Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Segregated living by class and race, Logue insisted, was not just a problem within cities. As suburbanization boomed in the postwar era, whole communities became differentiated and unequal in the opportunities they offered their residents. To address this segmentation, Logue tried to plan for entire metropolitan areas in New Haven and Boston, but it was only at the UDC where he finally enjoyed enough statewide authority to push it. The result was his Fair Share Housing program. He promoted it with passion and forbearance, but it created so much opposition that in a backlash, the UDC lost its extraordinary zoning-override powers.

  To achieve all these goals, Logue kept lifelong faith in the role, responsibility, and resources of the federal government. Although he felt that urban planning and execution were most successful when handled by locals who knew their cities well, only the federal government could supply sufficient financial and other support to help cities and their residents prosper. He knew no better vehicle for achieving what he enthusiastically referred to as “social engineering” that challenged the status quo, though some of his contemporaries disparaged it.16

  As loyal as Logue was to these enduring ambitions throughout his life, he did evolve over time. Probably the most significant shift was his recalibration of the ideal relationship of urban redevelopers to the communities they set out to “improve.” Despite his adoption of the motto “planning with people” in New Haven during the 1950s, there Logue considered himself the expert who needed to consult only with representatives from established interest groups to serve the public interest. I have labeled this mode of community input pluralist democracy. In those days Logue and his colleagues Dick Lee and Mike Sviridoff felt it unnecessary, if not unwise, to collaborate with more grassroots participatory democratic organizations like the Hill Parents Association. But in Boston, in the throes of the politicized 1960s, Logue by necessity learned to negotiate with community groups like the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation and South End housing activists, giving them more of what they wanted for their neighborhoods in return for advancing his own redevelopment agenda. The Boston Herald reported that the South End community organizer Mel King objected to Logue’s prioritizing of downtown over the neighborhoods but “credits Logue with setting the stage for neighborhood groups to get involved in housing development.”17

  By the time Logue was embedded once again in a local community during the late 1970s and 1980s in the South Bronx, he made an even bigger adjustment, recognizing that his only chance for success resided with working closely with neighborhood CDCs, community planning boards, and other grassroots vehicles advancing participatory democracy. Without the kind of backing he had once enjoyed from the federal government, the statehouse, and city hall, his best bet rested in allying with residents who were deeply invested in the fate of their neighborhoods. Somewhat to his own surprise, Logue came to value those relationships and to recognize their importance for everyone involved. One might be tempted to argue that Logue’s greater openness to community input resulted simply from the breakdown of the pipeline from Washington. But this explanation does not sufficiently account for Logue’s evolution from renewal czar of New Haven to collaborative colleague in the South Bronx.

  Another shift in Logue’s redevelopment strategy lay in his approach toward architecture. In New Haven during the 1950s, he and his partner Mayor Lee were convinced that building in a cutting-edge modernist style would send just the signal needed that New Haven was viable in the postwar economy and open for business. Logue even wanted the house that he and Margaret constructed for themselves to convey this up-to-dateness. Only in his last years in New Haven did Logue begin to experiment with rehabilitating existing housing rather than demolishing the old and building anew. The exemplary Wooster Square project would remain a source of great pride forever after.

  In Boston, Logue persisted with his conviction that the latest modernist architecture provided the perfect way to announce a declining city’s rebirth. Government Center in particular, with its new city hall chosen by international architectural competition, appropriately symbolized the New Boston. Logue’s confidence that there were rewards for good modern architecture extended to the point that in the late 1980s, long after the opening of Boston’s Government Center, Logue tried unsuccessfully to complete Paul Rudolph’s State Service Center as planned, with its pinwheeling tower, even bringing in Rudolph himself to help.18 Back in the 1960s, however, Logue had already begun to soften his exclusively modernist vision. Recalling New Haven’s Wooster Square, he came to appreciate even more the importance of preserving some of the historic fabric of Boston alongside the new buildings, which led to the preservation of the Sears Crescent and Quincy Market. In Boston, too, he lived in a nineteenth-century rowhouse on historic Beacon Hill. What I have called Logue’s embrace of a more “negotiated cityscape” between the old and new would influence later projects like Roosevelt Island, where Logue went out of his way to preserve historic structures.

  At the UDC, Logue welcomed what he considered his mission to create architecturally innovative housing prototypes for use anywhere.19 He adapted European New Towns to the American physical and political landscape. He pioneered applying the latest technology to residential construction. And he hired prominent architects to design new types of subsidized housing, such as an innovative model for low-rise, high-density living in Brooklyn’s Marcus Garvey Park Village. Logue later launched a competition for a fresh approach to high-rise subsidized housing on Roosevelt Island, until the UDC’s downfall kept him from seeing it to completion. Although some of the UDC’s critics blamed the agency’s financial woes on Logue’s hiring of high-profile architects, he stubbornly defended the importance of experimentation in housing design and sought to make improvements based on insights that emerged from the UDC staff’s famous live-ins. Not all UDC housing succeeded, of course. Some was judged poor in quality, due to overly experimental design, cost constraints, and Logue’s rush to get it up quickly with his fast-tracking schemes.

  When Logue arrived in the South Bronx and was faced with the challenge of redeveloping the devastated Charlotte Street neighborhood with a minimum of public resources, he abandoned his previous prioritizing of creative design and searched for another approach that would appeal to the prospective residents and private financers whose buy-in he now needed. Charlotte Gardens, a suburban-type development of ninety conventional, architecturally uninspired, ranch houses was groundbreaking only in its use of prefabricated construction. To Logue’s credit, although he knew that he was inviting condemnation from the planners and architects whose admiration he had long cultivated, he chose to put a viable future for Charlotte Street above his own architectural predilections and personal reputation. In the realm of design, as in the way he learned to consult more broadly with community members, Logue adjusted to the requirements of the moment and brought flexibility rather than ideological rigidity to his work.

  As opportunities allowed it, Ed Logue enjoyed being what I have described as a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast, using his powerful position to pursue his goals and, if necessary, impose his own standards and values on projects and people. But over time Logue learned that this role did not always serve him well. At the UDC, when Logue’s social mission sharply conflicted with the economic interests of his establishment sponsors, he was ousted. In the South Bronx, by necessity, Logue accomplished more as an outsider operating from the city’s far north reaches than as a mouthpiece of the political authorities downtown. At the height of his influence, Logue’s insider stance likely had blinded him to some of the limitations of federal urban renewal that only in later life did he fully understand. But although his passage from star performer to cast extra was not easy, Logue’s ability to shift ultimately helped him preserve his sense of self-worth and not withdraw into defeatism or alienation. Even if out of the mainstream toward the end of his career, Logue remained effective.

  THE LEGACY OF LOGUE’S STORY

  In 1987, a few years a
fter Logue returned to Boston from New York, he publicly criticized the trend toward privatization that had gained momentum over the twenty years since he had left the leadership of the BRA. Lamenting that “the lead role of the BRA in planning and development [has] diminished” while “the role of the private sector [has] increased,” Logue insisted that “when purely private interests make development proposals, their overwhelming concern is private profit, not the public interest.” He called fervently for Boston to resume “an active public leadership role instead of a re-active one.”20 Logue wasn’t naive about the inescapable necessity for public-private partnerships to help achieve urban projects. He had depended on a private developer for the downtown Church Street shopping mall in New Haven, on the support of the business-dominated Vault in redeveloping downtown Boston, on bondholders to fund the UDC, and on banks to provide mortgages for new Charlotte Gardens homeowners. He did expect, however, that public officials would be in the driver’s seat, not the back seat.

  The shift from public to private funding and initiative in city development that Logue decried would only expand after he left the South Bronx and following his death. It mattered little if Democrats or Republicans governed in Washington. Although Logue lived to see Boston and New York City benefiting from growth in private investment, and even the South Bronx turning the corner, New Haven continued to struggle. Like other deindustrialized cities in the United States, it was largely ignored by investors and the young talent who flocked to places with vibrant, new economies. But in all his cities, prosperous or not, affordable housing—as it was now universally called rather than “public,” “low-income,” or “subsidized”—was in devastatingly short supply. Today Logue would be deeply disturbed to observe the years-long wait lists in almost every American city for affordable rental units, apartments in aging public housing, and Section 8 vouchers—now officially named Housing Choice vouchers—that recipients theoretically could take into the private rental market.21

  In the urban policy regime of market-based solutions with few direct government provisions that prevailed by the end of Logue’s career and still persists, there are two major tools for making housing more affordable: housing vouchers and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) program, which arrived on the scene in 1986, a year after Logue departed the South Bronx.22 LIHTC, the predominant method today of financing subsidized housing in the United States, established a more expansive and efficient way than was available to Logue’s SBDO of mobilizing the private sector’s investment in affordable housing. It works by allocating tax credits to states, which then award them to selected low-income housing projects. Private investors gain valuable tax credits by making equity investments in the housing, which in turn reduces the cost of construction and the rents of tenants. Although this approach has encouraged a major scaling up of private investment in much-needed affordable housing, it also has serious vulnerabilities. Most obvious is its dependence on the vagaries of corporate need for tax credits to offset profits. In tough economic times, when struggling individuals are most desperate for decent housing, corporate participation often declines along with earnings, introducing uncertainty and limitations into the system. And if and when corporate taxes are lowered and companies have less need to shelter profits, demand drops for credits and less capital is available for building.23 Most fundamentally, in an echo of the debate that raged at the UDC’s demise, a public responsibility to house needy Americans gets fulfilled only by giving private corporations and banks financial breaks, at the sacrifice of tax monies that would otherwise have gone into government coffers.24

  Housing vouchers have likewise become a more significant provider of affordable housing, particularly as units in public housing have disappeared, but again the demand wildly outstrips the supply. Based on a compelling argument that low-income families benefit from moving to middle-class communities with better services and safer environments—an ideal that Logue himself endorsed—the voucher program has been undermined by holders’ shrinking buying power and the unwillingness of many landlords to accept vouchers in a competitive rental market. The resulting lack of choice that recipients have in using Housing Choice vouchers only perpetuates the economic and racial segregation that flourishes when the private market faces few constraints. Even with mounting evidence documenting the advantages, particularly to children, of living and schooling amid diversity and away from concentrated poverty, Logue’s dream of a more socially integrated America continues to fade.25 So, too, has Logue’s hope for metropolitan planning that better distributes low-income residents in a region, as power and responsibility for planning have devolved from the federal and state governments to municipalities and even more narrowly focused neighborhood-based CDCs.26 Only Logue’s pioneering effort to integrate the disabled into residential communities like Roosevelt Island has achieved universal acceptance, helped by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and successful litigation to enforce it thereafter.

  CDCs, such as the Mid Bronx Desperadoes—the SBDO’s partner—have only grown in importance since Logue’s days in the South Bronx. Here, as with the LIHTC, there are strengths and weaknesses. Many CDCs provide valuable affordable housing, frequently utilizing LIHTCs.27 As Logue learned, small-scale, locally oriented CDCs not only get the job done, but they do so in a way that increases community participation often missing in the more top-down federal urban renewal of Logue’s earlier days. On the other hand, neighborhood-based CDCs, many thinly staffed with dedicated but overworked housing activists, spend a lot of their time patching together funding from multiple sources, including tax credits, and have limited ability to provide housing on the scale needed or to plan beyond the neighborhood at the city and metropolitan levels.

  When Julie Sandorf asked MBD’s leaders Gennie Brooks and Father William Smith at their first meeting, as she looked around in disbelief at what seemed like miles of abandoned buildings and vacant lots in the South Bronx, “How in the world are you going to rebuild this neighborhood?” they replied with conviction, “Building by building, person by person, block by block.”28 Those were inspiring words, but they also conveyed a limitation that Felice Michetti, a longtime housing insider in New York City who oversaw Mayor Ed Koch’s ten-year housing program, recognized. She noted that the South Bronx’s CDCs, like MBD, SEBCO, and Banana Kelly, each “had their area … And generally, the groups respected the boundaries of each other,” making them “highly organized” in their own territories and less competitive with one another. But in turn, she lamented, they were also “less global.”29 In the shift from large-scale, citywide federally supported programs to the more piecemeal grants and smaller turfs of CDCs, community residents may have gained in influence, but they lost in access to financial resources, predictability, and reach. These were tough trade-offs.

  In addition to depending on limited LIHTC credits, housing vouchers, and CDCs, American cities have adopted new strategies of their own to squeeze public benefits out of the private real estate market. These include collecting linkage fees from developers seeking approval for new downtown ventures that are then used to build affordable housing elsewhere and passing inclusionary zoning laws that require developers to designate a certain percentage of units in new market-rate residential projects as affordable. Admirable as these tactics are, they do not come close to meeting the enormous demand for affordable housing nor creating socially balanced neighborhoods. Moreover, the necessity for cities to fend for themselves to solve their problems encourages them to use tax forgiveness and other financial incentives to lure investors promising needed resources. These baits often set off races to the bottom among cities, which all ultimately lose, as winning cities encounter new costs while their tax revenue is reduced and inequality among cities is accentuated.30

  The history of urban redevelopment since the end of World War II, as told through Logue’s career, yields many insights. The overarching message of Logue’s “Tale of a City Builder,” as he considered
titling his never-completed book, is that urban renewal was not one undifferentiated mistake from the Housing Act of 1949 to President Richard Nixon’s moratorium on federal spending for housing in 1973. Rather, the career of this urban redeveloper demonstrates that there were gains and losses, failed and successful experiments, times of breakthrough and moments of disgrace. Some of Logue’s work improved the cities and neighborhoods he labored in, and some did not. But there can be no denying that Logue learned lessons in doing one project that he carried to the next. He revised his strategies to adapt to changing times, shifting political realities, and his own evolving understanding of what it took to save America’s cities. Urban renewal was driven as much by improvisation as by orthodoxy.

  Like Logue, we, too, can learn lessons from urban renewal’s past successes and failures. Here are only a few. Architecture can be more than a means to an end; it carries within it the potential to improve the social and aesthetic quality of urban environments and to deliver better and cheaper housing when innovative design and technology are prioritized. The private sector has a significant role to play in expanding the capacity of American society’s investment in housing and other urban amenities and necessities, but that does not mean that government can abandon its responsibility for the general welfare. There is much lost in a neoliberal world where the most robust activity is local and global. The intervening levels of state and national governance are crucial tools of redistribution within vast and diverse territories. Only policy and program at that scale can counteract the inequalities that flourish in a society consisting of islands of poverty and privilege. Moreover, when government does assert itself, it must involve community residents in decisions that affect their homes, neighborhoods, and cities, seeking to avoid the extremes of both nonconsultative command and community NIMBYism. Development by increment rather than through mega plan often yields greater success and more citizen participation over the long term. And cities thrive by providing dynamic pedestrian- and transit-oriented alternatives to suburbia, not mimicking its sprawl and car-orientation.31