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Susan Gittelman
Providing sufficient housing – particularly housing that is affordable – is a tremendous challenge. And while the need is particularly urgent right now, this problem is not new.
Two new books by local authors address how we have struggled with this dilemma, often with unintended consequences, and how we have revised and tried again. Each book has its own scope and particular focus, but both offer useful perspectives on this, one of our society’s persistent challenges.
Lizabeth Cohen’s “Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age” is a sympathetic but objective biography of Ed Logue’s efforts in New Haven, then Boston, and finally New York. It highlights how he attempted, often unsuccessfully, to remake these urban areas and give them sustaining commercial life, jobs and housing. Urban fixer Edward J. Logue was recruited to Boston by Mayor John Collins some 60 years ago to reinvigorate the dying city after World War II.
Alex Krieger’s “City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present” is a breezily written survey of what can be the dry topic of city planning and solutions to common downtown problems, such as shortages of affordable housing. America’s cities have adopted a wide variety of approaches, both successful and failing, to restore and maintain their health.
These histories address urban renewal and the particular programs that were applied by the federal and local governments. Both books note that filling the housing needs of people left behind by the free market was an important goal.
The Bulldozers’ Failure
Cohen, an author, professor of American Studies at Harvard University, and former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, devotes 100 pages to Logue’s time in Boston, which took place in the ’60s, just a few years too late to have prevented the elimination of the West End neighborhood and the displacement of 11,000 people. But Logue oversaw local implementation of federal Urban Renewal on Boston’s waterfront, in Scollay Square – which became Government Center – and, with a lot of opposition and limited success, in other neighborhoods.
“Saving America’s Cities” plots the history of the U.S. Housing Acts – 1937, 1949, 1954, 1968 – and other agencies and tools created to foster housing development, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Housing Choice Vouchers.
“Intense contestation over what constituted an ideal physical environment and how to best achieve democratic decision-making taught Bostonians to assert themselves in new ways.”
— Lizabeth Cohen, “Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age”
“One of the most important legacies of neighborhood urban renewal in Boston was the spur it gave to community organizing, which flourished thereafter in many realms of American society,” Cohen writes. “Intense contestation over what constituted an ideal physical environment and how to best achieve democratic decision-making taught Bostonians to assert themselves in new ways.”
With a bulldozer, top-down approach having failed, the brand-new Boston Redevelopment Authority and residents “negotiated cityscape that bore the marks of tense give-and-take,” Cohen says, resulting in new homes in developments like Washington Park, Villa Victoria and Tent City Apartments in the South End, and Charlesview Apartments in Allston.
Effective Engagement Critical
Krieger, a professor of urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a principal at NBBJ, a global architecture and planning firm, takes us from critiquing the European settlers’ visions of creating an Eden in the New World to the “smart cities” being attempted today, highlighting successes like “Olmsted and the Parks Movement” and failures like “the urban clearance decades” in between.
Descriptive of the scraping of an entire neighborhood in the West End, Krieger laments, the three phases of federal housing policies between the 1930s and 1990s were – and here he quotes housing historian Lawrence Vale – “not just about clearing sites, but about clearing sights – a cleaning out of things that should not be seen.”
“As elsewhere,” Krieger reports, “until later amendments to the Housing Act made the replacement of housing mandatory, Boston’s leaders used federal funding for broad economic development goals, relegating housing for the poor to a secondary concern. Demolition of older neighborhoods invariably led to reductions, not increases, in the supply of affordable housing.”
As Krieger reminds us, excessive focus on market goals or on a technocratic vision of urban improvement, the results can be disappointingly the same.
Although the two books take two very different perspectives, they come to the same basic conclusion, which is that effective community engagement is a critical element in achieving systemic positive change.
Only purposefully and with such engagement will we make progress in creating housing to the extent and at the scale of what we need.
Susan Gittelman is the executive director of B’nai B’rith Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing developer currently working in Boston, Sudbury, and Swampscott.
