Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  To ensure Charlotte Gardens’ success, Logue contracted with the MBD, tapping its deep knowledge of the community for help soliciting, screening, and selecting buyers for the much-sought-after homes. Brooks herself interviewed every one of the hundreds of families who applied, did home visits, gave counseling sessions, encouraged buyers to get involved in the community, and in every way possible tried to make Charlotte Gardens successful. Other aspects of the project were also shared with the MBD—designated by Community Board No. 3 as the SBDO’s official community cosponsor—in what was a complex, deeply interwoven division of labor between the two organizations.75

  Relations between Logue’s SBDO and the MBD were not without tensions. When Peter Bray arrived to work on the Charlotte Gardens project, he was shocked to “get an absolute earful” from Gennie Brooks “along the lines of we’re not going to come in and tell them what to do.” Bray understood that, but he also learned it was a delicate balance, that if “they thought they could push us around, if we let them do it, shame on us. We had to push back … In that environment … a strong offense is the best defense.” Sometimes MBD members thought Logue went too far, operating as if he were still the big boss of the UDC.76 And the goals of the SBDO and the MBD were not always the same. They agreed on the importance of prioritizing current South Bronx residents who were not yet homeowners and recruiting stable families with dependable incomes and low debt as buyers. But the SBDO pushed for greater social and economic diversity among the homeowners selected for Charlotte Gardens, out of Logue’s long-standing commitment to create socially mixed communities. The MBD, perhaps more aware of the fragility of prospective buyers’ finances, worried more about homeowners not keeping up their payments and thereby jeopardizing the whole project. In internal discussions, the SBDO at one point fretted that the MBD was too “seduced by extremely high income, or perhaps factors such as the length of time a candidate has been living at his current residence,” while also favoring Hispanics over blacks and established households over young ones whose children would populate the local school and give a “family feel” to the neighborhood.77 But in the end Logue and Brooks, and their respective organizations, found a way of working together successfully. The MBD acknowledged that Logue did listen and was getting them what they couldn’t get on their own.78 Father Smith frequently went out of his way to convey his great respect for Logue, who reciprocated, repeatedly expressing enormous affection and respect for Brooks, Smith, and their colleagues.79

  Logue’s local collaborations in the South Bronx extended beyond the MDC. The SBDO worked closely with the six community boards in the area, attending meetings, coordinating with district managers, and seeking to win over suspicious residents. By 1983, the chairpersons of five of the six boards sat on the SBDO’s nineteen-member board of directors. SBDO’s human services director, Karolyn Gould, felt that Logue’s genius “was to position himself as the community’s advocate and prove this consistently and to dispel fears that this master urban planner would be their nemesis, another Robert Moses,” who—thanks to the Cross Bronx Expressway—was truly the enemy in the South Bronx. Logue’s message to community boards, according to Gould, was “Tell me what you want me to do.”80 That assessment was confirmed by an insider, Jack Flanagan, a board member and former local cop who was executive director of the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation, a grassroots activist organization promoting urban greening: “Logue is, contrary to popular belief, working with the local planning boards.”

  The Community District 3 manager Veralyne Hamilton recounted how the situation in her own district evolved into a collaboration between her board and the SBDO. When outsider Logue first arrived, her constituents “were ready to lynch him,” insisting, “I don’t want anything built unless I have input into it.” She feared that her community district would “get left out altogether because they were bogged down in that debate.” Over time, however, Hamilton convinced her members to work with Logue, telling them, “I respect him because of his knowledge.” While placating Logue’s critics with “Okay, Ed Logue may be a racist,” she went on to urge them to appreciate that he “knows how to push projects. You see this vacant land around here, ladies and gentlemen? Well, it could be like this forever if you don’t hook up with this new situation.”81 Community boards like Hamilton’s realized that so long as Logue listened to them, they would benefit from his ability to tap into resources otherwise inaccessible or even unknown to them. As Peter Cantillo, district manager of Community Board No. 2, put it, “When he’s on your side, he just makes life a lot easier.”82

  The Charlotte Gardens project manager Bray attributed the successful partnerships that eventually emerged not just to Logue’s learning from past mistakes but also to the fact that the SBDO had more in common with community boards than with city agencies downtown, as they both had to work from the margins to influence the city’s planning decisions.83 Brooks concurred: “Logue came in very optimistic and he soon found out the … heartache the local activist groups were feeling.” The real problem, according to Brother Patrick Lochrane of Board No. 6, was not Logue: “He’s spoken to everyone in the community, not just to the power brokers. When they [SBDO] came up with a plan for Board No. 6, it was what everyone wanted … Compared to Logue, it’s the City Planning Commission that’s the absolute horror.”84 Logue himself, of course, consistently battled city officials who enjoyed more official power than he did, though many came to appreciate the value to them of the SBDO’s deep connections to the South Bronx community.85 In a stunning reversal of Logue’s history of relationships elsewhere, when the Ford Foundation commissioned a confidential report on Logue’s work in the South Bronx in late 1980, it predicted that the SBDO’s success or failure would depend not on community support, which Logue seemed to have, but on “the degree of commitment coming from the opposite direction: the willingness and ability of the Mayor, Governor, and federal agencies to give Logue the kind of support he needs.” And two years later, in 1982, when the Fund for the City of New York did its own assessment of the SBDO, it concluded that the SBDO deserved higher marks for its impressive (and improving) relations with notoriously hard-to-please community boards in the South Bronx than with city agencies.86

  Over time, Logue also developed strong working relationships with Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, founded in 1977 with the motto “Don’t Move, Improve,” and particularly with SEBCO’s founder, Father Gigante.87 At first, Gigante was suspicious of Logue, considering him an interloper and perhaps judging him as a potential rival, but they learned to trust and help each other.88 Gigante eventually came to share Logue’s view that adding some homeowners would help stabilize low-income rental communities with residents who had a financial investment. “We must balance our neighborhood. We love the poor. We are working with the poor. But we have to bring an economic class in that can sustain the neighborhood,” Gigante explained.89 When Logue needed to protect the two model homes, fully furnished with donations from the nearby Kelly’s Furniture Store and now sitting vulnerable in the midst of a rough Charlotte Street neighborhood, Gigante assisted in the hiring of the Nighthawk gang members he had trained as a security force, with the goal of turning their street smarts to more benevolent ends. When Koch asked Logue how he protected the site at night, Logue took pleasure in replying, “We hire the people who steal it to be guards!”90

  This was a very different Ed Logue from the redevelopment czar of New Haven, Boston, and New York State. Logue’s transformation is particularly well captured in how he collaborated with the Catholic Church. In Boston, Logue allied with the highest levels of the archdiocese, Cardinal Richard Cushing and his right-hand adviser, Monsignor Francis Lally, who served for a decade as chair of the Boston Redevelopment Authority board, which theoretically made him Logue’s boss. But while Boston’s urban renewal had united the highest ranks of church and state, in the South Bronx Logue’s Catholic partners were parish-level priests and nuns—such as Fathers Smith and G
igante and the latter’s colleague Sister Thomas—and the community activists with whom they worked. He was convinced that these local religious leaders made the Catholic churches of the South Bronx, with their twenty-four parishes, seventeen parochial schools, and priests residing in neighborhoods—90 percent of them bilingual—a vital force for social stability and positive community change. They sat on community planning boards, built low-income housing, and ran social services. In fact, when The New York Times published a laudatory profile of Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York in March 1983, Logue wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the article’s omission of the “priests, nuns and brothers” of the South Bronx Catholic religious community who were “a very important element of strength,” so much so that he “wish[ed] they could be cloned.” These locally oriented Catholics were more likely to challenge the church hierarchy in New York with their activism and independence than to speak for it.91

  Another major way that Logue’s experience at the SBDO differed from his past efforts in urban redevelopment lay in how his work was now financed. In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when urban renewal money flowed plentifully from Washington, the 1970s and 1980s marked a steady decline in the federal government’s support for housing construction and other urban projects that benefited low- and moderate-income Americans. For example, the Section 235 deep mortgage subsidies created in 1968 that Logue had at first counted on to finance homes in Charlotte Gardens were effectively eliminated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.92 The next year, Reagan canceled Section 8 subsidies designed to encourage construction of buildings for low-income tenants through guaranteeing developers and landlords the difference between fair-market rent and 25 (later 30) percent of occupants’ income. Reagan kept only the cheapest part, the vouchers for individual renters.93 The Reagan administration also cut the Urban Development Action Grant program, aimed at leveraging government funding to spur private investment and jobs, though Logue managed to secure $14,500 for each Charlotte Gardens house out of remaining funds. Likewise, Reagan halved financing available under the Community Development Block Grant program. By one estimate, the $2.6 billion a year in federal funds that flowed to community development projects at the end of the Carter administration had shrunk to $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted) by 1985. Reagan cut HUD funding for assisted housing from $30.9 billion in Carter’s last budget to $18.2 billion in his own first budget. All told, over the period 1981 to 1987, housing programs were slashed by two-thirds, more than any other part of the Reagan budget, the latest chapter in the assault on federal spending and responsibility that had begun with Richard Nixon’s New Federalism a decade earlier.94

  This severe reduction in federal dollars by the 1980s forced redevelopers like the SBDO to piece together what remained of funding at the federal, state, and municipal levels to make projects work. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 helped. Between 1977 and 1997, total annual lending by banks to low-income communities grew from $3 billion to $43 billion a year.95 In Charlotte Gardens, the SBDO benefited from the New York State Mortgage Agency’s Forward Commitment Program, which made below-market mortgages available to first-time home buyers and specified neighborhoods by insuring banks against risk. With that protection, Chemical Bank was willing to provide $4 million worth of mortgages to Charlotte Gardens home buyers at low rates.96 But the funding was never enough, deepening Logue’s frustration with this shift in reliance from the public to private sector. In a 1983 speech to the National Housing Conference, he railed against the now reigning philosophy of “Let the market forces prevail.”97 Stephen Coyle, a successor of Logue’s at the helm of Boston’s BRA who would go on to run the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, visited Logue in the South Bronx that same year and felt he was witnessing “the master builder surrounded by urban decay, with the federal government abandoning [him].”98

  Filling part of the gap left by the retreat of the federal government and performing a novel role that connected private-sector funders to nonprofit recipients was a new player in the world of urban redevelopment: the “third sector,” dominated by foundations. Foundations had long been important to urban initiatives. The Ford Foundation had funded many of Logue’s projects over the course of his career. But with public support on the wane, nonprofit intermediaries grew even more important. Logue’s South Bronx work had already benefited from philanthropy; the Bathgate Industrial Park received funding from the Vincent Astor Foundation as well as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, which hoped to encourage the creation of more jobs in the apparel industry. But the major source of nonprofit support for the SBDO came from a brand-new spin-off from the Ford Foundation, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), founded and headed by Logue’s former colleague in New Haven, Mike Sviridoff. After establishing CPI in New Haven, Sviridoff went first to New York City to set up Mayor John V. Lindsay’s Human Resources Administration and then became a vice president of the Ford Foundation for thirteen years. LISC emerged out of Ford’s recognition under its new president, Franklin Thomas, who had been the founding president of the pioneering Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, that past failures in urban policy and this dawning era of greater dependence on the private sector called for the foundation to invent new ways of intervening in the nation’s still-troubled cities.99

  Born about the same time and building on the strong ties between Logue and Sviridoff, LISC and the SBDO grew up together. Although Ford had already given a little money to the Bronx’s SEBCO and Banana Kelly community development corporations, “the real commitment had to be to an organization like the South Bronx Development Organization that would begin to do some planning and putting in the financing for the rehabilitation,” explained Anita Miller, a top LISC staff member.100 LISC, in its role as financial intermediary, contributed about $300,000 to Charlotte Gardens—underwriting a feasibility study, financing the construction of the two model houses when no conventional lender would touch it, and providing other loans at key moments, which Miller’s assistant Richard Manson felt “tipped Charlotte Street forward to get done.”101 In turn, the South Bronx became an important laboratory for LISC as it developed into a significant player in the new regime of public-private financing of affordable housing, channeling dollars as well as working to develop greater managerial capacity in CDCs, which were bearing increasing responsibility.

  By 1984, LISC had opened thirty-one branch offices nationwide and raised more than $70 million from 250 corporations and foundations and 3 federal agencies. In the South Bronx alone, its loans and grants leveraged $60 million of investment.102 LISC was soon joined by similar nonprofit organizations, such as the real estate developer and philanthropist James Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation and the civic-minded banker David Rockefeller’s New York City Housing Partnership.103 Meanwhile, the Reagan administration continued to promote incentives that encouraged the private sector to invest, such as enterprise zones and tax relief, necessitating all the more intermediary groups who could direct private money into the hands of nonprofit housing developers.104 Almost three decades after Logue and Sviridoff had collaborated with Mayor Dick Lee to make New Haven a showcase for federal urban renewal both physical and social, they were once again teaming up, but this time to devise new strategies for coping with federal withdrawal from cities.

  SCORING LOGUE’S FOURTH ROUND

  Assessing the failures and successes of Logue’s SBDO is complicated. Logue acknowledged that “nothing I’ve done was as difficult as building those two goddamn houses on Charlotte Street,” referring to the two model homes.105 At one point, funding got so tenuous after only ten houses were built that Logue ordered all the remaining foundations to be poured—“to remove any doubt.”106 Charlotte Gardens as a whole should have taken a couple of years to complete; instead it stretched out to eight.107 Problems ranged from the technical challenge of building on ever-present rubble to political obstacles at almost every level of decision-making. New York City’s housing commissioner Gliedman fo
ught whatever Logue proposed, the State of New York was no great friend, and the Reagan administration’s HUD secretary, Samuel Pierce, was openly hostile to the SBDO. Nor did it help that under Pierce, HUD became increasingly mismanaged, with some officials later convicted of corruption and influence-peddling serious enough to be sent to prison. Pierce himself was investigated but never prosecuted.108 Faced with these obstacles, Logue was constantly worried about funding. The days of having a Lee, a Collins, or a Rockefeller watching Logue’s back, and loyal friends in Washington looking favorably on his proposals, were far in the past.

  Ultimately, the death knell for Logue came in May 1984 when the meager $1 million of federal money that for five years the SBDO had received annually from Washington—HUD Technical Assistance Funds, relied on to cover salary and administrative costs—was eliminated by the Reagan administration’s Pierce, out of a little spite and a lot of political expediency.109 Adding insult to injury, when the money was reallocated to four community groups in the Bronx, the big winner was the notoriously unethical Ramon Velez in return for his support of Reagan in the 1984 election and delivery of the Latino vote. No effort was made to hide the deal. Announcement of the HUD awards took place at a Hunts Point facility operated by Velez. Logue and Koch protested angrily at Velez’s muscling in, but it made no impact.110 Logue, denouncing the award as “straight whoredom,” submitted his resignation on May 22, 1984, setting a departure date of October 1.111 But when buyers of Charlotte Gardens homes, fearing for the project’s future, objected, Logue agreed to stay on until the end of the year, optimistically hoping that by then Charlotte Gardens would be “pretty much in place.” Logue even indicated some willingness to remain longer if the city made a concerted effort to keep him.112