Blog Post No. 2010-13: Washington Beech in the News & Reconsidering Jane Jacobs' Legacy

It's the last day of the month, a time when, by long-standing tradition, we here at RTUF survey the popular press and put our 2 cents out there about an interesting article or articles. Tonight, we have two:

1. Washington Beech ribbon-cutting makes the Globe. The completion of the first phase of the redevelopment of the former Washington Beech barracks-style public housing project into a contributing swath of the urban fabric, which I discussed in a post earlier this year (Blog Post No. 2010-9: Washington Beech is just the latest in a line...), was formally celebrated at a ribbon-cutting yesterday. It appears, according to the Boston Globe's Jennifer McKim ("Ailing Roslindale block gets a new life"), that, among many, Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, and Sandra Henriquez, the former head of the Boston Housing Authority now turned Undersecretary at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, were in attendance and spoke. The article discusses not only the redevelopment itself, but also Ms. Henriquez's discussion of HUD's current legislative proposal to dramatically expand public housing authorities' flexibility in financing such projects by permitting mortgage financing.

2. Reconsidering Jane Jacobs' Legacy. Or at least a part of it. My father gave me a heads-up today about an article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal that does a decent job of identifying one clearly mixed blessing of Jacobs' influence on the structure of urban policy and public involvement in decision-making over the last half-century. Written by Andrew Manshel, identified as the executive vice president of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation in Queens (NY), and titled "Enough with Jane Jacobs Already," the article's main focus is the City of New York's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which sounds essentially like the kind of development project impact review and mitigation process that is required in many large cities (and even some smaller ones) around the country. Here in Boston, this kind of project review is enshrined in Article 80 of the Zoning Code.

Manshel is clearly no fan of this kind of process, viewing it as producing, at the end, a "valueless document...crafted mainly to foil any lawsuits by opponents of development claiming that the process fell short of legal requirements for completeness." He urges New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to take a hard look at ULURP as it undertakes municipal charter reform because, in Manshel's words, "a better balance needs to be struck between considered judgment and citizen participation." As someone who has been there and been directly involved in what Manshel describes, I have to say that you'd be hard-pressed to find a thoughtful participant in the typical process who doesn't think it could use some improvement. Overall, the pendulum does seem to have swung too far in favor of those who oppose projects and want to stop development based on a narrow perception of what is in their and the public's interest. How to address that concern and promote better, more predictable, and more efficient decision-making is one of the great challenges of urban policy in the early 21st century. To the extent that Jacobs' success in promoting broad public involvement has now become calcified and an impediment to improving and thoughtfully expanding our built environment, it's a critique worth making. And if Manshel had stopped there, I wouldn't have all that much to disagree with.

But Manshel then takes the opportunity to take a few direct shots at Jacobs' overall influence on urban development and planning, based largely on what she said in her seminal work from the early 1960s: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He perceives her ideas to be too influential and too unexamined among the professionals charged with administering our system, the developers at ULI and the architects and planners coming out of our academic institutions. In this context, it is worth remembering that Jacobs was smart, dynamic, and influential, but not a trained professional in urban planning or architecture. She started out as a journalist and was essentially a generalist in her approach to problems and her proposed solutions to them. And she was not kind in her writing to the academics and professional technicians of the time. There is accordingly an irony in having a book like Death and Life attaining such widespread influence in academic and professional circles. Manshel also sees it as misguided and limiting. Jacobs was often wrong, he says, and turning her every utterance about urban life into gospel is a mistake. Again, not a bad thing to remember and entirely consistent with one of my own pet sayings: "Everyone (and I do mean everyone) is a mixed bag."

Yet the examples that Manshel offers of her mistakes are not clear-cut and themselves reveal a disregard for inconvenient facts. Lincoln Center may be a success and not the failure that Jacobs predicted, but I'm not sure it's responsible for revitalizing the neighborhood around it. It came at great cost in terms of displacement and in my view it's largely the surrounding neighborhood's ability to feed vitality into the site that saved it. Lincoln Center on its own would be pretty lifeless. The West Village may now be fully gentrified and hardly resembling the mixed-income paradigm that Jacobs described from the late 1950s, but claiming that such gentrification falls directly out of "policies she advocated" that "blocked real-estate development" overstates the case as well. A city like New York may well have failed to build enough new housing to keep prices in check over the last half century in part because of NIMBYs empowered by the public involvement structure that Jacobs inspired. But as one of the article's commenters notes, gentrification in a place like the West Village is also about a specific lack of supply of great neighborhoods, not just housing in general.

And then comes Manshel's climactic declaration: We should all pay less attention to Jacobs' "overblown pronouncements and unprovable theories" and more attention to the work of William H. Whyte, which Manshel describes as "finely-grained thinking" about the design of public spaces. Like another commenter to the story, I've never thought of Jacobs and Whyte as being opposed to each other or somehow mutually exclusive in their approach to what makes a successful and satisfying urban place. Overall, then, I'm a bit at a loss as to why Jacobs has to be denigrated as a crackpot and Whyte held up as the shining example of right thinking in order to make a valid point about reforming the development project review and public involvement process. This kind of gratuitous critique, not at all necessary to further Manshel's point, makes me wonder about motivation and context and broader implications. The debate over urban development is clearly still a live one. Recently, we've seen an attempt to rehabilitate Robert Moses 30+ years after The Power Broker. In my opinion, Alan Ehrenhalt's 2007 piece in Governing ("The Power Broker Reconsidered") was a thoughtful consideration of that boomlet. It now appears that one of his chief late-career opponents is being targeted. Wherever this is headed, we can only hope it isn't intended to put us back into the days of condemning and clearing entire neighborhoods, punching interstate highways through our urban cores, and building towers in lifeless parks.

Blog Post No. 2010-9: Washington Beech is just the latest in a line...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9


...of HOPE VI redevelopments here in Boston



Location: 4560 Washington Street, Roslindale, MA (Boston Housing Authority's Washington-Beech project, currently undergoing redevelopment) (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2010-2012

The Photos: In order, taking a walk through the first phase of the redevelopment, from a new Beechland Street and along the backs of the attached town houses (Photos 1 and 2), up along a new Beechland Circle past the town houses and row houses toward Washington Street (Photos 3 and 4), looking down Washington Street toward downtown Boston with the large multi-family building on the right (Photo 5), then from across Washington Street back toward the site (Photo 6), an internal street and sidewalk area detail shot (Photo 7), and finishing with two photos from the intersection of Beechland Circle and Beechland Street looking up toward Beech Street (Photo 8) and toward Washington Street (Photo 9).

The Story: By now, the story of how the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has funded the redevelopment of hundreds of distressed public housing projects across the county is almost as well known as the distress of those properties to begin with. Almost, but not quite. I'm sure most can easily name one or two of the truly horrific public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago that became poster children for everything that was wrong with urban America in the 1970s and 1980s. That list at one time included Columbia Point in Boston, which was one of the first public housing project redevelopments in the late 1980s.

HUD's HOPE VI program (the acronym stands for "Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere") emerged in the early 1990s as part of the department's response to the report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing. The report put the capstone on 30 years of withering, across-the-board criticism of public housing projects in the U.S. as generally dead-end disasters designed, constructed, and under-maintained in a manner that ultimately maximized alienation and separation from the broader community through super-blocks, high-rise construction that offered a twist on the Corbusian "Tower in the Park," and a lack of "defensible space." Among that report's major recommendations was prioritizing the redevelopment of the most distressed public housing projects into mixed-income, mixed housing-type neighborhoods that would reconnect with their surrounding communities both socio-economically and physically.


The physical, urban design component of HOPE VI has always been viewed as integral to the program, reflecting the significant influence of the Congress for the New Urbanism on HUD policy under the Clinton Administration. That administration's first HUD secretary, Henry Cisneros, was hismelf a signatory to the Charter of the New Urbanism in 1996. The guidelines for the HOPE VI program sent strong signals that HUD was serious about the urban design elements of each redevelopment. By and large and even as the HOPE VI program was put on life support by the second Bush Administration, that has meant that HOPE VI redevelopments fit much better with their surrounding communities. In fact, it's often a bit difficult to tell that they are even publicly-assisted housing. In Boston, HOPE VI redevelopments have included Mission-Main in Jamaica Plain, Orchard Gardens in Roxbury, and Maverick Gardens in East Boston. These redevelopments share an important feature with Washington-Beech: they were all done by the Boston Housing Authority with the help of Trinity Financial, a local developer that has also completed HOPE VI projects in Connecticut (Quinnipiac Terrace) and Rhode Island (Newport Heights).


As can be seen from the photos and the images below, Washington Beech is a true HOPE VI redevelopment from an urban design standpoint. It has mixed unit types in a variety of building types -- apartment building, row house, and attached town-house -- that respect and contribute to the surrounding and internal street network. The street network provides for real streets with curbs and sidewalks, on-street parking, and other elements that reflect a serious commitment to the public realm. The redevelopment also provides a centrally-located and publicly-accessible park space in the playground and basketball court.


All of this is to be contrasted with what existed here for the prior 50+ years: bare utilitarian brick structures located in a pattern that suggested a military encampment far more than a residential community. No real attention was paid to the street and the buildings were all surrounded almost uniformly by asphalt. Photos 6, 7, and 9 provide some particular points of comparison between old and new. Among them, I think Photo 7's depiction of the new sidewalk, curbing, street lights against the essentially undifferentiated treatment of the street on the opposite side is most instructive. And to take it a step further, it should not be surprising to see a dumpster facing into the street between the two older buildings on the right. In the old pattern, there really was no front, back or side to any of the buildings. They simply floated in an asphalt pond that meant it didn't really matter where you put something like a dumpster. In the new design, each buidling and therefore each set of units has clearly defined front (on the street), side, and back sides, providing an understandable logic for the location of entrances, utilities, and services (such as trash and general household storage). To say that the redeveloped Washington Beech will fit into the surrounding neighborhood far better than its predecessor is merely to state the obvious.


As can also be seen in the photos, the first phase is nearly complete and RTUF understands a ribbon-cutting will be held at the site on Saturday, June 29 at 11 am. Subsequent phases will fill in the rest of the overall site plan over the next 2 years.

RTUF sketch of the restored urban fabric: No hand-sketches this time. Instead, a link to the City of Boston's Assessing Department database for the pre-redevelopment configuration here, and an image provided by Trinity Financial (with credit to Icon Architecture), of the redevelopment's overall site plan (with Washington Street located at the top of the plan).