biology, and immediately joined the Peace Corps to conduct healthcare outreach & education programs in West Africa. Subsequently Ms. Stein spent 5 years conducting biomedical research at the Wistar Institute of Philadelphia, focused on viruses common to developing countries. Intrigued by the links between public health and development, Ms. Stein applied to the EMS program, seeking to understand the influence of urban environmental policies on public health. Now as EMS coordinator, Ms. Stein’s vision for the program includes a continued exploration of these influences as well as the roles of environmentalists, planners and designers in promoting social justice. In addition to coordinating the EMS program, Ms. Stein is the Policy Analyst for Sustainable South Bronx, a non-profit, environmental justice organization based in Hunts Point and a visiting assistant professor in the Design Management program.

Ira Stern is an environmental planner who received his M.S. in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute in 1985. He has worked for NYCDEP since 1995 and is a Regional Manager of the New York City Water Supply. He previously was Director of Watershed Lands and Community Planning for DEP where he led watershed protection efforts for more than a decade and was part of the core negotiating team that produced the historic 1997 NYC Watershed Agreement. He spent the previous ten years as the executive director of two land trusts in the Hudson Valley and is a former chairperson of the Land Trust Alliance of New York. This semester at Pratt, he is teaching Contemporary Issues: Planning for Water Resources in the EMS program.

Patricia Swann is a Senior Program Officer at NYCT where her grantmaking responsibilities cover the areas of Community Development, Civic Affairs, and Technical Assistance. She also serves as a board member of Brooklyn Workforce Innovations, a job training affiliate of the Fifth Avenue Committee. Previous board affiliations include the North Star Fund and Central Brooklyn Partnership.

Prior to The Trust, Pat directed economic development programs in Red Hook and in Manhattan, and served on the staff of the Manhattan Borough President’s Office under Borough President David Dinkins. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt Institute Graduate School of Architecture and Planning and she is a recipient of a Revson fellowship at Columbia University.

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Sabrina Terry was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the age of 17, she helped establish the first youth-created charter high school in the nation. Sabrina obtained a Bachelors of Arts degree in Political Science from San Francisco State University. She was a Congressional Black Caucus Intern and went on to work in public policy. Sabrina is currently pursuing a Master’s of Science in City and Regional Planning with a concentration in Community Development and Sustainability.

Anusha Venkataraman is a 2010 graduate of the City and Regional Planning program at Pratt Institute, and the editor of this publication. Anusha has worked with a variety of community planning organizations in the New York City area, including the Municipal Art Society and the Pratt Center.

She has also been involved with the cross-campus Pratt Initiative for Arts, Community, and Social Change since 2008. From 2005 to 2008, she was the Youth and Outreach Director at the Steel Yard, an industrial arts community center in Providence, RI. She has worked with numerous community groups in local organizing efforts, and with artist collectives in Providence and Brooklyn. She holds a bachelor’s in International Relations from Brown University.

Vicki Weiner is the Director of Planning and Preservation at the Pratt Center for Community Development. She has fifteen years of professional historic preservation experience and has been teaching at Pratt Institute since 2001. She has directed two non-profit preservation organizations in New York City, and was named the first Kress Fellow for Historic Preservation at the Municipal Art Society. Since coming to Pratt Center in 2004 her work has been focused on exploring the connection between preserving culturally important places and creating more equitable communities.

In numerous projects she has developed strategies and public policy initiatives to enhance communities physically, culturally, and economically. Beyond the Fulton Street Mall project discussed in this publication other projects at Pratt include developing policy solutions for local retailers facing displacement, and exploring ways to offset harms of the foreclosure crisis while increasing affordable housing opportunities. As an Adjunct Associate Professor at Pratt, she co-leads an annual joint studio between graduate planners and preservationists, among other courses. Weiner has an M.S. in Historic Preservation from Columbia University, and a B.A. from Drew University.

Sarah Jane Wick currently works as a project manager at Jonathan Rose Companies, specializing in the greening of affordable multifamily rehabilitation projects. Ms. Wick received a Master’s in Planning from Pratt Institute in the Spring of 2009, with a final thesis entitled “Stabilizing Neighborhoods Beyond the Foreclosure Crisis.” During her first year of graduate school, Ms. Wick worked for the Surdna Foundation’s Community to help promote and shape state policy that better supports America’s post-industrial cities with weak markets. Ms. Wick also completed a fellowship with the Pratt Center for Community Development, contributing to a number of affordable housing and planning projects in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Prior to coming to New York City, Ms. Wick worked as a grant writer for the Cleveland Housing Network, securing over $2 million annually in foundation and government funding for affordable housing and supportive services development.

Ms. Wick received her Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Geoffrey Wiener is the Assistant Vice President for Facilities Planning at Columbia University. After graduating from Pratt in 1978, Geoffrey became a land use and development consultant with the firm of Abeles and Schwartz. He left in 1984 to work on planning and development for Columbia University, which was just beginning work on the Audubon Research Park. Today he heads the Planning and Space Management Department, which is responsible for developing solutions to long-term and

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short-term space problems at all Columbia campuses, except the CU Medical Center. Planning problems run the gamut—from finding office space for a new administrator, to planning a new campus in the Manhattanville part of West Harlem. The department also surveys and maintains CAD drawings and space databases for 8 million square feet.

Charles Wilson is the coauthor, with Eric Schlosser, of the bestselling children’s book Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist. His case study was one of a dozen he has written on winners of the MetLife Foundation’s Community-Police Partnership Awards.

Edward Perry Winston, R.A., LEED AP, has a B.A. from Harvard University and an M. Arch from Rice University in Houston. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in Venezuela; worked for the non-profit Mission Housing Development Corp. in San Francisco; and has professional experience in private practices in Houston and New York City. He was a staff architect and eventually Director of Architectural Services over eighteen years at the Pratt Center for Community Development. He is currently an Associate at Magnusson Architecture & Planning PC in New York City. His professional work has included a new supportive housing & mixed-use building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, over a hundred residential renovations, school and child care facilities, community arts centers, park design, and a green roof on an industrial building in Long Island City. He participated in a HUD-COPC community planning program in East New York, Brooklyn, out of which the East New York Farms! project grew. Mr. Winston has taught at Parsons/The New School, as well as housing studios, a course on urban agriculture, and summer workshops in Germany, Panama, and Brazil for the Pratt planning and EMS programs.

Laura Wolf-Powers is an Assistant Professor in the graduate City and Regional Planning program at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, specializing in economic and community development with a focus on urban and metropolitan labor markets, the political economy of urban redevelopment, and the role of community organizations in urban governance and outcomes. Her research has been published in Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Economic Development Quarterly and several edited books on economic and workforce development. See http://works.bepress.com/laura_wolf_powers/.

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THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED GENEROUSLY TO THE PRATT PLANNING PROGRAM DURING ITS FIFTIETH YEAR:

Eva Neubauer Alligood Eve Baron Carol Clark Steve Flax Kenneth E. Gillman Sharon Griffith Lynne A. Grifo Gary S. Hattem Catherine M. Herman Samuel Hornick Frank Lang Alan Mallach Jonathan Martin Keith Outlaw Bruce A. Rosen John Shapiro Ron Shiffman Patricia A. Swann Geoffrey Weiner Charlie Whelan

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