W.W.J.J.D?(what would Jane Jacobs do?)

Elana Levin

W.W.J.J.D?(what would Jane Jacobs do?)

Superhero urbanist Jane Jacobs died yesterday and I don't really know where to begin.
There are lots of good overviews of the work and life of the genius who wrote "The Death and Life of American Cities" and helped to organize communities to vanquish "The Power Broker" himself, Robert Moses. Read those first if you've never heard of her. Check out Gothamist for the overview or Curbed blog if you want to be an urban planning nerd. Capitoilette has a great personal look back on Jacobs work.

So why am I speechless? Without Jane Jacobs' work to show why preserving New York's communities is necessary to the survival of a city, how many of us would be living here? Here's where the anger comes in. Yes, people are being chased out of New York by housing costs and an environment that is hostile to the very people that made New York great. Yes the legacy of Jacobs is under attack by developers that seek to replace mixed-income, mixed-use communities with luxury development and low-paying chain store jobs, bedroom communities and functionally privatized "public" space. But don't just speak in despair, the wisdom of communities and the grassroots is speaking up and just like Jane Jacobs old 'hood Greenwich Village, these communities are fighting back and have a shot at surviving.

In what I believe was one of her last public statements, Jane Jacobs wrote a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times in support of a community led plan for the rezoning of a diverse, destination neighborhood in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and in opposition to a developer backed plan that the city planning commission was pushing through. The Times didn't run her letter to the editor. But you can read her words here.
She said:

"What the intelligently worked out plan devised by the community itself does not do is worth noticing. It does not destroy hundreds of manufacturing jobs, desperately needed by New York citizens and by the city's stagnating and stunted manufacturing economy. The community's plan does not cheat the future by neglecting to provide provisions for schools, daycare, recreational outdoor sports, and pleasant facilities for those things. The community's plan does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing and imaginative and economical new shelter that residents can afford. The community's plan does not violate the existing scale of the community, nor does it insult the visual and economic advantages of neighborhoods that are precisely of the kind that demonstrably attract artists and other live-work craftsmen, initiating spontaneous and self-organizing renewal. Indeed so much renewal so rapidly that the problem converts to how to make an undesirable neighborhood to an attractive one less rapidly...But the proposal put before you by city staff is an ambush containing all those destructive consequences, packaged very sneakily with visually tiresome, unimaginative and imitative luxury project towers."

In "Systems of Survival: a Dialog on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics", one of the activists Jacobs quoted worried that he was not qualified to weigh in on urban policy. Another activist answered his question "why not us? If more qualified people are up to the same thing, more power to them. But we don't know that, do we?"
(hat tip NYT)

Her radical idea that the activists/community members that live under these public policies should have the chance to weigh in on those policies and be part of the process of finding better solutions is one I believe in. It's a legacy we try to continue through our DMI Fellows program which helps grassroots organizers speak out on the public policies they deal with every day.

In honor of Jane Jacobs, take the time to wander around your neighborhood tonight (even if you don't live in the city) and see what's happening on the streets. That's how she got her best inspiration and I hope it can be ours as well.

Posted by Elana Levin at April 26, 2006 01:01 PM

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Comments

Elana, very interesting. Thanks for pointing out her letter from last year. I hadn't been aware of that, but I'm glad to see that Jacobs was so active right up until a year ago.

"The community's plan does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing..."

Parts of your assessment are right on. But some of the DMI Fellows are working contrary to Jacobs' wishes by promoting policies that do hurt the city and neighborhoods, and the people they purport to represent. And, they're in complete denial about it. Policies such as Inclusionary Zoning, Community Benefits Agreements and so on, end up doing more damage than good. They are indefensable agendas from a group that purports to carry a progressive torch.

Elana,

Thank you for linking to my tribute of Jane Jacobs. I like your call to action in Jacobs’s name and support any and all whom hear it, but, like with Ms. Jacobs and the Williamsburg redevelopment, I find this city has become surprisingly ignorant of her principles and deaf to her words.

One need only look around at the roll-back of protection for the Purchase Building or the move afoot to allow for a glass tower in the Greenwich Village Historic District—not to mention mega-developments like the Atlantic Yards project—to see that New York’s powers-that-be are under the spell once again of phony urban engineers and rock-star architects (and the developers that bankroll all of them).

But I have a more personal encounter with the system. I heeded Jacobs’s call to action; I, with the help of many in my community, have worked for the last seven months to save an historic, low-rise building and a thriving profitable business in my neighborhood, SoHo. Yet, as I write this, jackhammers shake my apartment and bulldozers crush the façade of the Tunnel Garage. The building was noteworthy, and a google of it will turn up articles in the Times and the Villager, and blog entries at Gothamist and Curbed, and over at my sites as well, but perhaps even more to the point here is how much we all did to save it, and how little it all mattered.

When we first started the fight, I knew it would be an uphill battle, but as the months wore on, I was amazed by the support we received. Our efforts inspired hundreds upon hundreds of letters to the LPC asking they designate the garage—from residents, historians, preservationists, and every state and local elected official responsible for this area (with the notable exception of the Mayor). Practically everyone wanted to see the building protected, the business (and the necessary parking spaces) saved, and the nine-story, luxury high-rise development stopped. Though this outpouring would have likely worked in a past era, the LPC never held a formal hearing and city officials pretended there was nothing they could do if the owner wanted to redevelop the site.

As a result, SoHo will lose a beautiful link to its past, a working, 24-hour business, and 100 or so parking spaces, and will gain 40 or so luxury apartments. Though she might have been thrilled by the community’s effort, I can’t imagine Jane Jacobs would be proud of the result.

I am not anti-development by any means, but I am anti unchecked development. And though many Libertarians like to talk up Jacobs because of her belief in the organic laissez-faire of urban growth, they usually leave out her warnings about the need for government to guard against development done solely for the bottom-line interests of developers. With developer money pouring into local politics, and revolving door-style cozy relations between developers, deputy mayors, and City Council members, I am at a loss to see where New York City’s safeguards will come from.

Without campaign finance reform and Landmarks Preservation reform, I see a rough road ahead for the city Jacobs once helped save.

Considering how hostile Mayor Bloomberg has been to human-sized, affordable development of housing, transit and manufacturing, it is not a surprise to see in the New York Times on Sunday a broadside attack on Jane Jacobs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/weekinreview/30jacobs.html

While disturbing, it's worth reading. The Times has often been a fan of Bloomberg's monster developments which undermine what is left of blue collar New York and architecture critics need new buildings to critique. The Times vision of NY, however, neednt be ours and -- if we're prepared to slug it out -- needn't come to pass at all.