In this week’s readings, the issues and methods of affordable and low income housing in 1990’s New York City paint a picture of great effort and limited success. Among the most thought provoking was the chapter from “Who Deserves Housing? The Battle for East Thirteenth Street”, by Amy Starecheski. In this chapter, a number of former residents of the east thirteenth street squats discuss their experiences, and expose many contradictions to the fundamental ideas surrounding squats. Early on, there is a distinction between ideological squatters and their counterparts, low income New Yorkers with few other options. It would seem that the tension between these groups compromised the efficacy of the overall squat. The very concept of the deprivation based squat, as described in the chapter as a carefully selected group of vulnerable people, to the exclusion of the “undeserving poor” which include drug addicts, is inherently problematic. The precarious legal status also deprived the community of the tenant rights and the protection of law enforcement, leading to a lawless and somewhat unharmonious existence. Despite the limited early success of the urban homestead movement however, as time went on, the squats faced opposition from legally established low income housing developers.
While the squatting efforts undertaken in New York in the 1990’s were flawed, the contemporary efforts in low income housing rehabilitation primarily by the Joint Planning Council were also flawed. As described in Janet Abu-Lughod’s writing, “Defending the Cross-Subsidy Plan: The Tortoise Wins Again”, New York City was struggling in the early 1990’s, and both the commercial and multi-family sectors of the real estate market were severely depressed. This increased the activity of the low income housing developers, who saw an opportunity to gain control of the city owned tenement buildings which the squatters had already appropriated, in the absence of interest from private, market rate developers, which had been actively seeking such buildings in the late 1980’s, prior to the collapse of the movement to gentrify the Lower East Side. While this could be seen as a good thing, however, the pitting of two forces, both signaling the need for affordable and low income housing, was counterproductive and was ultimately damaging to both movements. All this was presided over by the government of New York City, which did nothing to take control of the situation and wasted favorable market conditions which could have been exploited to improve the affordability of housing in the city.
I’m very interested in your last sentence! How do you think favorable market conditions could have been better exploited? Do you think, for example, today’s market could be better leveraged for low-income affordable housing or do you think this is the best plan the city can offer? The Lower East Side in the 1980s is such a great case for thinking about property in a contemporary major city, particularly when we compare it to other cities facing massive vacancy and abandonment like Detroit, Baltimore, and the South Side of Chicago. What would you recommend these cities do that New York did not do then? Should the cities encourage squatting? Build perpetually affordable housing? Create land trusts? Sell off land to the biggest developers? And would you buy land in these cities if you could?