Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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Low income housing comes in many forms - I don't know of anyone seriously still in favor of the 70s model of low income housing that still haunt us to this day, particularly in major cities like Chicago and NYC.

There are a bajillion problems with the "garden of towers" model of low income housing (or really, just housing in general - middle and even upper income projects following that model have largely also failed, though obviously without such disastrous outcomes).

Stuy Town for example is an example of this model being applied to middle and upper-middle class housing, and it has similarly failed to produce the communities they were originally intended to, and are now more known for being inaccessible and cheap than desirable in any particular way.

The modern model in NYC for low income housing is to mix them in to market-priced buildings, and either subsidize the building directly or offer indirect incentives (more height limit and buildable floor area being the big one). IMO this works a lot better, and is at least closer to what Jane Jacobs IMO correctly identified as a critical element of making cities work (the geographic mixing of economic classes).

> Stuy Town [...is] more known for being inaccessible and cheap than desirable in any particular way

The last I heard about Stuy Town a friend of mine was moving out of there because he got priced out, and he was making ~90k/year.

Inexpensive relative to housing near it. Stuy Town is decidedly cheaper than its surrounding areas, though obviously not immune to the pricing pressures of being in Manhattan ;)

There's also a pretty interesting effect of pricing within Stuy Town, where apartments towards the center of the farm of towers are substantially cheaper than apartments towards the edges of the "community". That whole area is a dead zone - its intention is to be idyllic and serene, but it's actually just sterile and unappealing, and housing is priced proportionally to how easy it is to get the fuck out of there.

It's something to be aware of when people are all "build up, build up!" (And I know that building higher doesn't necessarily mean building true high rises but, in general, the more stories the smaller the footprint.) I've actually known people who moved into luxury high rises and ended up leaving because they found the experience too isolating and removed from the surroundings.

High rises come in many, many forms, and particularly how they interact with the streets below them is critically important to whether or not they work.

NYC does this better than most places, but mostly by luck. Le Corbusier's Radiant City philosophy of urban design (sleek towers surrounded by idyllic parkland) gained a lot of traction in the 60s and 70s. This is why most American downtowns are wastelands - most developed under that model. It's characterized by lack of street life, lack of ground floor usages, lack of mixed use, and mechanical features that separate buildings from the city rather than integrate it (deep staircases leading to the base of the building, large setbacks from the sidewalk, etc).

NYC has the benefit of predating that model, so besides the ubiquitous housing projects and some 70s-era highrises, has survived mostly intact.

It's frustrating that in some American urban planning circles Le Corbusier's name is still uttered in awe instead of derision. I think his ideas have been thoroughly debunked by reality, but not everyone agrees.

There's nothing inherently wrong with highrises, there's everything wrong with the prescriptive school of architecture and planning that are more concerned with fantasy scenes of tower-dwellers living idyllically in the surrounding parkland, than how people actually want to use that space.

Fully agree. Even Boston, which is a generally walkable and mixed-use city by US standards, has its monuments to 60s/70s urban planning like the Brutalist monstrosity that is City Hall and its generally vacant windswept surrounding brick footprint.

One of the problems has been that when cityscapes were planned, commercial activity has often been seen as this impure thing involving people making money on public space. While you don't want to just give developers and retail/restaurants a free ride, they have to be part of the mix or you end up with these sterile spaces that no one wants to be a part of.

If you haven't read the book, Jane Jacob's Life and Death of Great American Cities digs deeply into this, and really nails the prescriptivist design philosophy that contributed to this whole mess.

It's not necessarily that commercial activity was rejected - it was often accepted but only in spaces designated by the designers, which in turn bore no resemblance to where people actually wanted to shop, eat, entertain, etc. And so businesses failed to populate these spaces, and they became wastelands, with crime and decay following shortly after.

This philosophy extended beyond commercial spaces - these communities inevitably had spaces set aside for children to play, adults to entertain, etc, and deeply restricted the use of these spaces to these things, and these things only. There's a deep, controlling, Big Brother-esque undercurrent to that entire branch of urban planning.

And through all of this those same urban planners seemed to blame residents to failing to uphold their utopian urban vision than realize that a reasonable bit of laissez-faire is fundamental to functional cities.

I ran into that recently as I was following some links. I guess I should read it. (Funnily enough, I've mostly been largely rural--or at least exurban--but I've long had an interest in this topic.) Thanks.

The ground floor usage thing on mixed-used buildings seldom seems to work. SF has many such retail slots, and they seem to be about half rented, or rented to nail salons and such.

https://goo.gl/maps/WiT6s1cmk6y

https://goo.gl/maps/X3SeQrQwr6K2

It's worth noting that those high rise project style blocks in NYC, such as stuy town, are dramatically less dense than similar blocks with regular 4-6 story tenement style buildings.

They are tall but not dense, the latter being the thing that proponents of high rises and more development are actually in favor of.

Perhaps you're right, though the last time I went apartment hunting in that general area I did not find anything in stuy town that was in my price range (1BRs there were 3k+), and I ended up about 16 blocks due south from the south east corner of stuy town (in the last remaining grimy/non-gentrified part of the LES, though of course my presence was a sign of its "up and coming" status...).

I ended up getting priced out of that apartment (well, they jacked my rent and I was tired of paying that much for an essentially shitty, though somewhat spacious, apartment) and moved to a brand new building in queens.

I haven't lived in Brooklyn in 20+ years. Is Stuy Town the new name for Bed-Stuy?

No, there are lots of things in New York named after Peter Stuyvesant. "Stuy Town" is a large private development north of the the east village that was built after WWII and supposed to be a revolutionary model of urban living, but failed to live up to the hype.

Having known people who lived there, it feels like living in a housing project, but with the rent of a normal apartment. Not the best deal in the city, but it works for some.

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