When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing

7. "To Plan Our Own Community": Government, Grassroots, and Local Development

7 “To Plan Our Own Community” Government, Grassroots, and Local Development Months after Columbia shelved its gym-in-the-park plan, two local organizations released a new proposal for Morningside Heights. The West Harlem Community Organization and the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem, both formed during the mid-sixties struggles over institutional expansion, remained concerned about the Title I plan that the city had approved in 1964. That plan would redevelop blocks along Morningside Park’s eastern border for university use and widen Eighth Avenue to create a “buffer ” against Harlem. ARCH and WHCO denounced this agenda in terms that resonated with the principle of ghetto liberation. “For too long,” they wrote, “[the institutions] have despised us. . . . smiled in our faces while scheming behind our backs to take what is rightfully ours. . . . The time has come for us to plan our own community.”1 This declaration reflected not just anger, but hope. By the close of the 1960s, years of tenant and houser protest against orthodox redevelopment seemed to have gotten a hearing in corridors of power. Both Washington and City Hall signaled a desire to forge cooperative planning relationships between government and grassroots. ARCH, in fact, was now supported by a federal antipoverty grant. To many New Yorkers these were welcome signs. Only an overhaul of existing policy could turn back the marauding bulldozers. And only deep-pocketed state agencies could enlarge the stock of decent low-rent housing. “Unless you have government funds,” observed East Harlem activist Yolanda Sánchez, who worked with city and federal officials to develop hundreds of affordable housing units during this period, “nothing’s going to happen for the poor. Trump ain’t comin’ in unless he’s gentrifying.”2 Under the new banner of cooperation would march a series of state-funded projects that invoked the War on Poverty mandate of “maximum feasible participation” for community residents. What that mantra meant on the ground, however, varied considerably. Many neighborhoods harbored divided interests. Rivalry among self-proclaimed voices of “the community” had already broken out in the Manhattantown and West Side slum-clearance areas; such competition would proliferate as government authorized new funding for community-led projects. Some local communities thwarted the very types of housing endorsed by longtime advocates of tenant and citizen participation . And, as Cooper Square organizers had learned, even well-organized low-income communities could gain but so much control over officials who held the purse strings. Financial woes plagued projects of all stripes as the war in Vietnam siphoned public money and boosted inflation, as the city’s fiscal crisis intensified, and as Washington withdrew the support that had stabilized cities duringpreviousrecessions . By the early seventies, the national shift to neoliberalism—the ideology of slashing public provision in favor of market-driven development—was well under way. (Richard Nixon was philosophical about the effects: “Maybe New York shouldn’t survive,” he told aides. “Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction.”)3 In a few cases, however, grassroots organizing, bureaucratic savvy, and the fortuitous unattractiveness of ghetto areas to conventional developers produced successful, democratically planned state-sponsored projects. These did not entail the comprehensive community control envisioned by the most ambitious Black Power advocates—black-run financing and construction as well as housing4 —but they offered a meaningful say for the kinds of citizens long excluded from planning decisions. And nationalist sensibilities did play a role by inspiring some of the activists and their housing designs. The success stories showed that political and economic planets did not just line up by accident. New York’s tenant, labor, and civil-rights history helped make that happen. Most of the effective community planners in New York were people whose housing or other grassroots activism predated the new government programs. Several were women, although their leadership was less marked than it had been in the earlier struggles against redevelopment. This is unsurprising given that the new community programs targeted the ghettos and barrios, where housing activism had long been more evenly bal212 part ii anced between the sexes than it was in white neighborhoods. The women who did take part in grassroots development planning made that work yet another expression of the broadly defined, race- and class-conscious, community-based feminism that was thriving among welfare, health, and other rights groups during this period. Federal, State, and Local Initiatives Federal, state, and local agencies all launched new urban...