Jane Jacobs Quote #2

We can see around us, from the days preceding project building, many examples of decaying city neighborhoods built up all at once... Every city has such physically homogeneous neighborhoods.

Usually just such neighborhoods have been handicapped in every way, so far as generating diversity is concerned. We cannot blame their poor staying power and stagnation entirely on their most obvious misfortune: being built all at once. Nevertheless, this is one of the handicaps of such neighborhoods, and unfortunately its effects can persist long after the buildings have become aged.

When such an area is new, it offers no economic possibilities to city diversity. The practical penalties of dullness, from this and other causes, stamp the neighborhood early. It becomes a place to leave.

Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule. The little physical change that does occur is for the worse - gradual dilapidation, a few random, shabby new uses here and there. People look at these few, random differences and regard them as evidence, and perhaps as a cause, of drastic change. Fight blight! They regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually, it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell.

Finally comes the decision, after exhortations to fix up and fight blight have failed, that the whole thing must be wiped out and a new cycle started... A new corpse is laid out. It does not smell yet, but it is just as dead, just as incapable of the constant adaptions and permutations that make up the process of life.

There is no reason why this dismal, foredoomed cycle need be repeated. If such an area is examined to see which of the other three conditions for generating diversity are missing, and then those missing conditions are corrected as well as they can be, some of the old building must go: extra streets must be added, the concentration of people must be heightened, room for new primary uses must be found, public and private. But a good mingling of the old building must remain, and in remaining, they will have become something more than mere decay from the past or evidence of previous failure. They will have become the shelter which is necessary, and valuable to the district, for many varieties of middling-, low- and no-yield diversity. The economic value of new buildings is replaceable in cities. It is replaceable by the spending of more construction money. But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.

page 198, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published 1961

Against Change or Against Improvement?

I don't like it when a childhood haunt is demolished, and I can understand a person expressing sadness at the loss of a neighborhood.

But what if you grew up in a disfunctional 15 story housing project with elevators that smelled of urine and broken glass in the dusty playground? I have to admit, I would still be a bit saddened to see it demolished. I hate demolition. I think most all buildings can be saved and improved.

That said, some forms of housing are proven disasters, and the most disaster prone is high-rise government housing. Study after study has shown that they are unsafe and unsalvageable. In his ground-breaking studies Oscar Newman used scientific methods to successfully design what he termed "defensible space", something high-rise government housing always lacks. You can read his book for free on the HUD website.

An article on the AP today is about a woman who gives what I would term sentimental tours of the old ghetto:

..this "Ghetto Bus Tour" is.. the last gasp in her crusade to tell a different story about Chicago's notorious housing projects, something other than well-known tales about gang violence so fierce that residents slept in their bathtubs to avoid bullets.

"I want you to see what I see," says Beauty Turner, after leading the group off the bus to a weedy lot where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. "To hear the voices of the voiceless."

Turner, a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion "Plan for Transformation," which since the late 1990s has demolished 50 of the 53 public housing high-rises and replaced them with mixed-income housing.

City officials have heralded the plan. But Turner believes the city that once left residents to be victimized by violent drug-dealing gangs is now pushing those same people from their homes without giving them all a place to go.

In many ways similar to Cincinnati's City West Project, the Chicago Housing Authority is demolishing Robert Taylor Homes, which consisted of 28 high-rises and over 4,300 apartments and replacing it with a "mixed income" development. This is all part of a Federal Program called Hope VI, which was a controversial program to help Housing Authorities demolish housing.

I have concerns about any wholesale change of a neighborhood. To paraphrase Jane Jacobs: "Any neighborhood, built at once, and built to be unchanging, is bound for failure" (I'll try to look up the exact quote later and insert it here).

My concern with City West is that it is overly new and built to be unchanging. A mixture of old and new structures is essential to a vibrant city district because small, new ventures require the affordable places that old buildings provide. Only established businesses of large size can afford new construction.

Also, the new homes in City West are all wood framed construction with brick veneer fronts and vinyl siding on the sides and rears. This may be expected in the suburban neighborhoods that Drees typically builds in, and it is certainly the cheapest per square foot, however, it seems out of place in a city that is mostly brick.

Despite my reservations about the new City West, I am only slightly sentimental about the housing projects that it replaced, and think that a mixed-use, mixed-income project, with defensible space is certainly an improvement.

Washington Park Elementary: Closed

A teacher at Washington Park Elementary tells us that the school will not re-open this fall. The students will be re-assigned to other schools. I didn't see this announced anywhere. I thought it would be open until a replacement school was built, or at least another year. The school had declining enrollment, due to low test scores and less people in the neighborhood, however it was an anchor to the neihgborhood, and it will be missed. A few years ago there were 3 neighborhood schools in OTR. Now there is just Rothenberg, which is now located on Vine Street, half-way up the hill to Clifton and barely even in this neighborhood. What a shame for a neighborhood that raised so many generations of children.

Sleeping in Public

 

When is it socially acceptable to strip down to your skivies in public, get on the ground, lie on your back, and look up at the clouds, dream, watch passerbys, listen, and maybe even fall asleep? ... At the pool.