Urban Wa7:(a1·e
Raquel Rolnik
Verso, 2019
Capital City
Samuel SLein
Verso,2019
both hamstrung by shrinking municipal budgets and unwilling to take on
serious problems of entrenched poverty and structural racism. To their
relief, the face of early gentrification \Vas a group of middle-class, mostly
white liberals looking to add value to the city's building stock'.
So it has remained, through many changes in fashion.
Both of these books reflect an increasingly widespread awareness
of the crisis, and an acceptance, ranging from politicians from Bernie
Sanders to Ada Colau to John McDonnell, that it can't go on any longer.
But as to what happens next, Capital City has the more-concrete
suggestions. Change can come from planning, but not from the current
planning system, in which professionals are, 'being asked to intervene
in only one way: to do everything in their power to make land more
expensive'. Stein argues for using existing preservation laws to retain
the public and co-operative housing estates that exist, to preserve both
'the class character' of this housing and their coherent public spaces
(only one of the city's estates, Harlem River Houses, is currently listed).
He ends with the five-point programme of the New York City Not 4 Sale
movement: ending homelessness through a moratorium on evictions
and the seizure of vacant properties ; universal, cross-city rent control;
community ownership of 'distressed buildings'; the repair and expansion
of public housing; and direct election of community planning boards with
the power of veto. As Stein points out, t hese, 'take what we have now ...
and turn them into something bolder, more democratic and less profit-
oriented'. A start, not an end.
The clarity and vehemence of these books is a tonic for anyone used
to the combination of boosterism and sentimentality that marks so much
urbanist writing. But the sheer scale of the problem is chilling. It's also
maddening to realise that we already know how to solve homelessness
and housing poverty- as Rolnik notes, Britain, Scandinavia and Eastern
Europe actually did so between the '40s and the '80s - but threw that away
for the promise of a quick profit. In his introduction to Urban Warfa're,
David Harveycites a 1978 New York municipal publication Housing in
the Public Domain - The Only Solution, published just before the politics
and economics of housing moved radically in the other direction. He roots
the crisis in 'forty years of demonising that solution'. This demonisation
has failed to convince many of the young in the 2010s, who have
only known a private system that is dysfunctional at best and
disastrous at worst - try telling a 25 year old sleeping on a sofa
that council housing is dystopian. The next step will be to build
actual new public housing, without strings attached. We've only
got 40 years of neglect to catch up on.