Tenements: Culture and Condition: Planning, Architecture, and Aesthetics

Jeremiah P.Connell

"A city should be built to give its citizens security and happiness," Aristotle cited in Sitte in The City Reader. 2003, p 414

"All the studies suggest that housing quality is positively correlated with psychological well-being." Evans, Wells, and Moch, 2003,  Journal of Social Issues

“The urban renewal planners saw the traditional physical structure and appearance of urban, working class, and ethnic neighborhoods as antithetical to the modern aesthetic and way of life.  In this sense, the aesthetic and economic issues of urban renewal inter-relate as “unattractive” areas were thought to be a deterrent to business, especially the kind of high-end retail and tourist-based businesses that Portland had been attempting to secure since the decline of the port after World War I (from Babcock, as cited in Violette p 106).”

“Furthermore, the image of an urban working-class neighborhood can be seen as a physical embodiment of WASP fears in the post-World War II era (Violette, p107).”  

Portland’s SCRA (Slum Clearance and Redevelopment Authority)

City Hall Feb 9, 1953: pp 6-9  from a SCRA pamphlet/meeting outline/list of topics for discussion:  

"[The] group of problems is that of the basic causes of blight whose correction is so important to the long-run success of redevelopment...  In Portland these causes have been placed in four categories as follows:

 A: The causes which are inherent within the residential area itself: age and deterioration of structures and land development patterns, high density of settlement, lack of open spaces and inadequate streets, utilities, and services

B: The forces which attack the residential areas from without: invasion of industry, commerce and traffic.

C: Human misconduct and uncleanliness.

D. Poverty, whether the result of individual failure or of a low-wage structure

Programs attacking blight:

A: the housing inspection Program of the Health Department is one of the most important of these programs attacking blight

B:  Redevelopment

C: Planning

D: Economic development

E: New Programs Needed: in addition to the programs listed above, it is felt that more programs are needed to attack blight and to better the housing situation within the city… "

“Demolishing houses and apartment buildings and paving the sites for parking lots seemed to be Portland’s unofficial policy for the Bayside neighborhood throughout the 1990s." Casco Bay Weekly, Aug 20^th 1998,  Kimberly Jean Smith p.10-11, 14-15

Housing with a front porch would allow the mom in this photo to keep an eye on kids playing curbside and still mind what’s going on indoors.  It would also facilitate better interaction between passersby on the street and residents.

There are better ways to guide and shape the development of houses, blocks, neighborhoods, cities and regions.  

"Conventional design practice models are insufficient instruments for achieving meaningful social, economic, and political change in many complex contexts."  p 233, Jason Pearson in Good Deeds, Good Design; Community Service Through Architecture

Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2004. Bryan Bell, Editor.    

"It is known...that a lack of financial knowledge and skills can contribute to poor financial choices. Likewise, there is consensus that people have a tendency to perpetuate negative financial habits that can damage families for generations. It also is accepted that the behavior behind diminishing savings levels and escalating debt has disastrous implications, not just for families or communities, but for the entire nation, as well."

http://www.nefe.org/pages/whitepaper2004symposium.html

A culture of Poverty?

“Poverty is a state of want rather than scarcity. Oscar Lewis coined the expression "culture of poverty" for the ideas and behaviour poor people in some capitalist societies develop as they adapt to urban circumstances. Among the characteristics of the culture of poverty are a lack of involvement in the institutions of the wider society (except for the armed services, courts, prisons, and welfare organisations); financial circumstances that include a shortage of cash, lack of savings, borrowing, and pawning ; inadequate education and virtual illiteracy, mistrust of the police and government; social relationships that include early experience with sex, widespread illegitimacy, wife abandonment, and mother-centred families and a lack of privacy.

There are at least two different views of urban poverty. The first is that urban poor develop their own unique adaptation, fundamentally different from the larger society's way of doing things. The second is that the urban poor share many values of the larger society around them; their adaptation is different only because they lack the education and income to conform. http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/623.html”

"Many writers have since rejected the notion, [of a culture of poverty] proposing explanations that deflect blame from the victim and place it squarely on systemic structural barriers in the labor market: racial discrimination, technological change that has favored skilled labor and a spatial mismatch between suburban job growth and the confinement of the poor to inner-city neighborhoods."  Katherine Newman

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040315/newman/2

About Rent-to-Own Places:

"In my first week of training, we had to go and repo a bunch of furniture, appliances and such from a woman living on a second floor apartment. For starters it was very, very hot that day, and carrying all of that stuff down some very steep stairs was incredibly taxing. But the real bad part was this: The reason she could no longer afford stuff was because her live-in boyfriend had injured his hand and couldn't work. He was on a cot in the living room, with a drip in his arm. We took away her kitchen table, her bed, her dresser and bedside table, her fridge, and I believe a couch. She had two young children who just kind of stared at us the whole time. When we moved the bed, there was a mother cat and a brand new litter of kittens underneath, who would no longer have a nice dark place to chill under.

As we were in the process of removing stuff, the woman's ex-husband/boyfriend showed up and started screaming at her about what a bad mother she was. She screamed back at him about what an asshole he was. He told her he was going to fight to get sole custody of the kids.

I left feeling like the worst human being in the world. Let’s see what else....Well nothing else sticks out like that one, but in general there were several things I could not deal with. I could not deal with calling people and harassing them for money. I could not deal with asking them what other commitments they had in their life. I could not deal with asking them when they got paid, and trying to convince them to come straight to us before doing anything else. I could not deal with telling people who had trouble feeding their family that they needed a plasma television.  

Also, there was a bit of racism. Most of my co-workers did not like the various African immigrants who frequented the store. They loved the strippers who came in though.

One can understand why I only worked there for about 9 days.”

As told by  by Chris G. on  Oct 14, 2006

Poor housing conditions, absentee landlords, and a lack of basics that many take for granted, such as dependable plumbing and electricity, breed an atmosphere rife with resentment and anger.  The photograph in the upper left shows a neighborhood on the outskirts of Montego Bay Town in Jamaica.  There is no proper sewer system in this vicinity. Here, shallow trenches run with effluent down the sides of the hill, and electricity is pirated; piped in to only a few of the houses through amateur wiring.  The area is known to locals as a dangerous place where multiple murders have occurred within a span as short as a week.  The other two pictures show what once was a real estate office in another part of Montego Bay.  Land titles were actively sought out, and landowners from as far away as England tracked down and courted by this office in order to develop areas for a golf course and other leisure businesses.  People who had lived on this land for generations (often in conditions similar to those shown in photograph #1) were evicted en masse, and some of their houses demolished.  Around 1992 or 1993, evictees and squatters firebombed this real-estate office, killed some of the employees, and threatened and beat others.

Across the West Indies and pretty much all of the Americas, poor people need a place to live but are not adequately accounted for by planners and municipal authorities.  Developers often do not take these people’s existence or their needs into account until large protests are held, and/or their equipment is sabotaged, and/or violence against their agents occurs. 

Riis documented the conditions that many New York City working people lived in at the turn of the last century.  Modernist architecture and planning grew as a reaction to the sort of conditions illustrated in the photo above. 

Close-together Apartment houses like this were thought to be a fire hazard.  They were, but people had other reasons for seeking to raze them.  Some complained of the "haphazard" or amateur architecture and construction, and some found the convention of having large families in small apartments sharing common space and mothering duties to be very unlike their own norms.  People do not always respect one another's differences.

The Triple Decker is “a housing form that, in certain contexts (suburban Boston for example) is associated with the middle class, while in others (such the textile communities in New Bedford, Massachusetts or Lewiston, Maine) it is associated with the working class. While he calls some buildings “expensive three-deckers,” Warner describes the three-decker housing outside of Boston as a type the lower middle class “resorted” to because of high land prices.  Still, in context the form is still suburban and middle class.  Heath, on the other hand, describes the three-deckers in New Bedford, Mass as being largely speculator-built, and intended to house workers from the city’s textile mills.  Only in later periods did these buildings become owner occupied."  Zachary Violette, The Aesthetics of Class and Ethnicity in the Renewal of
     Portland's Vine-Deer-Chatham Neighborhood 1920-1960  p 14