About Small Town in Town

 

In Fall 2013, Pratt PSPD’s introductory courses in City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation focused on the Lower East Side.  The Fundamentals of Planning studio worked with Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) on a community economic development and disaster resiliency project, focusing on the needs of public housing tenants in the area.  The Historic Preservation program’s Fall 2013 Documentation/Interpretation course aimed to work in tandem with the Fundamentals studio to address issues facing this population, using a historic preservation lens.  This website represents the culmination of the Documentation/Interpretation course’s work. 

 

A major point of concern for current tenants of the New York Public Housing Authority (NYCHA) is NYCHA’s proposed Land Lease Program, which aims to lease property on NYCHA campuses for development of new housing, including both market and “affordable” units.  In November 2013, the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project (NYELJP), the Urban Justice Center, and a coalition of 409 tenants and four tenant associations filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop or slow the Land Lease plan, on the grounds that NYCHA violated state and federal laws by failing to conduct environmental reviews and a floodplain analysis before soliciting bids from private developers, and violated the Public Trust Doctrine by failing to obtain the necessary legislative approval before targeting parkland sites for non-parkland use.  Three of the eight sites included in NYCHA’s Land Lease pilot proposal (Baruch, Smith, and LaGuardia Houses) are included in this study, as are neighboring Wald and Riis Houses, which do not currently have proposed development, but may eventually if the Land Lease program is expanded.

 

Working in consultation with NYELJP and the New York State Historic Preservation Office, the Fall 2013 Documentation/Interpretation class’ goal was to reframe the narrative about public housing in New York City, recognizing its historic importance in the development of the city and current importance to the residents who live there, and to propose strategies for preservation of these campuses in a way that will lead to more thoughtfulness about and public input on potential new development on these sites. 

 

The name comes from something a resident of Smith Houses told us at a community meeting regarding the future of NYCHA on the Lower East Side – with over 19,000 people living in the five LES developments we studied, public housing truly is a small town in town!