Book Alert / Public Housing That Worked

Public Housing That Worked -- New York in the Twentieth Century by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, UPenn Press '08, $39.95, 368 pages, ISBN #0812240774. Index, source notes, no bibliography, two appendices, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Public housing on a large scale swept American cities in the 1930s in response to Depression-era homelessness. The sociology of creating new, vertical neighborhoods took a back seat to the desperate need to put a roof over people's heads. But within several decades, these large complexes were widely thought to be unliveable and crime-ridden. Such huge complexes as Chicago's Cabrini-Green and St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe fell before the wrecking ball.

Some experts singled out density as the enemy of harmonious living. So public housing was retooled as high-rises fell. Those tenants who could do so relocated to more sparsely-settled areas, and those who remained entered a decentralized environment of detached, low-rise dwellings.

But, as the author writes, not all cities embraced the new paradigm. The New York City Housing Authority, for example, continued to maintain 400,000 tenants in "vast and well-run high-rise projects." What was its secret? According to Bloom, it's "the constant search for better methods in fields such as tenant selection, policing, renovation, community affairs and landscape design."

Bloom, chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University Institute of Technology, is the first to admit the New York City experience is no panacea, but in tinkering around the edges of the public housing dilemma, it has developed new management modalities while avoiding billions of dollars in destruction and rebuilding costs.