Next American City--issue 12: Historic Preservation

THE NEXT AMERICAN CITY ISSUE TWELVE / 2006

HISTORIC

PRESERVATION

Paving Paradise

THE CENTURY BUILDING DEBACLE AND THE FUTURE OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION PRESERVATION IN THE PROGRESSIVE CITY Debating History and Gentrification in Austin

WILL BETHLEHEM TURN STEEL INTO GOLD?

PLUS: KATRINA, ONE YEAR LATER First in a Two-Part Series COMMENTARY / URBAN AFFAIRS

US $7.95 CAN $10.95

REBUILDING URBAN PLACES AFTER DISASTER Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter “This book reveals fresh and insightful approaches to the challenges of facing natural disaster. Contributions from the fields of regionalism and environmental planning are positive and prospective, offering new ways to understand how the places we call home are interconnected with each other and with the land. I’m particularly struck by the thoughtful writings about the individuality of these places, where cultural expressions in music and architecture are irrepressible, even amidst debris and discouragement.” —Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Partner, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, Chairman, Urban Land Institute “After reading Rebuilding Urban Places one comes away with the understanding of how complex a process it is to restore our urban communities after experiencing such a catastrophe . . . and an understanding of the leaps this country must take to help and protect our citizens.” —John Timoney, Chief of Police, Miami “No elected official or planning professional should miss this book. Birch and Wachter have collected essays spanning every dimension of rebuilding. From historical lessons to cutting-edge practices, there is so much to learn.” —Brent Warr, Mayor, City of Gulfport, Mississippi Disasters—natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks—are part of the American experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the public will. Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex, interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon. This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic, market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, strategic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation? Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina. Contributors include: Elijah Anderson, Richard J. Gelles, Robert Giegengack, Nick Spitzer, and Dell Upton The City in the Twenty-First Century Nov 2006 | 400 pages | 8 color, 60 b/w illus. | Paper | $34.95

www.pennpress.org

from the editor

YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED TO FIND that, in a magazine about the city of the future, we’ve built an entire issue around the theme of historic preservation. But preservation is just as important to a city’s beauty and flourishing as are growth, demolition, and change. Every day, whether or not they frame it in such terms, civic leaders take stands on this issue. Which structures are so valuable that they should be left intact and adapted for new, modern uses? Which should be destroyed to make way for more sound or innovative developments? While we believe that growth and change are vital—and inevitable—in American cities, we also know that newer isn’t always better, and that the wrecking ball doesn’t always signal progress. In “Paving Paradise,” Joseph Heathcott relates the gory details of one of the most controversial preservation battles in recent history. The Century Building in downtown St. Louis, a late-18th-century office tower with cast-iron doorways and ornate marble detailing, was torn down in late 2004 to make way for a 1,000-unit parking lot. It’s the stuff of folk songs, and a preservationist’s nightmare. And yet one of the oldest and most esteemed preservation groups in the country, the National Trust, supported razing the building and paving it over. In “Preservation in the Progressive City,” Jeffrey Chusid, a Cornell professor and former Austinite, tells a tale of clashing progressives in one of the most radical cities on the planet. Austin preservationists, long wary of the Smart Growth crowd, eventually faced off with a social justice group, who then blamed both Smart Growth and preservation laws for spurring gentrification in East Austin. No city has ever struggled with the kinds of historic preservation dilemmas currently facing the Gulf Coast cities of New Orleans, Biloxi, and Gulfport. Which buildings should be preserved and rehabilitated, or knocked down and never rebuilt? Now that the oneyear anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has passed and the issues that the storm stirred up are slipping off the political radar, we felt it was important to keep you updated on developments in the Gulf Coast. Emily Weiss reports on the role of Christian missionaries in the clean-up effort, and Brent Warr, the mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi—a city generally overlooked by the media last summer—

talks about casinos, local heroes, and how Gulfport is slowly rebuilding. On a bittersweet note, Doug Giuliano offers a darkly hilarious take on his experiences as a FEMA volunteer last fall. These are the first articles in a two-issue series about the storm’s longterm lessons and ramifications. For our next issue, appearing this winter, The Next American City will be ramping up editorial production and undergoing a radical re-design. This will mean both a new look and new kinds of editorial coverage. Our goal, as always, is to be a powerful and provocative voice in the national conversation about all things urban and suburban. We will be experimenting with new kinds of writing and reporting, offering our readers more timely, fresh, and insightful views on city developments around the country. We’ll also tackle, as our main theme, one of the most controversial news topics in recent memory: immigration. I’m very excited to come on board as fulltime editor of the magazine. Adam Gordon will remain involved as editor-in-chief. In upcoming issues, other editors, writers, and artists will use this space to give a behind-the-scenes look at their contributions to the magazine. Please let me know how we’re doing. Or, if you’re in the Philadelphia area, feel free to stop by The Next American City’s new offices at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research in Meyerson Hall.

Happy reading, Jess McCuan Editor [email protected]

ISSUE 12: HISTORIC PRESERVATION

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Paving Paradise: The Century Building Debacle and the Future of Historic Preservation by Joseph Heathcott

19

Will Bethlehem Turn Steel into Gold? by Jeff Pooley

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Preservation in the Progressive City: Debating History and Gentrification in Austin by Jeffrey Chusid

features: historic preservation 28

31

departments

book reviews

6

Sex in the City by Stephen Janis

43

Planet of Slums Reviewed by Carly Berwick

8

Resurrecting Death and Life by Anthony Weiss

44

10

Engineering the Perfect Suburb by David Gest

Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina Reviewed by Mariana Mogilevich

45

The Place You Love is Gone Reviewed by Anika Singh

Looking East by Robert Garland Thomson Saving High-Rise Public Housing by Sharon Maclean

Katrina: one year later 36

Crosses From Rubble by Emily Weiss

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15 Minutes With... Brent Warr, Mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi by Jess McCuan

last exit

Telephone Poles, Ninth Ward, October, New Orleans, LA, 2005. Photo ©Will Steacy

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An Outsider Peers into the FEMA Trailer by Doug Giuliano

STAFF

LETTERS

editor-in-chief Adam Gordon [email protected]

president Seth A. Brown [email protected]

editor Jess McCuan [email protected]

publisher Michelle Kuly [email protected]

art directors Jayme Yen Yve Ludwig

finance director Jonathan Adler

managing editor Sara C. Galvan [email protected] executive editor Nathaniel Hodes [email protected] submissions editor Anika Singh [email protected] senior editors Carly Berwick, Last Exit Paul Breloff, Planning & Transportation C.J. Gabbe, Features David Gest, Features Mariana Mogilevich, Architecture & Reviews Mike Sabel, Technology Anika Singh, Law, Policy, & Communities Jenna Snow, Features Shayna Strom, Politics, Labor, & Organizations Christy Zink, Education & Culture contributing editors Doug Sell, Beth Silverman, Jim Schroder, Allison Smith

intern Laura Michaelson Mei-Lun Xue researcher David S. Godfrey contributing writers Carly Berwick, Jeffrey Chusid, Doug Giuliano, David Gest, Joseph Heathcott, Stephen Janis, Sharon Maclean, Jeff Pooley, Anika Singh, Robert Garland Thomson, Anthony Weiss, Emily Weiss contributing artists Rebekah Brem, Alan Brunettin, Frank Klein, Shaun O’Boyle, Will Steacy editorial advisory board (affiliations for identification purposes only) Vicki Been, New York University Law School Cynthia Farrar, Yale University Joel Garreau Alexander Garvin Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker Hugh Hardy, H3 Hardy Collaboration LLC Bruce Heitler, Heitler Development W. Lehr Jackson, Williams Jackson Ewing Paloma Pavel, Earth House, Inc. David Serviansky, Landstar Homes

senior staff writer Charles Shaw

CREATIVES TAKING FLIGHT: A COMPOSER RESPONDS As a composer who has recently decided that the Bay Area is too expensive a place to live, I read with great interest Daniel Brook’s essay, “The Cultural Contradictions of the Creative Age.” Musical institutions of large American urban centers such as San Francisco can afford to provide an invaluable glimpse into the great music and traditional forms of the past, and occasionally of the present. But it is the second-tier cities that are becoming affordable centers of innovation and, as a result, are more attractive locations for many artists who are forging the music of the future. My particular niche of 21st-century choral music is thriving outside the traditional cultural centers. • Conspirare in Austin, Texas, led by Craig Hella Johnson, is a $1 million professional choir with a national reputation. <www.conspirare.org> • The Esoterics in Seattle, conducted by Eric Banks, and Opus 7, conducted by Loren Pontén, in Kenmore, Washington, are regular winners of ASCAP’s annual “Adventurous Programming” award. <www.theesoterics.org>, <www.opus7.org> • Seraphic Fire, conducted by Patrick Dupré Quigley, is an “astounding professional chamber choir” (Miami Herald) transforming the cultural landscape of south Florida. <www.seraphicfire.org> Next year I am relocating from Oakland to the desert Southwest, where my housing expense will be about one-third of what it is here, and yet I will have more opportunities to have my work performed. Since I am more likely to strike up a conversation with a conductor on the Internet than at a local party, the placelessness of the World Wide Web will enable me to maintain my professional relationships without the burden of living in an absurdly expensive location.

In the meantime, true creatives will find their voice and their audience in less mainstream idioms and places. Paul Crabtree Oakland, CA

GAMBLING ON PHILADELPHIA’S FUTURE The opening of the article in your last issue, “Gambling on Philadelphia’s Future,” states that “Philadelphia doesn’t need to become the next Atlantic City.” I would argue that Philadelphia doesn’t want to become the next Atlantic City. Judging from the lack of zoning considerations on the part of casino developers, and the lack of law enforcement beyond the one-mile perimeter of the casinos, I doubt any Philadelphian would want casinos anyway. The article also says this: “In the 1990s, Philadelphia was flirting with bankruptcy and reeling from decades of population and job loss. To encourage development, the city in 1997 and 2000 passed a ten-year property tax moratorium on most new construction and rehabilitation projects, fueling a real estate boom.” Since lowering taxes generated such a boom and thus created more revenue, why do we listen to the casinos’ promises of generating more revenue for the city? Every study done in cities that introduce casinos proves that the social costs and strain on emergency services actually outweighs the revenue generated by casinos. Why not continue to keep taxes lower to keep up the growth? Why not build the Delaware riverfront with responsible, legitimate businesses, and museums and parks? Sean Benjamin Philadelphia, PA www.NABRhood.org

I of course have mixed feelings about leaving a place that has been my home for twenty years. But I welcome the artistic innovations made possible by technology and necessitated by unchecked capitalism. Printed by WestCan Printing Group, Canada. ©2006 The Next American City, Inc.

[email protected] Online home:www.americancity.org

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photo ©frankkleinIV

THE NEXT AMERICAN CITY Issue 12 October 2006 (ISSN 1544-6999) is published quarterly by The Next American City Inc., PO Box 42627, Philadelphia, PA 19101. Periodicals postage pending at Philadelphia, PA, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE NEXT AMERICAN CITY, PO Box 42627, Philadelphia, PA 19101.

This is a critical issue that larger cities would be well advised to address in order to avert the consequences of talent flight. With the dwindling pool of young music teachers and little or no music in schools, audience recruitment puts even more strain on symphony dollars, and market forces will necessitate entertainment instead of art.

departments

arts & culture

by Stephen Janis

photos by Frank Klein

Sex in the City As the city gentrifies, will a red-light district called “The Block” disappear? Should anybody care?

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from a Barnes & Noble and a Best Buy—and less than one hundred yards from City Hall— sits a red-light district known simply as “The Block.” A dense assemblage of strip bars, antiquated neon signs, and grizzled doormen, the Block covers one-quarter of a square mile along Baltimore Street between South Street and Gay Street and has stubbornly occupied the same location for almost 75 years. Many of the clients of the Block’s bars are businessmen willing to spend up to thousands of dollars in high-end venues like the newly-renovated Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. But it’s no secret that the tourist trade—11 million people visited Baltimore in 2004— fuels the Block. According to a bartender at one of the more popular establishments, “We clean up during conventions—tourism is very important to us.” Baltimore City Coun-

cilman Nick D’Adamo, Jr., who represented the Block for nearly fifteen years before redistricting in 2003, adds that “Tourists definitely visit the Block, especially after football and baseball games.” Councilman D’Adamo takes a pragmatic view of the Block’s economic and social impact. He views a concentrated red-light district as a means of controlling an industry that would exist anyway. “If we close it down,” he argues, “it will just spread out to other neighborhoods; here, we can keep an eye on it.” Part of that attitude may stem from the failure of previous efforts to control or eliminate illegal activity on the Block. In 1994, then-Maryland Governor and former Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer ordered state troopers to conduct a fourmonth investigation of alleged drug dealing

photo ©frankkleinIV

ON A SNOWY MONDAY NIGHT IN December, the lights of the packed bars are warmly tempting. A thousand dancers work in the 28 strip bars here—bars like Flamingo Lounge, Lust, and Two O’Clock Club (home of cinematic icon Blaze Starr). Inside one of the clubs, patrons nurse beers as a young stripper extends her body upside down along the shimmer pole. One dancer, with moonstone eyes and luxurious dark hair, idles near the entrance of the bar. She comments that business was better after last week’s football game, played by the Baltimore Ravens, whose 70,000-seat coliseum is less than a mile away. Moments later, an older gentleman enters the bar; the dancer takes his arm and leads him into the dark, curtained back room for a private lap dance, and perhaps more. In downtown Baltimore, a stone’s throw

and prostitution. The investigation culminated in a massive raid, which effectively shut down the Block and resulted in dozens of arrests. Most of the charges were later dropped, however, as several of the undercover troopers were later convicted of bedding dancers and purchasing illegal drugs. Since then, despite the continued rumors of prostitution, drug dealing, and other illicit activity, the Block has operated without interference. A Contrast with the Rest of Downtown

That the Block still exists is especially surprising because it rests at the heart of Baltimore’s most valuable real estate. Just yards away, at the revitalized Inner Harbor, are granite skyscrapers, million-dollar condominiums, and retail development. The symmetrical square columns of Baltimore’s 25story World Trade Center sit alongside familiar suburban signs: a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, an ESPN Zone Sports Bar, and a Hard Rock Café. Couples linger on a pleasant, brick-laid harbor walk. Recently, the Brookings Institution issued a report titled, “Who Lives Downtown?” The report called Baltimore’s downtown “Emerging”—a category showing “promise of becoming a fully developed downtown” and just a step below A-list cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York City. Aside from a few upscale strip clubs, the Block has resisted the revitalization of the rest of downtown. Perhaps as a result, it is more true to the overall character of Baltimore. With a median household income of roughly $33,000, as reported to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2003, most Baltimoreans cannot afford to live in the rapidly gentrifying downtown. The rest of the city maintains a blue-collar ethos, fashioned by decades of steel workers, longshoremen, and factory workers living in working-class villages dominated by brick rowhouses. With 269 murders in 2005, according to the Maryland Central Records Division, Baltimore had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country. Much of the housing stock is in disrepair, and Baltimore has the highest eviction rates in the country, with 5.81 evictions per 100 renters, a statistic which shows in the piles of splintered furniture towering like burial mounds in front of

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rowhouses. Add to this a high concentration of opiate addicts and crack dealers, and one can get a glimpse of the divergent realities of the gleaming downtown and the rest of Baltimore. The Trouble with Red-Light Districts

These hopeless conditions likely compel many young women from the city’s poorer neighborhoods to fill the bars as sex workers. To be sure, prostitution is not an ideal lifestyle. Sidney Anne Ford, Executive Director of You Are Never Alone, an outreach center for city prostitutes located in West Baltimore, points out that almost all the women she works with share a common experience of sexual abuse. She argues that regardless of how sex work is characterized, the industry takes unfair advantage of emotionally traumatized and economically disadvantaged young women. “Exploitation is exploitation; it doesn’t matter what you call it,” Ford says. Others defend the urban red-light district as a reflection of changing social norms. Timothy Gilfoyle, a historian who researches urban prostitution and commercial sex, says that a commercialized sex industry is “more tolerated now than at any other point in U.S. history.” Gilfoyle notes the wide use of pornography in private homes, citing the statistic that in 1999 Americans rented 711 million pornographic videos, resulting in a $10 billion industry (more current sources put the value of the industry at $12 billion). Gilfoyle also cites performance artists like Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera who treat “prostitution and pornography as sources of creativity and liberation”—and not as marginalized activities. Councilman D’Adamo claims that the Block’s establishments employ many young women who view dancing as a career: “Some women, this is all they know.” A chain-smoking stripper named Tabitha confirms this analysis: “A dancer can make good money if she knows how to hustle,” she says. “In here, I’m in control. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want. On the street it’s a different story.” Inside the bar a contingent of bouncers and bartenders watch over the place, providing some safeguard against abuse. But on the street, things are less secure. Off-the-clock dancers loiter near a pizza parlor, pale and blemished under the harsh fluorescent lights. A pack of young men restlessly scour the sidewalk as hawkers

beckon them inside their clubs: “We have twelve girls, all fresh,” says one, “guaranteed beautiful.” The scrolling LED ticker of the Hustler Club touts drink specials and “couples night.” Meanwhile, at the end of Calvert Street, the Inner Harbor Pavilion is festively lit and casting gold platelets across the water. In Baltimore, residents have choices: the Harbor Pavilion or the Hustler Club, sex or professional sports, drugs or open air shopping. Indeed, they can have both. Unlike nearby Washington, where prostitutes traffic on the streets, and Philadelphia, where three “lifestyle” sex clubs have just been shuttered by the city, Baltimore’s “dirty” district is much more concentrated, active, and readily accessible to the pristine new downtown. The question for Baltimore is whether—and how—its gritty red-light underworld can coexist with the city’s efforts towards economic and social advancement.

Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Mitchell, Alexander D. Baltimore: Then and Now. San Diego: Thunder Bay Press, 2001. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1966. Weitzer, Ronald John. Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry. New York: Routledge, 2000.

in memoriam

by Anthony Weiss

illustration by Rebekah Brem

Resurrecting Death and Life Why Jane Jacobs’ followers still misunderstand her most important contributions to urban thought

THE DAY AFTER HER DEATH IN APRIL, newspapers across North America eulogized Jane Jacobs. Reporters and op-ed writers praised her masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as the most important book on cities in the 20th century. Planners, architects, critics, developers, and government officials in every major North American city spoke about how Death and Life changed the way they looked at cities, and changed their lives. Revolutionary when it was published, Death and Life has since become settled doctrine. The book has spawned a cottage industry of planners dedicated to advancing the ideas that Jacobs set down almost 50 years ago. They took her notions of mixed-use neighborhoods, 24-hour street life, and walkable downtowns and condensed them into hard formulas—a fixed prescription for mixed-use developments of shops, offices, and apartments, clustered around downtowns, oriented towards walking, and ideally, connected to a transit station. Some of these planners call themselves New Urbanists. Others stand for Smart Growth or Transit-Oriented Design, and some don’t bother with labels. But one and all, these apostles reverently sprinkle quotations from Jacobs throughout their writings. Their work, indirectly, is Jacobs’s great legacy, writ large across the landscape of North America. Yet their approach to planning misses the fundamental point of Death and Life. Jacobs’s great power as a writer and thinker was rooted in her tremendous talent as an observer, and Death and Life is a work of reportage. Her critique of contemporary planning rested upon a simple premise: the planners of cities did not understand how cities worked. More precisely, they did not understand how people actually lived in cities because they had not bothered to observe city life.

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Her approach was scientific, not in the sense of formulas and statistics, but in the classic mode of the scientific method: she observed, developed hypotheses, tested hypotheses, modified them, and drew conclusions based on what she had seen. “Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design,” she wrote. “This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories.” She also stressed that her observations were site-specific: “I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which are still suburban,” she warned. “Towns, suburbs, and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities.” Too many of her would-be followers have ignored this precaution. They have adopted Jacobs’s conclusions without applying her careful methods. They build according to models for how neighborhoods and towns and suburbs should work, and how people should live, rather than how people do live. Just as the conceivers of modernist towers-inthe-park wrongly assumed that tenants would stroll through the grass because it was there to be strolled through, contemporary planners too often believe that if a place looks like a 19th-century town, it will function like one. The contemporary visions of Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and town centers are not so much rooted in Jacobs’s work as they are superficial readings, mixed with elements of late-19th- and early-20th-century urban centers. Architects have criticized these movements for being stylistically retrograde. The problem is not their style, however, but that they are in a sense nothing but style. Today’s planners believe they can plop

down a visual model of town centers and shopping villages just about anywhere on the map. But appearances don’t dictate function, nor do they create markets from thin air. Jacobs wrote Death and Life specifically to attack this way of planning. Instead of dreaming up imaginary cities, she observed real cities, and from those observations arrived at her own model for how cities work. Now some of her adherents have reverse-engineered her observations to create just another set of visual models. Fifty years ago, the planners’ doctrine was light and air and grass. Today, the doctrine is bustling streets and front porches and community. Both are simply visual styles—design masquerading as planning. Jacobs wrote, “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” The living spaces of today are admittedly a confusing jumble— people own cars, shop online, have jobs in faraway office parks. But the most complex living spaces are precisely the ones that should be our laboratories. These are places to observe and learn, rather than mere problems in need of prescriptions. Honoring Jacobs’s legacy means uncovering the order beneath the disorder in cities and suburbs. All this digging may not produce a pretty picture, but it will be a critical step in developing livable spaces that are honest about the needs of markets, geography, and—most of all—the people they are created to serve.

planning

text and photos by David Gest

Engineering the Perfect Suburb A California naval base becomes an experiment in suburban living

IN THE HEART OF ORANGE COUNTY, California—the poster child for postwar suburban sprawl in the United States—lies a 1500-acre former military base, one of the last remaining major development sites in a 3-million person county with little room to grow. The choices made by local residents and builders in redeveloping Tustin Marine Core Air Station (MCAS) show that Orange County can no longer be stereotyped as the land of endless freeways, widely scattered single-family detached homes on large lots, and homogenous neighborhoods of wealthy, conservative white people. But neither will Orange County necessarily become a place of inevitable, dense urbanization. The innovative development plan proposed for the Navy base, called Tustin Legacy, aligns with a new planning theory—New Suburbanism—that promotes the acceptance and reuse of the suburban form. By merging some of the ideals of the anti-sprawl, Smart Growth movement that currently dominates urban planning theory with the culture of one of America’s most important suburbs, Tustin Legacy may become an important model for the infill development of aging and crowded suburbs across the country. A New Look for Orange County

The air base began as a Navy blimp repository in 1942, and after WWII converted to a Marine Corps helicopter station. Over the years, its surroundings changed rapidly— with single-family homes and business parks to the north, low-lying industrial parks and strip malls to the west and south, and the master-planned, ultra-manicured city of Irvine to the east. In 1991, the federal Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission slated Tustin MCAS to close. The Tustin community was deeply invested in redevelopment plans and, in an unusual move for a military community, insisted on

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the closing. In 1999, the military relocated operations to another air base and granted the property to the city. The property is a uniquely valuable development parcel in a county where the median home price is over $700,000. The former base has easy access to freeways and the commuter rail “Metrolink” station, linking the site to five surrounding counties, including Los Angeles to the north and San Diego to the south. John Wayne International Airport is also nearby for connections further afield. The redevelopment plans for the base— already about fifteen percent built out—call for a wide array of uses, including approximately 2,500 new homes, a “community core” of mixed-use buildings; an “Advanced Technology and Education Park” with a range of educational facilities; and a retail and entertainment center, including several national retailers, restaurants, and a multiplex movie theater. A park intended to serve as the premier recreation facility for the area will be at the center of the development, linked via bikeways and walking trails to a system of smaller linear and pocket parks. The project will also include two unique features: a family-oriented homeless shelter and job training facility called the Village of Hope, the most comprehensive capital project ever undertaken by the Orange County Rescue Mission; and two of the largest wood-frame structures in the world: the massive blimp hangers in the middle of the property, each more than 1,000 feet long and 300 feet wide. Even more unusual than these behemoths are the project’s proposed density and (relatively) tall buildings. Most mixed-use development in Orange County is horizontal, according to John Buchanan, Redevelopment Program Manager with the City of Tustin. Tustin hopes to enlist a well known architecture firm to erect “mini skyscrapers” that will give the city a noticeable profile against the

low-lying buildings spread over the county. “The challenge,” says Buchanan, “is to create enough density and energy with vertical mixed-use development, on a 24-hour basis… Although there probably won’t be anything over ten stories tall. We’re looking to create something that’s more of an Orange Countytype environment than Manhattan.” Poster Child for New Suburbanism?

What does this kind of infill project represent for the county, and for suburbs as a whole? “Orange County is going back to the initial suburban ideal,” proclaims Joel Kotkin. Kotkin is a proponent of a movement called “New Suburbanism” and the author of a 2005 paper of the same name. Whereas its more established counterpart, New Urbanism, takes cues from “traditional” town planning—epitomized by older European and American cities with narrow, walkable streets, public squares, vernacular architecture, and front porches—New Suburbanism references the Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard, which envisioned a harmonious balance between housing, industry, and open space in the suburbs. New Urbanism advocates dense, pedestrian-oriented city centers (in the form of infill projects in older cities, or concentrated, axis-oriented “greenfield” designs such as those in Seaside, Florida). New Suburbanism, on the other hand, accepts car-oriented, single-family-homedominated development, but aims to integrate it with denser, self-sufficient suburbs, some including large apartment buildings upwards of 10 units per acre (not just stereotypical collections of single-family homes) and employment, shopping, and entertainment within suburb limits. Many New Urbanists decry Kotkin’s New Suburbanist terminology, claiming that he has simply tweaked New Urban ideas for his

own purposes. Whether or not Kotkin’s ideas are wholly original, the New Suburbanism concept seems accurate: critics note that many walkable New Urbanist communities are ultimately car-dependent, often in the form of suburbs lacking links to a regional transit system. Whatever these relatively dense and self-sufficient (but still car-dependent) communities are called, they represent a new form of suburban development. Tustin’s thoughtful planning could thus qualify the Legacy as a poster child for New Suburbanism’s brand of suburban reuse. While few communities have the luxury of “newly created” wide-open space, as in Tus-

In large part, Tustin residents established their vision through an extensive planning process preceding the redevelopment. According to Christine Shingleton, Tustin’s Assistant City Manager and Tustin Legacy Project Coordinator, city planners and a team of outside consultants started out analyzing the redevelopment successes and failures of then-recent base closures across the country. They began devising a plan to incorporate “livable community” and “sustainable design” techniques similar to those promoted by New Urbanism. But while the evolving plans “played off of New Urbanism and those other ideas,” says Shingleton, considerable

tin or the nearby decommissioned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, increasing suburban density and intensity of use may be the most viable solution to America’s rapidly crowding suburbs. Tustin Legacy’s design represents an important middle ground between New Urbanism’s focus on the city’s urban form, and developers’ market-driven subdivision expansion farther and farther away from city centers. “People aren’t going back to the corner store,” asserts Kotkin. “Especially when you’re shopping for families, you’re going to shop at the big box retailers.”

input from residents helped shape Tustin’s own version of a livable community: “[The plans] became ours, and we embraced them.” The goals for the property and the community articulated by residents included the creation of a new destination with a distinct sense of place; an architectural and economic diversity of housing types; a community-inspiring layout featuring interconnected open space or parkland, humanscaled buildings and social and recreational activity centers; and proximity to jobs, in order to cut down on commute times and decrease area traffic.

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Community involvement in the early planning has paid off in that very little, if any, controversy surrounds the complex endeavor; most area residents are “on board” and looking forward to completion. Almost all of the 1,153 buildable acres have been designated for particular developments, and the Navy will provide funding and labor for environmental cleanup efforts to remove hazardous materials from the site. Shingleton hasn’t taken the success of the project to date for granted. “It is like rocket science!” she joked. “It’s not like developing a vacant piece of property—this is infill, brownfield development!”

Planning with Open Arms

In addition to the balance of housing, schools, and parks planned for Tustin Legacy, the city has ensured a diversity of residents by hiring a variety of homebuilders and enacting “inclusive” zoning through different affordable homeownership plans. The city mandated a 25 percent housing affordability provision, higher than anywhere else in the county, meaning that they will lose about $40 million of land value in exchange, according to Shingleton. The economic variety of residents drawn from the surrounding county will most likely mean an ethnic diversity as

well: as of 2000, whites represented about half of county residents, with approximately one-third Hispanic, fifteen percent of Asian descent, and the remaining portion African American. British homebuilder John Laing Homes has completed the first housing on the site, the 376-unit Tustin Fields I, and is nearing completion of another group of homes. According to Dan Flynn, Vice President of Acquisitions at John Laing, their slice of development at Tustin Legacy includes a variety of architectural styles and pricing plans. Densities range from ten to eighteen units per acre, primarily in the form of compact, attached row houses, and homebuyers may pay from $74,000 to more than $500,000, depending on housing type, for adjacent units. Affordability has drawn county residents to Tustin Fields, but would they prefer a detached home with a big yard and a picket fence? Flynn suggests not: “In Orange County there’s a pent-up demand for the urban lifestyle. Residents are looking for more convenience: no yard to maintain, adjacent to amenities like retail, entertainment, and dry cleaning. They’re willing to sacrifice the bigger house and bigger yard for that convenience.” Alex Alix, who will move into Tustin Fields II with his family, concurs: “The buildings here are more distinct, more bold, than the blander homes in Irvine. There is a noticeable design difference; Tustin has more character.” But not everyone agrees. Jack Denny, another recent addition to Tustin Fields II, does not consider Tustin Legacy an ideal home, but “you have to pick and choose what fits best” in a county where affordable housing is not prevalent. “There are lots of commuters here, so I haven’t had much time to spend with the neighbors, and the housing is a little tight,” says Denny, but at least the planned high-rises will be reserved for office space, not homes. Beyond planning the site’s subsidized housing, the City of Tustin has taken suburban “inclusionary” housing to people with far lower incomes than are typically served by such affordable housing programs by building the Village of Hope. The city’s partner in the project, the Orange County Rescue Mission, a 50-year-old “faith-based” non-profit

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commended by President Bush, provided nearly 1 million meals to the hungry and 35,000 homeless in the county during the last fiscal year. While the Mission does accept non-Christians, according to Melanie McNiff, Director of Communications for the Mission, participants—mostly homeless—must set self-sufficiency goals and accept the organization’s faith-centered mission. Slated to open in summer 2006, the Village will incorporate existing Navy buildings and new construction to house 192 family members and individuals, along with a medical center, job training facility, and chapel, all using $25 million raised by the Mission. “There has been no controversy surrounding our project,” says McNiff. “The Rescue Mission has a good reputation in the county, and we hope to establish partnerships with a lot of the other businesses and schools coming in [to Tustin Legacy], so that they can be a part of the community helping the homeless.”

can rehabilitate as a recreational facility or museum. Other aspects of the project, from subsidized housing to a network of parks and schools, may serve as a model for suburban infill and the reuse of brownfields or other open space. As built-out suburbs become the focal point for expanding American cities, whether considered “New Suburban,” “New Urban,” or community and market-driven urban planning, Tustin Legacy demonstrates that careful planning can overcome persistent problems of finding ways to provide affordable homes and also meet the frequent community objections to any kind of serious development in desirable suburbs.

John Laing Homes, Orange County www.johnlainghomes.com/ orangecounty/ History of Tustin MCAS www.militarymuseum.org/

More Than Just a Pretty Base

Christine Shingleton emphasizes the unusual partnerships that have defined Tustin Legacy to date. “In addition to involving and engaging the community” in the planning process, the city has worked collaboratively with the development community on project designs, Shingleton says. “As opposed to working in isolation to develop plans that don’t reflect reality, we’ve tested the market to create something that can be replicated anywhere. Partnering with the private sector and responding to the market are reasons why this project will be successful.” Working with a variety of experienced suburban developers, including John Laing, Shea Homes, Centex Homes, and Lennar, which also has base reuse experience, the city has assured Tustin Legacy a diversity of home types produced by massive, market-tested homebuilding companies. At first glance, Tustin Legacy could be labeled simply as a base reuse project, the kind receiving frequent press coverage following each round of military closures. But the city’s “bottom-up” site planning—involving community feedback and incorporating a variety of partnerships between the public, private, and non-profit sectors—offers broader lessons. The colossal blimp hangars represent the kind of unique features that a city

MCASTustin.html Orange County Rescue Mission’s Village of Hope www.rescuemission.org/1programs/ voh/intro/intro.htm Tustin Legacy (City of Tustin) www.tustinlegacy.com Tustin Legacy news from the Orange County Register www.ocregister.com/community/ tustin_news/legacy/

Historic Preservation

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historic preservation

by Joseph Heathcott

photos by Alan Brunettin

Paving Paradise: The Century Building Debacle and the Future of Historic Preservation It isn’t every day that the National Trust for Historic Preservation steps into a local development debate with this advice: turn a massive marble-clad downtown building into a thousand-unit parking lot

IN THE LATE-NIGHT HOURS OF OCTOBER 20, 2004, bulldozers began demolishing one of the finest buildings in downtown St. Louis. Fearful that an injunction might halt his pet project, Mayor Francis Slay took a page out of the Richard Daley playbook and ordered crews to commence work under cover of night. By the morning, efforts to save the Century Building were moot. The damage had been done. The demolition of the Century Building resulted from a perfect storm of bad decisions, and the episode offers a case study of what can go wrong in historic preservation despite decades of accumulated wisdom in best practices. For most preservationists, the destruction of irreplaceable pieces of the historic urban fabric is unacceptable unless it clears the way for exceptional new architecture worthy of future preservation efforts. Local and state officials should act as stewards of their built heritage, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation should provide guidance and leadership to promote innovative adaptive reuse projects. In the case of the Century Building, these roles, responsibilities, and best practices were ignored. City officials lined up behind a tragically short-sighted demolition scheme while squelching viable alternatives to appease developers. Demolition made way not for exceptional new architecture, but rather for a bland, unnecessary, one-thousand-unit parking garage. Most shockingly, officials at the National Trust—looked to for leadership in preservation efforts—provided the financial support to make the project possible, betraying their own long-term constituency. The ramifications of this reversal for historic preservation—and for the cities salvaged through its practice—appear grim. Fracturing Previous page: The Century Building, prior to demolition. Alan Brunettin ©2004. This page: Construction of the parking lot on the site of the Century Building. Photo taken July 2, 2006. Alan Brunettin ©2006.

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the Civic Landscape

Anyone who has been to St. Louis knows two things about it: it is a city rich in architectural

heritage, and it has destroyed that heritage with reckless abandon. St. Louis is renowned for its superb trove of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century architecture. In the decades following World War II, however, the city lurched into decline, suffering catastrophic losses in population, jobs, and capital. Land values plummeted through the 1970s and 1980s, and the reduced tax base left the city with few options but to defer maintenance of infrastructure. Desperate to compete with automobile-oriented suburban malls and office parks, city officials used urban renewal funds to demolish superb old buildings for surface parking lots. The news was not all dismal. Beginning in the early 1960s, citizens coalesced for an all-out fight to save the Wainwright Building, Louis Sullivan’s terra-cotta-clad masterpiece situated in the heart of the city’s business district. Declared a National Landmark in 1968, the Wainwright Building catapulted historic preservation into the public eye, and St. Louisans took a fresh look at their built heritage. In the 1970s, preservation enthusiasts began to make use of federal—and later, state—tax credits to finance the rehabilitation of houses, shops, and whole neighborhoods. By 2005, the Landmarks Association had facilitated the listing of hundreds of individual buildings on the National Register, and thousands more through inclusion in historic districts. St. Louis had emerged as one of the leading cities in the national preservation movement. Despite their best efforts, however, preservation activists have regularly seen their labors in one neighborhood counteracted by large-scale demolition in another. The city’s downtown has been particularly gutted. The Washington Avenue Loft District has had some improvements, but the downtown as a whole retains a listless quality, drowning in a dull sea of surface lots and parking garages. Faced with their city’s fragmentation, St. Louisans cherish the great public buildings still standing. These structures connect them to a rapidly disappearing past and represent options for adaptive reuse

in the future. With indications that St. Louis is now adding population for the first time since 1950, the availability of unique, beautiful, solid buildings is emerging as the city’s foremost advantage. Anatomy of a Preservation Fight

The demolition of the Century Building resulted from a perfect storm of bad decisions, and the episode offers a case study of what can go wrong in historic preservation despite decades of accumulated wisdom in best practices.

When the Downtown Now! Coalition released its Downtown Plan in 1999, there was reason for optimism. Noting the ugly history of demolition and fragmentation behind them, planners clearly recognized the path forward was in adaptive reuse of the city’s remaining historic buildings. Unfortunately, the Francis Slay administration quickly betrayed the vision laid out in the Downtown Plan and in 2001 began to work feverishly for the demolition of one of the city’s greatest commercial structures. The buildings under fire were the Old Post Office (OPO) and the Century Building. Designed by federal architect Alfred Mullet and constructed between 1877 and 1884, the Old Post Office is a somber pile of grey limestone in the Second Empire style. It served as the city’s main postal station until 1937. Across the street from the OPO stood the Century Building, designed by the firm of Raeder, Coffin, and Crocker and completed in 1896. With its massive Beaux-Arts façade, the Century was one of the few remaining marble-clad buildings in the United States. But for preservationists, the Century’s real value was its part in an ensemble of superb buildings, comprising a remarkably intact, early-twentieth-century civic landscape in downtown St. Louis. Recognizing the buildings’ potential for adaptive reuse, the city’s Downtown Plan provided explicit directions to reject all future demolitions within a three-block radius of the OPO. But the Slay administration soon defied the recommendations of its own committee. In 2001, city officials announced that they had chosen a development team—DESCO, Inc. and DFC, Inc.—to renovate the OPO as

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demolition from a local battle into a national scandal was the role of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Distraught over the city’s actions, St. Louis preservationists looked to their national allies for support. After all, the National Trust’s own advertising asserts that “No one looks back fondly on the time they spent in a parking garage.” Preservationists naturally assumed the Trust stood by its words. When first confronted with the DESCO-DFC plan, the Trust unequivocally opposed the sacrifice of the Century Building. In a January 2001 letter to the Missouri General Services Administration (owner of the OPO), Midwest Trust Director Royce Yeater challenged the parties to find a new parking solution. Yeater concluded, “preservationists never like the prospect of trading one potentially historic building for another.” Besides, alternative parking provisions abound in downtown St. Louis, with ten underused parking facilities in the ten blocks surrounding the Old Post Office. Like all demolition schemes that involve federal money and historic properties, the OPO plan triggered a routine Section 106 review in court. During the hearings, Landmarks Association representatives argued that the developers should be barred from receiving tax credits because the project included the demolition of a building listed on the National Register. The city and the developers countered that the demolition of the Century Building and the redevelopment of the Old Post Office were technically separate projects. Since the tax credits would only fund the renovations of the OPO, the city was therefore free to dispense with the Century Building as it saw fit. Though a cynical political maneuver, it fell just within the law. The courts ruled in favor of demolition, and the project was clear to proceed.

the new home for the Missouri Eastern District Court of Appeals and an extension of the suburban campus of Webster University. They would demolish the Century Building to erect a parking garage. According to officials in the Slay administration, the future tenants demanded adjacent parking “within view” of the OPO. The decision to “sacrifice” the Century to this end was a “tough choice,” they said, but was the only way the project could work. Preservationists didn’t buy it. The Landmarks Association of St. Louis—the group that had originally saved the Old Post Office from the scrap heap in the 1960s—found the idea that the Century Building had to be destroyed to save the OPO patently untrue. The adjacent area was already in redevelopment. Viable alternatives did exist, and reputable developers advanced efforts to save the Century, but the Slay administration squelched them. The city had chosen its developers and would not budge. To seasoned preservationists, such intransigence on the part of city officials was a routine feature of St. Louis political culture. But what transformed the Century Building

A Betrayal of Trust

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, preservationists in St. Louis stepped up efforts to save the Century Building. Unable to sway

city officials and DESCO-DFC from their single-minded devotion to demolition, preservationists turned to their old allies at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They were shocked, however, to find that the Trust had become complicit in the scheme. In June of 2004, the Landmarks Association discovered that the National Trust had decided to provide gap financing for the project: $6.9 million in tax credits. Not only had the Trust refused to intervene in support of its old allies; it was actively working against them, backing a local redevelopment coalition that was openly hostile to the local preservation movement. As policy analyst Kevin Priestner put it, the Trust’s move constituted an “egregious act of mission drift.” St. Louis preservation advocates were bewildered. “For the National Trust to capitulate to the expediency of the moment simply makes no sense,” noted Landmarks Association Executive Director Carolyn Toft in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article. Toft charged that National Trust president Richard Moe’s actions undercut two decades of close collaboration and mutual support between local preservationists and the National Trust. After all, Toft explained, “we know the building, we know the neighborhood, we know the downtown.” Over 3,500 preservationists around the country signed an online petition in protest. Many resigned their membership in the National Trust, charging that it had abdicated its responsibility not only to St. Louis preservationists, but also to its national constituency. In his comments on the petition, Michael Tomlan, director of the Historic Preservation program at Cornell University, reflects the exasperation of long-term Trust members: “The project violates everything the National Trust is supposed to stand for. They have gone terribly wrong.” The Trust closed ranks in response to the national outcry. Moe released a statement that demolition of the Century for a parking garage was the key to revitalizing the entire OPO district. St. Louis preservationists contended that Moe was relying solely on the assertion of Mayor Slay, the very person most zealous about demolition. Most cynically, Moe parroted the city’s earlier argument that the National Trust’s award of $6.9 million in tax credits would only pay for the renovation of the Old Post Office, not demolition of the

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Top: With a wrecking ball poised above its corner, the Century Building waits. Bottom: A local architectural salvage company at work, with permision to remove the historical ornamentation from the Century Building prior to demolition. Both images by Alan Brunettin ©2004.

Century Building. Preservationists around the country, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Robert Duffy, regarded this last point as transparent semantics: everyone knew full well that the Trust provided the crucial piece of gap funding for a project that included demolishing an historic treasure. Finally, Moe claimed that since neither the mayor of St. Louis nor the Old Post Office developers exhibited the political will to locate the parking garage elsewhere, he had no alternative but to support the demolition plan. Opponents countered that the Trust also lacked political will, as it refused to challenge a redevelopment scheme that so clearly contravened the principles and best practices of historic preservation. The Trust, they argued, could have easily demanded retention of the Century as a condition of the tax credit award. But Trust officials were singularly focused on saving Alfred Mullet’s Landmark Old Post Office at the Century’s expense. The best efforts of preservationists in St. Louis and around the nation were to no avail. DESCO-DFC moved ahead with the demolition of the Century Building, and once again the city of St. Louis lost a piece of itself that can never be replaced. Historic Reckoning

The decision by the National Trust to oppose local preservationists and to back the city’s redevelopment scheme is one of the most significant in the history of the organization. The Trust’s actions left the Landmarks Association high and dry, setting the local preservation movement back twenty years. Virtually any other major city would have treasured the Century as an opportunity for innovative adaptive reuse. Portfolios of historic buildings are fueling the current renaissance of cities like Boston, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Providence. In Providence, for example, the city government has committed substantial resources to historic preservation and has established progressive cultural and housing policies that encourage socio-economic diversity. In fact, as urban journalist Roberta Gratz argues, most cities today view parking shortages as a sign that their downtowns are on the upswing. But St. Louis is a city mired in old ways of doing business. Still in shock over its cata-

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strophic population loss, city officials have been slow to move beyond the strategy developed in the 1960s and 1970s of competing with the suburbs by providing ample parking in its dense urban core. The Slay administration in particular has demonstrated an outmoded preference for prioritizing short-term real estate deals over long-term planning and stewardship. Whether or not one cares about the Century Building as a unique architectural accomplishment or as part of the historic urban fabric of St. Louis, its demolition sets a dangerous precedent. By funding the OPO project, the National Trust has clearly signaled its departure from its original mandate, and that it is now in the business of backing local redevelopment schemes however witless, myopic, and ill-conceived. Worst of all, the actions of the Trust have emboldened opponents of historic preservation and left the movement vulnerable to serious attack. The question now is, if preservationists can no longer trust the Trust, who will be the advocate of last resort?

Duffy, Robert W. “National Trust Backs Plan to Raze Building.” St. Louis PostDispatch 29 June 2004. Duffy, Robert W. “Battle of the Century.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 4 July 2004: B01. Gratz, Roberta Brandes. “We Don’t Have Enough Parking.” Planning Commissioners Journal 48 (Fall 2002). www.plannersweb.com Landmarks Association. “Thousands Rebuke National Trust Over Support for Demolition of Historic Building.” Press Release. 12 July 2004. www.prweb.com Moe, Richard. “Saving Landmark Buildings Can Require Tough Tradeoffs.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 14 July 2004: B07. Prost, Charlene. “Raze a Building and Get Tax Credits.” St. Louis PostDispatch 4 July 2004: B05. Prost, Charlene, and Tim Bryant. “Suit Seeks to Protect Building from Razing in Old Post Office Project.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 29 May 2003: B2. Shinkle, Peter, and Charlene Prost. “Developer Charges That Threats Killed Proposal.” St. Louis PostDispatch 22 July 2004: B01.

Opposite page: photo by William Herman Rau, January 21, 1896. No. 534. The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection.

historic preservation

by Jeff Pooley

Will Bethlehem Turn Steel into Gold? By the end of the year, Bethlehem’s famous abandoned steel mill could be a casino—but does the city have even better ways to bring in cash?

IF THE SLOW DEATH OF BETHLEHEM STEEL WAS TRAGEDY, then the imminent slots-and-lofts redevelopment of its idled riverside steelworks is farce. Located in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, the company operated its hometown plant until 1996. The acres of abandoned industry were, for a few short years, the stuff of coffee-table nostalgia and regional despair. Despite the downer vibe and lost-hope dereliction, outside developers (and city boosters) saw potential and began circling covetously. Today, a consortium of developers led by casino giant Las Vegas Sands plans to turn 120 acres of abandoned foundries and blast furnaces into a theme-park mix of stores, apartments, and a casino hotel. In just a decade, “The Steel” will have gone from functioning industrial plant to a haven for yuppies with lattes, waylaying plans to preserve it as a symbol of post-industrial American decay. By taking advantage of the surrounding area’s boom, redevelopment of the steelworks may compress the transformation process many older industrial cities have experienced, skipping the stage in which hipsters and artists make a neighborhood attractive enough that they will no longer be able to afford to live there. The Steel’s Rise and Fall

The Steel emerged in late-19th-century Bethlehem, a city dominated by the Moravian Church, which had settled there in 1741. Its two anchor institutions gave the city a bipolar character: starched and ecclesiastical north of the Lehigh River, grimy and profane to the south. The divide was mirrored in the Bethlehem population, with the old Pennsylvania Dutch settlers to the north, and Eastern and Southern European steel immigrants to the south.

For most of the 20th century, Bethlehem Steel was a Fortune 500 icon, the world’s second biggest steel company. Its workers supplied the steel for many of the bridges, tunnels, and skyscrapers that occupy our collective memory—the Golden Gate and George Washington Bridges, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, among others—and armed the nation for both World Wars. The Steel lavishly compensated its executives: in 1956 it paid nine out of the twelve top salaries in American business. Its thousands of laborers were not treated as well, but they won union recognition during World War II, and by the mid-1970s were among the highest paid industrial workers in the world. By then, the company employed 115,000 workers, and its Bethlehem operations stretched for five miles along the Lehigh. But then the hemorrhaging began. A combination of factors, including overseas competition, reduced demand, upstart American firms, and the company’s gilded executive culture, left Bethlehem Steel reeling by the late 1970s. In August of 1977, over 7,000 blue-collar workers were laid off—though it was, tellingly, the September 30 layoff of 2,500 white-collar workers that is remembered as “Black Friday.” Billy Joel’s 1983 single “Allentown” made the Bethlehem layoffs infamous: “Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time / filling out forms / standing in line.” (The song was reportedly inspired by Bethlehem, not nearby Allentown, but a song named for Bethlehem would, presumably, have been read as heavy-handed religious allegory.) By 1984, the company’s employee ranks had plummeted to 48,500. The company limped along until 2001, when it finally declared bankruptcy. Its remnants were purchased by the lean, privately owned International Steel Group shortly after bankruptcy allowed the com-

pany to shirk its pension obligations, a move since echoed by other faltering companies. The international steel market had transformed the Bethlehem works into a vast brownfield. City Slicker

The city’s current post-steel revival is the product of another outside market—New York City. New York is just 60 miles down I78, a drive lined by in-built and pricey New Jersey suburbs. Real estate arbitrage—the large gap between New Jersey’s overheated housing market and the Lehigh Valley’s still modest costs—has exerted its predictable magnetism over developers, resulting in the same farms-to-McMansion makeover that has transformed the outlying districts of most large American cities in recent years. In the Valley’s case, the especially steep New York prices and proximity to Philadelphia have accelerated the acre-devouring sprawl, making it the fastest-growing region in Pennsylvania. The Valley’s average home price jumped 60 percent in the last five years, to $218,000, in the first half of 2006. And the trend shows no sign of cooling. Many of the Valley’s new residents are well-off professionals, who have pushed the region’s average household income to over $71,043, according to the Lehigh Development Corporation. The newly attractive demographics have yielded four separate proposals to build “lifestyle centers,” the industry’s euphemism for upscale malls that mimic traditional streetscapes. The Lehigh Valley has become, almost overnight, one big exurb. Most exurbs, though, don’t have three gritty, post-industrial cities (Bethlehem, Allentown, and Easton) in their midst. The same kind of arbitrage pressure that produced the Lehigh Valley housing boom began to act on the cities themselves: “used” homes in the city cores started to look like bargains compared to the new developments on their outskirts. Bethlehem capitalized on the region’s new edge-city dynamism to start its own renaissance. Initially, Bethlehem survived the lost jobs and decreased tax dollars by shifting attention from the steelworks to its Moravian community in the north. With careful preservation, the stewardship of the Moravian Church, and savvy marketing, the city successfully re-branded itself as “Christmas City,” complete with seasonal pageantry, an

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arts-and-crafts “Christkindlmarkt,” and an 81foot-high “Star of Bethlehem” atop the city’s South Mountain. Today, the Moravian’s 18thcentury church and namesake college buildings are the core of a picturesque boutique-lined downtown. A postcard in stone and mortar, it is surrounded by a well maintained residential district of 19th-century mansions. The city’s “South Side,” home to the steelworks, Lehigh University, and crowded working-class rowhouses is now experiencing its own revival. Artists began moving to the South Side in growing numbers over the last decade, in a now-clichéd pattern played out in the aging, post-industrial districts of other Northeastern cities. The South Side, in the first years of the new millennium, started to look like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, ten years ago: vinyl siding neighbored restored brick, goateed hipsters frequented art galleries, and cheap restaurants were opened in buildings exhibiting signs of recent distress. Vacant industrial buildings were renovated for lofts and street-level bohemia. Packaging Nostalgia

For all of the city’s good news, north and south, the steelworks remains a brownfield. A number of ambitious plans for redevelopment had been proposed after its final, mid1990s shuttering, but each fell apart. Even as development stalled, the same years witnessed steady growth in packaged nostalgia for the Steel, its industrial legacy, and the steelworks themselves. Two glossy photo collections have, in the last few years, joined John Strohmeyer’s classic account of the company’s demise, Crisis in Bethlehem. The local newspaper published a thick commemorative, “Forging America,” in late 2003 and followed it up a few months later with a slickly produced DVD. A former Steel execu-

tive, meanwhile, launched ambitious plans for a “National Museum of Industrial History” to be housed in the colossal Machine Shop No. 2, which, when it was erected in 1890, was the world’s largest industrial space. The NMIH even earned a first-ever Smithsonian “affiliation,” though that didn’t translate into federal funding. In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the steelworks as one of America’s eleven “most endangered historic places” and profiled the site in its May/June 2005 Preservation magazine cover story. A grassroots advocacy group called “Save Our Steel,” formed out of the steelworker community, has pursued the tightwire goal of a “historically sensitive redevelopment” of the site—lending cautious support to developer proposals that, at one time or another, appeared on the cusp of groundbreaking In the fall of 2004, after a decade of scrapped plans and false starts, city officials, NIMH backers, and local preservationists alike applauded the announcement that a prominent, New York-heavy development team calling itself “BethWorks Now” had bought the 120 core acres of the site from Steel corporate successor ISG for a reported $3 million. The buyers included Barry Gosin and his gargantuan New York-based Newmark Group. Gosin is famous for his trendy makeovers of aging New York industrial neighborhoods, including, almost singlehandedly, DUMBO in Brooklyn. And Gosin has been effusive in his public pronouncements. This summer, for example, he told a group of prominent Lehigh Valley business leaders that he was “overcome by emotion” when he first visited the site. “I want to someday be able to bring my granddaughter there and say, ‘I did this,’” said Gosin. The development plan pressed all the

The familiar, stage-by-stage progression of gentrification—first, the edgy pioneers, then the young professionals who love them, and after a long interval, the boutiques and brick sidewalks—has, in Bethlehem’s case, collapsed due to the rapid boom of the surrounding area.

The now-empty Number 2 Machine Shop, one of the largest industrial buildings in the world when it was built. This is the building they are proposing to make the centerpiece of the industrial museum for exhibits. Photo ©Shaun O’Boyle.

right historical buttons. There was, for example, a pledge to preserve the iconic, seventeen-story high blast furnaces, the Machine Shop No. 2, and the iron foundry. The plan, to be sure, called for a predictable mix of the upscale and voguish development that would make it profitable—with over 700 lofts, an entertainment center (with “cool bowling alleys”), one or two hotels, and the requisite “lifestyle center.” Still, the group’s preservationist bona fides and ready capital assuaged the concerns of most steelworks stakeholders. Save Our Steel almost immediately endorsed the developers and their proposal. An Unexpected Plot Twist

Enter the Las Vegas Sands Corp. Just four months after the original BethWorks plan was announced, the $16 billion casino giant quietly revealed that it planned to join

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the existing investors. This was, to put it mildly, a bombshell. Here was the fastest growing gambling company in the world proposing a $350 million slots parlor and convention center as the centerpiece of a revamped plan, now worth $879 million. Las Vegas Sands is best known for its “Renaissance Venice”-themed Venetian Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, which boasts a full-scale Ducal Palace, working gondolas, and a Guggenheim Museum franchise. While Bethlehem is a long way from Las Vegas, recent Pennsylvania legislation authorizing slot gambling gave the two cities something in common. Legislators voted in 2004 to award fourteen slot licenses across the state. Since twelve of the licenses were effectively spoken for, the new law has set off a statewide scramble for the two remaining stand-alone licenses. In addition to the jobs

and investment, host communities are guaranteed, by law, an annual $10 million payment from each slots operator. Thanks to revenue projections and the New Jersey border, the Lehigh Valley has been widely viewed as an odds-on favorite for one of these two licenses. The prospect of all that one-armed Lehigh Valley banditry attracted not just Las Vegas Sands, but three other out-of-state gambling concerns with their own elaborate proposals for developments in Bethlehem and nearby Allentown. By May of 2005, Las Vegas Sands had unexpectedly acquired a majority stake in the BethWorks Now investment team. The new plan, in addition to the hotel casino, called for at least 400 more lofts—and Disney-esque touches like climbing walls, boat rides, a restored elevated railway, and light shows said to evoke the steelmaking process.

Fewer historic buildings would be preserved under this new Sands-led plan. Machine Shop No. 2 would be saved, but no longer set aside for the industrial museum; instead, the “steel cathedral,” as it has been called, would house a mix of lofts and high-end retail. The museum would move to a much smaller nearby structure. “We’ve talked to the retailers,” Gosin told the local newspaper at the time. “They tell us, ‘If the Venetian comes, we’ll come.’ ... If I tell them the Museum of Industrial History is going to be the anchor tenant, they’re not going to come.” Resistance Mounts

Preservationists were frustrated by the revamped plans. “We were very disappointed because they were quite a bit different from the earlier sketches, which looked pretty sensitive to the history of the site,” Mike Kramer, co-founder of Save Our Steel, told local reporters. “It looked to us to be a basic mall design.” More worrisome to the Sands and its partners was the growing and organized resistance of religious groups. Polls taken over the summer of 2005 showed city residents split on the gambling proposal—with some calling the slots parlor a threat to Bethlehem’s carefully cultivated (and seasonally lucrative) “Christmas City” image. In the wake of the Sands deal, two antigambling groups formed: “Citizens for a Better Bethlehem” and “Valley Citizens for Casino-Free Development.” Neither group is explicitly religious, but personnel and non-profit records reveal that both have clear ties to the Moravian Church and the Valley’s evangelical community. Also during the summer, two Bethlehem City Councilmen—one a Moravian minister, the other an attorney for the Catholic Diocese of Allentown—proposed a zoning change that would ban gambling on the steelworks site, which was backed by the two activist groups. In response, BethWorks and the Sands hired a veteran Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, lobbying firm and launched a charm offensive that included a twelve-page newspaper insert, door-to-door canvassing, and an automated telephone campaign (complete with phone patch-throughs to the City Council switchboard). The investor team gave $50,000 to the city’s popular MusikFest, and donated 3.5 acres of Bethlehem Steel land to

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the local arts community for a future arena and performing arts center. More than 1,400 residents on both sides of the slots issue crowded into two Council forums that summer. At the July forum, the Reverend Gary Straughan, president of the Eastern District of the Moravian Church in North America, spoke on behalf of Citizens for a Better Bethlehem. “We all know that there is something inherently evil about gambling,” he said. “Don’t exchange the Star of Bethlehem for the neon lights surrounding slot machines and beckoning those instant riches.” The City Council, after a summer of bitter debate, voted 4-3 to reject the anti-gambling zoning proposal in September. Gambling would be permitted in Christmas City, and now both sides awaited the state’s decision.

high-end makeover already underway and entomb the once grand and gritty Bethlehem Steel works in market-tested urban chic and glittery casino lights. More people may be taking their Christmas breaks in Bethlehem in coming years—not for the city’s carefully cultivated religious imagery, but rather for the irresistible spectacle of a flashy casino 60 miles from New York City. One hopes for Bethlehem’s sake that five years from now a new casino developer does not find an even sexier site a few miles closer in, with a bigger climbing wall and longer boat ride.

“Forging America: The History of Bethlehem Steel.” The Morning Call 14 Dec. 2003: S1. www.mcall.com/news/specials/

Bethlehem’s Star Ascends

The Lehigh Valley rarely surfaces in the national media, so The New York Times’ lateDecember 2005 story on the region’s resurgent cities stood out. Headlined “Shaking Off the Rust, New Suburbs Are Born,” the article claimed that the Valley’s cities were attracting “an influx of middle-class New Yorkers” who were “bringing their cosmopolitan tastes with them.” In breathless prose, the story cited $1,200 designer quilts and $800 end tables made of steel beams on sale, as the Times put it, in the “shadow of the hulking industrial carcass” of Bethlehem Steel. While the steelworks project remains in limbo, Bethlehem’s South Side continues to gentrify. The familiar, stage-by-stage progression of gentrification—first, the edgy pioneers, then the young professionals who love them, and after a long interval, the boutiques and brick sidewalks—has, in Bethlehem’s case, collapsed due to the rapid boom of the surrounding area. One local developer envisioned his $30 million South Side loft renovation as a rental property, but as it nears completion, over half of its units have already sold as condos. The developer expects to sell them all before opening—and his is just one of many upscale projects underway in the old steelworkers’ sloped neighborhood. Pennsylvania is expected to award the coveted slots licenses in late 2006. A victory for the BethWorks team would accelerate the

bethsteel Hurley, Amanda Kolson. “Industrial Strength: Can the Remnants of Bethlehem Steel Be Reborn?” Preservation May/June 2005: 32-37. www.nationaltrust.org/magazine Save Our Steel www.saveoursteel.org Strohmeyer, John. Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel’s Struggle to Survive. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.

historic preservation

by Jeffrey Chusid

Preservation in the Progressive City: Debating History and Gentrification in Austin A city taskforce, spurred on by activists, planned to save East Austin by rolling back historic preservation laws

MOST RESIDENTS CONSIDER AUSTIN, Texas, an enlightened, progressive city. Home to one of the nation’s premier research universities, a renowned live music scene, Lance Armstrong, and the homegrown Dell Corporation, this blue dot in a red state has consistently ranked high in various surveys of “best places to live in America.” But its political maverick status has frequently put the city on a collision course with conservative state legislators, who seem to have a penchant for passing bills that reverse city ordinances. One such case recently led to a major battle in Austin over gentrification and historic preservation—a five-year long public controversy that generated several task forces and expert studies, as well as uncounted pages of newspaper coverage. In the process, the debate nearly terminated the city’s 30-year-old practice of protecting historic properties, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and brought into public discourse some unpleasant realities about modern American urban life from which most Austinites probably imagined themselves immune. The story of this debate underscores the complex relationship between gentrification and preservation, and how difficult it can be to measure their relationship. Ultimately, the Austin debate outlines ways in which preservation can be used to combat displacement and a loss of cultural identity, but it also demonstrates the limitations faced by an individual municipality attempting to counter national— even global—economic and political forces. A Fractured City

The population of Austin has roughly doubled every twenty years since the city was founded in 1836, and that rate of growth is expected to continue. It is now larger than Boston, Seattle, or Washington, D.C. The city has sprawled westward across its scenic yet ecologically fragile hill country landscape, which overlies the Edwards Aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the region and of the many springs and creeks that nourish native flora and fauna. To control this growth, Austin’s voters in 1992 adopted the growth-control Save Our

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Springs (SOS) Ordinance through a citizen initiative. State lawmakers and local developers, however, passed legislation rendering the SOS ordinance largely ineffective. At the end of the decade, Austin responded by adopting a set of planning incentives under the rubric of Smart Growth; instead of restricting development in ecologically sensitive areas, they would reward developers for building in non-sensitive areas. Smart Growth, however, had a rocky reception. Initially, historic preservation advocates perceived it as a devious strategy for developers to gain access to historic districts, and as a threat to neighborhood character across the city. But the more resounding outcry came from community groups in East Austin, who perceived that Smart Growth encouraged construction in their neighborhoods—neighborhoods that are poorer and have larger minority populations than elsewhere in the city. East Austin lies on one side of Interstate 35, a major north-south artery that bisects Austin geographically, historically, and socially. West of the line, the fragile, dry, and rocky landscape advances toward the High Plains, while to the east, rolling prairie and bottomlands mark a landscape of deep soils and plentiful water. Cotton and Southern Plantation culture, which included slavery, ran from the Atlantic all the way to Austin’s central divide. West of the divide, where ranching predominated, was populated in large part by liberal free-thinkers who had fled the 19th-century revolutions and counter-revolutions in Central Europe. As a result, I-35 has come to represent Austin’s political and cultural divide, helping to explain its vacillation between conservative and liberal viewpoints. It also explains the divisions between multi-cultural and Anglodominant communities. Minorities have always been part of Austin’s history. African Americans, both slaves and freedmen, had a significant presence in Austin since its founding. Hispanics historically accounted for a much smaller percentage of the population, and when their numbers started increasing in the late 19th century, the

East Austin is characterized by tree-shaded neighborhoods made up of modest homes with long, rich histories. Photos by Natalie Charles.

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city drove them out. Despite several well established freedmen communities in the western part of the city, including Clarksville, which would later become one of Austin’s first National Register Districts, in 1928 the city adopted a new Master Plan that segregated public facilities, and which urged that “all undesirables”—meaning both industrial uses and minority citizens—be moved to East Austin. City officials implemented the plan successfully, and most blacks who had been living in the western half of the city were “relocated” back to the former plantation lands, on the other side of I-35—what was then a broad boulevard called East Avenue. Austin became a segregated city, with an eastern half composed of isolated pockets of European settlement, such as Swede Hill, surrounded by growing communities of African Americans and Hispanics. Clashing Perspectives on Neighborhood Growth

Fast forward to 2000. Austin is Richard Florida’s poster child for the New Creative Class. Its citizens have the 9th highest median income in the country according to 2000 Census figures. In East Austin, Smart Growth has been adopted, a redevelopment agency has been established, and the city airport has been moved ten miles to the southeast while its former East Austin site is master planned as a “New Urbanist” community. At the same time, in just 30 years, Austin has gone from the city with the best housing affordability index in the country to the most expensive housing market in Texas, and one of the most expensive of any large non-coastal U.S. city. East Austin neighborhoods, only a few blocks from a growing downtown and an enormous university, are increasingly seen as hip and funky—the place to go for entertainment, great food, and a cute, affordable house. Crime rates are relatively low, and gang activity is negligible, and although the schools are poor, that doesn’t seem to deter musicians, grad students, or young professionals from contemplating a move east. Inadequate local services and a dearth of supermarkets matter little to residents with cars, and improved goods and services are following the new populations to the area anyway.

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This widespread and benign public perception of East Austin was soon loudly challenged, however, by People in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources (PODER), a group of local activists. Formed in the mid-1990s to force the removal of a leaking gasoline tank farm endangering the health of East Austin residents, PODER, in an unrelenting drumbeat of press releases, testimony at public hearings, special events, and interviews, painted a completely different picture of East Austin development. PODER described an “influx of wealthy whites” who were “displacing the traditional black and Hispanic communities.” East Austin, they claimed, had been “marketed to affluent, largely Anglo, home buyers,” and growing real estate values, combined with the historic preservation and Smart Growth policies, had resulted in “gentrification.” PODER’s Exhibit A was the wholesale rehabilitation of historic residences, which not only allowed whites and “well-heeled professionals” to play with bargain-priced attractive homes, but led to a rise in property values that “mess[ed] with everyone’s tax base … as much as a mile around,” said PODER founder Susana Almanza, in an interview in a Ford Foundation newsletter. This drove out the very working-class population that built East Austin’s neighborhoods. According to PODER, new owners of historic properties also received huge, permanent, historic property tax exemptions, while poor folk surrounding the upgraded homes not only had to pay more for the enhanced value of their own, less attractive, houses, but then had to make up the missing tax revenue lost to the exemption. “That’s the main thing that is displacing people and making them feel that they have no choice but to sell out,” said Almanza. PODER’s anti-gentrification, anti-historic preservation campaign got results. Several Austin City Council members took the claims seriously, and the city held a series of public hearings and Council discussions on the topic. Publicly, everyone in City Hall expressed dismay at the situation. Preservation groups and city staff, however, quietly pleaded for a more careful analysis. Mayor Will Wynn, an architecture school graduate and former board member of the Heritage Society of Austin, the city’s main preservation group,

listened, as did several other council members. Over the next several years, the city established two citizen task forces and conducted at least two internal staff studies of the matter. They examined gentrification in East Austin, the impact of historic designations and other preservation policies on housing prices and displacement, and whether to rewrite or abandon historic tax exemptions— or even scrap the city’s historic preservation ordinance altogether. A steady stream of articles in the Austin American-Statesman, the weekly Austin Chronicle, and the University of Texas’s Daily Texan kept the issue in the public’s consciousness, and other public and private entities entered the fray, from the Heritage Society, which hosted a public symposium on gentrification, to the Capital Metropolitan Transit Authority, which issued a large report in 2005 on “best practices” to combat gentrification. Upon Closer Examination

Many of PODER’s alarms seemed real at first. East Austin’s African-American population had dropped by over 25 percent since 1980, while the white population in at least one neighborhood near downtown increased by 30 percent. Property values—and property taxes—doubled in East Austin between 1990 and 2003, with the values of historic homes in East Austin increasing even more. Over the next several years, however, as the city staff studies analyzed the meaning of these numbers and their relationship to gentrification, a different picture began to emerge. The African-American population in Austin had actually been in decline for years, marked by a steady flight to surrounding suburbs. This exodus began well before 1990 and had actually resulted in scattered areas of vacant houses throughout East Austin. In a perverse way, the effective end of segregation in the 1960s and ’70s made many of the community’s cultural institutions, from jazz clubs to black colleges, both less necessary and less viable. At the same time, neither true integration nor a new set of institutions rose in their stead, leaving the community adrift. As one ex-resident said in a radio interview, “There’s nothing here for us.” Meanwhile, the supposed white influx into East Austin was actually an overall decline during the 1990s, from 24 to 17 per-

cent of area population. East Austin did experience a significant increase in Hispanic population, however, from 30 to over 50 percent of area residents, doubling in actual numbers. Property values did skyrocket, but they still lagged behind increases in the rest of the city, and East Austin homes, at a 2005 median price of $103,000, remained considerably cheaper than the city’s median home price of $155,000. Despite increases in property values and taxes, East Austin homeownership levels remained roughly constant at 44 percent throughout the boom, a proportion that still leads the city. Most importantly from the point of view of the preservation community, historic homes turned out to be irrelevant either as a factor in tax assessments or as a drain on the public weal. In fact, only 28 properties in East Austin were designated as landmarks and eligible for a tax exemption, out of a total of 13,823 parcels. Overall, the various city staff studies suggested that historic preservation played a relatively minor role in East Austin’s evolution. One study even concluded that preservation could help in conserving ethnic communities and their institutions, and in maintaining affordable housing. Evidence of this phenomenon came from property value assessments in two East Austin National Register Historic Districts. National Register districts in Austin adhere to voluntary design guidelines and oversight from the city’s Landmarks Commission, but the properties do not get tax breaks. Even though residents of the two districts pulled a higher number of building permits than the rest of East Austin, home prices actually rose slightly less than the area average. In fact, the historic district status mitigated market pressures because it disallows the high-density construction that their proximity to downtown would suggest as the “highest and best use” for the land. The protection from skyrocketing housing prices has not been lost on other inhabitants of East Austin. Since the adoption of Austin’s new Neighborhood Planning framework, all of the five plans produced by East Austin neighborhoods have called for updated historic resources surveys, increased designations of individual buildings and local districts as historic, rehabilitation incentives, and preservation education. One plan explic-

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Gabia Alejo with her parents, Jose and Tomasa, in front of the East Austin home that Gabia is fixing up. Photo by Natalie Charles.

Ultimately, the Austin debate outlines ways in which preservation can be used to combat displacement and a loss of cultural identity, but it also demonstrates the limitations faced by an individual municipality attempting to counter national—even global— economic and political forces.

itly identifies districts as powerful mechanisms for maintaining affordable housing, because they prevent indiscriminate demolitions and unsympathetic or out-of-scale additions and infill construction. An East Austin community leader has stated that historic districts may also halt the influx of sub-standard housing built by absentee landlords. Turning a Taskforce to Better Ends

Despite early results from the studies revealing little connection between gentrification and historic preservation, in 2003, the City Council decided to form a “Historic

Preservation Taskforce” to further investigate the matter. In fact, the new taskforce had a clearly broader charge than East Austin gentrification. It included, explicitly and implicitly, reviewing how much the city was losing by granting preservation tax abatements, and finding ways to change the Landmarks Commission to make them less obstreperous and more sympathetic to developers. For almost a year, the taskforce, primarily made up of city commissioners, developers, and lawyers, examined every aspect of historic preservation in Austin and seemingly came extremely close to recommending an end to preservation as a city policy. Several taskforce members were not terribly subtle about seeing their job as putting a halt to a string of recent preservation victories. Only an enormous effort by a handful of preservation advocates and professionals, working nights and weekends, holding meetings, writing letters and white papers, and attending public hearings, influenced the taskforce enough to keep preservation policies in Austin alive. The taskforce made several significant changes to Austin’s preservation regulations; however, the degree to which the resulting changes in the preservation ordinance have weakened preservationists remains to be seen. The city greatly reduced the automatic tax exemption granted to all new historically designated properties. (Interestingly, the 1981 Austin Preservation Plan had predicted this change, identifying the practice of tax exemptions as divisive and a disincentive for the city to designate properties.) The taskforce also recommended reducing the number of members and eliminating seats reserved for specific professional representatives on the Landmarks Commission. More importantly, the city significantly tightened the criteria by which a property could become an Austin landmark. While PODER, developers, and most elected officials were trying to weaken preservation in Austin, many neighborhood associations and community groups used the taskforce as an opportunity to expand preservation protections considerably. Austin’s fourteen National Register districts bestow prestige on the city and a measure of protection from federally funded projects, but what Austin had always lacked was a local historic district designation, which is the only real pro-

tection for a neighborhood on a day-to-day basis. Local designation can be enforced where it counts: at the building department where demolition and alteration permits are issued. The head of the taskforce had long opposed local districts, however, so it was a bit of sweet irony for Austin preservationists that there was near unanimous support for these districts on the taskforce; they were both recommended and implemented. Now all existing Austin National Register districts can become local historic districts once they fulfill the new regulatory requirements, such as preparing design standards for new construction and alterations in concert with the city’s historic preservation officer. The local ordinance thus provides a much greater incentive for neighborhoods to create their own districts. In East Austin, these districts could potentially include a dozen or more individual neighborhoods. A sampling of potential local district resources include areas of larger, well established homes dating back to the 1870s; shotgun houses or simple craftsman-style workers cottages from the early 20th century; the campus of historically black Huston-Tillotson College; the old Oakwood cemetery; 19th century commercial buildings lining the old railroad tracks; and a variety of tranquil streetscapes where winding roads line wild creeks. Addressing Gentrification One Neighborhood at a Time

In the end, the taskforce’s final report reflected the preservation community’s active campaign of education and lobbying, and reemphasized three points made by the other studies. First, preservation can be of assistance to communities facing gentrification by saving community institutions and cultural practices, stabilizing property values, valuing and protecting affordable working-class housing, and providing financial and technical support to low-income owners of historic properties. Second, significant structural issues still impact East Austin, making it vulnerable to gentrification. Ignoring them in order to attack preservation has served no one well—least of all the vanishing African-American community. Thirty years ago, just when Austin was described as “most affordable,” the city changed its zoning regulations so that only uses specifically permitted in an area could be constructed. Consequently, housing

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could only be built in areas specifically zoned as residential. That helped subdivision developers, but not the cause of affordable housing. The final major issue is the clouded legal title of much East Austin real estate, a legacy of Mexican land grants, the Civil War, and poverty. Legal questions make homeowners ineligible for regular mortgages, and even more importantly, for the myriad property tax exemptions offered by city and state. While preservation can provide a powerful set of tools and design approaches for urban design and economic development, it is still only one relatively modest part of the kind of comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy needed to combat gentrification. Today, although both PODER and the preservationists remain polarized, they share a common desire to save communities: their physical character, traditions, institutions, and inhabitants. The mere mention of gentrification has so inflamed the discussion in Austin, however, as in other cities around the country, that stereotypes and political grandstanding have obscured the facts and tangible impacts on real people. Austin succeeded, at least in part, in detaching itself from much of the hyperbole by conducting a set of separate, relatively rigorous studies on the intersection of gentrification and preservation. The city’s efforts have suggested that the answer to gentrification is not found in broad-brush generalizations, but rather in analyzing each neighborhood’s specific economic and social concerns, understanding them as inextricably tied to a complex local history, and devising appropriate solutions and strategies responsive to the community’s needs and aspirations.

Bingamon, Brant. “PODER vs. HZoning: Ready for Round Two?” Austin Chronicle 1 Nov. 2002. www.austinchronicle.com Carlson, Neil. “Urban Gentry: What Happens When a Neighborhood Starts to Sell Its Soul?” Ford Foundation Report Online Spring 2003. www.fordfound.org City of Austin. “Gentrification Committee Report.” 14 June 2001. www.ci.austin.tx.us/housing/ publications.htm City of Austin Neighborhood Housing and Community Development Department. “Community Preservation and Revitalization Program Implementation: Recommendations.” Draft Report. 28 July 2005. www.ci.austin.tx.us/ housing/ publications.htm City of Austin. “Staff Task Force on Gentrification in East Austin: Finding and Recommendations.” 13 Mar. 2003. www.ci.austin.tx.us/ housing/ publications.htm Economic & Planning Systems, Inc. “A Review of Best Practices for Mitigating Gentrification throughout the Country.” 15 June 2004. saltillo.capmetro.org Kennedy, Maureen, and Paul Leonard. Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, 2001. www.brookings.edu PODER www.poder-texas.org Sadowsky, Steve. “City of Austin Historic Preservation Task Force Report to City Council.” 25 Mar. 2004. www.heritagesocietyaustin.org/ taskforce_rec.pdf

historic preservation

by Robert Garland Thomson

Looking East The Asian megacity is set to become this century’s predominant urban form, which means Western preservationists have much to learn from Bangkok, Dhaka, and Mumbai

THE HILLS AND BEACHES OF TODAY’S Indian megacity Mumbai were for centuries little more than a series of sleepy islands populated by fishermen and traders plying the eastern shores of the Arabian Sea. Even under British colonial rule (1661-1948), the city was largely characterized by its grand Victorian public buildings, graceful seafront boulevards, and arcaded shopping districts, particularly around the Fort district, once the colonial hub of the city and today its central business district. Not until after Indian Independence did Mumbai grow into the financial, cultural, and entertainment capital of the world’s second most populous nation. By 2020, the Population Institute projects Mumbai’s population will reach 28.5 million, surpassing Tokyo as the world’s largest city. Mumbai’s massive growth in the past 50 years exemplifies Asia’s urban expansion: constantly straining all available resources and services, resulting in vast unregulated development in the form of shantytowns and other illicit construction. As Mumbai and other Asian cities grow, their historic colonial and vernacular architectural heritage have received little attention. Real estate speculation, infrastructure development, and a preference for modern forms have prevailed over preservation. Local historic preservationists, however, have become increasingly adept at working in these booming environments. Bucking conventional top-down legislative approaches, community-based organizations have pioneered more effective tactics for preservation in Mumbai and elsewhere. Successful strategies from Asian cities may foretell a new era where Western cities follow their Eastern counterparts’ lead in many aspects of urban management, including historic preservation. Constructing Cultural Significance

In Mumbai, community-focused projects have concentrated on the southern Fort district and the adjacent Kala Ghoda district, bustling commercial areas teeming with street hawkers, employees of the nearby Bombay Stock Exchange, and middle-class residents from the Colaba and Marine Drive neighborhoods. The area boasts a dense collection of colonial-era buildings, including Victorian Neo-Gothic gems such as the Elphinstone College (completed in the 1880s), the David Sasson Library (1870), the Indo-Saracenic Prince of Wales Museum (1914), and the cast-iron Watson’s Hotel, now called Esplanade Mansion (1869). Despite municipal preservation legislation passed in 1995 and the numerous agencies charged with monitoring Mumbai’s historically significant architecture, real estate pressures, community neglect, pollution, and poor maintenance all take heavy tolls on the buildings.

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Perceiving the inadequacies of the official process, a local organization, the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), has rallied local planners, community leaders, and citizens to take the initiative in preservation efforts. The historic value of the area, however, has proven the major impediment to engaging community support. For many Indians, buildings dating from the British period of rule conjure grim recollections of racism, exploitation, and exclusion. At the same time, the swelling urban populace of Mumbai largely consists of newcomers who might regard the 150-year-old British buildings with disdain or disinterest. Since the historic value could not suffice as a rallying cry for preservation efforts, the UDRI had to find creative ways to inject new cultural significance into the old Fort neighborhoods. The UDRI initiated a detailed survey of Kala Ghoda and discovered that the district held Mumbai’s densest collection of art galleries. Seizing upon this distinction, the UDRI helped to establish the Kala Ghoda Association, an organization of art enthusiasts, business owners, and concerned citizens, to enhance the district’s visibility and encourage appreciation of its built fabric. The annual Kala Ghoda Art Festival, launched in 1998, has been an important tool in this effort, raising money for preservation efforts and community-based projects throughout the district. Since its launch, several buildings, including the Sasson Library and Elphinstone College buildings, have received façade cleanings and some interior restorations. More recently, the UDRI and Kala Ghoda Association have begun negotiating with the owner of Watson’s Hotel—which suffered a partial collapse in 2005 and which the World Monuments Fund placed on its 2006 World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites—to stabilize and restore certain public areas of the much deteriorated building. Preservation efforts, in short, embraced the rapidly changing nature of Mumbai. By “constructing cultural significance,” UDRI executive director Rahul Mehrotra argues, preservationists can use public advocacy to invigorate a community’s appreciation for buildings whose origins are so far removed. Eighteen hundred miles away, in another rapidly developing regional hub that has struggled to preserve historic buildings, the Bangkok Forum has employed similar grassroots techniques. Founded by Chaiwat Thirapantu, a German-trained local activist, the Forum is a citizen’s group that organizes street-level events and public action, often around preservation issues, using the publicity from these events to advance a more pluralistic urban planning process in Bangkok. Unlike Mumbai, Bangkok has no colonial legacy—the Kingdom of Siam, under King Rama I and his Chakri Dynasty, famously evaded European rule. Rama established Bangkok in 1782—then known

Top: The Teachers’ Council (Khurusapha) Printing House (1930s) in Bangkok’s Banglamphu district in the foreground was the target of the Bangkok Forum’s community-level activism. Photo courtesy Marc Askew. Bottom: The David Sasson Library (1870) is an excellent example of the eclectic Colonial-era architecture of the Kala Ghoda district in Mumbai’s Old Fort. Photo by author.

Even in the face of powerful interests — including development pressure, neglect, and top-down policy making — organized citizenry can reclaim the process of urban change in their cities.

as Krung Thep—across the Chao Praya River from its predecessor capital, Thon Buri. Absolute monarchy ended in 1932, but the Chakri Dynasty has persisted to this day, holding a place of prominence over the decades alongside Thailand’s autocratic and democratic leaders. The Thai government has traditionally used historic preservation as a vehicle for promotion of the monarchy. As a result, historic preservation activity in Bangkok has traditionally been of a top-down nature, focusing on royal monuments and frequently neglecting vernacular architecture and informal urban spaces. One neighborhood full of such architecture and spaces is the Banglamphu district. An exceptional example of Bangkok’s early urban development, Banglamphu contains a diverse assemblage of temples, mosques, royal palaces, shophouses (hybrid commercial/ residential spaces), and vernacular wooden buildings. Beginning in 1997, the Bangkok Forum began working with a broad coalition of local residents, students, and business people to organize and promote a festival in Banglamphu. Their aim was both to galvanize community participation in the district’s future, and to draw attention to a particular building threatened by demolition: the old Teachers’ Council (Khurusapha) Printing House, which dates to the 1930s. Though lacking official historic or aesthetic distinction, the building nevertheless occupied a prominent position in the neighborhood. The Bangkok Forum’s coordinated campaign, aided by Silpakorn University students who gave presentations on the building’s early history, ultimately persuaded the building’s owner, the Treasury Department, to cancel demolition plans. The Khurusapha Printing House was converted instead into a multi-use community center, supporting a cafe, library, and performance venue. Like the Kala Ghoda Association and UDRI, the Bangkok Forum’s objectives were not preservation of historically or architecturally significant buildings per se, but rather the empowerment of local communities to direct change in their surrounding built environment. Frequently in Mumbai, Bangkok, and other emerging Asian megacities, the rapid pace of development, hegemonic role of government, and market forces often rob citizens of their voice in planning decisions.

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Engaging the public in planning decisions by bestowing new significance on a historic urban space, however, proves not only a highly effective preservation tool, but can give a voice to citizens in the dynamic Asian urban environment.

Askew, Marc. Bangkok: Place, Practice and Representation. London: Routledge, 2002. King, Anthony D. “The Times and Spaces of Modernity (or Who Needs Postmodernism?).” Global Modernities. Ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and

Challenging the Very Notion of the City

As the Australian urban designer Richard Marshall points out in an essay on Asian megacities, the current urbanization in the East can only challenge “the very notion of the city—what it is, how it works, and the kind of urbanities it is capable of supporting.” Although he does not mention it specifically, one of the “urbanities” that the new megacity must support is the historic built environment. Mumbai and Bangkok demonstrate that even in the face of powerful interests—including development pressure, neglect, and top-down policy making—organized citizenry can reclaim the process of urban change in their cities. To be sure, many challenges remain. In Mumbai, a city where over half the residents live in slums or on the street, participation in an arts festival might not represent the most sustainable model for engaging large portions of the population in historic preservation. Nor do the success stories above represent the norm in the Asian megacity, as anyone observing the sad fate of Beijing’s Hutong neighborhoods or Yangon’s colonial architecture has witnessed. Nevertheless, as Asian cities come to define the urban norm in the 21st century, preservation strategies that work in them must be highlighted, refined, and shared throughout the region. Tactics developed in the new Asian megacities also have the potential to make their way back to North America and Europe, challenging the traditional conventions of historic preservation practice there. The emerging emphases in Bangkok and Mumbai on community-level (rather than top-down) action, on negotiating the relationship between the dynamic populace and the static urban environment, and on accommodating the shifting values of new constituent communities, all represent worthy objectives in the West, as well as the East.

Roland Robertson. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Logan, William S., ed. The Disappearing “Asian” City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Marshall, Richard. “Asian Megacities.” Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design. Ed. Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins. New York: Routledge, 2004. Mehrotra, Rahul. “Constructing Cultural Significance: Looking at Bombay’s Historic Fort Area.” Future Anterior 1.2 (Fall 2004): 24-31. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2001 Revision. New York: United Nations, 2002.

historic preservation

by Sharon Maclean

Saving High-Rise Public Housing After imploding many of its most loathed towers in the 1990s, the Chicago Housing Authority decided to save two historic developments from the scrap heap

MOST PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE UNITED States is decrepit and getting worse. Today, tenants of crumbling garden apartments or dreary high-rise towers occupy units dating back, in some cases, to before the Second World War. The architects and planners responsible for these developments were fueled with purpose: to replace squalid tenements with innovative and humane housing. To this end, they integrated ideas from the progressive Garden City Movement and International Style architecture into their work. Elements of these design trends survive in decaying public housing complexes from coast to coast, representing important aspects of America’s architectural heritage. But “the projects” are rarely considered design heirlooms. Years of neglect have taken a toll on garden apartments and “towers in the park” high-rise clusters, stigmatizing both residents and their homes. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), however, has realized that preserving and rehabilitating some of its historic buildings is a viable—and valuable—option. In partnership with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA), the CHA is demonstrating a new strategy to restore some low-income public housing projects to their former glory. According to Anne Haaker, Deputy State Historic Preservation

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Officer for the IHPA, the city’s public housing is “important not only to the history of Chicago, but to the whole country.” In light of the Bush administration’s many recent cuts to federal housing program budgets, Chicago’s use of historic preservation tax credits to help fund housing efforts may signal an alternative for other cities. Preservation: A New Strategy

One of the largest housing authorities in the country, CHA manages 78 properties and 25,000 tenants, including residences for families and seniors. Traditionally, dilapidated public housing in Chicago has fallen victim to the wrecking ball, or perhaps worse, to unappealing exterior alterations. Much has been written about CHA’s razing of large-scale high-rises, such as Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, and their subsequent “rebirth” as lower density townhouse developments. But CHA’s new strategy, as detailed in their “Plan for Transformation,” approved by the federal government in 2000, is to preserve and revitalize a mid-century housing stock once thought incorrigible. Proponents of continued spending on site-based public housing have largely supported the Department of Housing and Urban Devel-

opment’s HOPE VI program, which funds demolition of the worst projects and their replacement with a combination of affordable public units and market-rate dwellings—a “mixed-income” approach—often in the New Urbanist design style. HOPE VI requires public-private partnerships to leverage funds from a variety of sources. But critics say there’s actually been an overall reduction in the total number of public housing units since the program’s inception in 1993. Fiscal conservatives instead prefer the Section 8 voucher initiative started in the 1980s. Apartment-seekers enrolled in Section 8 receive federal subsidies to pay rent. Some economists believe the market demand expressed through voucher use triggers an increase in private sector affordable housing production—which should reduce public spending. But Section 8 also has critics, who claim the program destabilizes neighborhoods and lets some landlords charge unreasonably high rents in low-value areas. While CHA hasn’t abandoned Hope VI and Section 8—the Plan for Transformation includes strategies involving both—its new preservation-based option presents an intriguing opportunity for both Chicago and the nation. In redesigning America’s decaying public housing stock, planners and policy makers have, in recent years, focused on a New Urbanist approach with traditional neighborhood development (TND) concepts to provide a mix of residential and small-scale commercial land uses, walkable neighborhoods, and centrally located public space. This approach is more popular than modernist developments because it can minimize sometimes stark visual differences between public housing and surrounding areas—while addressing the physical deterioration and stigmatization that may have struck both. Yet at the same time, constructing neighborhoods from scratch has required the demolition of historic buildings—eliciting protests not only from preservationists but also public housing advocates concerned with tenant displacement. Housing advocates are more generally critical of TND as well, decrying any initiative that fails to expand the nation’s affordable housing stock. In 1999, the National Park Service (NPS) inserted itself into the debate, producing a guide for listing public housing on the

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National Register of Historic Places, which NPS administers. The guide recommends that states and cities evaluate a property’s impact on social or design history, and the existence or absence of other local examples. As an initial step in implementing the Plan for Transformation, IHPA undertook an assessment of every CHA-owned property and identified six developments with significant social or architectural history. The preservation approach to public housing consists of retaining, rehabilitating, and physically integrating a portion of the original residential building into newly built mixed-use components, including residential, commercial, and service units, as well as recreational amenities. IHPA has focused preservation requirements on exterior features, allowing the developers to reconfigure the interior apartments—typically too small for today’s standards—even at the loss of certain historic elements. This approach is a compromise. According to Anne Haaker, IHPA recognizes “the need to balance preservation with the authority’s primary goal of providing affordable housing.” While the majority of properties identified by CHA and IHPA for preservation are garden apartments, like the 454-unit Trumbull Park Homes, or mid-rise buildings dating from the late 1930s and early 1940s, Chicago’s focus on historic preservation has opened more recently built affordable housing structures to rehabilitation efforts. In the early 2000s, developers approached IHPA regarding the Hilliard Homes, constructed in 1966. Designed by noted architect Bertrand Goldberg—who was also responsible for Marina City, a landmark mid-century office, apartment, and parking complex located in Chicago’s Loop district—the Hilliard Homes consist of two 22-story arc-shaped apartment buildings that encircle a public space, and two cylindrical 16-story buildings for seniors. Developers successfully lobbied to list the Hilliard Homes, located on South State Street near Chinatown, on the National Register of Historic Places. This qualified the project for a Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit of twenty percent, which can be applied to substantial rehabilitations and adaptive reuse of private properties provided that “character-defining” features are preserved. By comparison, the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit

alone only offers developers a maximum nine percent credit per year (with a limit of ten years) for acquisition, rehabilitation, or new construction of rental housing targeting lower-income households. The Hilliard Homes project effectively combined the low-income and historic preservation credits. The first phase of renovations to the Hilliard Homes started in 2002 and has been completed, with two more phases remaining. Improvements to landscaping, parking, connections to the street grid, lighting, and recreation areas, are planned as part of a mixedincome community. Jonathan Fine, President of Preservation Chicago, a non-profit advocacy group for the preservation of the city’s history, supports the Hilliard rehabilitation because of the architectural quality and social significance of Goldberg’s design. “There is not enough appreciation for the designs of more recent architects, and they are not viewed as historic,” he says. One of Preservation Chicago’s major initiatives includes preservation of structures designed by notable architects of the recent past, including Goldberg. CHA and IHPA have also met joint success in rehabilitating Trumbull Park Homes, a two-story complex on the city’s Far South Side. Like Hilliard Homes, this project combines low-income and historic preservation tax credits to upgrade the property. According to CHA’s Press Secretary, Karen Pride, a mixed public/private finance deal is pending for the project, which will retain key exterior features, such as its terraced entrances. Interiors, however, will be upgraded to satisfy modern building code requirements. D. Bradford Hunt, a public housing historian and Assistant Professor of Social Science at Roosevelt University in Chicago, advocates preserving and rehabilitating low-rise row house public housing projects. He believes that the Trumbull Park Homes rehabilitation works primarily because it is small, not that dense, and has a strong tenant organization. In 1953, Trumbull Park was the site of a notorious standoff between mostly white residents, who opposed an African-American family moving in. By the 1980s, Trumbull Park had become predominantly African-American. “As a community, it works,” says Hunt. “Many high-rise buildings in the city do not work. They have elevators, combined with

Counter-clockwise, from top left: Three archival photos of the Trumbull Park Homes. Top right: archival photos of the Hilliard Homes. All images courtesy the Chicago Housing Authority.

high densities of children, which makes enforcing informal social controls a problem. Trumbull Park has two-bedroom apartments, and there are rarely more than two to three kids in a family.” The Troubled Legacy of Urban Renewal

By the late 1930s, federal legislators began to create public housing for the very poor, not just for people temporarily displaced by the Depression. Despite this, a strict tenant selection process remained in place, favoring complete families with an employed head of household. Federal agencies created the system of local housing authorities that exists today, and increased standardization of materials, designs, and policies, leaving less room for design creativity. By the 1950s, new federal housing acts were significantly changing the urban landscape. First they permitted construction of private housing on land that had previously been called slums, and later, they funded housing that was strictly built in conjunction with urban renewal programs. These policies resulted in large-scale displacement of poor, often minority, populations while relaxing tenant standards, marking a shift away from the creation of model communities and toward providing housing for larger numbers of poor families. During this period, new public housing construction mirrored the evolving International Style, centering on unadorned concrete or steel and glass high-rises. The new designs radically changed the relationship between residences and their surroundings. Even though garden apartments and row houses had proved to be successful public housing types, architects and reformers wanted to explore other designs that would maximize usage of land. The resulting high-rise projects saved money—a crucial factor in the face of a dwindling federal housing budget— but yielded less livable environments. Parents living in upper-floor apartments could not easily monitor children’s play areas at ground level, and cost cutting led to reductions in security and maintenance services, creating darkened hallways and stairwells, dangerous places ripe for gang activity. By the 1960s, with little new public housing built and funds still low, the oft-neglected

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existing housing began to fall apart. It became increasingly hazardous, spurring sociological studies on crime, poverty, and their relationship to the physical environment. Large-scale public housing creation officially ended in 1974 when President Nixon banned new construction. Since that time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has focused on private management of publicly subsidized housing, and on serving elderly and disabled populations, in addition to HOPE VI and voucher programs. While the popular press has focused on the relatively infrequent demolition and New Urbanist reconstruction of the HOPE VI program, the Chicago Housing Authority has been quietly at work implementing some of HUD’s lesser known, yet critically important, recommended changes, with potential ramifications for the vast majority of its public housing stock. While the possibilities for revitalizing older public housing have their limits, the coordinated redevelopment of an overall community would allow some historic features— buildings, landscapes, and site plans—to be saved. Renovating and retaining existing units is an economical alternative to building new affordable housing that may also be less disruptive for residents. Rather than continuing the cycle of demolition and displacement that began as part of the urban renewal era, it may be more appropriate and feasible to conserve public housing and keep communities intact while retaining affordable units. As CHA’s rehabilitation of Trumbull Park and the Hilliard Homes shows, careful evaluation of the potential to reuse existing properties, partnerships with local, state, and federal historic preservation agencies, and combined use of available tax credits could prove an effective strategy toward improving the lives of public housing residents across the country—all while preserving an important part of our nation’s heritage.

Bristol, Katharine G. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” Journal of Architectural Education 44.3 (1991): 163-171. Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. Chicago Housing Authority www.thecha.org Congress for New Urbanism, Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design: www.cnu.org/cnu_reports/ inner-city.pdf and www.cnu.org/cnu_ reports/inner-city2.pdf Davis, Sam. The Architecture of Affordable Housing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. De Wit, Wim. “The Rise of Public Housing in Chicago, 1930-1960.” Chicago Architecture and Design, 1923-1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis. Ed. John Zukowsky. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1993. 232-245. Fuerst, J. S., and D. Bradford Hunt. When Public Housing Was Paradise. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Illinois State Historic Preservation Office www.state.il.us/hpa/ Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Preservation Chicago www.preservationchicago.org U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development www.hud.gov Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.

Opposite page: Couch, New Orleans, LA, 2006. Photo ©Will Steacy

Katrina: One Year Later

katrina: one year later

by Emily Weiss

Crosses from Rubble After Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Christian groups stepped in where government agencies left off. Here, the tale of a tenacious widow, a transplanted family, and three Matts on a mission EMMETT WALLACE IS 49 YEARS OLD. Until last fall, the farthest he had ever moved from his hometown of Bridge City, Louisiana, was five miles down the road to Marrero, another small, impoverished community across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Wallace was living in Marrero with his wife Gloria, 29, and their six children, all under the age of 11, when Hurricane Katrina struck last August. The family did not evacuate. “Me and my daughters were at my house at the time,” Mr. Wallace told me this spring. “First it was just raining hard. Then we all decided we were gonna lay down and go to bed. But it started raining harder. Five minutes later the ceiling fell down in the living room.” When the rain subsided on the next day, father and daughters returned to their house, but as Mr. Wallace said flatly, “We couldn’t even stay there. It was a total disaster.” The next few days became a whirlwind tour of temporary residences. Mr. Wallace’s wife and four sons were at his mother-in-law’s house at the time, so they stayed put. It began a nearly four-month-long separation for the family. Mr. Wallace and his daughters were not the only ones to flee Marrero. Even the local operators of emergency pumping stations had deserted—a controversial decision that ultimately destroyed the Wallaces’ neighborhood. The family tried their luck carving out space in a trailer owned by one of Mr. Wallace’s sisters in nearby Napoleonville. But after a week, the trailer filled up with other relatives, and so the three Wallaces once again moved on. They ended up at a temporary shelter at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, a small bayou town 60 miles west of New Orleans. They stayed for a little more

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than three weeks—the longest stop on their continuing journey. During that time, Mr. Wallace grew increasingly desperate, unsure how to proceed. How would he be able to care for his family once the shelters shut down and the handouts stopped? Unable to support his wife and children adequately before the storm with the wages from his $5.70-an-hour garbage truck “hop” job in New Orleans, he was looking to make a fresh start, but he didn’t know how to go about it. All he could do, he reasoned, was wait, and pray. Parting the Red Tape

Wallace wasn’t the only one. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, victims throughout the Gulf Coast region were waiting and praying. That strategy proved at least as effective as relying on any kind of secular or public support network. In the days, weeks, and months after the hurricane, as the media told indignant stories of communities let down by shortfalls at every level of government, it was Christian groups who were quietly picking up the pieces. One of the most striking examples of this religious outreach was Campus Crusade for Christ International, an evangelical missionary group that has organized more than 15,000 volunteers to travel to the Gulf Coast region since last September. At first, its volunteers provided manpower at relief centers and feeding stations, according to the group’s website. Later, they expanded their efforts to removing debris from victims’ homes, schools, churches, and parks. More recently, the group brought more than 10,000 college students to the region to spend their spring breaks cleaning yards and installing sheetrock. Then there is God’s Katrina Kitchen, located halfway between New Orleans and

Biloxi, in the appropriately named town of Pass Christian, Mississippi. Started by Kentuckian Greg Porter, funded entirely by donations, and led by a team of Christian volunteers who, according to Porter, “answer to God first and foremost,” God’s Katrina Kitchen bills itself as, “amidst the devastation and debris, a place of peace, hope, caring, love and comfort… the result of God’s calling people … to serve.” When Porter first arrived in Pass Christian last September 14th, “Highway 90—a four-lane highway—looked like it had been hit by mortars.” Undeterred, Porter set up in the middle of the road, cooking and serving over 120 hamburgers that day for lunch. With its cadre of volunteer cooks, servers, and skilled and unskilled workers, God’s Katrina Kitchen has been serving three meals a day to local residents and workers every day since. Although G.K.K. is non-denominational—their motto is “Many Churches, One God”—their shared faith and hopes of evangelism bind them together. As Porter explained to me in an email message in June, “We have never been about feeding and distribution only—we are here to show God’s Love to the People of the Gulf Coast.” Beyond such notable large-scale operations were the efforts of congregations across the nation, whose members “adopted” Gulf Coast churches; collected and delivered donations of food, water, and clothing; and sent carloads of volunteers to destroyed neighborhoods. Interviewing hurricane victims about their experiences, the stories of religious charity grew familiar: a Canadian group called Samaritan’s Purse sent ten men equipped with chainsaws and Bobcats to a neighborhood on the Mississippi coast to clear trees from yards. Three church girls from Pennsylvania showed up one weekend to drag muddy rugs out of an elderly wom-

This page: Emmett Wallace. Previous page: Wallace’s daughters, Moniquequa and Gloriadeidra. Photos courtesy Dr. John Griffin

an’s house on the Mississippi gulf coast. “If the religious groups had not come to help, I think we would’ve been back three or four months ago waiting on government assistance,” Mississippi hurricane victim Ginnie Smith told me. Deanne Kimball, a parishioner at Bible Fellowship Church, whose members have housed numerous teams of volunteer relief workers in its hurricane-ravaged home of coastal Mississippi, concurred. Also in agreement was Jane Griffin, an Auburn University sophomore and Louisiana native who spent a weekend last fall doing Katrina relief work as part of a college church group: “The government… took a long time deciding what to do, whereas the church groups jumped on it and found ways to help [the Katrina victims]: they cared, gave, fed, clothed, loved, and served.” The Damage Done in Pass Christian

Nowhere do these statements ring truer than in the tiny fishing village and retirement community of Pass Christian. Pronounced “Pass Kristy-Ann,” the town takes its name from a local deepwater pass, which in turn was named for Nicholas Christian L’Adnier, a French property owner who moved to nearby Cat Island in 1745, just before the start of the French and Indian War. When Katrina hit, the town caught a 30-foot surge of water, pushing many historic houses out to sea and knocking others right off their foundations. Ginnie Smith, an 80-year-old widow and longtime Pass Christian resident was

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unharmed by the storm, but her house, a renovated gardener’s cottage that sat behind a huge historic house on the beach, was completely decimated. According to Mrs. Smith’s daughter, Cecette Bassett, “The house literally floated off its foundation and moved inland about eight feet, destroying it and everything in it.” The “sweet little” wood-framed home—including the full-length gallery Smith had added across the front, with French doors, rocking chairs, and ceiling fans—had become, in Bassett’s words, “nothing but rubble, matchstick rubble—I mean just trash.” Although it has gotten scant media coverage compared to larger cities in the area, Pass Christian has been in rough shape since last August. Four months after the hurricane struck, most of the 6,700 residents were still without running water. The only groceries were at a local distribution center run by missionaries, or at stores in Gulfport, 30 miles away. Hundreds of residents were camping out in tents, and according to the local Clarion-Ledger, as of late December, “tons of debris remain[ed] to be cleared” and 80 percent of the city was still “in ruins.” Although 3,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, only 160 building permits had been issued for rebuilding, and the town was “still trying to provide basic services.” Contributing to the town’s slow recovery process was its mayor, Billy McDonald, whose leadership style in the months following the hurricane was described by a local alderman as “absent.” In mid-December, in fact, the board of aldermen voted to slice the

mayor’s salary by ten percent due to his “lackluster” performance. (The mayor later vetoed the motion—but he could not veto the sentiment behind the decision.) Mrs. Smith was in a particularly harrowing situation. “I’m 80 years old, and I don’t have a house,” she said, a week before Christmas last year. Her insurance company claimed she should have had a flood insurance plan that the government had told her she didn’t need. Her bank was clamoring for mortgage payments on a house that was no longer livable, and her worldly belongings had been destroyed. Her FEMA relief check came in at a mere $2,000, so Mrs. Smith found herself in a position that she—the widow of a Texas oil executive—never would have imagined. “I never thought I’d be homeless when I’m 80,” she said last December. She began eating three meals a day at God’s Katrina Kitchen. Three Matts on a Mission

While Emmett Wallace and his daughters were idling at Nicholls State University, the answers to his prayers for deliverance—in the form of three men named Matt—were climbing into a van in Ohio. It was Matt Pardi’s idea to adopt a family of evacuees. Pardi, 37, is the pastor of H20 Ministries in Bowling Green, Ohio, a college town an hour and a half south of Detroit. H20, a non-denominational church that is part of an umbrella organization, Great Commission Ministries, is composed almost entirely of young people—95 percent of

members are college students—and its mission, according to staff member Matt Olszewski, 25, “is to effectively communicate and live out the transforming power of Jesus Christ.” In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Pastor Pardi felt that God was telling him to go down to New Orleans. So Pardi, Olszewski, and another staff member, Matt Hilderbran, 31, set off for Louisiana in Pardi’s van. The three Matts were uncertain about what would happen during their trip. The three men spent the twenty-hour drive on their cell phones, calling Louisiana shelters in search of someone who needed their help while phoning contacts in Bowling Green to make arrangements for spare apartments in case they found a family to bring back. What they saw on their drive encouraged them. “We drove down one street in Slidell [a town on the northeast bank of Lake Pontchartrain], and each church it seemed had at least 30 to 50 people that they were feeding and finding places for them to sleep,” said Hilderbran. After a couple of days of calling around and bouncing from shelter to shelter without success, one of the Matts received a call from the Nicholls State gym: a single, 24-year-old French Quarter prep cook, Don Williams, was interested in their proposition. Although the H20 team was still hoping to take home a family, they followed this lead to the shelter in Cajun County—to a university that sells sweatshirts reading “Harvard on the Bayou.” When the Matts arrived to pick up Williams, they spoke to a Red Cross worker who made an announcement on their behalf over the loudspeaker—“something like, ‘There are some individuals here from a church in Ohio, and they are willing to help out a family that may want to relocate to Ohio. If you are interested in this, come up to the info table,’” Matt Pardi recalled. The Red Cross worker explained the arrangement: six months of an all-expense-paid new life in Bowling Green, Ohio, with no pressure to stay permanently or attend church—“and you will need to be willing to work.” Emmett Wallace and his daughters heard the announcement. So did Wallace’s distant cousin, Michelle Burnside, 44, who was staying at the shelter along with her daughter Tiffany, 26, and Tiffany’s three young boys. It was Burnside, a widow, who approached the

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Matts, expressing interest in going back to Ohio with them. “But,” Emmett told me, “the only way she was gonna leave was if her cousin Emmett was going with her.” Nine people was a little more than the Matts had bargained for. “I was nervous about the enormity of the project,” Pardi said. “We initially imagined one family and guessed about six to eight thousand in expense. Now with three families we were looking at over $20,000. That was a little scary!” The three men drove a couple miles down the road, bought a cheap minivan and loaded everyone up for the trip back to Bowling Green. Following the long drive, the church workers ushered Wallace and his family into a furnished two-bedroom apartment, stocked the refrigerator, and set him up with what he described as a “nice job” in a warehouse, packing print labels for a food safety system for $8 an hour—nearly 50 percent more than he’d earned in Louisiana. Soon after arriving, he sent for his then-estranged wife Gloria— they reconciled—and his six-year-old son, Terry. The rest of the couple’s children remain with Gloria’s mother, who relocated to Arkansas. Every day for months, H20 church members gave the Wallaces rides, taking them grocery shopping and to football games. They told Emmett they would continue to do so until he figured out how to pay the outstanding Louisiana speeding ticket that he claimed was delaying him from getting an Ohio driver’s license. “They all are wonderful people, they truly are,” Mr. Wallace told me last December. Though the Matts made it clear that the Wallaces’ coming to church wasn’t a condition of their staying, the Wallaces came anyway. “We go to church with the organization that came and got us,” Wallace explained. And compared to the chaos in Marrero— where, eleven weeks after the storm, many residents were still homeless and FEMA was half-heartedly handing out trailers—Emmett Wallace was finding that he actually liked life in Ohio. In fact, in some ways, things were better than they had been before Katrina. “My family feels great, and so do I,” he told me last December. “It’s a blessing to me, because I’m able to take care of my family the way I wanted to. Really, in Louisiana, I

couldn’t.” The other evacuees that the Matts had taken back with them—Michelle and her family, and Don—were unable to take root in this small Midwestern town, and so they all returned to New Orleans in January. As of late June, however, Emmett was still living with his family in Bowling Green, working full time as a cook. He has stopped receiving financial assistance from H20— “If he was in a bind we could help him, but Emmett knows that we can’t support him,” Hilderbran says. “We’re not one of those big mega-churches that have a lot of money to throw at things.” Over time, the men’s roles have changed: from rescuer and victim, to friendly neighbors with separate lives—or in the case of Pardi, who still talks to Emmett several times a week, “now that there are no strings attached,” it has become “more of a friendship.” A Cross of Rubble

In Pass Christian, the government— starved of sales tax revenue after losing 100 percent of downtown buildings—has struggled to rebuild infrastructure. Running water and a primitive sewer system were not restored until early spring. Residents are wary of the fast road to recovery through private redevelopment, as in neighboring oceanfront town Biloxi, where thousands of companies are bidding to come in and build large condominium high-rises and casinos along its shore. Still, the severe need for housing has changed many locals’ attitudes toward developers. Town officials have accepted an offer from Wal-Mart to turn the once-historic downtown, formerly a strip of antique shops, boutiques, and health food stores shaded by a canopy of 300-year-old live oaks, into an area to be known as Pass Christian Wal-Mart Village. According to the Mississippi Renewal Forum, a consortium started last October by Governor Haley Barbour, the retail giant has partnered with a New Orleans-based realestate development company called Historic Restoration, Inc. “to develop the mixed-use housing portion of the project.” Meanwhile, the missionaries at God’s Katrina Kitchen can at least offer spiritual continued on page 42

katrina: one year later

by Jess McCuan

Fifteen Minutes With… Brent Warr, Mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi The mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi talks about his city’s lowest moments after Katrina, the importance of casinos, and the tremendous help he’s gotten from outsiders as his city digs out from one of the most devastating storms in history

WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA STRUCK the Gulf Coast last August, most TV cameras were trained on New Orleans. That focus only intensified after the city’s levee system failed and left whole neighborhoods underwater. But other Gulf Coast cities were arguably just as devastated. A 27-foot storm surge wiped out most of the buildings along the Mississippi coastline. More than 200 Mississippians were killed, including 30 people trapped in one beachfront apartment complex in Biloxi. In nearby Gulfport, the state’s second-largest city, 4,000 homes were destroyed, sewage overflowed into city streets, and the storm knocked out all but six traffic lights. Brent Warr, the Republican mayor of Gulfport, who had never before held an elected office and had only been mayor for seven weeks prior to the storm, was in for the ride of his life. His own home was damaged, as was his business, Warr’s Men’s Clothing in downtown Gulfport. In the days after Katrina hit, his main goal was to get food and water to some 72,000 residents. Another goal was to help his overwhelmed police force maintain order as looters ransacked stores and drug addicts, looking to stave off withdrawals, started raiding hospitals and medical centers. Yet within ten days after the storm, most Gulfport residences and buildings had power restored. The Senate commended the city for its efficient removal of 4 million cubic yards of debris, and now, though Gulfport has lost approximately 3,000 jobs, it has also man-

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aged to attract new investors who are planning commercial, residential, and mixed-use developments that will revive—and even improve—this devastated coastal area. “I don’t deserve a nickel of credit,” Warr told a crowd recently as he accepted an award for his leadership during the disaster. “I was just the linchpin. The city employees were the ones carrying the weight.” But many see Warr, whose booming voice and southern drawl give him the air of a preacher, as an unsung hero of the Gulf Coast’s rebuilding efforts. Warr spoke with The Next American City about the lowest moments, the importance of casinos, and the tremendous help from outsiders as his city digs out from one of the most devastating storms in history. TNAC: After Katrina hit Gulfport, you resorted to some fairly unconventional methods for helping people out. I read one story that said you asked your police chief to hotwire a truck, and you ordered someone else to steal a stove. Was anyone in Gulfport alarmed? The important part about that stove is, we gave it back. And we gave it back cleaner than we got it, that’s for sure. These were things that we had to do. We had to feed ourselves and other people. What we took was a stove that you’d use for a big barbecue. I knew where it was because I’d driven by it so many times. Really, everybody was doing the best they could. We had to siphon fuel out of wrecked vehicles to run pumps

for generators. It was just necessary to keep things going. With the city in chaos, what did you decide to fix first? We made sure we had pumps going for wells, and we made sure the hospitals had water and were able to keep running. We have 157 lift stations for sewage in the city, and 54 of them were submerged. They melted down to nothing. They still had electricity running to them when they were underwater. We had to try to get generators to bypass pumps to run those lift stations, so that we could get water. Another concern: if you put water in but you’re not pumping the sewage out, you get dysentery, especially in August and September. So that was something we watched very closely. At one point we were told by the Department of Health, the local authority, to quit pumping water. But we refused to do it. Was there a time in the days after the storm when you felt panicked? There was one particular day—within the first week. We weren’t able to get control of the looting, or of the traffic. Our police forces were totally overwhelmed, and they were doing everything they could to maintain order. We just couldn’t gain any ground. Things were slipping away every day. Mayor Joe Riley, the mayor of Charleston [South Carolina], sent in 54 police officers. He didn’t call; he didn’t ask if we needed them. He just knew to send them. I was driving through the

city that day, and I saw a uniform I didn’t recognize. A young lady who was a Charleston police officer was standing in one of the busiest intersections in Gulfport directing traffic. That really meant everything in the world to me. He’s an incredible leader. How long were city employees in crisis mode? Lord have mercy, we worked out of tents set up on the front steps of city hall. People were sitting in the corners of these tents on the steps of a 100-year-old building. That probably went on for two and a half months. Our public works director, Kris Reimann, is an incredible talent. He himself was in there with his whole department, fixing sewer lift stations and sleeping four to five hours a day. He and the policemen and firemen were out doing search and rescue constantly. We needed water first, then food, then we started worrying about infrastructure. All this time I had dozens of contractors coming in wanting to talk about debris removal. We had millions of cubic yards of debris. That was quite a complicated issue. I didn’t know anything about it. That was something we figured out as we went along. Who do you think were the most important people in Gulfport’s recovery and rebuilding effort? Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, and Haley Barbour—I don’t know which I’d put on top of the list. Those were the go-to people that we called with problems. If we needed a generator, they would get us a generator. Also, Congressmen Chip Pickering and Gene Taylor. On the local level, the guy that I have so much respect for is our coroner, Gary Hargrove. Can you imagine what his job was like? He was having to find places to store bodies. He did it with a lot of respect and dignity, and he gave a lot of respect to the victims of the storm. That could have been very mishandled. He was kind of an unsung hero. There was also a North Carolina Baptist Men’s group that was unbelievable. They made a commitment to come into Gulfport and rebuild over 600 homes for free, providing labor and materials at no cost. It’s amazing the way this worked. I think God just did this for us. We got an old armory given back to the city by the National Guard about four

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weeks before the storm. It was just sitting there: a bunch of bunk houses, warehouses, and a kitchen. We agreed to give the NC Baptist men the use of this for two years. They came in and built us another big warehouse and brought in trailers for showers and places to sleep. They’ve got 400 volunteers on the ground all the time down there rebuilding these homes. They come to people and say, “Look, we’re going to put you a new roof on. It’s not going to be a 20-year shingle, it’s going to be a 30-year architectural shingle. What color would you like?” They go around saying things like, “That tub is dirty—let’s pull it out and put you a new one in for free.”

have been able to go work at other casinos. There are three open in Biloxi now. A lot of people who weren’t from the coast and worked at casinos left and moved back to where they were from.

What was their connection to the Gulfport area? They’re just wonderful Christian people. They came in and said, “We’d like to help.” Before they came in with construction crews, they had set up the largest feeding facility on the Coast. They fed—I can’t remember how many meals—well over 50,000 meals in a very short amount of time. They came in on buses, slept on cots, and they’re still down there, feeding people and praying with them, taking them meals and asking nothing.

What will it take to draw people back in to the Gulfport region? We have only lost about 2.5 to 3 percent of our population. It’s already happening. People are coming in, wanting to work, wanting to participate in all the new economic activity. The government opportunity zones and taxincentives are huge. We have a lot of labor in the city, a lot of activity, that wasn’t there before. A lot of sophisticated investors are coming in now, looking for prime opportunities and prime pieces of real estate. They can really build a quality product now, and they’re very attracted to Gulfport.

Was it a big blow to the city and the local economy when the two casinos shut down? It was. But not as significant a blow as some people think. The gaming revenue was about 5.8 to 6 percent of the general income for the city. More important than that, there were a lot of local jobs that were tied to the gaming industry. They’ll be able to find other jobs, we hope, and hang on until we have the new casinos open. Harrah’s, a big player, decided to sell their assets in Gulfport, rather than rebuild. They had one in Biloxi, and they decided to take their interest money and move to Biloxi. Are both Gulfport casinos back up and running? Nope. The other one bought the Harrah’s property and they’re working on it. Late summer they’ll be open, and we have other casino properties coming in. How many jobs were lost? Probably 3,000. Some of them were able to draw unemployment for some time, and they

Do you think it will be a big part of the plan for moving forward, attracting new casinos and getting the current ones up and running? It’s part of the plan. We’re not going to have as many casinos as Biloxi. That’s not our plan or our desire. We’d like to have enough to have them as a good added amenity, but we won’t have a dozen.

Did you feel that, in the aftermath of Katrina, the media and the public overlooked cities like Gulfport to focus mainly on New Orleans? They did, and I think everybody would agree that that happened. But I think there are practical reasons for that. We weren’t as vocal about what had happened to us as some other cities were. One of the reasons for that is that we had seen storms before. No one in New Orleans had ever lived through a levee break and the city flooding. I’ve been through all the hurricanes since Camille in ‘69. I knew what I was going to be looking at when I walked out of the house after the storm. I had no idea it was going to be as bad as it was, but I knew what blown-down trees and cars on houses and damaged houses looked like. Folks that lived over in New Orleans—I don’t know if there’s anybody alive that’s lived in the city when the levees broke.

Did you feel that residents of Gulfport dealt with the crisis well? Oh God, they were just as devastated as people in New Orleans. There’s no question about that. Everyone was traumatized and heartsick. They were scared, upset, sad. But they moved on with an incredible amount of dignity. They didn’t complain; they just got to work. Why has Gulfport rebuilt so much more quickly than other cities? We’ve begun the rebuilding process. We’re not rebuilt yet. But everyone who’s there, they love it. It’s their home. Many of them have other options for places to go. They’re not going to do it. They’re not willing to let the storm win. Katrina took a whole lot from us on that day. But it’s kind of like—she won the battle, but we’re going to win the war.

Knabb, Richard D., Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown. “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, 23-30 August 2005.” Miami, Florida: National Hurricane Center, 2005. www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCRAL122005_Katrina.pdf

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support to a community whose churches cont’d from page 39 were universally destroyed. At some point after the storm, according to Cecette Bassett, Ginnie Smith’s daughter, the missionaries built a huge cross on the beach out of trash and started holding free services every night at 8 p.m. Large businesses have kicked in too: Robin Roberts of Good Morning America, who happens to be a Pass Christian native, organized fund-raising efforts involving Salvation Army, Home Depot, Staples, and AmeriCorps’ parent company, the Corporation for National and Community Service. You might think that someone like Mrs. Smith, an 80-year-old widow without a home, would have wanted to flee all this chaos. But she wouldn’t even consider the thought. In the end, her house was unfixable; it had to be completely torn down and rebuilt. Despite her lack of flood insurance, the government is helping, providing Mrs. Smith with a federal grant tailored for homeowners outside the “flood zone” who nonetheless lost property, and a small-business loan. So now Mrs. Smith has hired a contractor to rebuild her house on the same footprint as it was before. In the meantime, she lives in the gardener’s cottage of a friend’s house and is trying slowly to rebuild her life. I called Mrs. Smith in late April to see how she was doing. “I just got a telephone yesterday!” she reported triumphantly. Bassett is impressed by the vivacity of her mother and her mostly elderly, widowed friends: “It looks like Afghanistan bombed their town, and they’re still partying up a storm,” she told me. “It’s amazing, all these women who refuse to leave—they’re just gonna live there, stay in their community. They all feel like they’re Scarlett O’Hara: ‘The South will rise again!’” As of late April, God’s Katrina Kitchen was still set up on the beach in Pass Christian, distributing Clorox and gloves, three meals a day, and other needed supplies. Scott Kimball, a parishioner at Bible Fellowship Church in Pass Christian, continues to be impressed by the revolving crew of volunteers. His small congregation’s initial goal, after Katrina hit, was yard cleanup for members and their neighbors. But eight months after the hurricane, most of their energy con-

tinues to be spent on housing volunteer teams from all over the U.S. “God has met the needs in amazing ways,” Kimball told me. While most volunteers stay only a short while, “the few longterm volunteers I’ve spoken with have no immediate plans for pulling out—even with another hurricane season looming.”

Campus Crusade for Christ International www.ccci.org God’s Katrina Kitchen www.godskatrinakitchen.org Great Commission Ministries International, Inc. (the umbrella organization for H20 Church) www.gmci.net Historic Restoration Inc. of New Orleans www.hrihci.com Mississippi Renewal Forum: Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal (includes information about the Pass Christian Wal-Mart Village) www.mississippirenewal.com Pass Christian Historical Society www.frogbellies.com/ passchristianhistory Samaritan’s Purse International Relief www.samaritanspurse.org Schmucker, Jane. “3 B.G. Men Give Shelter from Storm: Church Leaders Travel to Louisana, Drive 10 Victims back to Ohio.” Toledo Blade 3 Oct. 2005. www.toledoblade.com

BOOK REVIEW

by Carly Berwick

Planet of Slums By Mike Davis. New York: Verso. Cloth, 228 pages. $24 An urban scholar looks into the earth’s future and sees a heap of filth

ORDINARY CITIZENS OF BEIJING SHOULD worry: the 2008 Olympics are coming. To beautify the city before the eyes of the world, the slums need to go. At least 350,000 people are being moved for one stadium. Maverick historian Mike Davis, in his most recent book, Planet of the Slums, calls the relocation projects an unnecessary forced march so the rich do not have to see the massive numbers of desperate poor. Within a year or two, a majority of the world’s population will live in cities. But these are not Jane Jacobs’s cozy villages within the metropolis: they are sprawling masses of misery, where a huge proportion of the populace—currently 1 billion of the world’s 3.2 billion city-dwellers—live in slums. There, the poor colonize available land with handmade shacks and shanties, plumbing is scarce, and governments and landlords can sweep aside established settlements at their convenience. In the meantime, anyone who can afford it retreats to private communities with names like “Beverly Hills” (near Cairo) and “Long Beach” (north of Beijing). In past writing, Davis’s unorthodox prose and unexpected comparisons—between action movies and patterns of urban settlement, for instance, in Ecology of Fear—have made even the gloomiest prognostications

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eminently readable, drawing him a much wider audience than most neo-Marxists could ever hope to enjoy. But Planet of Slums lacks Davis’s characteristic flamboyance—most of it reads like a dry policy report. In fact, he does draw much of his data and observations from such reports, most notably the United Nations Human Settlements Programme’s 2003 report, “The Challenge of the Slums.” Statistic after statistic pummels the reader with a manic global tour of widespread suffering: the slums, despite the noble efforts of their residents to make them homey, are miserable; they are growing; and their growth is in large part due to neo-liberal policies of FirstWorld lending institutions. In one paragraph we move rapidly from Beijing to Bangalore to Shenzhen. It’s dizzying, and difficult to discern any narrative other than that most lives anywhere other than North America and Europe are currently looking particularly nasty and brutish. Davis’s most impassioned and gripping examples come in the chapter titled, “Slum Ecology,” when he revisits a theme prevalent in earlier books: how human expansion and environmental degradation propel disastrous feedback loops. Squatters often settle in dirty or polluted areas where lack of state-provided sanitation creates even more dirt and pollution. In Rio de Janeiro and Caracas, slums sit on unstable hillsides, whose recurring dissolution has killed thousands. Most disturbing are the examples of millions of people literally “living in shit.” Kinshasa, in the Republic of Congo, has a population of 10 million and “no waterborne sewage system,” Davis says, leaving us to imagine gutters by the road filled with excrement. Worse are the examples of Indian slums with approximately nineteen latrines for 100,000 people. People relieve themselves outdoors, which—in addition to the obvious health

problems in crowded areas—creates particularly onerous burdens for women, who wait for the cover of early morning or dark to excrete in public. But why exactly have these states abandoned their citizens to lives of squalor? Davis explains: “As Third World governments abdicated the battle against the slum in the 1970s, the Bretton Woods institutions—with the IMF as ‘bad cop’ and the World Bank as ‘good cop’—assumed increasingly commanding roles in setting the parameters of urban housing policy.” Slums are born out of “structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment.” Unfortunately, no further discussion of Bretton Woods or structural adjustment, a term frequently bandied about by critics of neo-liberalism, follows his explanation. Three-quarters of the way through a book devoted to critiquing structural adjustment programs, Davis finally defines them as “the protocols by which indebted countries surrender their economic independence to the IMF and World Bank.” What are those protocols? A detailed example would do wonders. It is also unclear if solutions lurk within Davis’s assembled facts and exposés. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has advocated making property owners out of slum dwellers, but Davis tells us it would do no good: newly empowered property owners simply evolve from slum dwellers to slumlords. ‘Titling,’ Davis further admonishes, is ultimately a nefarious scheme to undermine slum solidarity. So is the very concept of private property flawed? Can self-organized slums somehow demonstrate the virtues of settlement without property rights? Is Davis’s critique of ‘titling’ actually a plea for statesponsored housing—unlikely as that seems given his skepticism of corrupt governments and substandard public housing projects? We simply don’t know what he thinks

because he never tells us, moving quickly on to his next example of slum deprivation. Davis once stood out among socialist critics because he was able to entertain lay readers. But Planet of Slums reads as if addressed to a seminar of grad students or New Left Review subscribers. If Davis means for it to be a wake-up call, he is ringing the morning bell in the commune of the already converted. Still, the book is not entirely without its pleasures. Davis returns to form in the final chapter, offering the unexpected, off-thewall, and trenchant cultural and political analysis that first made him famous in the classic City of Quartz. He suggests that the U.S. military may be the First-World institution best prepared to pragmatically answer the challenge of the slums, since it is from the slums that the next generation of terrorists and so-called freedom fighters will emerge. The slums are growing at a ferocious pace; North Americans, Europeans, and the wealthy of Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Rio ignore them at their peril. Despite its lapses and ellipses, Planet of the Slums is an important goad to other writers and thinkers to pick up the cause.

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BOOK REVIEW

by Mariana Mogilevich

Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. A new collection of essays offers lessons for rebuilding after Katrina, but may be a bit too late

THE PUBLISHED PROCEEDINGS OF A conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in early 2006, Rebuilding Urban Places, aims to “draw lessons for the present and the future from our experience to date with the aftermath of Katrina.” Contributors reach from as far back as the Lisbon Fire of 1755 to more recent disasters in the United States— the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco earthquakes of 1906 and 1989, and Hurricane Andrew’s destruction of the Florida Coast in 1992—for strategies and lessons in rebuilding the places where people live, work, and find meaning, in the wake of terrible destruction. Sadly, the lessons learned, techniques developed, and suggestions proffered may be more relevant for the country’s next major disaster than to the struggling city of New Orleans, about which the contributors are realistically guarded, if not pessimistic. In the first essay of this interdisciplinary volume, a bioengineer and environmental scientist set the tone, arguing that “New Orleans can not be protected from a repetition of Hurricane Katrina.” The reasons are simple: either a major flood on the Mississippi system that originates higher in the watershed or the inevitable diversion of the Mississippi into a new distributary, the Atchafalaya River, will bring new destruction to New Orleans in the not-so-distant future. Establishing New Orleans’s unfitness for human habitation in the long term starts the collection on a gloomy note. But in the contributions that follow, thinkers from the worlds of design, public policy, education and economics—as well as a folklorist and sociologist—offer what they can to help others learn from the disaster and

create a realistic model for the city’s shortterm recovery. From their multiple perspectives, these valuable essays examine questions of who must take responsibility for rebuilding and how. They offer many promising suggestions and means for preventing, predicting, and reacting faster to such devastation in the future. Considering the missteps already made, and the growing challenges to replenishing housing and devising resettlement strategies, however, the lessons come too late for New Orleans. At this point, the city might benefit more from a companion volume addressing how to rebuild after disastrous rebuilding. In light of the overwhelming natural, social, and economic challenges posed by the problem at hand, historic preservationist Randall Mason’s argument for the centrality of cultural preservation in rebuilding provides a much-needed perspective. Emphasizing the import of cultural values over economic ones, and highlighting the power of New Orleans as place, he reminds us why we must continue to search for solutions that respect the past but are viable for the immediate future: We cannot simply move away to drier ground or on to the next problem.

BOOK REVIEW

by Anika K. Singh

The Place You Love is Gone: Progress Hits Home By Melissa Holbrook Pierson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hardcover, 208 pages. $25.95 An unapologetic sentimentalist takes on sprawl—and loses

WHY DID MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON write The Place You Love is Gone? In a series of meditations on displacement by new forms of development, Pierson preaches to those already baptized as haters of sprawl, strip malls, and big-box-lined highways. She bemoans suburban sprawl and urban gentrification for wreaking havoc in the places she once called home, but her book sheds no new light on this much observed phenomenon. At war with any force that has altered places she loves, Pierson repeatedly casts herself as an unapologetic sentimentalist, “nostalgic,” and a “hypocrite,” to shield herself from criticism that her book is just that: an indulgent exercise in nostalgia and a hypocritical critique of the American lifestyle, which she herself lives. It’s a neat trick—embracing one’s flaws in the hopes that doing so will neuter others’ criticisms. It might even have worked, were it not that Pierson is, in addition to begin overly sentimental, also dull, repetitive, and melodramatic. Pierson begins by telling her childhood story not as a chronological narrative, but through the lens of place. She grows up in “a small snow globe of suburban happiness.” Specifically, the places she means to evoke are downtown Akron in Ohio, Daddy’s office,

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and the Akron City Club. To the extent that there is a story here, it goes something like this: Melissa Holbrook Pierson had a happy, upper-middle-class, white childhood. The place where it happened no longer exists as it did in the 1950s and ‘60s. “They change everything (thus a retroactive version of you),” she tells us, “and they didn’t even ask if they could. The bastards.” The reader is expected to empathize. The story might be somewhat more compelling, despite the melodrama, if we knew who “they” were. But Pierson’s villains seem not only abstractions but, worse, drawn from the standard “Who’s Who in Suburban Sprawl”: cars, interstate highways, and malls; Wal-Mart and Bed, Bath & Beyond; Red Lobster and Friendly’s. Pierson attempts to make the reader complicit in her attack on “progress.” “We are a generation weighed down by a sadness we do not know we feel,” she tells her readers. But just who is a member of Pierson’s “We,” mourning for her lost childhood? In her twenties, Pierson finds herself in Hoboken, New Jersey. Pierson’s 1980s Hoboken is both bohemian and dingy. Her description of a one-bedroom apartment would sicken an exterminator. Beyond the rodent-infested, unheated apartments shared with duplicitous roommates and failed romances, Pierson finds yet more fault with how New Jersey gradually changes: how an upscale gourmet market supplants a grocery founded by Italian immigrants at the turn of the century, for instance. Despite her disdain for the city’s humble beginnings, Pierson mourns Hoboken’s renaissance, a gentrification and displacement presumably jumpstarted by an influx of white, “artsy” college graduates, much like Pierson herself. Pierson finishes by describing her current home in New York’s Hudson River Val-

ley. This Eden, too, has fallen prey to outside forces, specifically New York City’s need for water and homes. Residential development replaces woods and farms. Eminent domain claims private property for reservoirs to quench the thirst of downstate inhabitants. Not that Pierson’s sympathies are for her neighbors’ private property rights; rather, she wishes she could undo their choice to sell a particular property to a developer so that she could continue to go on hikes with two mountain views. Pierson’s understanding of urban development is painfully simplistic. She hates the cars, highways, and malls for their failure to appreciate Akron’s urban center. She is equally disdainful of the gentrification that evidences a renewed interest in Hoboken’s urban charm. In the end, Pierson offers her reader nothing but the sense that America would make better use of its land if it would simply let her make all land use decisions. Pierson’s book is an apt example of what critics of the anti-sprawl and New Urbanist movements despise. She is patronizing and contradictory; she yearns to live in open spaces but despises others who want the same for getting in her way. Whether you want to live in an urban downtown or a rural town center, Pierson can and will critique your choices in long, melodramatic sentences, brimming with nostalgia but devoid of the sort of intelligent sensitivity that might make her work useful.

CONTRIBUTORS Carly Berwick writes about art and culture for Bloomberg.com, ARTnews, New York, and Travel and Leisure, among other places. She recently traveled to Hong Kong, which made her New York-area home look green and spacious by comparison. Rebekah Brem is a cartoonist and illustrator who is currently making a painted graphic novel, Misericordia. She lives in Brooklyn. [email protected] Alan Brunettin is a multi-media artist now living and working in Chicago, having recently relocated from St. Louis. While he is an experienced photographer and works in new media/motion arts, he is primarily a painter of the urban landscape as well as a portraitist. Video projects he’s produced include an elegy to the lost buildings of downtown St. Louis and an animated art piece that created a spinning Gateway Arch. <www.urbis-orbis.com> Jeffrey Chusid is an architect specializing in historic preservation and a professor at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. His recent research has focused on three areas: the fate of historic resources in areas of cultural exchange and conflict; the conservation of Modernist Architecture of Southern California; and cultural landscapes. Doug Giuliano received his Masters of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and works on planning and policy issues for downtown Brooklyn. A Philadelphia expatriate, Doug now lives in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn and still roots for the 76ers. David Gest, originally from Washington, D.C., graduated from Yale in 2003 with a degree in architecture and urban studies. He then moved to Los Angeles, and has been wearing shorts for most

of the past three years. After working as an architectural consultant specializing in historic preservation, he joined the staff of Planetizen fulltime in late 2005. Joseph Heathcott is an architectural historian, writer, and educator living in St. Louis. He is a graduate faculty member in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University, where he teaches history and theory of city planning and urban design. Stephen Janis is a reporter for the Baltimore Examiner and an adjunct professor for Johns Hopkins School of Communications and Contemporary Society. His first novel, Orange, will be published this summer. Frank Klein is a freelance photojournalist living in the Baltimore-Washington area. Klein is the recent recipient of a 2005 award for a photo feature from the Society of Professional Journalists. Sharon Maclean works as a community planner in New Jersey and is originally from Pittsburgh. Her work and research focus on using historic preservation to revitalize communities. Shaun O’Boyle received an Education BFA in Architecture from Parsons School of Design. O’Boyle is interested in architecture, entropy, and the dissolution of industrial systems; of particular interest are recent ruins of industrial and institutional architecture and infrastructure. <www.oboylephoto.com/ruins>

Anika Singh is a staff attorney at the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center where she practices community development and consumer protection law. She is a senior editor and the submissions editor at The Next American City. Will Steacy is a photographer who has been documenting the city of New Orleans in a state of transition in his project titled, “When Night Becomes Day.” His work will be exhibited in New York, Hamburg, Toronto, Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Sun Valley, and Las Vegas this year. He lives and works in New York. <www.willsteacy.com> Robert Garland Thomson is trained as an archaeologist and historic preservationist. His work in education and training programs in cultural heritage management has focused on several sites in the U.S., South and Southeast Asia, and the Balkans. Based in San Francisco, he currently works at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. Anthony Weiss is a freelance writer and works as an urban planner for Alex Garvin & Associates. He lives in Brooklyn, works in Manhattan, writes where he can, and is kind to old ladies and small children. Emily Weiss, an education policy analyst and former Teach For America corps member, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has family in the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana.

Jeff Pooley is an Instructor of Media History and Communication at Muhlenberg College. He has worked as a researcher-writer and editor for the Let’s Go travel guide series, and as a staff writer and columnist for Brill’s Content, the media affairs monthly.

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americancity.org page 46

for a few months, take temporary shelter in an office building in the continued from page 48 vicinity of a recent natural disaster. Most of their communication happens through paperwork. When they communicate verbally, it is through acronyms. A complex code determines if you belong: “Are you URS?” “Umm, I don’t know.” “ERPMC?” “I don’t know what that means.” “What’s your code?” “I thought you were gonna tell me that one.” “Do you have an I-pass?” “I don’t think so.” “You shouldn’t be on this floor.” The small staff of permanent FEMA workers reproduced and increased exponentially. New staffers consisted of people like me, who had no preparation and only knew where to show up. We received computers and phones and badges and cameras and parking passes. The outfitting is only one small task for FEMA, whose broad instructions boil down to: wait for a disaster, staff it, outfit the staff, send them to the field. Just this simple task is like waking a hungry, hibernating bear and making it catch a deer for dinner. Not impossible, but awkward. For the next three months, I was careful not to expect anything. I spent every day as if it might be my last in that town. The branch I found myself working for was called ESF-14, Long Term Community Recovery. After a storm event, various branches of FEMA respond, and many federal agencies assist in different aspects of recovery. ESF-14 helps communities make sense of all the agencies. In theory, we were fashioning a plan to coordinate applying for and disbursing funds. Of course, each member of the twenty-person ESF-14 team had their own idea about what this plan actually was. After a while in Jackson, a few team members were sent south to Waveland, Mississippi, to attend a town meeting. Waveland had been decimated, and Robert Orr, a designer of the New Urbanist ShangriLa, Seaside, Florida, would be unveiling his plans for the new town. We arrived at night in a gigantic, gold Infiniti SUV donated by a local Nissan plant. In the town of 2,500, you would be hard-pressed to find ten habitable homes. Airplanes flew overhead spraying for mosquitoes. Two hundred people showed up to attend a meeting in a modular home that could hold fifty. The next day we attended a planning symposium at the Imperial Palace Casino in Biloxi, one of the few usable spaces in the area. One hundred FEMA employees gathered to hear Andrés Duany introduce yet another New Urbanist solution for the Gulf Coast. It directly contradicted the plan the FEMA mitigation staffers had in mind. FEMA wanted to designate a strict flood zone that called for a town built on stilts. Duany warned the audience that they should be wary of FEMA’s presentations. “You cannot live in a town where everything is raised ten feet,” he said. The experience would be unsatisfying, he said, and the cost prohibitive. After this stand-off, I was told to meet my field team of five at a McDonald’s in Wiggins, Mississippi, the seat of Stone County. Wig-

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gins is 50 miles north of the Mississippi coast and sustained little hurricane damage, but was nonetheless part of the long-term recovery plan: any responsible long-term plan would recognize the town as the receiving area for an evacuation; it would also be a logical place to encourage well planned development. At the McDonald’s, I met Steve, a former full-time FEMA employee and now consultant. He was our team leader and seemingly the most capable person in all of Mississippi. He managed to be professional and thoughtful while maintaining a sense of humor amongst all the frustrated and disgruntled FEMA staff. Steve scribbled some words on a Steno sheet that would kick off the intense ten weeks of recovery work I had long anticipated. On the sheet was a list of who’s who in Stone County: mayors, aldermen, sheriffs, wardens, business owners. We would interview them to suss out their visions for their county’s future. We would consult experts in the field. We would create and release this plan in three months so that Stone County would have a beacon in the fog of recovery. In the next ten weeks, people came and went, rumors circulated, plans were drafted, forms were filled out, permission was given and taken away, relationships were built. And nothing happened. By January all that was left of our team was Gary, a retired sheriff from South Dakota, and myself—an unlikely pair. Gary gained the trust of skeptical townsfolk instantly. We spent a month of twelvehour days alternating between meetings in the town and our “office” in the back of an old supermarket in Wiggins, next to the Piggly Wiggly. This was 50 miles from FEMA’s Mississippi operations base, but it may as well have been 1,000. Communication with the rest of our branch was nonexistent. We looked for work every way that we could. Everyone in town was sick of seeing us. FEMA culture severely discouraged us from talking with any FEMA workers outside the branch, and nobody within the branch had a clue what was going on. I waited every week for Saturday, when I would drive the two hours to Biloxi to meet with our branch. There was always the hope that this would be the day that they would take the leash off and let us go to work. We did this for about a month. We lobbied. We said that our county, being the farthest from the coast and hit with the least damage, could complete a plan the fastest. It would act as a model that other counties could follow. But everyone was told by FEMA higherups to wait and not step on anyone’s toes. We were told that the state would provide direction. Finally, they did. They said that they would prepare the long-term recovery plan, and we should all go home. We had a week to get out of town, maybe less. That was it. I still have no idea what happened. By that point, I was more than ready to go home. Personally, I had little to show for my time in Mississippi except a speeding ticket and a new appreciation for buffet lunches. The work was difficult—not just because of the grueling hours or living out of a hotel—but because a talented, capable staff was denied the opportunity to contribute.

LAST EXIT

text and photos by Doug Giuliano

An Outsider Peers into the FEMA Trailer Our hero sets out to do a good deed by helping FEMA rebuild the Gulf Coast. But he finds himself waylaid for weeks by a strange tribe of nomad bureaucrats in an outpost near a Mississippi Piggly Wiggly LAST FALL I MADE A PHONE CALL TO TEST THE FEMA WATERS. I was quickly pulled into a riptide of inertia. A few months after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a master’s in city planning, I still had not found the Philadelphia planning job I wanted. It was November 2005, and a friend was doing debris cleanup after Hurricane Katrina in Florida. FEMA volunteering seemed like a way to use my degree, get a basic per diem, and help some people out. My friend connected me with Mark, an engineer in Chicago, who told me that I would be on a team of ten to twenty planners, architects, and engineers creating a Hurricane Katrina recovery plan for the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Days later, Mark called me at my temp job and asked if I wanted to go to Mississippi. I had to be there in three days. I showed up at the airport with only a driver’s license and got a ticket to Jackson, Mississippi, courtesy of the engineering firm. At the Budget Rent-a-Car, I gave my name, used the magic word “DirectBill,” and received the keys to a car. The same routine worked at the

hotel in Jackson. Pretty soon I was watching cable TV and drinking a High Life with the A/C on 60. The next day I went to the address Mark had given me to look for my contact, known to me only as Michelle. After getting through security—no easy task—I found her. I told her my name and expected all the secret FEMA doors to open. “It’s Doug Giuliano.” [Blank stare.] “It’s with a G. G-I-U...” Michelle turned her back on me and asked her colleague: “Why do they keep sending me these people? I have no idea who this is. Why do they keep sending me this shit?” Michelle then began to openly sob in her cubicle. This was my introduction to government bureaucracy. The next few days felt like an anthropological field study: I had uncovered a new tribe of nomadic North American bureaucrats who, once a year continued on page 47

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COMING UP

ISSUE 13 IMMIGRATION * THE DAY-LABOR DILEMMA * THE SOMALIS OF LEWISTON, MAINE * IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE: THE SHOWDOWN AT SOUTH CENTRAL FARM * WHY MONTREAL IS GHETTO-FREE PLUS: WHY CARS NO LONGER MEAN FREEDOM FOR WOMEN AND: THE GREAT PUBLIC TOILET DEBATE