82 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
X-rays values: we pay shortstops more
than teachers because most of us actu-
ally care more about watching baseball
than about educating our children. We
as a civilization perhaps care more about
how art is housed than about how com-
mon people are housed.
Yet every civilization carries a mys-
tery, or several, within it. (Why didn’t
the Toltecs, who had wheeled toys, make
wheeled vehicles?) Our great mystery
may be why there is no readily turned-to
model of what humane, high-density,
inclusive urban housing would look like.
Or, rather, we do know what humane,
high-density, inclusive urban housing
looks like. It looks like what we’ve got
already and don’t have enough to share.
The examples that are occasionally trot-
ted out as counterinstances, such as
Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, in Montreal,
are hard to scale and to re-create. As it
happened, I lived with my family in Hab-
itat 67, a scant decade after leaving the
Philadelphia housing project, and its con-
crete passageways were terrific. But it
has since become an oddity in a corner
of Montreal, though much loved by dog
owners who like its easy walkable spaces.
What we want is—well, the entire
old housing stock of the city. The trou-
ble is not that we don’t recognize it but
that we can’t reproduce it. People want
to live in New York’s West Village, San
Francisco’s North Beach, or Philadel-
phia’s Society Hill; they’re drawn to the
right kind of density. Harlem has been
expensively “reoccupied” by urban pro-
fessionals because the streets and the
housing stock of Harlem, paralyzed by
prejudice for so long, are intrinsically ap-
pealing to anyone who has the chance
to live there. It is not a taste for the retro,
or mere nostalgia, that makes this hap-
pen. It is a recognition that the building
habits of times past created spaces that
are more hospitable than the sterility
of time present. There may be no fix to
this, but it is the unspoken reality within
which we all live. No one rooted harder
for the implosion of the Corbusian hous-
ing projects than the people forced to
live in them.
R
uskin spent his entire life trying to
get nineteenth-century people to
build like fourteenth-century Venetians.
He hated the results, but we love them—
all those “streaky bacon” buildings, the
masonry interspersing red brick with
pale stone, which every British city now
lovingly restores. The most quixotic cur-
rent proposal in New York is to rebuild
Penn Station in its original form; it
sounds absurd, but, given that we are
sooner or later going to build a new
Penn Station, it is hard to come up with
good arguments for not going back to
the old one.
An earnest search for award-win-
ning, successful contemporary pub-
lic-housing schemes turns up disap-
pointingly little; they tend to be French,
Spanish, and Slovenian, and, though
they doubtless have many virtues, for
the most part they do fall prey to the
Jacobsian sins of streetlessness, and typ-
ically still take the form of towers in the
middle of a plaza, albeit often more
brightly colored or oddly shaped than
their dynamited predecessors. We ’r e not
Corbusian nightmares, they seem to in-
sist. We’re neighborhoods—thirty stories
high, on a plaza.
Cohen ends her life of Logue with
a laundry list of lessons, some items
bleached and clean, some still stained.
The lessons are compounded to the
point of contradiction: Big Government
is essential to building housing, because
“state and national governance are cru-
cial tools of redistribution within vast
and diverse territories,” but we must “in-
volve community residents in divisions
that affect their homes, neighborhoods,
and cities.” (We need Big Government
to override local bigotries and local con-
trol to override Big Government insen-
sitivities.) Urban circles are very hard to
square. Do we really want to revive, on
progressive grounds, the old impreca-
tions against outsiders coming into set-
tled neighborhoods when “the element,”
in this case, are gentrifying hipsters in
fedoras rather than black-hatted Hasi-
dim? Krieger, too, ends his book with a
set of recommendations, all commend-
able—minimize inequality, share access
to abundance—but none tied to partic-
ular buildings or developments that
work. There are, tellingly, lots of insis-
tences and no illustrations.
The legendary urbanist Alain Ber-
taud has observed, in reference to hous-
ing policies, that, while the law of sup-
ply and demand may be as fixed as the
law of gravity, we defy the law of grav-
ity all the time. We build balloons and
airplanes and elevators to counter it.
What we can’t do is repeal the law of
gravity—take an ordinary rug and de-
clare that it’s a magic carpet.
Some city planning is like the craft-
ing of an airplane, or at least an eleva-
tor: we can protect small merchants with
ordinances that limit the size of their
competitors, as happens in France, or
with tax structures that would discour-
age landlords from maintaining empty
storefronts while holding out for na-
tional chains that could pay the exorbi-
tant rents they hope for, rather than
continuing to accept lower rents actu-
ally available from the bookstore or the
wine shop. We can insist (as we’re al-
ready beginning to do) on social hous-
ing as part of every development.
Other projects, like rent control, are
clearly magic carpets that won’t fly: with
the best intentions in the world, all rent
control does is to reward the incumbents
and punish the incomers. What makes
cities even trickier to regulate than fall-
ing objects is that the pull of their grav-
ity alters all the time: the progressive
ambition of Logue and Lee’s time, to
lure the rich folks back, is very different
from the logic of ours, when we are sav-
ing cities from being filled only with
rich folks. Perhaps we don’t need de-
partments of urban planning so much
as graduate degrees in city problem-solv-
ing, alert to the pragmatic perplexities
each inch of pavement presents.
Sometimes left and right converge on
a common cause out of common sense;
sometimes left and right converge on a
common cause out of a reluctance to face
the inherent contradictions in a prob-
lem. What aspects of Ed Logue’s legacy
do we really want to revive? Essentially,
the intentions but not the edifices. We
want a generous state investment in
affordable housing—which means sub-
sidized housing—but we want it not to
look like most of the affordable housing
that’s been built before. (It’s noteworthy
that the de Blasio administration’s pub-
lic-housing initiatives tend to involve
rehab more than construction.) We want
Logue’s principles and Jacobs’s places.
We want the project of public housing
so long as what we build does not look
like a public-housing project. The con-
tradictions are self-evident, but, then, cit-
ies are contradictions with street lights,
or else they are not cities at all.
