The Failure of the Projects

In walking through a housing project the other day, I reflected on what a failure the projects are on a variety of levels.

Let's begin with urban design/form. The first thing that strikes you about projects is the lack of what we call "street life" or "urban vitality." This is true especially at night, but even during the day you will mostly find people just milling about. What explains this lack of dynamism? The absence of commerce. Think about the neighborhood you live in -- what gives it its vitality is not the "sense of community" or "cool people" or whatever else you may think; it is shops, restaurants and bars. Commerce makes a neighborhood vibrant, even a relatively poor neighborhood- just look at the renaissance of Harlem's 125th Street to see what a difference commercial land uses make in the vitality a neighborhood. Even if you live in a brownstone on a quiet street in Park Slope, chances are you are no more than one block away from a major commercial avenue with restaurants, shops, etc. But projects are organized as mega-blocks in which you might live over two blocks from any commerce. Moreover, the project is organized as a sort of geographical unit, with a store even a block away perceived as a bit of a trek- it is inexcusable that there is little to no commerce within the housing project megablocks.

Another flaw in the urban design of housing projects is the space set aside for parking. Even New York's upper-middle-class residents rarely have cars, and these are the poorest New Yorkers - why waste space on this (not to mention the environmental argument against encouraging car use)?


The only successful, dynamic place in any project is usually the playground/basketball court. Indeed, parks are a good use of space that promote social life, and even in this respect projects do not get high marks. When you look around a project, you will often see a lot of grass; the problem is that the grass is inaccessible and broken into small patches. Contrast the layout of the projects (small patches of grass that are gated off) with the layout of a college courtyard; the courtyard is successful because it is totally open for residents to walk on and it leverages the economies of scale that come from combining small pieces of land to provide a playing space of meaningful size for sunbathers, picnics and even sports.

On a more macro-level, the layout of projects is dreadful. They are physically isolated when the real value people get from being in cities is connectivity. This is the genius of the street grid. Even Mayor Bloomberg's mansion on 79th Street literally just opens out onto the street and he is immediately hooked into the street network to walk or take public transportation anywhere in the city. The projects, by contrast, offer little of the street network's amazing connectivity because they are focused inward, their megablocks are disconnected from and interrupt the normal street pattern, and some are even actually gated off from the rest of the city.

On an even more macro-level, I wonder if projects are a good idea at all. Even when the private market is involved, it is very difficult to master plan a vast area at one time because successful neighborhoods change and evolve organically over time, and master planners simply don't have enough information and can't account for what the future will bring. This is part of why projects look so dated today.

And does it really make sense to have projects on valuable land in Manhattan (say the East Village) when there is no doubt in my mind that every project resident paying $300 to live in the East Village would gladly rent out her apartment for the market rate of $1500 and use the $1200 profit to live somewhere else? When the City of New York could sell the land the projects sit on for billions of dollars and fund a huge housing voucher program for far more low-income residents? It seems to me that the poor would be better off with a voucher program that would give them more options to choose from; competing developers would try to cater to the low-income residents' tastes in order to get vouchers, and low-income residents would be better off. There exists a federal voucher program now but the numbers are low enough that they can be sort of dismissed by landlords. A robust program, however, would create a critical mass of voucher holders that would make developers and landlords interested in serving them.

Ultimately there are a limited number of things the government is good at, and creating and maintaining massive tracts of housing is not one of them. But given that we are perhaps stuck with projects for some time (at least in New York), the City could at least make some of the changes I proposed - adding commercial land uses, ridding the projects of parking lots, and reconfiguring the open space to be larger and more accessible (perhaps using some of those former parking spots...).