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Sabrina Deitrick and Cliff Ellis Respond

Dear Shelterforce:

Your article, “The Importance of Design” (Shelterforce #116), was disturbing for two reasons.

First, as to the role of design: there’s no doubt that good design is better than bad design, and what was described sounds like good design. But better design won’t solve the housing problems of low-income households, as HOPE VI sometimes seems to hold, with particular reference to New Urbanist approaches. We shouldn’t have to reargue the physical environmental determinist debate all over again.

In fact, very often the stress on good design comes about only because the objective is also income mix, and you can only get higher income folk to move next to poorer ones if you have decent design. The decent design ends up aimed at attracting the higher income people, not for the poor, and generally ends up reducing the new amount of housing available to the poor. That’s particularly true where income mix is introduced into a formerly all-low-income development without one-for-one replacement. Shelterforce ought to point out the limits and misuses as well as the benefits of good design. (Ed.’s note: See our article on HOPE VI in Shelterforce #104.)

And second, glib acceptance and promotion of New Urbanism is out of place in a magazine like Shelterforce. There’s been pretty consistent criticism of it from progressives as upper class, elitist, falsely nostalgic, anti-urban, sprawl-inducing in a regional context, pretentious and environmentally deterministic. Even the American Planning Association’s Planning magazine is skeptical.

Certainly some of what goes under the name New Urbanism is good design. Design should be participatory and contextual and respectful historically, and infill is a solid approach to building new housing. We’ve known all that a long time; part of it has even been official Department of Housing and Urban Development policy since the 1970s, after much tenant agitation. But New Urbanism, as the article mentions, is also often called the New Suburbanism. The article doesn’t point out why: that it’s a class-specific, nostalgic, anti-urban, rigidly controlling approach that makes money for developers but hurts the cities.

Some of its practitioners may do good work in the cities, and call it New Urbanist; most of its practitioners, and most of its rhetoric, and certainly its role in the discussion of the problems of urban society, are harmful to the principles for which Shelterforce stands.

Shelterforce should promote good design; it shouldn’t offer it as a panacea, nor present a major new ideology that defends suburban housing without some critical examination.

In friendship and appreciation of the good work Shelterforce does,

– Peter Marcuse
School of Architecture,
Planning & Preservation
Columbia University

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It’s not clear that Professor Marcuse bothered to read our article. Like others, he is blinded by the success of front page, New Urbanist, greenfield projects – Seaside, Celebration and the like. They generate pretty colored pictures in magazines and even star in Hollywood movies, but Pittsburgh is not Florida, Holmes Place is not Celebration, and the Hill District is not Seaside. The four projects in Pittsburgh that we profiled are not in “upper class, elitist, nostalgic, anti-urban” neighborhoods, and the article makes that clear.

Professor Marcuse ignores the years of organizing in these communities that led them to their own community planning processes. He doesn’t even acknowledge that lower-income communities can address their own housing problems and forge collective solutions. To him, the neighborhoods were passive receptacles of “class-specific, nostalgic, anti-urban” housing. This is untrue. Oakland, the Hill, Manchester and the South Side are active communities planning their own futures.

Professor Marcuse also assumes that these projects were the product of a “rigidly controlling approach that makes money for developers.” However, the Pittsburgh projects we discussed were developed or conceived by nonprofit CDCs. His letter seems to carry an undertone that somehow affordable housing for lower-income and working-class people cannot be well designed. But our article shows that CDCs in Pittsburgh have learned how to combine affordability with high quality design using New Urbanist principles.

Finally, nowhere in the article do we glibly accept and promote the New Urbanism. We simply show how several urban projects in Pittsburgh, designed by not-so-famous architects working closely with local communities, have successfully produced attractive, functional and affordable inner city housing. Nowhere do we present a deterministic argument that better design solves all urban housing problems, and nowhere do we defend suburban housing.

Perhaps Professor Marcuse should be more open to innovations from outside the Connecticut-Manhattan corridor with which he is so familiar. Pittsburgh is a declining city (population down 10 percent in the 1990s) in a declining region (the largest metropolitan population drop in the country). CDCs and inner city neighborhoods that are attempting to solve their housing problems through new solutions should be praised for their effort and determination, not scolded for designing high-quality affordable urban housing.