The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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William Menking
has continued to work in the city and use its services but largely live and pay
taxes elsewhere. “Between 1815 and 1875,” Kenneth Jackson points out,
“America’s largest cities under went a dramatic spatial change . . . the steam
ferry, omnibus, the commuter railroad . . . gave additional impetus to an exodus
that would turn cities ‘inside out’ and inaugurate a new pattern of suburban
affluence and center despair.” 4 In fact, so many prosperous residents
were leaving the tumultuous city by 1850 that New York newspapers complained
the city was being “desert[ed] by its men of wealth”; one New York
City politician argued against “the improvement of ferry service,” hoping
thereby to slow the middle-class exodus. 5
With a declining upper and middle class to help provide for services,
the city faced the problem of providing for a population that required
but could not pay for social services. Unfortunately, American cities are
legally prohibited from trying to plan and regionally tax the escaping suburban
middle classes. Unlike in Europe, where cities have historically been
self-governing, in America cities derive their power to govern entirely from
their state: they have no political power that is not granted to them by the
state legislature. If New York City, for example, wants to levy a tax on its
commuting suburbanites to help with the city’s finances, it must first ask
permission of the state legislature. The state of New York, always careful to
guard against the power of Gotham and representing conflicting rural, regional,
and suburban interests, typically denies the city any such authority.
Contemporary gentrification or urban regeneration is also the result
of a thirty-year campaign by government, real estate interests, the media, city
planners, and architects to reverse the perceived “urban crises” of the American
city in the 1960s and 1970s. 6 These crises began after the Second World
War, when the American middle class in ever greater numbers abandoned entire
neighborhoods of the country’s central cities—with their aging infrastructure
and declining government assistance—for subsidized houses, roads,
parks, and schools in former farmlands surrounding the old commercial cores.
These old inner-city neighborhoods became the home to poor immigrants and
racial groups locked out of the new suburbs by segregation. 7 Many buildings,
even blocks, of the old city were abandoned and left to deteriorate.
The accelerated deterioration of the city’s housing stock, now no
longer owner-occupied but controlled by large real estate groups, led to a reduction
in the buildings’ economic value, causing a simultaneous reduction
in the city’s tax base. A gap between public needs and the city’s ability to
meet them led to the much-debated urban crises of the American city. A
1968 survey of homeowners in Boston makes this point: