next american city--issue 12: historic preservation

HISTORICPRESERVATION

Paving ParadiseTHE CENTURY BUILDING DEBACLE AND THE FUTURE OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION

PRESERVATION IN THE PROGRESSIVE CITYDebating History and Gentrification in Austin

WILL BETHLEHEM TURN STEEL INTO GOLD?

PLUS: KATRINA, ONE YEAR LATERFirst in a Two-Part Series

ISSUE TWELVE / 2006

THE NEXTAMERICAN CITY

US $7.95 CAN $10.95COMMENTARY / URBAN AFFAIRS

REBUILDING URBAN PLACES AFTER DISASTERLessons 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 Rebuilding Urban Places one comes away with the understanding of how complex a process it Rebuilding Urban Placesis 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 Ameri-can 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, stra-tegic 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 CenturyNov 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 preserva-

tion 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 con-

troversial preservation battles in recent histo-

ry. The Century Building in downtown St.

Louis, a late-18th-century office tower with

cast-iron doorways and ornate marble detail-

ing, 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 for-

mer Austinite, tells a tale of clashing progres-

sives 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 one-

year 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 gener-

ally overlooked by the media last summer—

talks about casinos, local heroes, and how

Gulfport is slowly rebuilding. On a bitter-

sweet 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 long-

term 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 experi-

menting with new kinds of writing and report-

ing, 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 full-

time editor of the magazine. Adam Gordon will

remain involved as editor-in-chief. In upcom-

ing 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]

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

ISSUE 12: HISTORIC PRESERVATION

14 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

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

departments

6 Sex in the City by Stephen Janis

8 Resurrecting Death and Life by Anthony Weiss

10 Engineering the Perfect Suburb by David Gest

features: historic preservation

28 Looking East by Robert Garland Thomson

31 Saving High-Rise Public Housing by Sharon Maclean

book reviews

43 Planet of Slums Reviewed by Carly Berwick

44 Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Reviewed by Mariana Mogilevich

45 The Place You Love is Gone Reviewed by Anika Singh

last exit

48 An Outsider Peers into the FEMA Trailer by Doug Giuliano

Katrina: one year later

36 Crosses From Rubble by Emily Weiss

40 15 Minutes With... Brent Warr, Mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi

by Jess McCuan

LETTERS

CREATIVES TAKING FLIGHT: A COMPOSER RESPONDSAs 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 tra-ditional forms of the past, and occa-sionally of the present. But it is the second-tier cities that are becoming affordable centers of innovation and, as a result, are more attractive loca-tions 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 rep-utation. <www.conspirare.org> • The Esoterics in Seattle, conducted by Eric Banks, and Opus 7, conducted by Loren Pontén, in Kenmore, Wash-ington, are regular winners of ASCAP’s annual “Adventurous Pro-gramming” award. <www.theesoterics.org>, <www.opus7.org> • Seraphic Fire, conducted by Patrick Dupré Quigley, is an “astounding pro-fessional chamber choir” (Miami Her-ald) transforming the cultural land-scape of south Florida. <www.seraphicfire.org>

Next year I am relocating from Oak-land 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 relation-ships without the burden of living in an absurdly expensive location.

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.

This is a critical issue that larger cit-ies 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 neces-sitate entertainment instead of art.

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

Paul CrabtreeOakland, CA

GAMBLING ON PHILADELPHIA’S FUTUREThe 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 bank-ruptcy and reeling from decades of population and job loss. To encourage development, the city in 1997 and 2000 passed a ten-year property tax morato-rium 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’ prom-ises 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 gener-ated 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, PAwww.NABRhood.org

STAFF

Printed by WestCan Printing Group, Canada. ©2006 The Next American City, Inc.

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.

[email protected] home:www.americancity.org

editor-in-chiefAdam [email protected]

editorJess [email protected]

art directorsJayme YenYve Ludwig

managing editorSara C. [email protected]

executive editorNathaniel [email protected]

submissions editorAnika [email protected]

senior editorsCarly Berwick, Last ExitPaul Breloff, Planning & TransportationC.J. Gabbe, FeaturesDavid Gest, FeaturesMariana Mogilevich, Architecture & Reviews Mike Sabel, TechnologyAnika Singh, Law, Policy, & CommunitiesJenna Snow, FeaturesShayna Strom, Politics, Labor,

& OrganizationsChristy Zink, Education & Culture

contributing editorsDoug Sell, Beth Silverman, Jim Schroder, Allison Smith

senior staff writerCharles Shaw

presidentSeth A. [email protected]

publisherMichelle [email protected]

finance directorJonathan Adler

internLaura MichaelsonMei-Lun Xue researcherDavid S. Godfrey

contributing writersCarly 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 artistsRebekah Brem, Alan Brunettin, Frank Klein, Shaun O’Boyle, Will Steacy

editorial advisory board (affiliations for identification purposes only)Vicki Been, New York University Law SchoolCynthia Farrar, Yale UniversityJoel GarreauAlexander GarvinPaul Goldberger, The New YorkerHugh Hardy, H3 Hardy Collaboration LLCBruce Heitler, Heitler DevelopmentW. Lehr Jackson, Williams Jackson EwingPaloma Pavel, Earth House, Inc.David Serviansky, Landstar Homes

photo ©frankkleinIV

departments

by Stephen Janisarts & culture

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

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 moon-

stone 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

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 door-

men, 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 thou-

sands 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 redis-

tricting 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 dis-

trict 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 four-

month investigation of alleged drug dealing

photos by Frank Klein

photo ©frankkleinIV

and prostitution. The investigation culminat-

ed 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 undercov-

er troopers were later convicted of bedding

dancers and purchasing illegal drugs. Since

then, despite the continued rumors of prosti-

tution, 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 Bal-

timore’s most valuable real estate. Just yards

away, at the revitalized Inner Harbor, are

granite skyscrapers, million-dollar condo-

miniums, and retail development. The sym-

metrical square columns of Baltimore’s 25-

story World Trade Center sit alongside

familiar suburban signs: a Cheesecake Fac-

tory 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 Balti-

more. With a median household income of

roughly $33,000, as reported to the U.S. Cen-

sus Bureau in 2003, most Baltimoreans can-

not 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 domi-

nated by brick rowhouses.

With 269 murders in 2005, according to

the Maryland Central Records Division, Balti-

more had one of the highest per capita mur-

der 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 furni-

ture towering like burial mounds in front of

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 life-

style. 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 trau-

matized 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 por-

nography in private homes, citing the statistic

that in 1999 Americans rented 711 million

pornographic videos, resulting in a $10 bil-

lion 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 “prosti-

tution and pornography as sources of creativi-

ty 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 “cou-

ples 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 shop-

ping. 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 co-

exist 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.

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 govern-

ment 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 doc-

trine. The book has spawned a cottage indus-

try 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 walk-

able downtowns and condensed them into

hard formulas—a fixed prescription for

mixed-use developments of shops, offices,

and apartments, clustered around down-

towns, 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 root-

ed 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 peo-

ple actually lived in cities because they had

not bothered to observe city life.

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 con-

clusions based on what she had seen. “Cit-

ies are an immense laboratory of trial and

error, failure and success, in city building

and city design,” she wrote. “This is the lab-

oratory in which city planning should have

been learning and forming and testing its

theories.” She also stressed that her obser-

vations 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 subur-

ban,” she warned. “Towns, suburbs, and

even little cities are totally different organ-

isms 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-in-

the-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 func-

tion 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 ele-

ments of late-19th- and early-20th-century

urban centers. Architects have criticized

these movements for being stylistically retro-

grade. The problem is not their style, howev-

er, 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 dream-

ing up imaginary cities, she observed real cit-

ies, and from those observations arrived at

her own model for how cities work. Now

some of her adherents have reverse-engi-

neered her observations to create just another

set of visual models. Fifty years ago, the plan-

ners’ doctrine was light and air and grass.

Today, the doctrine is bustling streets and

front porches and community. Both are sim-

ply 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 far-

away office parks. But the most complex liv-

ing 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 dig-

ging may not produce a pretty picture, but it

will be a critical step in developing livable

spaces that are honest about the needs of mar-

kets, geography, and—most of all—the people

they are created to serve.

by Anthony Weissin memoriam illustration by Rebekah Brem

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

IN THE HEART OF ORANGE COUNTY,

California—the poster child for postwar sub-

urban 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 sin-

gle-family detached homes on large lots, and

homogenous neighborhoods of wealthy, con-

servative white people. But neither will

Orange County necessarily become a place of

inevitable, dense urbanization. The innova-

tive 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 ide-

als of the anti-sprawl, Smart Growth move-

ment that currently dominates urban plan-

ning theory with the culture of one of Ameri-

ca’s most important suburbs, Tustin Legacy

may become an important model for the

infill development of aging and crowded sub-

urbs 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

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 devel-

opment parcel in a county where the median

home price is over $700,000. The former

base has easy access to freeways and the com-

muter 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 approxi-

mately 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 fami-

ly-oriented homeless shelter and job training

facility called the Village of Hope, the most

comprehensive capital project ever undertak-

en 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 behe-

moths 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 architec-

ture 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 County-

type environment than Manhattan.”

Poster Child

for New Suburbanism?

What does this kind of infill project rep-

resent 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 Urban-

ism, takes cues from “traditional” town plan-

ning—epitomized by older European and

American cities with narrow, walkable

streets, public squares, vernacular architec-

ture, and front porches—New Suburbanism

references the Garden City movement of

Ebenezer Howard, which envisioned a har-

monious balance between housing, industry,

and open space in the suburbs. New Urban-

ism advocates dense, pedestrian-oriented city

centers (in the form of infill projects in older

cities, or concentrated, axis-oriented “green-

field” designs such as those in Seaside, Flori-

da). New Suburbanism, on the other hand,

accepts car-oriented, single-family-home-

dominated development, but aims to inte-

grate it with denser, self-sufficient suburbs,

some including large apartment buildings

upwards of 10 units per acre (not just stereo-

typical collections of single-family homes)

and employment, shopping, and entertain-

ment within suburb limits.

Many New Urbanists decry Kotkin’s New

Suburbanist terminology, claiming that he

has simply tweaked New Urban ideas for his

text and photos by David Gestplanning

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

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-depen-

dent) 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-

tin or the nearby decommissioned El Toro

Marine Corps Air Station, increasing subur-

ban 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 fami-

lies, you’re going to shop at the big box

retailers.”

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

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 dis-

tinct sense of place; an architectural and

economic diversity of housing types; a com-

munity-inspiring layout featuring intercon-

nected open space or parkland, human-

scaled buildings and social and recreational

activity centers; and proximity to jobs, in

order to cut down on commute times and

decrease area traffic.

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 look-

ing 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 materi-

als 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 resi-

dents 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 com-

pact, 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 Coun-

ty there’s a pent-up demand for the urban

lifestyle. Residents are looking for more con-

venience: no yard to maintain, adjacent to

amenities like retail, entertainment, and dry

cleaning. They’re willing to sacrifice the big-

ger house and bigger yard for that conve-

nience.” Alex Alix, who will move into Tustin

Fields II with his family, concurs: “The build-

ings 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 hous-

ing is not prevalent. “There are lots of com-

muters 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 subur-

ban “inclusionary” housing to people with far

lower incomes than are typically served by

such affordable housing programs by build-

ing the Village of Hope. The city’s partner in

the project, the Orange County Rescue Mis-

sion, a 50-year-old “faith-based” non-profit

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 organiza-

tion’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 individu-

als, 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 rep-

utation in the county, and we hope to estab-

lish partnerships with a lot of the other busi-

nesses and schools coming in [to Tustin Leg-

acy], so that they can be a part of the commu-

nity helping the homeless.”

More Than Just a Pretty Base

Christine Shingleton emphasizes the

unusual partnerships that have defined Tus-

tin Legacy to date. “In addition to involving

and engaging the community” in the plan-

ning process, the city has worked collabora-

tively 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 devel-

opers, 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 pro-

duced by massive, market-tested homebuild-

ing companies.

At first glance, Tustin Legacy could be

labeled simply as a base reuse project, the

kind receiving frequent press coverage fol-

lowing each round of military closures. But

the city’s “bottom-up” site planning—involv-

ing community feedback and incorporating a

variety of partnerships between the public,

private, and non-profit sectors—offers broad-

er lessons. The colossal blimp hangars repre-

sent the kind of unique features that a city

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 afford-

able homes and also meet the frequent com-

munity 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/

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

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.

page 15

Paving Paradise: The Century Building Debacle and the Future of Historic PreservationIt 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 stew-

ards of their built heritage, and the National Trust for Historic Preser-

vation 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 constituen-

cy. The ramifications of this reversal for historic preservation—and for

the cities salvaged through its practice—appear grim.

Fracturing

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 early-

twentieth-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 auto-

mobile-oriented suburban malls and office parks, city officials used

urban renewal funds to demolish superb old buildings for surface park-

ing lots.

The news was not all dismal. Beginning in the early 1960s, citi-

zens 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 feder-

al—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 build-

ings 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

by Joseph Heathcotthistoric preservation photos by Alan Brunettin

in the future. With indications

that St. Louis is now adding

population for the first time

since 1950, the availability of

unique, beautiful, solid build-

ings is emerging as the city’s

foremost advantage.

Anatomy of a

Preservation Fight

When the Downtown Now!

Coalition released its Down-

town 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. Unfortunate-

ly, the Francis Slay administra-

tion 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 com-

mercial structures.

The buildings under fire were the Old

Post Office (OPO) and the Century Build-

ing. 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 pro-

vided 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

page 16

the new home for the Missouri Eastern Dis-

trict Court of Appeals and an extension of

the suburban campus of Webster Universi-

ty. They would demolish the Century Build-

ing 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 Land-

marks 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 redevelop-

ment. Viable alternatives did exist, and repu-

table 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

demolition from a local battle into a

national scandal was the role of the

National Trust for Historic Preserva-

tion. 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 Janu-

ary 2001 letter to the Missouri Gen-

eral Services Administration (own-

er of the OPO), Midwest Trust

Director Royce Yeater challenged

the parties to find a new parking

solution. Yeater concluded, “preser-

vationists 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, Land-

marks 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 sepa-

rate 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 politi-

cal maneuver, it fell just within the law. The

courts ruled in favor of demolition, and the

project was clear to proceed.

A Betrayal of Trust

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, preser-

vationists in St. Louis stepped up efforts to

save the Century Building. Unable to sway

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.

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.

page 17

city officials and DESCO-DFC from their sin-

gle-minded devotion to demolition, preserva-

tionists 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 Associa-

tion discovered that the National Trust had

decided to provide gap financing for the proj-

ect: $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 preserva-

tion 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 capitu-

late to the expediency of the moment simply

makes no sense,” noted Landmarks Associa-

tion 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 preserva-

tionists 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 preser-

vationists, but also to its national constituen-

cy. 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 con-

tended 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

Century Building. Preservationists around

the country, according to St. Louis Post-Dis-

patch 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 demoli-

tion 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 sin-

gularly 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 demoli-

tion 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 organiza-

tion. 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 his-

toric buildings are fueling the current renais-

sance of cities like Boston, Milwaukee, Pitts-

burgh, 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-eco-

nomic diversity. In fact, as urban journalist

Roberta Gratz argues, most cities today view

parking shortages as a sign that their down-

towns are on the upswing.

But St. Louis is a city mired in old ways

of doing business. Still in shock over its cata-

strophic population loss, city officials have

been slow to move beyond the strategy devel-

oped in the 1960s and 1970s of competing

with the suburbs by providing ample parking

in its dense urban core. The Slay administra-

tion in particular has demonstrated an out-

moded preference for prioritizing short-term

real estate deals over long-term planning and

stewardship.

Whether or not one cares about the Cen-

tury 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 sig-

naled its departure from its original mandate,

and that it is now in the business of backing

local redevelopment schemes however wit-

less, 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?

Opposite page: photo by William Herman Rau,

January 21, 1896. No. 534. The Library of Congress,

Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection.

Duffy, Robert W. “National Trust Backs

Plan to Raze Building.” St. Louis Post-

Dispatch 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 Trade-

offs.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 14 July

2004: B07.

Prost, Charlene. “Raze a Building and

Get Tax Credits.” St. Louis Post-

Dispatch 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 Post-

Dispatch 22 July 2004: B01.

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 fur-

naces 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 tak-

ing advantage of the surrounding area’s boom, redevelopment of

the steelworks may compress the transformation process many old-

er 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 domi-

nated 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 occu-

py 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 compa-

ny 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.” Bil-

ly 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-

by Jeff Pooleyhistoric preservation

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?

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.

page 20

pany to shirk its pension obligations, a move

since echoed by other faltering companies.

The international steel market had trans-

formed 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 I-

78, 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, mak-

ing it the fastest-growing region in Pennsyl-

vania. 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 Develop-

ment Corporation. The newly attractive

demographics have yielded four separate pro-

posals to build “lifestyle centers,” the indus-

try’s euphemism for upscale malls that mim-

ic traditional streetscapes. The Lehigh Valley

has become, almost overnight, one big exurb.

Most exurbs, though, don’t have three grit-

ty, 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. Bethle-

hem 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 steel-

works 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

arts-and-crafts “Christkindlmarkt,” and an 81-

foot-high “Star of Bethlehem” atop the city’s

South Mountain. Today, the Moravian’s 18th-

century 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 redevelop-

ment had been proposed after its final, mid-

1990s 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 com-

memorative, “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 Histo-

ry” 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 commu-

nity, has pursued the tightwire goal of a “his-

torically 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 New-

mark Group. Gosin is famous for his trendy

makeovers of aging New York industrial

neighborhoods, including, almost single-

handedly, DUMBO in Brooklyn. And Gosin

has been effusive in his public pronounce-

ments. 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 some-

day be able to bring my granddaughter there

and say, ‘I did this,’” said Gosin.

The development plan pressed all the

right historical buttons. There was, for exam-

ple, a pledge to preserve the iconic, seven-

teen-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 preserva-

tionist bona fides and ready capital assuaged

the concerns of most steelworks stakehold-

ers. 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

the existing investors. This was, to put it

mildly, a bombshell. Here was the fastest

growing gambling company in the world pro-

posing a $350 million slots parlor and con-

vention center as the centerpiece of a

revamped plan, now worth $879 million.

Las Vegas Sands is best known for its

“Renaissance Venice”-themed Venetian Casi-

no 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 autho-

rizing slot gambling gave the two cities some-

thing in common. Legislators voted in 2004

to award fourteen slot licenses across the

state. Since twelve of the licenses were effec-

tively 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 guar-

anteed, by law, an annual $10 million pay-

ment 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 develop-

ments 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.

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.

Fewer historic buildings would be pre-

served 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 near-

by 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 Indus-

trial 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 sensi-

tive to the history of the site,” Mike Kramer,

co-founder of Save Our Steel, told local report-

ers. “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 resi-

dents split on the gambling proposal—with

some calling the slots parlor a threat to

Bethlehem’s carefully cultivated (and sea-

sonally lucrative) “Christmas City” image.

In the wake of the Sands deal, two anti-

gambling 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, Pennsylva-

nia, lobbying firm and launched a charm

offensive that included a twelve-page news-

paper insert, door-to-door canvassing, and an

automated telephone campaign (complete

with phone patch-throughs to the City Coun-

cil switchboard). The investor team gave

$50,000 to the city’s popular MusikFest, and

donated 3.5 acres of Bethlehem Steel land to

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 surround-

ing 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.

Bethlehem’s Star Ascends

The Lehigh Valley rarely surfaces in the

national media, so The New York Times’ late-

December 2005 story on the region’s resur-

gent 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 cosmo-

politan 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 Bethle-

hem Steel.

While the steelworks project remains in

limbo, Bethlehem’s South Side continues to

gentrify. The familiar, stage-by-stage progres-

sion of gentrification—first, the edgy pio-

neers, 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 envi-

sioned his $30 million South Side loft reno-

vation 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

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/

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.

by Jeffrey Chusidhistoric preservation

Preservation in the Progressive City: Debating History and Gentrification in AustinA 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 uni-

versities, a renowned live music scene, Lance Armstrong, and the

homegrown Dell Corporation, this blue dot in a red state has consis-

tently ranked high in various surveys of “best places to live in Ameri-

ca.” 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 gentri-

fication 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 relation-

ship between gentrification and preservation, and how difficult it can

be to measure their relationship. Ultimately, the Austin debate out-

lines 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

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-sen-

sitive areas.

Smart Growth, however, had a rocky reception. Initially, historic

preservation advocates perceived it as a devious strategy for develop-

ers 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 South-

ern Plantation culture, which included slavery, ran from the Atlantic

all the way to Austin’s central divide. West of the divide, where ranch-

ing 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 politi-

cal and cultural divide, helping to explain its vacillation between con-

servative and liberal viewpoints.

It also explains the divisions between multi-cultural and Anglo-

dominant communities. Minorities have always been part of Austin’s

history. African Americans, both slaves and freedmen, had a signifi-

cant 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.

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 segregat-

ed 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 Afri-

can 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 medi-

an 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 air-

port has been moved ten miles to the south-

east while its former East Austin site is mas-

ter planned as a “New Urbanist” community.

At the same time, in just 30 years, Austin

has gone from the city with the best hous-

ing 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 neigh-

borhoods, only a few blocks from a grow-

ing downtown and an enormous universi-

ty, 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 profes-

sionals from contemplating a move east.

Inadequate local services and a dearth of

supermarkets matter little to residents

with cars, and improved goods and servic-

es are following the new populations to the

area anyway.

This widespread and benign public per-

ception of East Austin was soon loudly chal-

lenged, 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 drum-

beat 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 “displac-

ing the traditional black and Hispanic com-

munities.” East Austin, they claimed, had

been “marketed to affluent, largely Anglo,

home buyers,” and growing real estate val-

ues, 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 pro-

fessionals” to play with bargain-priced attrac-

tive homes, but led to a rise in property val-

ues 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 prop-

erty tax exemptions, while poor folk sur-

rounding 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 dis-

placing 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 top-

ic. 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 mem-

bers. Over the next several years, the city

established two citizen task forces and con-

ducted at least two internal staff studies of

the matter. They examined gentrification in

East Austin, the impact of historic designa-

tions and other preservation policies on hous-

ing 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 arti-

cles 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 sym-

posium on gentrification, to the Capital Met-

ropolitan 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 popula-

tion 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 gentrifica-

tion, a different picture began to emerge.

The African-American population in Aus-

tin had actually been in decline for years,

marked by a steady flight to surrounding sub-

urbs. 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 inter-

view, “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 expe-

rience a significant increase in Hispanic pop-

ulation, however, from 30 to over 50 percent

of area residents, doubling in actual num-

bers. Property values did skyrocket, but they

still lagged behind increases in the rest of the

city, and East Austin homes, at a 2005 medi-

an price of $103,000, remained considerably

cheaper than the city’s median home price of

$155,000. Despite increases in property val-

ues and taxes, East Austin homeownership

levels remained roughly constant at 44 per-

cent 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 eli-

gible for a tax exemption, out of a total of

13,823 parcels.

Overall, the various city staff studies sug-

gested that historic preservation played a rela-

tively 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 phenom-

enon 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 Com-

mission, but the properties do not get tax

breaks. Even though residents of the two dis-

tricts pulled a higher number of building per-

mits than the rest of East Austin, home pric-

es actually rose slightly less than the area

average. In fact, the historic district status

mitigated market pressures because it disal-

lows the high-density construction that their

proximity to downtown would suggest as the

“highest and best use” for the land.

The protection from skyrocketing hous-

ing prices has not been lost on other inhabit-

ants of East Austin. Since the adoption of

Austin’s new Neighborhood Planning frame-

work, all of the five plans produced by East

Austin neighborhoods have called for updat-

ed historic resources surveys, increased des-

ignations of individual buildings and local

districts as historic, rehabilitation incentives,

and preservation education. One plan explic-

itly identifies districts as powerful mecha-

nisms for maintaining affordable housing,

because they prevent indiscriminate demoli-

tions and unsympathetic or out-of-scale addi-

tions and infill construction. An East Austin

community leader has stated that historic dis-

tricts 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 gentrifica-

tion 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 gen-

trification. It included, explicitly and implicit-

ly, reviewing how much the city was losing by

granting preservation tax abatements, and

finding ways to change the Landmarks Com-

mission 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 preserva-

tion in Austin and seemingly came extremely

close to recommending an end to preserva-

tion as a city policy. Several taskforce mem-

bers 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 week-

ends, holding meetings, writing letters and

white papers, and attending public hearings,

influenced the taskforce enough to keep pres-

ervation 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 exemp-

tions as divisive and a disincentive for the city

to designate properties.) The taskforce also

recommended reducing the number of mem-

bers and eliminating seats reserved for spe-

cific 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 preser-

vation in Austin, many neighborhood associ-

ations and community groups used the task-

force as an opportunity to expand preserva-

tion protections considerably. Austin’s four-

teen National Register districts bestow pres-

tige on the city and a measure of protection

from federally funded projects, but what Aus-

tin had always lacked was a local historic dis-

trict designation, which is the only real pro-

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.

Gabia Alejo with her parents, Jose and Tomasa, in front of the East

Austin home that Gabia is fixing up. Photo by Natalie Charles.

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 con-

struction and alterations in concert with the

city’s historic preservation officer. The local ordi-

nance 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 neighbor-

hoods. A sampling of potential local district

resources include areas of larger, well estab-

lished homes dating back to the 1870s; shotgun

houses or simple craftsman-style workers cottag-

es from the early 20th century; the campus of

historically black Huston-Tillotson College; the

old Oakwood cemetery; 19th century commer-

cial 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 assis-

tance to communities facing gentrification by

saving community institutions and cultural

practices, stabilizing property values, valuing

and protecting affordable working-class hous-

ing, and providing financial and technical

support to low-income owners of historic

properties. Second, significant structural

issues still impact East Austin, making it vul-

nerable to gentrification. Ignoring them in

order to attack preservation has served no one

well—least of all the vanishing African-Amer-

ican 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

could only be built in areas specifically zoned

as residential. That helped subdivision devel-

opers, but not the cause of affordable hous-

ing. 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 compre-

hensive, 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 gentri-

fication has so inflamed the discussion in

Austin, however, as in other cities around the

country, that stereotypes and political grand-

standing 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 gen-

trification is not found in broad-brush gener-

alizations, but rather in analyzing each neigh-

borhood’s specific economic and social con-

cerns, understanding them as inextricably tied

to a complex local history, and devising appro-

priate solutions and strategies responsive to

the community’s needs and aspirations.

Bingamon, Brant. “PODER vs. H-

Zoning: 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

by Robert Garland Thomsonhistoric preservation

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 sea-

front 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 Insti-

tute 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 heri-

tage have received little attention. Real estate speculation, infra-

structure development, and a preference for modern forms have

prevailed over preservation.

Local historic preservationists, however, have become increas-

ingly 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, includ-

ing 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 near-

by Bombay Stock Exchange, and middle-class residents from the Cola-

ba 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, pol-

lution, and poor maintenance all take heavy tolls on the buildings.

Perceiving the inadequacies of the official process, a local organiza-

tion, the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), has rallied local plan-

ners, community leaders, and citizens to take the initiative in preserva-

tion 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 recollec-

tions of racism, exploitation, and exclusion. At the same time, the swell-

ing urban populace of Mumbai largely consists of newcomers who

might regard the 150-year-old British buildings with disdain or disinter-

est. Since the historic value could not suffice as a rallying cry for preser-

vation 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 discov-

ered 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 own-

ers, 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 build-

ings 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 evad-

ed European rule. Rama established Bangkok in 1782—then known

Looking EastThe 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

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.

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.

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 Bang-

kok 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 architec-

ture and spaces is the Banglamphu district.

An exceptional example of Bangkok’s early

urban development, Banglamphu contains a

diverse assemblage of temples, mosques, roy-

al 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 Banglam-

phu. Their aim was both to galvanize com-

munity 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 persuad-

ed the building’s owner, the Treasury Depart-

ment, to cancel demolition plans. The Khuru-

sapha 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 architectur-

ally significant buildings per se, but rather the

empowerment of local communities to direct

change in their surrounding built environ-

ment. Frequently in Mumbai, Bangkok, and

other emerging Asian megacities, the rapid

pace of development, hegemonic role of gov-

ernment, and market forces often rob citi-

zens of their voice in planning decisions.

Engaging the public in planning decisions by

bestowing new significance on a historic

urban space, however, proves not only a high-

ly effective preservation tool, but can give a

voice to citizens in the dynamic Asian urban

environment.

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 support-

ing.” Although he does not mention it specif-

ically, one of the “urbanities” that the new

megacity must support is the historic built

environment. Mumbai and Bangkok demon-

strate that even in the face of powerful inter-

ests—including development pressure,

neglect, and top-down policy making—orga-

nized 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 por-

tions of the population in historic preserva-

tion. Nor do the success stories above repre-

sent the norm in the Asian megacity, as any-

one 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 tradi-

tional conventions of historic preservation

practice there. The emerging emphases in

Bangkok and Mumbai on community-level

(rather than top-down) action, on negotiat-

ing the relationship between the dynamic

populace and the static urban environment,

and on accommodating the shifting values

of new constituent communities, all repre-

sent worthy objectives in the West, as well

as the East.

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

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.

by Sharon Macleanhistoric preservation

Saving High-Rise Public HousingAfter 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 responsi-

ble 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 architec-

tural 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 via-

ble—and valuable—option. In partnership with the Illinois Historic

Preservation Agency (IHPA), the CHA is demonstrating a new strate-

gy to restore some low-income public housing projects to their former

glory. According to Anne Haaker, Deputy State Historic Preservation

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 man-

ages 78 properties and 25,000 tenants, including residences for fami-

lies and seniors. Traditionally, dilapidated public housing in Chicago

has fallen victim to the wrecking ball, or perhaps worse, to unappeal-

ing 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 neighbor-

hoods and lets some landlords charge unrea-

sonably 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 preserva-

tion-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 neighbor-

hood development (TND) concepts to provide

a mix of residential and small-scale commer-

cial land uses, walkable neighborhoods, and

centrally located public space. This approach

is more popular than modernist develop-

ments because it can minimize sometimes

stark visual differences between public hous-

ing and surrounding areas—while address-

ing the physical deterioration and stigmatiza-

tion that may have struck both. Yet at the

same time, constructing neighborhoods from

scratch has required the demolition of histor-

ic buildings—eliciting protests not only from

preservationists but also public housing advo-

cates 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 hous-

ing stock.

In 1999, the National Park Service (NPS)

inserted itself into the debate, producing a

guide for listing public housing on the

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 signifi-

cant 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 residen-

tial, commercial, and service units, as well as

recreational amenities. IHPA has focused

preservation requirements on exterior fea-

tures, allowing the developers to reconfigure

the interior apartments—typically too small

for today’s standards—even at the loss of cer-

tain historic elements. This approach is a

compromise. According to Anne Haaker,

IHPA recognizes “the need to balance preser-

vation with the authority’s primary goal of

providing affordable housing.”

While the majority of properties identi-

fied by CHA and IHPA for preservation are

garden apartments, like the 454-unit Trum-

bull Park Homes, or mid-rise buildings dat-

ing from the late 1930s and early 1940s, Chi-

cago’s focus on historic preservation has

opened more recently built affordable hous-

ing 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 low-

er-income households. The Hilliard Homes

project effectively combined the low-income

and historic preservation credits.

The first phase of renovations to the Hill-

iard Homes started in 2002 and has been

completed, with two more phases remaining.

Improvements to landscaping, parking, con-

nections to the street grid, lighting, and recre-

ation areas, are planned as part of a mixed-

income community. Jonathan Fine, Presi-

dent of Preservation Chicago, a non-profit

advocacy group for the preservation of the

city’s history, supports the Hilliard rehabilita-

tion 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 suc-

cess in rehabilitating Trumbull Park Homes,

a two-story complex on the city’s Far South

Side. Like Hilliard Homes, this project com-

bines 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. Interi-

ors, however, will be upgraded to satisfy mod-

ern building code requirements. D. Bradford

Hunt, a public housing historian and Assistant

Professor of Social Science at Roosevelt Uni-

versity in Chicago, advocates preserving and

rehabilitating low-rise row house public hous-

ing 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 predomi-

nantly 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 selec-

tion process remained in place, favoring com-

plete families with an employed head of house-

hold. 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 land-

scape. 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 Interna-

tional Style, centering on unadorned con-

crete 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 want-

ed to explore other designs that would maxi-

mize 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 hous-

ing built and funds still low, the oft-neglected

existing housing began to fall apart. It

became increasingly hazardous, spurring

sociological studies on crime, poverty, and

their relationship to the physical environ-

ment. Large-scale public housing creation

officially ended in 1974 when President Nix-

on 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 popula-

tions, in addition to HOPE VI and voucher

programs. While the popular press has

focused on the relatively infrequent demoli-

tion and New Urbanist reconstruction of the

HOPE VI program, the Chicago Housing

Authority has been quietly at work imple-

menting 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 com-

munity 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 continu-

ing the cycle of demolition and displacement

that began as part of the urban renewal era, it

may be more appropriate and feasible to con-

serve 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 his-

toric preservation agencies, and combined

use of available tax credits could prove an

effective strategy toward improving the lives

of public housing residents across the coun-

try—all while preserving an important part of

our nation’s heritage.

Opposite page: Couch, New Orleans, LA, 2006.

Photo ©Will Steacy

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.

Katrina: One Year Later

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 com-

munity across the Mississippi River from

New Orleans. Wallace was living in Marrero

with his wife Gloria, 29, and their six chil-

dren, all under the age of 11, when Hurri-

cane 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 min-

utes 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’ neighbor-

hood. The family tried their luck carving out

space in a trailer owned by one of Mr. Wal-

lace’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 tempo-

rary shelter at Nicholls State University in

Thibodaux, a small bayou town 60 miles west

of New Orleans. They stayed for a little more

than three weeks—the longest stop on their

continuing journey.

During that time, Mr. Wallace grew

increasingly desperate, unsure how to pro-

ceed. 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 sup-

port network. In the days, weeks, and months

after the hurricane, as the media told indig-

nant 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 mission-

ary group that has organized more than

15,000 volunteers to travel to the Gulf Coast

region since last September. At first, its volun-

teers provided manpower at relief centers and

feeding stations, according to the group’s web-

site. 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 Ken-

tuckian Greg Porter, funded entirely by dona-

tions, and led by a team of Christian volun-

teers who, according to Porter, “answer to

God first and foremost,” God’s Katrina Kitch-

en bills itself as, “amidst the devastation and

debris, a place of peace, hope, caring, love

and comfort… the result of God’s calling peo-

ple … to serve.” When Porter first arrived in

Pass Christian last September 14th, “High-

way 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, serv-

ers, 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-denomination-

al—their motto is “Many Churches, One

God”—their shared faith and hopes of evan-

gelism bind them together. As Porter

explained to me in an email message in June,

“We have never been about feeding and dis-

tribution only—we are here to show God’s

Love to the People of the Gulf Coast.”

Beyond such notable large-scale opera-

tions were the efforts of congregations across

the nation, whose members “adopted” Gulf

Coast churches; collected and delivered dona-

tions of food, water, and clothing; and sent

carloads of volunteers to destroyed neighbor-

hoods. 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-

by Emily Weisskatrina: one year later

Crosses from RubbleAfter 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

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 assis-

tance,” Mississippi hurricane victim Ginnie

Smith told me. Deanne Kimball, a parishio-

ner at Bible Fellowship Church, whose mem-

bers have housed numerous teams of volun-

teer 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

unharmed by the storm, but her house, a ren-

ovated gardener’s cottage that sat behind a

huge historic house on the beach, was com-

pletely decimated. According to Mrs. Smith’s

daughter, Cecette Bassett, “The house literal-

ly 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, “noth-

ing 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 resi-

dents were still without running water. The

only groceries were at a local distribution cen-

ter run by missionaries, or at stores in Gulf-

port, 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 follow-

ing 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 “lack-

luster” performance. (The mayor later vetoed

the motion—but he could not veto the senti-

ment behind the decision.)

Mrs. Smith was in a particularly harrow-

ing situation. “I’m 80 years old, and I don’t

have a house,” she said, a week before Christ-

mas last year. Her insurance company

claimed she should have had a flood insur-

ance 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 wid-

ow of a Texas oil executive—never would

have imagined. “I never thought I’d be home-

less 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 climb-

ing 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 Com-

mission Ministries, is composed almost

entirely of young people—95 percent of

This page: Emmett Wallace. Previous page: Wallace’s daughters, Moniquequa and Gloriadeidra.

Photos courtesy Dr. John Griffin

members are college students—and its mis-

sion, according to staff member Matt Olsze-

wski, 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 Pontchar-

train], and each church it seemed had at least

30 to 50 people that they were feeding and

finding places for them to sleep,” said Hilder-

bran. 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 inter-

ested 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 stay-

ing at the shelter along with her daughter Tif-

fany, 26, and Tiffany’s three young boys. It

was Burnside, a widow, who approached the

Matts, expressing interest in going back to

Ohio with them. “But,” Emmett told me, “the

only way she was gonna leave was if her cous-

in 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 Bowl-

ing 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 con-

tinue 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 condi-

tion of their staying, the Wallaces came any-

way. “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 strug-

gled 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 pri-

vate 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 Vil-

lage. 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 real-

estate 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

WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA STRUCK

the Gulf Coast last August, most TV camer-

as were trained on New Orleans. That focus

only intensified after the city’s levee system

failed and left whole neighborhoods under-

water. 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 elect-

ed 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 main-

tain 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-

aged to attract new investors who are plan-

ning 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 impor-

tance 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 barbe-

cue. 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 Septem-

ber. 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

by Jess McCuankatrina: one year later

Fifteen Minutes With… Brent Warr, Mayor of Gulfport, MississippiThe 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

city that day, and I saw a uniform I didn’t rec-

ognize. A young lady who was a Charleston

police officer was standing in one of the busi-

est 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 proba-

bly 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 need-

ed water first, then food, then we started wor-

rying 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 com-

plicated 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 impor-tant people in Gulfport’s recovery and rebuilding effort? Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, and Haley Barbo-

ur—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 genera-

tor, they would get us a generator. Also, Con-

gressmen Chip Pickering and Gene Taylor.

On the local level, the guy that I have so

much respect for is our coroner, Gary Har-

grove. 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 dig-

nity, and he gave a lot of respect to the vic-

tims 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, provid-

ing labor and materials at no cost. It’s amaz-

ing 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

weeks before the storm. It was just sitting

there: a bunch of bunk houses, warehouses,

and a kitchen. We agreed to give the NC Bap-

tist men the use of this for two years. They

came in and built us another big warehouse

and brought in trailers for showers and plac-

es 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.”

What was their connection to the Gulf-port 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.

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 indus-

try. 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 sum-

mer 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

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.

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.

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. Peo-

ple are coming in, wanting to work, wanting

to participate in all the new economic activity.

The government opportunity zones and tax-

incentives 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 opportuni-

ties and prime pieces of real estate. They can

really build a quality product now, and they’re

very attracted to Gulfport.

Did you feel that, in the aftermath of Katrina, the media and the public over-looked cities like Gulfport to focus main-ly 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.

support to a commu-

nity whose churches

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 busi-

nesses 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 com-

pany, the Corporation for National and Com-

munity 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 gov-

ernment 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 gar-

dener’s cottage of a friend’s house and is try-

ing 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 report-

ed 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 gon-

na 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 Chris-

tian, distributing Clorox and gloves, three

meals a day, and other needed supplies.

Scott Kimball, a parishioner at Bible Fel-

lowship Church in Pass Christian, continues

to be impressed by the revolving crew of vol-

unteers. His small congregation’s initial goal,

after Katrina hit, was yard cleanup for mem-

bers 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 volun-

teers stay only a short while, “the few long-

term volunteers I’ve spoken with have no

immediate plans for pulling out—even with

another hurricane season looming.”

page 42

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 ques-

tion about that. Everyone was trauma-

tized 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.

cont’d from page 39

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/TCR-

AL122005_Katrina.pdf

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

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 with-

in 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 hand-

made 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 settle-

ment, for instance, in Ecology of Fear—have

made even the gloomiest prognostications

eminently readable, drawing him a much

wider audience than most neo-Marxists could

ever hope to enjoy.

But Planet of Slums lacks Davis’s charac-

teristic 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.” Statis-

tic 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 misera-

ble; they are growing; and their growth is in

large part due to neo-liberal policies of First-

World lending institutions. In one paragraph

we move rapidly from Beijing to Bangalore to

Shenzhen. It’s dizzying, and difficult to dis-

cern any narrative other than that most lives

anywhere other than North America and

Europe are currently looking particularly nas-

ty 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 pollu-

tion. In Rio de Janeiro and Caracas, slums sit

on unstable hillsides, whose recurring disso-

lution has killed thousands.

Most disturbing are the examples of mil-

lions of people literally “living in shit.” Kin-

shasa, in the Republic of Congo, has a popu-

lation of 10 million and “no waterborne sew-

age system,” Davis says, leaving us to imag-

ine 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 particu-

larly onerous burdens for women, who wait

for the cover of early morning or dark to

excrete in public.

But why exactly have these states aban-

doned their citizens to lives of squalor? Davis

explains: “As Third World governments abdi-

cated 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 command-

ing 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 sur-

render their economic independence to the

IMF and World Bank.” What are those proto-

cols? A detailed example would do wonders.

It is also unclear if solutions lurk within

Davis’s assembled facts and exposés. Peruvi-

an economist Hernando de Soto has advocat-

ed 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 slum-

lords. ‘Titling,’ Davis further admonishes, is

ultimately a nefarious scheme to undermine

slum solidarity. So is the very concept of pri-

vate 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 state-

sponsored housing—unlikely as that seems

given his skepticism of corrupt governments

and substandard public housing projects?

We simply don’t know what he thinks

Planet of SlumsBy Mike Davis. New York: Verso. Cloth, 228 pages. $24

An urban scholar looks into the earth’s future and sees a heap of filth

by Carly BerwickBOOK REVIEW

because he never tells us, moving quickly

on to his next example of slum deprivation.

Davis once stood out among socialist crit-

ics because he was able to entertain lay read-

ers. 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-the-

wall, 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 insti-

tution 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 impor-

tant goad to other writers and thinkers to

pick up the cause.

THE PUBLISHED PROCEEDINGS OF A

conference held at the University of Pennsyl-

vania in early 2006, Rebuilding Urban Plac-

es, 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 Hurri-

cane 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, tech-

niques 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 repeti-

tion of Hurricane Katrina.” The reasons are

simple: either a major flood on the Missis-

sippi system that originates higher in the

watershed or the inevitable diversion of the

Mississippi into a new distributary, the

Atchafalaya River, will bring new destruc-

tion to New Orleans in the not-so-distant

future. Establishing New Orleans’s unfit-

ness 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 folk-

lorist and sociologist—offer what they can

to help others learn from the disaster and

create a realistic model for the city’s short-

term 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 replen-

ishing 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 nat-

ural, social, and economic challenges posed

by the problem at hand, historic preservation-

ist Randall Mason’s argument for the central-

ity of cultural preservation in rebuilding pro-

vides a much-needed perspective. Emphasiz-

ing the import of cultural values over eco-

nomic 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 imme-

diate future: We cannot simply move away to

drier ground or on to the next problem.

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

by Mariana MogilevichBOOK REVIEW

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 gentri-

fication 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 Pier-

son 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,

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 com-

pelling, 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 Lob-

ster and Friendly’s. Pierson attempts to make

the reader complicit in her attack on “prog-

ress.” “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 Hobo-

ken 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 gentrifica-

tion and displacement presumably jumpstart-

ed by an influx of white, “artsy” college grad-

uates, much like Pierson herself.

Pierson finishes by describing her cur-

rent 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 devel-

opment 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 spac-

es 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.

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

by Anika K. SinghBOOK REVIEW

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 full-time 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>

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.

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.

CONTRIBUTORS

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for a few months, take temporary

shelter in an office building in the

vicinity of a recent natural disas-

ter. 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 impossi-

ble, 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 Shangri-

La, 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 mosqui-

toes. Two hundred people showed up to attend a meeting in a modu-

lar 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 con-

tradicted 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-

gins is 50 miles north of the Mississippi coast and sustained little

hurricane damage, but was nonetheless part of the long-term recov-

ery 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 seeming-

ly 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 scrib-

bled 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 twelve-

hour days alternating between meetings in the town and our “office”

in the back of an old supermarket in Wiggins, next to the Piggly Wig-

gly. 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 with-

in 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 dam-

age, could complete a plan the fastest. It would act as a model that

other counties could follow. But everyone was told by FEMA higher-

ups 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 opportu-

nity to contribute.

continued from page 48

americancity.org

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, archi-

tects, 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 “Direct-

Bill,” 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

text and photos by Doug GiulianoLAST EXIT

An Outsider Peers into the FEMA TrailerOur 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

continued on page 47

Design and Map the Future of Your Community With GIS

GIS Facilitates the Decision Making Process for Planning GIS Facilitates the Decision Making Process for Planning

No matter how large or small your community, as a planner you deal with spatial informa-tion such as parcels, zoning, land use, addresses, transportation networks, and housing stock. You also monitor multiple urban and regional indicators, forecast future community needs, and plan accordingly to help improve the quality of life in your community.

Every day, planners use geographic information system (GIS) technology to research, develop,implement, and monitor the progress of their plans. GIS provides planners, surveyors, and engineers with the tools they need to design and map their neighborhoods and cities. Plan-ners have the technical expertise, political savvy, and fi scal understanding to transform avision of tomorrow into a strategic action plan for today, and they use GIS to facilitate the decision making process. Call ESRI today to learn more about how you can plan the futureof your community with GIS.

1-888-603-3207www.esri.com/planning E-mail: [email protected]

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GIS Planning Solutions for

• Community-based design and planning

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• Better communities for future generations

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Planners deal with multiple scenarios and design innovative solutions to meet the needs of their communities.

Use GIS to design and map existing and future city neighborhoods.Use GIS to design and map existing and future city neighborhoods.

Planners deal with multiple scenarios and design innovative solutions to

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

next american city--issue 12: historic preservation

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