New York state of mind | MR Online

There is nothing inherent or natural about the way we experience the built environment. Those structures of feeling, thought, and action, of association and signification, which shape our perception of urban space, much like the buildings and infrastructure that make up a city, are determined by culture and politics. This insight is blindingly obvious, but few writers in recent times have done so much to draw out this process than Owen Hatherley, and in his latest book for Repeater, Walking the Streets, Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC, he goes West, directly addressing the seat of American Empire. This book is concerned with a certain way of seeing and thinking about cities that originated there, which he terms the ‘New York Ideology’.

What Hatherley calls the ‘New York Ideology’ is, in simple terms, the mode of thinking about urbanism and development that has been dominant in the West for the past 50 years. Its origins lie in the New York of the 1960s, where a particularly overextended and corporatist state planning model embodied by the megalomaniacal Robert Moses–with its racist ‘meat-ax’ imposition of car infrastructure–was rightly challenged and beaten through community politics and organising.

The totemic champion of that fight was Jane Jacobs, most associated with her community organising which saved a neighbourhood of socially mixed, densely built nineteenth-century housing in Greenwich Village from the Lower Manhattan Expressway. For Jacobs, the Expressway embodied a mode of modernist planning defined by large scale ‘projects’, and blind to the granular, unplanned vivacity that defined a successful city. The campaign succeeded in saving the historic neighbourhood, but that mode of politics had no programme to resist the gentrification that followed and destroyed the social composition described in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Hatherley argues that Jacobs’s priorities have blinded us to the vital role that ‘projects’ and modernist planning have to play in protecting a diverse and successful city, primarily through providing a bulwark of affordable housing so that working-class communities can still afford to live there.

The final defeat of modernist planning came with the crises of the ’70s and ’80s, when the Federal government abandoned New York, and landlords in turn abandoned their properties in huge swathes of the Bronx, Queens, and the Lower East Side, deliberately burnt out their tenants for insurance money, and left the city looking like ‘it had recently been subjected to aerial bombing’. This Hobbesian catastrophe is almost unimaginable from the perspective of New York today, where the ceaseless inflation of land prices and rent make it difficult to imagine a landlord ever giving up their claim to any parcel. Never again would the state be trusted to intervene at scale in the urban fabric, and the abandonment by state and capital alike of large swathes of the city set the terms for a new phase of urban development. The following story of the city’s recovery, traced through decades of gentrification, limitless speculation and the contemporary housing crisis, is largely the story of neoliberalism, but also of Hatherley’s ‘New York Ideology’.

The impact of this history on our experience of the built environment today comes largely through Jacobs and her intellectual heirs on both right and left. Jacobs’ cohort emphasises the vibrancy of dense, unplanned communities, a heterogeneous built environment constructed lot-by-lot through small-scale private development. The lessons learned in the 1960s—70s persisted long after state capacity or will to impose ‘projects’ on the urban fabric had withered on the vine. However, the communitarianism of Jacobs’ work is more fundamentally a neoliberal assertion of the primacy of the market. Only developers decide what gets built where.

This way of thinking has produced the dominant strain in contemporary policy-circles known as YIMBYism. YIMBYism or market urbanism asserts–in the face of overwhelming evidence–that private development can solve the crises of commodification and price spirals which have defined housing in the urban core of the twenty-first century West. Unbeknownst to many of that tendency, the way they think about the city has its roots in the history of New York, co-opted by the developer lobby.

Hatherley aptly summarises the perverse effects of the New York Ideology, but what he finds when he visits New York itself is a city with a vast stock of social, affordable, and cooperative housing. Despite the protestations of Jacobs, it is precisely ‘projects’ in their various forms which are the hold-out sanctuaries of the dense, diverse communities which have since been gentrified out of the Village she fought so hard to save. The book’s first and most complex task, then, is to unpick the web of institutions and organisations which built this housing stock. A cavalcade of local and federal authorities, trade unions, and cooperative movements variously arranged along ethnic, ideological, and factional lines make up the players of the book. Its basic insight is that on a walk through the Bronx, you may well be surprised to come across serried ranks of Brezhnevka (Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks), and be even more so to discover that they were built not by the New York City Housing Authority but by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union for its members.

This complicated network also required compromise with oppositional forces of capital and establishment politics. In an age where mass urban politics were keenly felt by a plutocracy with a sense of self-preservation, some figures like John D. Rockefeller weighed in behind the cooperative movement, enabling organisations like Abraham Kazan’s Amalgamated Housing Union (AHU) to develop vast numbers of affordable homes for an urban upper-working-class who were to become part-owners in the housing stock of the city. As a mixture of socialist, Marxist, Jewish, and earlier cooperative formations secured chunks of housing, other factions came forward to dispute the settlement. A leftist political formation, Asian Americans for Equality—which had its origins fighting for an end to the exclusion of migrant labour from employment in the construction of affordable housing developments in Chinatown—is today the largest administrator of affordable housing in Lower Manhattan. One Maoist printworker, leading a rent strike in an AHU project, called that earlier formation of Abraham Kazan, in its compromises with capital and empire, ‘social democratic whores’.

Alongside these myriad factional formations, we must not forget public housing provided by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)—places like the Queensbridge Houses, a vast estate of 96 austere buildings with tiny windows constructed at the height of the New Deal. Such projects operate with an income ceiling: if residents earn too much, they are forced onto a private housing market which has socially cleansed the working class from large swathes of the city. Projects like Queensbridge, which the New York Ideology would frame as the great failures of the twentieth century, are the last redoubts of a social democratic settlement which underwrote the dynamism and vigour of late-twentieth-century culture. As Marley Marl, one of the key innovators of hip hop, remarked:

I was paying $110 dollars a month for my rent, free electricity. So New York Housing Authority kind of co-produced some of my earlier hits. Thank you guys.

These projects were imperfect; they were designed with little regard, if not active contempt, for their inhabitants. But they continue to make life possible in pockets of the city for a class of people that have been priced out everywhere else. Throughout the book lurk the threats to the islands of affordable housing which pepper the metropolis. Depending on their structure, cooperatives can be vulnerable to votes by residents to privatise, sell-out, and cash-in, a sort of miniature cascade of Right-to-Buy flat-by-flat. Indeed, the threats can come as a kind of Anglophilia, with the NYCHA seeking to ‘learn from London’ and apply a British model of demolition, privatisation, resident removal, and redevelopment that has done so much to accelerate gentrification and the housing crisis in the UK.

What might these complicated histories tell us about how new social housing could be achieved today, then? What skein of local political movements, community action groups, and trade unions might be required to build such housing again, or more generally, in a context where the prospect of housing built at scale directly by the state or local government is a distant memory?

The difficulties of achieving this under the glare of supertall luxury skyscrapers should not be understated; land and construction are now so much more expensive, and the developer lobby has such a grip on national and local politics. But if the Left in the urban core of the West is going to have any hope of achieving its broader programme, housing must lie at the heart of that project. Hatherley is right that the New York Ideology has been totally incapable of tackling its own crises of gentrification and spiralling prices, and it is the social democratic ‘projects’ it demonised which offer the clearest route beyond commodification and crisis. Much like New York in the twentieth century, global cities under neoliberalism might require institutional collaboration: between organised labour, local government, cooperatives, community organisers, and fractions of capital, if affordable and social housing is to be built at the scale needed to solve the housing crises in these cities.

However, while Hatherley is right to advocate for these overlooked buildings and offer a corrective to the high priests of YIMBYism, it is important not to trap ourselves fighting the last war. As Hatherely remarks:

The only way the New York Ideology envisages housing becoming affordable is through some sort of economic or natural disaster emptying the buildings so that you can squat them.

For anyone that has lived in an urban centre over the last forty years, it is unthinkable that government and landlords could abandon property on the scale of New York in the 1970s. And yet, those forty years have been marked by a period of remarkable stability, which might be proved anomalous. Economic and especially natural disasters are accelerating and intensifying across the world, and the response to them will doubtless require new combinations of the modernist planning embodied by ‘projects’ and some of the flexibility and dynamism which sits at the kernel of the New York Ideology.

Today on the Lower East Side, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space holds tightly to the radical, anarchist, communitarian, and left-libertarian legacies of New York’s urban crisis. In the late 1970s, a curious coalition of young suburban whites, holdout Puerto Rican communities, Young Lords, and those that refused to leave filled the space left by absentee landlords and collapsing local government with community gardens. They commandeered or squatted abandoned housing blocks, and the resulting residences, formally recognised by city government, were termed ‘homesteads’, language tellingly redolent of the frontier. Only small vestiges of this movement survive today, and they hold on through compromise and formalisation of status by the municipal bureaucracy that once abandoned them. But they did build stable and supportive community out of ruin, and did much to resist the turning tide of gentrification and particularly the racism of the NYPD through those years. Their way of thinking about the city, rather than the YIMBYs, is the part of the New York Ideology we should take seriously in an age of climate crisis.

Hatherley is right that these movements have much less to teach us than the projects in delivering housing right now in the urban heart of the West; they were only possible because disaster struck the city. But it may yet come to pass that we are living again in an age of disasters.

Matthew Lloyd Roberts is an architectural historian and podcast producer. He works on ‘About Buildings and Cities‘, a podcast about architecture and culture.