NY Times: How the Coastline Became a Place to Put the Poor
Ever wonder why there are so many housing projects in what are now considered prime waterfront locations (at least until Sandy)?
There is some great coverage of this in Ric Burns’ documentary on New York City, where Moses chose to deal with problems in the ghetto by tearing them down and replacing tenements with hi-rises. In time one form of blight was replaced with another, accomplishing very little beyond eliminating whatever sort of community that had previously existed. Of course, this is one of the major issues in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, and this article quotes Caro.
I grew up near Far Rockaway, and I remember well the miles and miles of abandoned land just off the beaches. So far as I know, there have been some attempts at redevelopment, but overall, little has changed, and there are still definite borderlines between some sections of the Rockaway peninsula…and other sections.
Not much different from much of the rest of the city, where most forms of discrimination in housing has been outlawed…but not along economic lines. And I’m not sure you can ever force a property owner to accept a tenant who does not earn enough, in the view of the landlord, to afford the rent.