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New York
City’s Stuyvesant Town is the largest housing development in Manhattan, and
also one of the most controversial and most studied. Adam Tanaka reviews the
latest contribution to studies of Stuyvesant Town, by Rachael A. Woldoff,
Lisa M. Morrison and Michael R. Glass. Gentrification and rent
deregulation have changed the composition of the development, and longtime
renters now coexist with younger and wealthier households. Woldoff et al. explore this coexistence
using ethnographic methods, and situate the transformation within a broader
shift to a neoliberal housing policy.
Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village as
seen from the air over the East River looking north
(cc) Alec Jordan/Wikimedia Commons
Stuyvesant Town:
between myth and reality
Seventy years after
opening its doors to World War II veterans, Stuyvesant Town remains
by far the largest housing development in Manhattan. The project looms over the
Lower East Side, with its 35 red-brick towers, 8,755 apartments and
superblock design providing a marked contrast to the surrounding urban fabric.
Stuyvesant Town also remains one of the city’s most controversial real-estate
developments. In its early years, the project was a maligned symbol of urban
renewal and racial segregation. More recently, the development sparked heated
debates about the viability of middle-class housing in Manhattan as it was
bought and subsequently foreclosed upon in the largest real-estate transaction
and mortgage default in American history.
The project has also been
the subject of considerable research. Historian Samuel Zipp’s Manhattan
Projects (2010) explored the politics of development
and the culture of early occupancy, while real-estate journalist Charles
Bagli’s Other People’s Money (2013) drew attention to the financial speculation that drove the highly
leveraged purchase of the complex in 2006 and the subsequent
post-recession fallout. Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the
Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods, co-written by Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison and
Michael R. Glass, also examines the most recent chapter of the Stuyvesant
Town story. But rather than studying the elite politicking of private investors
and public officials that animated Bagli’s book, Priced Out shifts its focus to the politics of everyday
life within the complex.
In particular, the
authors explore the impacts of rent deregulation on the social composition of
this previously “stodgy” middle-class neighborhood. As younger, market-rate
residents have gradually replaced older, rent-stabilized tenants, a “curious
menagerie” has come to occupy Stuyvesant Town’s anonymous red brick towers
(p. 3). Using ethnographic methods, the authors examine the
intergenerational and class conflicts between the project’s various subgroups,
and the role of management in exacerbating tensions. Criticizing the
economistic focus of much housing scholarship, Woldoff et al. argue that it is impossible to fully understand
transformations in the city’s housing market without examining how these
changes affect the social dynamics of specific communities.
The book is structured in
four parts. First, the authors provide a brief historical overview of
Stuyvesant Town’s origins. The authors then describe Stuyvesant Town’s
evolution from a racially segregated veterans’ community focused almost
exclusively on child-rearing to an increasingly disparate mixture of
rent-stabilized seniors and new market-rate renters, comprising students,
professionals and young families drawn to the project’s convenient downtown
location.
Inset chapters describe
the policy context driving the deregulation of the city’s middle-income housing
stock. The authors pinpoint New York State’s Rent Regulation Reform Act of
1993 and Vacancy Decontrol Law of 1997 as watershed moments in the
transformation of Stuyvesant Town from a relatively stable middle-class
community to a so-called “luxury rental” development. They situate these
changes within a broader paradigm shift from a managerial urban housing policy
with state-enforced rent controls to an increasingly neoliberal agenda
promoting the “invisible hand” of the market at the expense of permanently
affordable housing.
Daily life in a
community in flux
The authors’ principal
focus, however, is on how the transformation of Stuyvesant Town from community
to commodity has impacted daily life. “What is it like for such different
groups to live in Stuy Town together?” they ask. “Are all of these residents happy
here? How long do they plan to stay?” (p. 3). These questions are explored
through interviews with 49 residents across the range of subgroups living
in the project. In-depth “vignette” chapters describe the experiences of
representatives of the two resident groups perhaps most at odds with each
other.
Chapter 3 tells the story
of Ruthie, who has lived at Stuyvesant Town since 1948. Ruthie describes
the transformation of the neighborhood from an age- and income-homogeneous
community to a diverse set of groups with competing interests and expectations.
While Ruthie herself is relatively indifferent to these changes—and highlights
moments of collaboration between young and old—she relates anecdotes of other
senior citizens who feel victimized by managerial decisions that they feel
promote the interests of young residents at their expense.
Chapter 7 explores life
at Stuyvesant Town from the perspective of Kara, a senior-year student at
nearby New York University (NYU). Kara is emblematic of the trend of “studentification”
in Lower Manhattan’s private rental sector. Pre-existing residents argue that
they cannot compete with students willing to subdivide apartments and split the
rent, particularly when such practices are encouraged by revenue-maximizing
landlords. With college-based social networks and a short-term view of her
residency, Kara’s relationship to Stuyvesant Town differs from that of
long-standing residents. Like Ruthie, Kara does not recount any out-and-out
conflicts between her and her elderly neighbors. She views the area without
sentimentality, as a temporary housing solution rather than a community in
which she has a deep stake.
Change at
Stuyvesant Town: a neoliberal story?
While Priced Out’s
ethnographic research is balanced and precise, giving equal weight to the
various constituents in Stuyvesant Town’s “curious menagerie,” the book
stumbles when trying to tie the story to broader political-economic and
theoretical concerns. The authors situate Stuyvesant Town’s transformation from
rent-regulated to market-rate housing within a structural shift from a
Fordist–Keynesian to a neoliberal urban-policy paradigm. At first glance, this
appears to be a plausible analytic framework. On closer inspection, however, it
becomes clear that the authors’ use of a neoliberal framework is more of a
hindrance than a help.
Critiques of
neoliberalism tend to romanticize either the state or the community as the
appropriate scale of social management; Priced Out does both. The authors contend that
“New York City’s policies in the mid-twentieth century were in keeping
with larger societal ideals grounded in justice and pragmatism, in which
housing was viewed as a right” (p. 101). But the early history of
Stuyvesant Town itself directly contradicts such a thesis. Not only did the
project benefit from significant public subsidies to clear a low-income
neighborhood in favor of a racially homogeneous, middle-class enclave—hardly a
policy of “justice and pragmatism”—but its contractual arrangements guaranteed
only 25 years of rent controls, tied to ongoing tax abatements, after
which MetLife, a life-insurance company turned developer, could charge market
rents—hardly a vision of housing “as a right.” While the authors argue that
Stuyvesant Town was built due to “a need for middle-class families to have
access to affordable housing in the city,” they fail to acknowledge that the
project was as much—if not more so—driven by a rationale of fiduciary profit
and the upgrading of Manhattan’s property values: nothing short of state-sanctioned
gentrification.
It is not only the
state’s historic role in social welfare provision that is uncritically
embraced, however. Priced Out also romanticizes the notion of community as an ahistorical and morally upright social unit, without unpacking its
complexities. Many scholars have explored the question of whether
community—particularly middle-class community—is a necessarily exclusionary
concept, a literature with which Woldoff et al. do not engage or even
acknowledge (see Herbert Gans, The Levittowners, 1982; Suzanne Keller, Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality, 2003; and Robert Nelson, The Private Neighborhood, 2005, among others). Instead, they lament the disintegration of a
previously homogeneous urban neighborhood, implicitly suggesting that cities
work best when composed of a mosaic-like fabric of introverted communities.
Whose “right to
the city”?
The authors deploy urban
theorist
Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “the right
to the city” to assert the primacy of existing residents’ claims to the
neighborhood over the rights of newer, richer tenants. The authors assert that,
historically, “Stuyvesant Town provided a sense of place” and a “sense of
stability,” qualities currently being eroded by market pressures
(pp. 38–39). But who qualified for entry into that community in the first
place? The authors admit that MetLife’s original leasing procedures were hardly
meritocratic. Beyond the racial restrictions, many early tenants had
professional or personal connections with the life insurers that fast-tracked
their applications and left others to languish on the waitlist for years, if
not decades. What of their “right to the city”?
In contrast to the
original tenants, who apparently came in search of “the promise of community,”
the authors castigate new, market-rate residents for using the development “as
a foothold to begin an ambitious life in New York City, or as a stepping
stone on the way to an aspirational, higher-status residence” (p. 184).
This is also a simplistic dichotomy. Many of Stuyvesant Town’s early tenants
were driven into the project by a desperate postwar housing shortage as much as
any romanticized notions of community life—arguably exactly the same reasons
why so many people are willing to pay exorbitant market rents to live in
Stuyvesant Town’s institutional tower blocks today.
Many of the project’s
early tenants also benefited from rent controls to build up savings and later
purchase a home, using Stuyvesant Town as both foothold and stepping stone to
homeownership—possibly the prime function of urban rental housing. There is
nothing wrong—and indeed, much right—with arguing that pre-existing residents
should have a greater right to the community by dint of longevity of tenure.
But the authors do not grapple with the thorny issue of how to evaluate, let
alone rank, rights-based claims to shelter, and they tend to romanticize the
motives that drew residents to Stuyvesant Town in the first place.
Neighborhood
politics: possibilities and constraints
The book’s most
intriguing moments come when the authors engage with the multifaceted meanings
and uses of Stuyvesant Town to different resident groups. They describe how
Stuyvesant Town is appropriate for senior living; single-floor apartment
layouts and elevators are convenient for mobility-impaired residents, while
proximity to major hospitals in “Bedpan Alley” make trips to the doctor less
stressful. At the same time, the authors show that many aspects of Stuyvesant
Town’s design and location are convenient to younger residents. Students from
nearby universities and young professionals working in Midtown are drawn to the
walk-to-work location, while young families appreciate the lack of through
traffic and the plentiful recreational facilities.
In the book’s closing
pages, the authors also acknowledge the importance of politics—or the process
of collectively binding decision-making—to the future of increasingly age- and
income-diverse urban neighborhoods. “In order to achieve community in the city,
the heterogeneous groups who inhabit the same space must establish strong
relationships and unify politically in pursuit of their best interests,” they
write, in a statement that could apply to urban governance more generally
(p. 192).
Whether the pursuit of
disparate interests can be achieved through political action is a promising
avenue for further research, and arguably more fruitful than the authors’
reliance on an orthodox neoliberal framework. That said, any analysis of
political organizing at the neighborhood scale must also engage with the role
of both public and private sectors in structuring outcomes. After all, in the
recent October 2015 sale of Stuyvesant Town to private equity giant
Blackstone and Canadian pension fund Ivanhoe Cambridge, the new landlord’s
pledge to maintain affordable rents in 5,000 apartments for another
20 years was as much a product of closed-door negotiations between
investors and politicians as it was a result of direct community action.
Bibliography
- Bagli, Charles. 2013. Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real-Estate Deal Ever Made, New York: Penguin.
- Gans, Herbert. 1982. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, New York: Columbia University Press.
- Keller, Suzanne. 2003. Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Nelson, Robert. 2005. Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.
- Zipp, Samuel. 2010. Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold-War, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
