New York City Housing Authority’s resident-led plan is to turn the land around their buildings into gathering places of cohesive communities.
For 86 years, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has been the home of many of that city’s affordable housing residents. With over 175,000 flats housing around 400,000 residents, NYCHA is the largest housing authority in the United States. As a whole, it is a city within a city, and some of its properties are so large that they are neighbourhoods within neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, due to a lack of federal funding, those properties have seen better days, which is why NYCHA is turning to its residents to spur a much-needed rejuvenation.
That change comes in the form of the Connected Communities Initiative, and it is the reason the City of New York won the 2020 Wellbeing Cities Award for the category of Supporting Cohesive Communities. The plan is to reimagine 75 percent of NYCHA’s land portfolio by making it more accessible to residents. Many of the properties were built in the mid-20th century when the problems facing the city, and the expectations of citizens were different. NYCHA’s goal now is to create the affordable housing community of the future by getting residents to initiate the design process.
The focus is on increasing access to the land NYCHA already owns. Less fences, less barriers, and more open spaces for the NYCHA community to gather. The details of the plan can be found in the Connected Communities Guidebook.
When NYCHA CEO Greg Russ accepted the Wellbeing Cities Awards, he described how the Connected Communities Guidebook is only the beginning of enhancing the quality of life for their residents: “ Not only must we think about how we’re going to use this open space, it comes at a time when the housing authority must reinvest in its buildings, in its properties, and in its communities,” he said during his acceptance speech in a Zoom session for the forum. “We must raise significant capital to make these buildings new again, and we must make them new in the context of the world that we live in today.”
That new context has become even more urgent during the pandemic. The international recognition that this award brings to NYCHA for its centring of the resident experience in the development of its policies, programs, and projects only encourages them to press forward.
“New York City was one of the hardest hit cities by Covid-19, so we’re thinking this is an extremely important time now to be having conversations about wellbeing and how we use initiatives such as the Connected Communities Initiative to really help our residents recover and come back more resilient to this pandemic and other future risks,” says Delma Palma, Community Design Architect for NYCHA. “Connected Communities highlights the co-benefits of access to open space, opportunities for climate resilience, infrastructure and improved physical and mental health.”
The need to invest in the maintenance and retrofitting of NYCHA properties is something that is hard to deny. From flooding in the Douglass Houses apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to problems with mold in a Bronx apartment that took a year to fix, the needs of NYCHA residents are well documented in the local New York news by award-winning journalist Monica Morales. Who is ultimately to blame for these living conditions? We have to go back 30 years to find the answer.
The U.S. Federal Government began disinvesting in public housing in the early 1990s. In 1998, the U.S. Faircloth Amendment was enacted, barring the construction of any new federally-funded affordable housing. In an expensive city like New York, providing affordable housing is crucial, but there was the U.S. Government making it impossible for NYCHA and other American housing authorities to do so.
Over the next 30 years, the federal subsidies for affordable housing continued to decrease. With some NYCHA buildings reaching 50 years old or more, it is no surprise that these ageing structures need substantive improvements now. A sentence in the Connected Communities Guidebook describes what has happened to NYCHA residents over the last couple of decades. “While the city as a whole has prospered economically, many NYCHA campuses and their residents have been excluded from the prosperity of their immediate neighbourhoods.” Politically, both Democratic and Republican federal administrations have been in power during that time. Ultimately, the blame is shared by many people.
Why did the U.S. senior political class lose interest in ensuring that affordable housing communities remained strong and did not suffer from differed maintenance? “The federal government does a really good job at building. We can build bridges, we can build highways, we can build housing,” says Steven Lovci, the Executive Vice President of Capital Projects for NYCHA, “but to maintain it and to provide funding to make sure that it doesn’t fall apart over the years is where we tend to have difficulties. Public housing authorities are not immune to that.”
According to Lovci, the lessening role of the U.S federal government is only part of the reason. As the public sector has backed away from funding affordable housing on its own, it has tried to get help elsewhere. “There are a lot more public-private partnerships. There are programs even for private developers to incentivize them to provide affordable housing,” explains Lovci. The problem is that private developers do not have the same motivation as public housing authorities. While developers including affordable housing in market-rate projects is laudable, it does not fill the gap sufficiently, especially in a city like New York.
“We have to make sure that the next generation has all of these (NYCHA) units so that we can at least have this as the minimum benchmark for the number of affordable housing in New York City,” Lovci says. “If an urban centre does not have economic diversity, the urban centre doesn’t exist. You can’t have an urban centre that is strictly one economic piece or one economic branch. It takes that diversity to fill all sorts of different types of jobs and to provide the context of what is the human experience.”
The value of economic diversity is what NYCHA represents. Despite obvious deficiencies in some buildings, not all of them are noticeably in need of repair. Many of NYCHA’s buildings do not fit the stereotype of American affordable housing, with some existing in affluence neighbourhoods like Manhattan’s Upper West Side. One could walk by a NYCHA property without knowing it. “It might be just a walk-up townhouse. It could be a garden apartment. You might walk by what is a Mitchell-Lama program, which was a state program that created affordable housing,” describes Lovci. “Then you might look at a tower-in-the-park apartment, and assume that must be public housing, when in actuality it might not be.”
The tower-in-the-park apartments that Lovci is referring to is the Corbusian-approach to social housing, which many architectural and urban thinkers consider a modernist failure. Over the years, I wrote about this topic twice for Design Exchange, here and here. When asked if he sees the Connected Communities initiative as correcting the wrongs of the past, Lovci gives a surprising answer.
“Life is about context. NYCHA came out of the eros of the city. Lower East Side, where now you have very expensive apartments, were tenements. They lacked running water, light, and air, because they were cramming people as tight together as possible. You had a lot of disease because of the lack of ventilation. And in the crowdedness of those tenement areas, multiple families lived in single apartments or even single rooms,” he says.
“So if you look at all the ills that were happening in the tenements, compared to the public housing tower-in-the-park, the building that had grass around it had the most light. It had the most air. The windows that we say today are kind of small, were big windows in 1950. These buildings had elevators. There were a lot of French flats that were being built for luxury, that were above 8 stories that didn’t have any elevators in them. So you had wealthy people that were moving into wealthy apartments and didn’t have elevators, but you had affordable housing that had elevators. It’s all contextual.”
Palma is equally contextual in her view of the towers-in-the-park. She sees the ‘parks’ as spaces for residents to really make an impact. “It’s not that the typology was wrong,” she says, “it’s the asset that the typology gave us, which is land. We have a significant amount of open space and we have a huge inventory of very mature trees. That is something very special in New York City. It helps mitigate against heat too. So all of these are co-benefits that come with this landbank that NYCHA has.”
This is where residents are getting involved in the Connected Communities Initiative.
Palma and Lovci feel that it is important to involve NYCHA community leaders, organisations, and resident associations in this process. Instead of making plans and bringing them to the residents, the residents were invited to ideate themselves.
“Participatory design is a huge tenet of the initiative and that’s the thing that’s easy,” explains Palma. “It does mean that it’s a lot of leg work to get out there, do it consistently, revise the design, and communicate clearly. But it’s important because the residents are the experts, they’re the ones with the lived experiences. They can give us information on how spaces are currently used, or misused, how they’re maintained if there are events that transform the spaces, and that’s something you only know if you live there.”
They held public design charettes and were a presence at many established NYCHA community events. There, young and old give their input, ideas, and feedback. “We made sure we were out there talking about these types of participatory design strategies,” describes Palma. “What we keep hearing time and time again was just appreciation for being included in the process. Even if the project was small or it was very complex, they would say thanks for keeping us up to date or responding to our design requests. It really increased their sense of trust.”
Although NYCHA is still underfunded, for Palma and Lovci, listening to residents is the first step of a larger strategy. The more residents are involved, the more they will be able to have the political power to influence senior levels of government to take affordable housing seriously, making the resident engagement a form of leverage.
“Architecture and design is a service industry, and as public sector designers, we are directly serving NYCHA residents. That’s really who should be involved in the decision-making process,” says Palma. “And it benefits the design in the end because there’s also a lot more ownership of the project when residents are involved. It helps with the success and longevity of the project.”
Words Phil Roberts
