Priced Out

Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods

Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison, Michael R. Glass

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479881888
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación de ciudades y desarrollo urbano

On an average morning in the tree-lined parks, plazas, and play-areas of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town housing development, birds chirp as early risers dash off to work, elderly residents enjoy a peaceful morning stroll, and flocks of parents usher their children to school. It seems an unlikely location for conflict and strife, yet this eighteen-block area, initially planned as middle-class affordable housing, is the site of an ongoing struggle between long-term, rent-regulated residents, younger, market-rate tenants, and new owners seeking to turn this community into a luxury commodity. Priced Out takes readers into this heated battle as a transitioning neighborhood wrestles with contemporary capitalist strategies and the struggle to preserve renters’ rights. Since the early 2000’s, Stuyvesant Town’s owners have sought to transform this iconic Manhattan housing development into a luxury destination for those able to afford the higher price tag. Attempting to replace longtime residents with younger, more affluent tenants, they have disrupted native residents’ sense of place, community, and their perceived quality of life. Through resident interviews, the authors offer an intimate view into the lives of different groups of tenants involved in this struggle for prime real estate in New York, from students experiencing the city for the first time to baby boomers hanging on to the vestiges of middle-class urban life. A compelling, fascinating account of changing urban landscapes and the struggle for security, Priced Out offers a comprehensive perspective of a community that, to some, is becoming unrecognizable as it is upgraded and altered.

1

History

The Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1940s was in many ways a relic of a bygone era. Historic neighborhoods such as the Gas House District evoked the life and memories of the nineteenth-century city. Tenement blocks and ethnic neighborhoods housing first- and second-generation migrant communities held much in the way of social capital, or what some refer to as the invisible “ties that bind.” However, the housing was functionally obsolete and ripe for renewal. Forces pushing for modernization could be found in former Mayor LaGuardia’s policies and in plans for a new Manhattan that would house veterans returning from World War II battlefields. Stuyvesant Town merged these backward- and forward-looking characteristics in a unique fashion that has, perhaps, never been precisely repeated.

This chapter describes the formation of Stuyvesant Town as a new neighborhood, and it places particular emphasis on public works administrator Robert Moses and his collaboration with the private-sector developer, MetLife. We examine the sense of place that emerged in the new Stuyvesant Town superblock, a community created and shaped by rent-control policy. This chapter also outlines the significant events surrounding the disappearance of New York City’s rent-controlled housing, a phenomenon that continues to affect the community more than fifty years later. We also begin to hear from members of two distinct communities within Stuyvesant Town: original tenants and newcomers, both of whose experiences are detailed throughout this book.

The Master Builder Plans a Neighborhood

The story of Stuyvesant Town, as with New York City’s broader twentieth-century urban history, is inexorably linked to the plans and philosophy of Robert Moses, an appointed city official with a definitive vision for his city. Moses was trained in political science at elite institutions—Yale, Oxford, and Columbia—reflecting both his background and his attitudes toward social structure. He developed a strong belief in the power of public administration through his scholarship and early employment with the Bureau of Municipal Research; this attitude was very much in keeping with the guiding principles of his contemporaries.1

What came to distinguish Moses from other New York City public officials was his success at building upon his career ambitions. By the early 1940s Moses had accumulated considerable power through his participation on several New York City planning commissions, committees, and through his appointment as Mayor LaGuardia’s housing coordinator.2 The power that Moses wielded during the mid-twentieth century continues to be a polarizing topic in planning and community development circles, raising the ire of urban activists concerned with the rights and needs of all urban residents.3 Adhering to the planning axiom “make no small plans,” Moses’ approach to city planning was informed by the modernist principles of urban designers, such as French architect Le Corbusier’s preference for large-scale developments that often centered on high-rise residential structures and the use of the automobile. Moses’ influence as a “public entrepreneur” wielding bureaucratic power led to the construction of Stuyvesant Town—a centerpiece of his broader objectives to reshape New York’s social geography through large-scale, privately financed redevelopments of so-called slum areas throughout the city, including Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, and the Gas House District.

Stuyvesant Town was built, at least in part, as a response to the broad housing crisis that started during the Depression and was intensified by the Second World War. Tenement buildings known for being cramped, dark, unsanitary places with poor air circulation dominated the residential landscape of New York City’s poor and working-class communities, and this form of housing persisted despite housing reform legislation and amendments. A housing inventory conducted in 1934 for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) found seventeen square miles of slums and blight in the city; the report recommended that the city demolish the slums on the grounds that they were unfit for human dwellings, were economically unprofitable, and acted as “breeding places of crime and disease.”4 The deplorable conditions in the nineteenth-century tenements continued into the 1930s, as historian Jan Morris explained: “The most diligent housewife could hardly maintain a decent home in a place like this. Damp got into everything, you could keep nothing clean, roaches were inescapable and rats brown, black and Alexandrian defied extermination—the only cure for rats, it was said, was to ‘build them out.’”5

Humanitarian rationales for slum clearance were only part of the equation for New York’s leaders; as suburban developments created new residential options for city residents, Moses and the LaGuardia administration began to consider plans for modernizing the city’s housing stock in order to better compete with the suburbs.6 World War II hastened these plans when it became clear that postwar New York would need to provide safe, stable, and affordable housing to returning veterans. In his role as city housing coordinator, Moses was responsible for selecting the neighborhoods to redevelop in order to meet the city’s postwar needs. By 1942 he had turned his attention to the Gas House District on the Lower East Side as a target for redevelopment.

The Gas House District, named for the placement of large gas storage tanks along the East River, was located between Fourteenth Street and Twenty-Seventh Street. From the late 1800s, poor immigrant communities populated this neighborhood, and it had a reputation for criminal activity arising from groups such as the Gas House Gang, who were known for street fighting and looting homes and stores. The combination of crime, poverty, and the foul odor emanating from the gas houses garnered this area an unsavory and turbulent reputation; a journalist in 1907 reported that the Gas House District “is not a pleasant place in the daytime, much less at night. But then you don’t go there at night ordinarily. Having created these places, we leave them severely alone.”7

According to period accounts, the area had improved somewhat by 1942, with most of the gas tanks removed and with better access through the newly constructed East River Drive. Yet the Gas House District remained blighted and was an obvious site for Robert Moses’ redevelopment agenda. Moses had what many would refer to as an “opportunistic” approach to urban development. Writing about New York’s Astoria neighborhood in 1942, Moses could have just as easily been describing the Gas House District when he explained that Astoria’s current state of neighborhood decay provided “an opportunity to acquire a large tract at low cost, to build a bulkhead out into the river with a park and esplanade along the waterfront, to wipe out some pretty poor buildings, a few fairly good ones, and to build on native land.”8

Moses’ plans for New York’s postwar redevelopment called for slum clearance on several sites simultaneously. Given the extent of his planned postwar housing program, Moses sought to involve private investors in the redevelopment projects in order to subsidize the costs of slum clearance and to minimize the public financial risk of new developments. Moses believed strongly that the private sector should take the lead in providing housing, and during 1942 he worked with City Corporation Counsel Paul Windels, Insurance Superintendent Louis Pink, and State Housing Commissioner Edward Weinfeld on a new law enabling the creation of limited-dividend redevelopment companies to spearhead slum clearance in New York.9 Signed into law as the Redevelopment Companies Law (RCL) of 1942, this legislation created a groundbreaking partnership between the public and private sectors that other cities subsequently would replicate, and that would have significant implications for urban renewal projects over the next fifty years.10

The RCL leveraged the city’s legal rights as a public corporation, and by authorizing the city to exercise eminent domain, it could assemble parcels of land on behalf of a private redevelopment company. Savings banks and life insurance companies could invest directly in these limited-dividend companies and gain tax exemptions from the increased value of the property after improvements for twenty years.11 In return for these benefits, developers were required to comply with three conditions. First, they had to certify that tenants who were displaced from the development site would find adequate replacement housing; second, developers were required to build interior streets and parks within the site; and third, and perhaps most relevant to Stuyvesant Town’s story, the developer had to agree to place rent controls on the new housing for the duration of the development’s tax exemption.

The area above Fourteenth Street would be the first in New York to be redeveloped with a public-private partnership enabled by the RCL. Moses first approached the New York Life Insurance Company with plans for a middle-income housing development on the site, but the board proved too risk-averse to pioneer such a scheme. After several other companies also expressed a reluctance to lead the area’s rehabilitation, Moses approached Frederick H. Ecker, chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. MetLife had recent experience with a residential construction project on largely vacant land in the Bronx, and Moses wanted to convince the company to redevelop the blighted land in Manhattan. He was able to secure their cooperation by amending the Redevelopment Companies Law to loosen regulatory controls. The amendment extended the tax exemption to twenty-five years, dropped the stipulation to obtain replacement housing for displaced residents, and raised residents’ income limits in order to attract a higher social class of tenants. With MetLife installed as a redevelopment partner, the plans for Stuyvesant Town were first made public on April 18, 1943.12 These plans called for the construction of apartment buildings on an eighteen-block area that could house 11,250 middle-income World War II veterans and their families.

Moses considered it necessary to award MetLife considerable latitude to overcome corporation leaders’ historic reluctance to invest in New York’s housing market. However, many New York residents were vocal in their concerns that the local government was overreaching by encouraging private-sector investment in the city’s medium-income housing. New York citizens and planners alike also worried that city officials and private investors would fail to include in their plan the needed public facilities and schools for such a large population of tenants. After all, despite its squalor and functional obsolescence, the Gas House District could at least lay claim to one public school and two parochial schools, which under the new plan, would be relocated outside of the Stuyvesant Town footprint. Further, many New Yorkers were critical of the fact that MetLife would have the power to deny unrestricted citizen access to the entire site, despite the purported “public” basis for the housing development.

Fear of displacement was an added concern felt by residents of the Gas House District and other neighborhoods facing urban renewal. At the time, 11,000 people were living in the area, and these residents worried about how and where the city would relocate them. In a letter to the editor published in the New York Times on June 3, 1943, Robert Moses indicated that MetLife and the Stuyvesant Town Corporation would relocate the residents at no cost to the city.13 Local residents formed the Stuyvesant Tenants League, a branch of the United Tenants League, to advocate for residents, coordinate social services, and provide support for the soon-to-be-evicted tenants.14 However, the seemingly inevitable destruction of the Gas House District meant that opposition to displacement was muted.

As the plans for Stuyvesant Town became more publicized, residents of the Gas House District and a variety of civic groups including the Citizens Housing Council and labor unions raised concerns over privatization, accessibility, and displacement,15 but these social justice concerns were considered secondary issues when compared to the vocal criticisms of Stuyvesant Town’s racial segregation policy. MetLife had made it clear from the start of the project that it did not intend to accept African American veterans’ applications. This decision was in direct opposition to the growing public sentiment that African Americans should be protected from discrimination with regard to access to public housing projects. In response to the planned discrimination, the spokesman for the Permanent Committee for Better Schools in Harlem stated that “at a time when Negro and white Americans are dying on the battle fields to preserve our Nation, it seems shocking that such a project could even be proposed.”16

However, despite the public subsidization of MetLife’s development, Moses and the LaGuardia administration considered Stuyvesant Town a private project, and its management had more discretion to discriminate against nonwhites in order to maintain segregation. The Board of Estimates, a city board charged with land-use decisions, was set to vote to approve the Stuyvesant Town plan. On the night before the vote, Frederick Ecker stated his case for the whites-only policy: “Negroes and whites don’t mix. If we brought them into the development it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property.”17 Robert Moses fully endorsed Ecker’s stance, as Moses not only believed strongly in the right of private companies to choose their own tenants, but he also had concerns that fair housing mandates could dissuade private-sector firms from participating in his other planned slum clearance projects. Writing in support of legislation designed to protect MetLife’s right to discriminate, Moses warned that “if control of selection of tenants” is “to be supervised by public officials, it will be impossible to get insurance companies and banks to help us clear sub-standard, run-down, and cancerous areas in the heart of the city.”18

Though Mayor LaGuardia had strong reservations about the contract after becoming aware of the racially restrictive policy,19 he signed it as written, and the plan for Stuyvesant Town went to the Board of Estimates. The Board members approved the plan within just a few weeks, and such hasty consideration meant there was little opportunity for the public to consider or debate the design and redevelopment plans. Exacerbating the narrow window for public participation was the fact that three of the most powerful men in New York City at the time, LaGuardia, Moses, and MetLife chairman Frederick Ecker were all strong Stuyvesant Town champions. Against this triumvirate of city power and amidst the backdrop of modernist planning rhetoric that proclaimed the creation of a better postwar New York, the public stood little chance of successfully opposing Stuyvesant Town’s plans, or of lobbying for a racially inclusive renting policy. In the end, Stuyvesant Town’s plans were approved by a vote of five to one, with the dissenting commissioner, Lawrence M. Orton, objecting because the development lacked a provision for a public school. The city’s board approved Stuyvesant Town as a whites-only development and green-lit the project for construction.

A year later, in 1944, MetLife answered the charges of racism by announcing a new housing project for African Americans—the Riverton project in Harlem. This project copied Stuyvesant Town’s tower designs, but on a far smaller scale, constructing only six buildings adjacent to the Harlem River at East 135^th Street. With lower rents than those charged in Stuyvesant Town, architectural critic Richard Plunz concluded that MetLife’s racially segregated housing developments were “a symptom of the new generation of racism endemic to the emerging postwar culture.”20 What mattered to Moses and MetLife was that the path had become cleared for Stuyvesant Town to replace the blighted blocks of the doomed Gas House District.

Building Stuyvesant Town

With the plans approved, development of Stuyvesant Town proceeded quickly. Under the supervision of Robert Moses’ subordinate Gilmore Clark, Irwin Clavin, H. F. Richardson, George Gore, and Andrew Ekin laid out the design utilizing a sixty-acre s...