How de Blasio Can Get Housing Policy Right

Photo by Paul Sableman

 

The mayor has some good options—if creating affordable housing is really his goal.

 

New mayors, like new presidents, often start their administrations with signal actions. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has had several, including limiting expansion of some charter schools and pushing to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for expanded pre-K education. On housing policy, about which the new mayor professes to be “deadly serious,” he has pressured the redeveloper of the derelict former Domino Sugar refinery on the Brooklyn waterfront to increase—from 20 percent to 30 percent—the number of apartments set aside at below-market prices.

 

Read more: http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0430hh.html

Phillip Blond on the Civic State and Conservatism

Phillip Blond, English political thinker and director of think tank ResPublica, is credited with the resurgence of conservatism in the UK.

 

Cobblestone Conservative

How Jane Jacobs saved New York City’s soul.


Housing projects are almost universally loathed today, not least by their residents. Still, one can understand the vision that inspired them. City life is crowded and, at first glance, messy. Even if the middle and lower classes cannot afford their own backyards, we can at least provide them a simulacrum of suburban life. Sixty years ago, lacking the benefit of hindsight, planning officials honestly believed that by bulldozing neighborhoods and replacing them with modern towers, highways, open space, parks, and playgrounds they could cure poverty and save the city.

The woman who proved that it wouldn’t work was an eccentric freelancer named Jane Jacobs. In her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs assaulted a century’s worth of received wisdom in urban planning. Jacobs read voraciously; she would test her ideas by imagining dialogues between herself and thinkers from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. But she was no academic. In Death and Life, she cited not one paper nor analyzed one set of data.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cobblestone-conservative/

Quote of the Day

“[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.” ― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Communist housing policy

The Communist regime believed that people were shaped by their environment. New uniform socialist housing, it reasoned, would produce a new uniform Socialist Man shorn of bourgeois individualism. Building socialism meant building panelaks (plus, of course, the minimal facilities of school, health centre, police station and prefabricated concrete pub.) 
Source: Rory Wilmer Photographer

"Communist housing policy had other and more brutal sides. In Prague, it tied the residents down in their city, offered them menial employment, and left them more or less to their own devices. But elsewhere—in Prostejov, for example, or the once beautiful Slovakian town of Povázská Bystrice—the Communists bulldozed the old town centers and stacked up the population in blocks on the perimeter, for the Party was anxious to destroy the past and the loyalties that grew in it."  — Roger Scuton

Taken aken from the  1999; article, "Sleeping Cities" City Journal,

Detroit’s Message to Investors

 

Photo by Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan

 

When emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr filed his plans in late February to lift Detroit out of bankruptcy, his proposals drew fire from the municipal-finance industry. Investors, bond insurers, ratings analysts, and industry groups all balked at his terms. That’s not surprising, since Orr, a private-sector restructuring expert, has used the Detroit bankruptcy to try to overturn years’ worth of precedent in municipal finance.

Read more: http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_snd-detroit-bankruptcy.html