Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Logue made several miscalculations. He brought in a team including two veterans of Boston redevelopment, the architects I. M. Pei and David A. Crane, and the equally high-profile planner George M. Raymond, who together proposed a “macro-scale” concept that resembled Crane’s “capital web” proposal for Boston, a linear spine punctuated with clusters of commercial and community development. Undeniably, Logue received ambiguous and conflicting guidance from the CDC’s leaders, but his proposal still proved too big, too long-term, too top-down, and too far from the incremental, consultative approach that the local community, itself quite factionalized, demanded.45 One community-oriented board member, Judge Thomas R. Jones, complained, “We were supposed to accept the Gospel According to St. Logue, and we weren’t ready to do that.” In the end, the call of Boston’s mayoral primary gave Logue a convenient way to bow out of the increasingly fraught project, but he drew the disapproval of the same kind of participatory democrats in New York as he had alienated in New Haven and Boston.

  Despite the shadow cast by these previous New York involvements, Logue arrived in New York City on July 1, 1968, eager to make a success of this new, thrilling, well-funded opportunity.46 He expected New York’s UDC to become a model that other states would emulate, the first statewide semiautonomous urban renewal agency supported by two underutilized sponsors—state government and private capital. According to the well-respected planner Louis K. Loewenstein, who was funded by the Ford Foundation to assess the UDC, officials in the other forty-nine states were indeed watching closely what Loewenstein judged to be “the boldest effort of any state to match the size of its housing and urban problems with an agency of comparable authority.”47 The other major chronicler of the UDC during its lifetime, Dr. Eleanor Brilliant, concurred, claiming that few new public authorities since the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s “have aroused more interest among social reformers and planners … After a decade of immobilisme in urban affairs, the UDC presented a welcome possibility for authoritative decision making and action.” Brilliant, publishing in the midst of the UDC’s unraveling in 1975, was not blind to the enormous risks involved as well.48 She understood that the scale of Logue’s ambitions for the UDC and a worsening economic and political environment in New York State and nationally were converging to bring the UDC to a spectacular downfall. An urban renewal superagency that its founders conceived to be forever self-renewing would in the end last only seven years.

  FRUITS OF UDC LABOR

  Once Logue arrived in New York, he lost little time getting the UDC’s operation up and running. Both Logue and Rockefeller understood how important it was for the UDC’s shaky political fortunes to disperse its riches widely upstate and downstate. A letter soon went out under Governor Rockefeller’s signature to each of the more than sixty mayors and city managers in New York State, urging them to take advantage of this “new instrument to help you” and requesting a list of possible projects. Logue and top staff then traveled the state, often by helicopter, meeting local officials and checking out potential sites. Barely a month in, during August 1968, Logue reported having visited nineteen towns in ten days.49 The requests for UDC help—and money—started rolling in fast, from all over the state. By the end of the UDC’s first year, Logue was well on his way to identifying most of the locations for its future projects.50

  Between 1968 and 1975, the UDC produced nothing short of a whirlwind of building in the state. As a result of an IRS ruling early on that only 10 percent of the UDC’s tax-free bonds could go toward the industrial and commercial development that had been central to the UDC’s original mandate, most of the UDC’s building ended up being residential, along with schools, parks, and other civic projects.51 The score sheet was still impressive. Over seven years the UDC launched 117 separate housing developments in forty-nine cities and towns, comprising more than 33,000 dwelling units for 100,000 people, about a third low-income, the rest subsidized for moderate- and middle-income residents. In addition, the UDC developed sixty-nine commercial, industrial, and civic projects and three brand-new communities. Armed with an authorization to sell $1 billion in bonds (eventually increased to $2 billion), as well as start-up funds and interest-free loans from New York State, the UDC by early 1975 had launched $1.5 billion worth of projects (over $7 billion in 2019 dollars), with more in the works.52 Logue and his team were confident that the combined revenue streams of bond and property sales, state and federal government funding, and rental income would cover all costs.53 Moreover, the UDC expected its own investments to catalyze even greater private development in New York State. In the case of Utica, for example, the city’s downtown renewal had been abandoned seven years earlier by a developer, leaving the city in 1969 with not only vacant land but also “the lack of confidence of developers and real estate investors.” Now with the UDC, a city official hoped for renewed interest: “It’s a wonderful thing … where you have New York State behind you like that.”54

  During its lifetime, the UDC’s handprints could be found on an extraordinarily wide range of projects throughout the state, varying in location, scale, and type. A very partial list includes a major $60 million facelift to the old, depressed Hudson River town of Newburgh; construction of six thousand units of housing in metropolitan Rochester, half of them low income and on scattered sites in the suburbs; an expansive low-and-moderate-income residential project, the Shoreline Apartments, with a school and shops along Buffalo’s Lake Erie, designed by Paul Rudolph; Schomburg Plaza, located at 5th Avenue between West 110th and 111th Streets in Harlem, consisting of two award-winning thirty-five-story octagonal apartment towers with six hundred mixed-income units, stores, and a day care center, developed in collaboration with the prominent black psychologist and UDC board member Kenneth Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark; new housing and a convention-tourism complex to help buoy the off-season economy of Niagara Falls; remediation and future planning for six upstate communities in the Chemung River Valley devastated by Hurricane Agnes in June 1972; and the replacement of dilapidated shacks without indoor plumbing in a migrant labor camp in Kent, Orleans County, with the townhouse apartments of Carlken Manor.55 The UDC’s most ambitious and innovative undertaking was the creation of three New Towns on undeveloped land—Audubon, in Amherst, near the new campus of SUNY Buffalo; Lysander, renamed Radisson, twelve miles north of Syracuse; and the transformation of Welfare Island into Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River. These New Towns were intended to increase the state’s supply of decent housing; to create model, socially integrated communities; and to address an anticipated population increase of five to eight million between 1970 and 2000 (which turned out to be overly optimistic, as New York State’s population barely grew by one million).56

  It looked for a while like New York City would stubbornly refuse help from the UDC. Mayor Lindsay’s contentious rivalry with Governor Rockefeller was a factor, but the city also had a long tradition of jealously guarding its home rule from Albany, convinced that the state rarely compensated the city fully and fairly for burdens on transportation, education, or the environment. Snapped Lindsay, “Our cities cannot be renewed by state-operated bulldozers which move into local communities without their consent and without knowledge and concern about the increasing need for supportive services connected with all development.”57 But once Logue “sent word to Lindsay, through an intermediary, that, you know, at the rate we’re going, we’re going to have all our funds committed upstate and there won’t be anything left for New York,” the Lindsay administration buried its pride in favor of addressing its huge need.58 New York’s housing supply was shrinking, with new construction at a standstill and landlord abandonment growing. One hundred thirty thousand were on the waiting lists for public housing. And the severe cuts in federal funding that had alarmed Logue were hitting New York hard. According to a despairing Jason R. Nathan, the New York City housing and development administrator, “‘Crisis’ is an understatement. ‘Disaster’ may be more appropriate.�
�59 After tough negotiations, where Nathan pressured Lindsay “to lock arms, not horns, with the UDC … to harness UDC’s talents and powers … to make them work for the city,” the UDC and New York City struck a deal in May 1969. The UDC would agree not to launch any projects in New York City without the mayor’s prior approval but would pledge to build at least twelve thousand units.60 In return, the city would protect the UDC by promising to clear the sites and handle any required relocations.

  By 1971, half the UDC’s total housing starts would be located in New York City, encompassing 30 percent of the city’s publicly assisted housing construction that year.61 What Logue valued most in the deal was securing the land for what became the UDC’s crown jewel: the development of two-mile-long Welfare Island in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Queens as the mixed-income, pedestrian-only New Town of Roosevelt Island. In return for this prize, Logue agreed to take on building sites in the South Bronx and Coney Island that the city found too difficult to develop. Logue was willing to live with that. As he gleefully exclaimed, “I got the goat sites but I got the island.”62

  OPERATING THE UDC

  The UDC established an infrastructure statewide to support its ambitious program. At the start, in July 1968, there were only three staff: Logue; his personal assistant Janet Murphy, who moved with him from Boston University and acted, Lefkowitz joked, as “the interpreter of the words of God to man”; and Lefkowitz himself, who officially became the UDC’s general counsel but unofficially served as Rockefeller’s eyes and ears, put there by the governor, Lefkowitz readily acknowledged, “to watch Ed!”63 But very quickly new staff were added. At its height, the UDC employed over 550 personnel in seventeen offices, with central functions like executive, design, construction, finance, and legal located in its New York City headquarters, and project-oriented regional and field offices fanning out across the state in a more expansive version of the decentralized organization in Logue’s BRA.

  In New York, even more so than in New Haven and Boston, the work attracted young and idealistic professionals. Many were trusted veterans of past Logue projects who flocked to the UDC like homing pigeons once the word was out that he was launching an ambitious new venture. The architect Ted Liebman recalled Logue presenting him with a copy of the UDC Act of 1968 and saying, “‘Read it. This is where I’m going. I think I’m going to want you to come … This is going to be really important.’”64 New blood soon arrived as well. Lawrence Goldman was twenty-eight in 1973, with an almost-completed Princeton Ph.D. dissertation on a planned town outside London, when he jumped at the chance to become Logue’s special assistant and join a “veritable children’s brigade of smart—and sometimes smart-assed—uncontainable young professionals…, the best and the brightest.”65 Richard Kahan was a Columbia law student in 1971 when he started working at the UDC: “There was this great sense of momentum and everybody feeling they were part of something historic and wanting to kill for this guy … He was a two-fisted, roll-up-your-sleeves, let’s-get-down-in-the-dirt-and-make-things-happen kind of progressive.”66 Paul Byard, a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law, was hungry for a job with more social value than his current one at a prestigious New York law firm. “It was thrilling—hours, risks, adventures—but above all, the conviction of the worth of what we were doing. We thought of it as the public business—I think of that as Ed’s phrase—not because it was so businesslike but because the phrase made clear … the public good we sought to do.”67 Christine Flynn, who began as a staff attorney at the UDC and later served as the executive vice president of Roosevelt Island, summed it up this way: “It was like no other place I’ve ever worked. Logue had a genius for motivating people.”68 Flynn was one of the few women in a position of authority at the UDC. Urban redevelopment had emerged as a new profession more than a decade earlier, but it was still a male club into which few women gained entry, other than as staff assistants. Janet Murphy exerted substantial influence and kept track of everything and everyone at the UDC, but she did so from a traditional role.

  As in Boston, Logue invested in a headquarters intended to convey the stature and ambition of his new superagency. The UDC took over a full floor (later expanding onto two others) of a new skyscraper, the Burlington House, at 1345 6th Avenue, between 54th and 55th Streets. The Burlington Company had re-created a full-scale working textile mill for visitors to its lobby, celebrating the company’s loyalty to its industrial roots even as it inserted itself in the postindustrial economy of midtown Manhattan—a mix reflected in the UDC’s own economic development activities in New York State. Higher up, the UDC’s offices on the forty-sixth floor afforded spectacular views of the vast land awaiting the UDC’s imprint. “I could look out my window and see Central Park … and see the mountains up in the Catskills,” said Logue. And lest he forget less-visible upstate areas, a giant relief map of New York State sat opposite his desk.69 As in Boston, Logue spared no expense decorating these offices. Though critics condemned them as “Logue’s Lush Lair,” he defended the modern décor as “well-designed, but not luxurious.”70 To further inspire his staff aesthetically, the Museum of Modern Art, with its well-respected architecture and design department, was just down the block. The UDC found it the perfect venue for its fifth anniversary celebration in 1973.71

  With the aid of big money, the Rockefellers’ well-flexed political muscle, a powerful new toolkit, and a gung-ho staff, Logue took off on a tear to make a big difference in New York State and beyond. Never one to be modest in his self-confidence or his goals, Logue aimed not only to change the physical face of New York but also to pioneer new solutions to the nation’s severe housing shortage and its ailing cities. This was the opportunity that Logue had been waiting for his whole career.72

  MAKING A FAST TRACK

  The UDC’s power to take a project all the way from land acquisition, finance, and construction to its opening as a home, school, police station, library, or factory made it possible to avoid what had long troubled many in the redevelopment business: the frustratingly slow completion of projects due to time-consuming coordination among multiple parties. Rockefeller and Logue both frequently lamented that it could take five to seven years under normal conditions to build a new residential project. Urban renewal ventures took even longer—an average of eight years in the state and thirteen in New York City.73 The thicket of funding and regulatory requirements from different levels of government slowed down progress to the point of discouraging private developers from even trying to work in New York State. When a group of major builders were queried about why they hadn’t constructed more affordable housing in New York City despite the enormous demand, they uniformly complained about lack of subsidies but even more passionately about horrific delays from red tape.74 The developer of a project in New York City, for example, had to obtain official approvals from ten separate departments or agencies of the city, state, and federal governments, seven serially.75 Logue despaired at the problem. “This is hurting us. Some of the builders and developers are [instead] going to Florida.”76

  The UDC was equipped with extensive capabilities in part to address this logjam in housing construction, but even within the UDC’s comprehensive operation Logue felt the need to institute a practice he called “fast-tracking.” This meant avoiding delays by moving ahead with projects before all the final funding, permitting, designing, and bidding were securely in place. Logue had confidence that they would all come through in the end, and rather than lose valuable time, he began construction using funds already in hand. Interestingly, even Logue’s harshest critics, who would later fault the UDC for many abuses, admired what fast-tracking made possible: substantial cost-savings given the constant escalation in construction prices, a reduction in red tape, avoidance of panic selling by project neighbors, and quicker availability of construction jobs.77 The real estate developer Richard Ravitch, no fan of Logue’s UDC and the person Logue most blamed for its downfall, agreed that “he was right to do that. Time is mone
y. If you delay the start of construction, it’s going to cost you more.” Ravitch stressed, however, that this approach worked only if projects were held tightly to budget, which was not always the case at the UDC.78 Years later Logue took pride in the boldness of his fast-tracking strategy, which could shorten the time to construction to eighteen months: “Since we had the power of eminent domain, had the resources to hire plans, and to build it ourselves if necessary, I would start a project on land we didn’t yet own, with subsidies that were not yet tied up in contract … But I had commitments, and I relied on that.”79

  Fast-tracking made it possible for the UDC not only to undertake steps simultaneously rather than sequentially on any one project, but also to launch a multitude of projects concurrently, which Logue felt was crucial to the agency’s success. As he once put it: “I wouldn’t want to make the people of Harlem think we can solve their problems by nibbling at them, nor would I go to Bedford-Stuyvesant and say, ‘Look, you nice people, we’ll be working over in the South Bronx for the next ten years, but we’ll get to you eventually.’ You either do them all at once and on a large scale, or you don’t bother.”80 To make fast-tracking work, the UDC operated with a system perhaps best described as “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” utilizing funds raised from general-purpose bonds and government grants secured for one set of projects to jump-start others and complete unfinished ones. So long as the faucet kept flowing—and there was no reason to suspect it would not—the UDC could continue to set construction records.