THE NEXT

AMERICAN
CITY
ISSUE TWELVE / 2006

HISTORIC
PRESERVATION

Paving Paradise
THE CENTURY BUILDING DEBACLE AND
THE FUTURE OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
PRESERVATION IN THE PROGRESSIVE CITY
Debating History and Gentrification in Austin
WILL BETHLEHEM TURN STEEL INTO GOLD?

PLUS: KATRINA, ONE YEAR LATER

First in a Two-Part Series

COMMENTARY / URBAN AFFAIRS

US $7.95 CAN $10.95
REBUILDING URBAN PLACES AFTER DISASTER
Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter

“This book reveals fresh and insightful approaches to the challenges of facing natural disaster. Contributions
from the fields of regionalism and environmental planning are positive and prospective, offering new ways to
understand how the places we call home are interconnected with each other and with the land. I’m particularly
struck by the thoughtful writings about the individuality of these places, where cultural expressions in music
and architecture are irrepressible, even amidst debris and discouragement.”
—Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Partner, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, Chairman, Urban Land Institute

“After reading Rebuilding Urban Places one comes away with the understanding of how complex a process it
is to restore our urban communities after experiencing such a catastrophe . . . and an understanding of the
leaps this country must take to help and protect our citizens.”
—John Timoney, Chief of Police, Miami

“No elected official or planning professional should miss this book. Birch and Wachter have collected essays
spanning every dimension of rebuilding. From historical lessons to cutting-edge practices, there is so much to learn.”
—Brent Warr, Mayor, City of Gulfport, Mississippi

Disasters—natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks—are part of the Ameri-
can experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities
afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the
public will.

Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex,
interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational
access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and
several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon.

This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable
to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success
in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic,
market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, stra-
tegic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation?
Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues
of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina.

Contributors include: Elijah Anderson, Richard J. Gelles, Robert Giegengack, Nick Spitzer, and Dell Upton

The City in the Twenty-First Century

Nov 2006 | 400 pages | 8 color, 60 b/w illus. | Paper | $34.95

www.pennpress.org
from the editor YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED TO FIND
that, in a magazine about the city of the
future, we’ve built an entire issue around the
theme of historic preservation. But preserva-
tion is just as important to a city’s beauty and
flourishing as are growth, demolition, and
change. Every day, whether or not they frame
it in such terms, civic leaders take stands on
this issue. Which structures are so valuable
that they should be left intact and adapted for
new, modern uses? Which should be destroyed
to make way for more sound or innovative
developments? While we believe that growth
and change are vital—and inevitable—in
American cities, we also know that newer isn’t
always better, and that the wrecking ball
doesn’t always signal progress.
In “Paving Paradise,” Joseph Heathcott
relates the gory details of one of the most con-
troversial preservation battles in recent histo-
ry. The Century Building in downtown St.
Louis, a late-18th-century office tower with
cast-iron doorways and ornate marble detail-
ing, was torn down in late 2004 to make way
for a 1,000-unit parking lot. It’s the stuff of
folk songs, and a preservationist’s nightmare.
And yet one of the oldest and most esteemed
preservation groups in the country, the
National Trust, supported razing the building
and paving it over.
In “Preservation in the Progressive City,”
Jeffrey Chusid, a Cornell professor and for-
mer Austinite, tells a tale of clashing progres-
sives in one of the most radical cities on the
planet. Austin preservationists, long wary of
the Smart Growth crowd, eventually faced off
with a social justice group, who then blamed
both Smart Growth and preservation laws for
spurring gentrification in East Austin.
No city has ever struggled with the kinds
of historic preservation dilemmas currently
facing the Gulf Coast cities of New Orleans,
Biloxi, and Gulfport. Which buildings should
be preserved and rehabilitated, or knocked
down and never rebuilt? Now that the one-
year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has
passed and the issues that the storm stirred
up are slipping off the political radar, we felt
it was important to keep you updated on
developments in the Gulf Coast. Emily Weiss
reports on the role of Christian missionaries
in the clean-up effort, and Brent Warr, the
mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi—a city gener-
ally overlooked by the media last summer—
talks about casinos, local heroes, and how
Gulfport is slowly rebuilding. On a bitter-
sweet note, Doug Giuliano offers a darkly
hilarious take on his experiences as a FEMA
volunteer last fall. These are the first articles
in a two-issue series about the storm’s long-
term lessons and ramifications.
For our next issue, appearing this winter,
The Next American City will be ramping up
editorial production and undergoing a radical
re-design. This will mean both a new look and
new kinds of editorial coverage. Our goal, as
always, is to be a powerful and provocative
voice in the national conversation about all
things urban and suburban. We will be experi-
menting with new kinds of writing and report-
ing, offering our readers more timely, fresh,
and insightful views on city developments
around the country. We’ll also tackle, as our
main theme, one of the most controversial
news topics in recent memory: immigration.
I’m very excited to come on board as full-
time editor of the magazine. Adam Gordon will
remain involved as editor-in-chief. In upcom-
ing issues, other editors, writers, and artists
will use this space to give a behind-the-scenes
look at their contributions to the magazine.
Please let me know how we’re doing. Or,
if you’re in the Philadelphia area, feel free to
stop by The Next American City’s new offices
at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute
for Urban Research in Meyerson Hall.
Happy reading,
Jess McCuan
Editor
jess@americancity.org
ISSUE 12:
HISTORIC PRESERVATION

14 Paving Paradise: The Century Building Debacle

and the Future of Historic Preservation
by Joseph Heathcott

19 Will Bethlehem Turn Steel into Gold?

by Jeff Pooley

23 Preservation in the Progressive City:

Debating History and Gentrification in Austin
by Jeffrey Chusid

features: departments book reviews

historic preservation
6 Sex in the City 43 Planet of Slums
28 Looking East by Stephen Janis Reviewed by Carly Berwick
by Robert Garland Thomson
8 Resurrecting Death and Life 44 Rebuilding Urban Places
31 Saving High-Rise Public Housing by Anthony Weiss After Disaster: Lessons from
by Sharon Maclean Hurricane Katrina
10 Engineering the Perfect Suburb Reviewed by Mariana Mogilevich
by David Gest
Katrina: one year later 45 The Place You Love is Gone
Reviewed by Anika Singh
36 Crosses From Rubble
by Emily Weiss
last exit
40 15 Minutes With... Brent Warr, Mayor
of Gulfport, Mississippi 48 An Outsider Peers into
by Jess McCuan the FEMA Trailer
by Doug Giuliano

Telephone Poles, Ninth Ward, October, New Orleans, LA, 2005. Photo ©Will Steacy
STAFF LETTERS
editor-in-chief president CREATIVES TAKING FLIGHT: In the meantime, true creatives will
Adam Gordon Seth A. Brown A COMPOSER RESPONDS find their voice and their audience in
adam@americancity.org seth@americancity.org As a composer who has recently less mainstream idioms and places.
decided that the Bay Area is too
editor publisher expensive a place to live, I read with Paul Crabtree
Jess McCuan Michelle Kuly great interest Daniel Brook’s essay, Oakland, CA
jess@americancity.org michelle@americancity.org “The Cultural Contradictions of the
Creative Age.”
art directors finance director GAMBLING ON
Jayme Yen Jonathan Adler Musical institutions of large American PHILADELPHIA’S FUTURE
Yve Ludwig urban centers such as San Francisco The opening of the article in your last
intern can afford to provide an invaluable issue, “Gambling on Philadelphia’s
managing editor Laura Michaelson glimpse into the great music and tra- Future,” states that “Philadelphia
Sara C. Galvan Mei-Lun Xue ditional forms of the past, and occa- doesn’t need to become the next
sara@americancity.org sionally of the present. But it is the Atlantic City.” I would argue that
researcher second-tier cities that are becoming Philadelphia doesn’t want to become
executive editor David S. Godfrey affordable centers of innovation and, the next Atlantic City. Judging from
Nathaniel Hodes as a result, are more attractive loca- the lack of zoning considerations on
nat@americancity.org contributing writers tions for many artists who are forging the part of casino developers, and the
Carly Berwick, Jeffrey Chusid, the music of the future. lack of law enforcement beyond the
submissions editor Doug Giuliano, David Gest, one-mile perimeter of the casinos, I
Anika Singh Joseph Heathcott, Stephen Janis, My particular niche of 21st-century doubt any Philadelphian would want
submissions@americancity.org Sharon Maclean, Jeff Pooley, choral music is thriving outside the casinos anyway.
Anika Singh, Robert Garland Thomson, traditional cultural centers.
senior editors Anthony Weiss, Emily Weiss • Conspirare in Austin, Texas, led by The article also says this: “In the 1990s,
Carly Berwick, Last Exit Craig Hella Johnson, is a $1 million Philadelphia was flirting with bank-
Paul Breloff, Planning & Transportation contributing artists professional choir with a national rep- ruptcy and reeling from decades of
C.J. Gabbe, Features Rebekah Brem, Alan Brunettin, Frank Klein, utation. population and job loss. To encourage
David Gest, Features Shaun O’Boyle, Will Steacy <www.conspirare.org> development, the city in 1997 and 2000
Mariana Mogilevich, Architecture • The Esoterics in Seattle, conducted passed a ten-year property tax morato-
& Reviews editorial advisory board by Eric Banks, and Opus 7, conducted rium on most new construction and
Mike Sabel, Technology (affiliations for identification purposes only) by Loren Pontén, in Kenmore, Wash- rehabilitation projects, fueling a real
Anika Singh, Law, Policy, & Communities Vicki Been, New York University Law School ington, are regular winners of estate boom.”
Jenna Snow, Features Cynthia Farrar, Yale University ASCAP’s annual “Adventurous Pro-
Shayna Strom, Politics, Labor, Joel Garreau gramming” award. Since lowering taxes generated such a
& Organizations Alexander Garvin <www.theesoterics.org>, boom and thus created more revenue,
Christy Zink, Education & Culture Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker <www.opus7.org> why do we listen to the casinos’ prom-
Hugh Hardy, H3 Hardy Collaboration LLC • Seraphic Fire, conducted by Patrick ises of generating more revenue for the
contributing editors Bruce Heitler, Heitler Development Dupré Quigley, is an “astounding pro- city? Every study done in cities that
Doug Sell, Beth Silverman, W. Lehr Jackson, Williams Jackson Ewing fessional chamber choir” (Miami Her- introduce casinos proves that the social
Jim Schroder, Allison Smith Paloma Pavel, Earth House, Inc. ald) transforming the cultural land- costs and strain on emergency services
David Serviansky, Landstar Homes scape of south Florida. actually outweighs the revenue gener-
senior staff writer <www.seraphicfire.org> ated by casinos. Why not continue to
Charles Shaw keep taxes lower to keep up the
Next year I am relocating from Oak- growth? Why not build the Delaware
land to the desert Southwest, where riverfront with responsible, legitimate
my housing expense will be about businesses, and museums and parks?
one-third of what it is here, and yet I
will have more opportunities to have Sean Benjamin
my work performed. Since I am more Philadelphia, PA
likely to strike up a conversation with www.NABRhood.org
a conductor on the Internet than at a
local party, the placelessness of the
World Wide Web will enable me to
maintain my professional relation-
ships without the burden of living in
an absurdly expensive location.

I of course have mixed feelings about

leaving a place that has been my
home for twenty years. But I welcome
the artistic innovations made possible
by technology and necessitated by
unchecked capitalism.

Printed by WestCan Printing Group, Canada. ©2006 The Next American City, Inc. This is a critical issue that larger cit-
ies would be well advised to address
THE NEXT AMERICAN CITY Issue 12 October 2006 (ISSN 1544-6999) is published quarterly by in order to avert the consequences of
talent flight. With the dwindling pool of
photo ©frankkleinIV

The Next American City Inc., PO Box 42627, Philadelphia, PA 19101. Periodicals postage
pending at Philadelphia, PA, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address young music teachers and little or no
changes to THE NEXT AMERICAN CITY, PO Box 42627, Philadelphia, PA 19101. music in schools, audience recruitment
puts even more strain on symphony
info@americancity.org dollars, and market forces will neces-
Online home:www.americancity.org sitate entertainment instead of art.

page 4
departments
arts & culture by Stephen Janis
Sex in the City
As the city gentrifies, will a red-light district called “The Block” disappear?
Should anybody care?
ON A SNOWY MONDAY NIGHT IN
December, the lights of the packed bars are
warmly tempting. A thousand dancers work
in the 28 strip bars here—bars like Flamingo
Lounge, Lust, and Two O’Clock Club (home
of cinematic icon Blaze Starr). Inside one of
the clubs, patrons nurse beers as a young
stripper extends her body upside down along
the shimmer pole. One dancer, with moon-
stone eyes and luxurious dark hair, idles near
the entrance of the bar. She comments that
business was better after last week’s football
game, played by the Baltimore Ravens, whose
70,000-seat coliseum is less than a mile
away. Moments later, an older gentleman
enters the bar; the dancer takes his arm and
leads him into the dark, curtained back room
for a private lap dance, and perhaps more.
In downtown Baltimore, a stone’s throw
page 6
photos by Frank Klein
from a Barnes & Noble and a Best Buy—and
less than one hundred yards from City Hall—
sits a red-light district known simply as “The
Block.” A dense assemblage of strip bars,
antiquated neon signs, and grizzled door-
men, the Block covers one-quarter of a square
mile along Baltimore Street between South
Street and Gay Street and has stubbornly
occupied the same location for almost 75
years. Many of the clients of the Block’s bars
are businessmen willing to spend up to thou-
sands of dollars in high-end venues like the
newly-renovated Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club.
But it’s no secret that the tourist trade—11
million people visited Baltimore in 2004—
fuels the Block. According to a bartender at
one of the more popular establishments, “We
clean up during conventions—tourism is
very important to us.” Baltimore City Coun-
cilman Nick D’Adamo, Jr., who represented
the Block for nearly fifteen years before redis-
tricting in 2003, adds that “Tourists definitely
visit the Block, especially after football and
baseball games.”
Councilman D’Adamo takes a pragmatic
view of the Block’s economic and social
impact. He views a concentrated red-light dis-
trict as a means of controlling an industry
that would exist anyway. “If we close it
down,” he argues, “it will just spread out to
other neighborhoods; here, we can keep an
eye on it.” Part of that attitude may stem
from the failure of previous efforts to control
or eliminate illegal activity on the Block. In
photo ©frankkleinIV
1994, then-Maryland Governor and former
Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer
ordered state troopers to conduct a four-
month investigation of alleged drug dealing
and prostitution. The investigation culminat-
ed in a massive raid, which effectively shut
down the Block and resulted in dozens of
arrests. Most of the charges were later
dropped, however, as several of the undercov-
er troopers were later convicted of bedding
dancers and purchasing illegal drugs. Since
then, despite the continued rumors of prosti-
tution, drug dealing, and other illicit activity,
the Block has operated without interference.
A Contrast with the Rest
of Downtown
That the Block still exists is especially
surprising because it rests at the heart of Bal-
timore’s most valuable real estate. Just yards
away, at the revitalized Inner Harbor, are
granite skyscrapers, million-dollar condo-
miniums, and retail development. The sym-
metrical square columns of Baltimore’s 25-
story World Trade Center sit alongside
familiar suburban signs: a Cheesecake Fac-
tory restaurant, an ESPN Zone Sports Bar,
and a Hard Rock Café. Couples linger on a
pleasant, brick-laid harbor walk. Recently,
the Brookings Institution issued a report
titled, “Who Lives Downtown?” The report
called Baltimore’s downtown “Emerging”—a
category showing “promise of becoming a
fully developed downtown” and just a step
below A-list cities like Boston, Chicago, and
New York City.
Aside from a few upscale strip clubs, the
Block has resisted the revitalization of the
rest of downtown. Perhaps as a result, it is
more true to the overall character of Balti-
more. With a median household income of
roughly $33,000, as reported to the U.S. Cen-
sus Bureau in 2003, most Baltimoreans can-
not afford to live in the rapidly gentrifying
downtown. The rest of the city maintains a
blue-collar ethos, fashioned by decades of
steel workers, longshoremen, and factory
workers living in working-class villages domi-
nated by brick rowhouses.
With 269 murders in 2005, according to
the Maryland Central Records Division, Balti-
more had one of the highest per capita mur-
der rates in the country. Much of the housing
stock is in disrepair, and Baltimore has the
highest eviction rates in the country, with
5.81 evictions per 100 renters, a statistic
which shows in the piles of splintered furni-
ture towering like burial mounds in front of
page 7
rowhouses. Add to this a high concentration of
opiate addicts and crack dealers, and one can
get a glimpse of the divergent realities of the
gleaming downtown and the rest of Baltimore.
The Trouble with Red-Light Districts
These hopeless conditions likely compel
many young women from the city’s poorer
neighborhoods to fill the bars as sex workers.
To be sure, prostitution is not an ideal life-
style. Sidney Anne Ford, Executive Director
of You Are Never Alone, an outreach center
for city prostitutes located in West Baltimore,
points out that almost all the women she
works with share a common experience of
sexual abuse. She argues that regardless of
how sex work is characterized, the industry
takes unfair advantage of emotionally trau-
matized and economically disadvantaged
young women. “Exploitation is exploitation; it
doesn’t matter what you call it,” Ford says.
Others defend the urban red-light district
as a reflection of changing social norms.
Timothy Gilfoyle, a historian who researches
urban prostitution and commercial sex, says
that a commercialized sex industry is “more
tolerated now than at any other point in U.S.
history.” Gilfoyle notes the wide use of por-
nography in private homes, citing the statistic
that in 1999 Americans rented 711 million
pornographic videos, resulting in a $10 bil-
lion industry (more current sources put the
value of the industry at $12 billion). Gilfoyle
also cites performance artists like Annie
Sprinkle and Veronica Vera who treat “prosti-
tution and pornography as sources of creativi-
ty and liberation”—and not as marginalized
activities. Councilman D’Adamo claims that
the Block’s establishments employ many
young women who view dancing as a career:
“Some women, this is all they know.”
A chain-smoking stripper named Tabitha
confirms this analysis: “A dancer can make
good money if she knows how to hustle,” she
says. “In here, I’m in control. I don’t have to
do anything I don’t want. On the street it’s a
different story.” Inside the bar a contingent
of bouncers and bartenders watch over the
place, providing some safeguard against
abuse. But on the street, things are less
secure. Off-the-clock dancers loiter near a
pizza parlor, pale and blemished under the
harsh fluorescent lights. A pack of young
men restlessly scour the sidewalk as hawkers
beckon them inside their clubs: “We have
twelve girls, all fresh,” says one, “guaranteed
beautiful.” The scrolling LED ticker of the
Hustler Club touts drink specials and “cou-
ples night.” Meanwhile, at the end of Calvert
Street, the Inner Harbor Pavilion is festively
lit and casting gold platelets across the water.
In Baltimore, residents have choices: the
Harbor Pavilion or the Hustler Club, sex or
professional sports, drugs or open air shop-
ping. Indeed, they can have both. Unlike
nearby Washington, where prostitutes traffic
on the streets, and Philadelphia, where three
“lifestyle” sex clubs have just been shuttered
by the city, Baltimore’s “dirty” district is
much more concentrated, active, and readily
accessible to the pristine new downtown. The
question for Baltimore is whether—and
how—its gritty red-light underworld can co-
exist with the city’s efforts towards economic
and social advancement.
Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New
York City, Prostitution, and the
Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
Mitchell, Alexander D. Baltimore: Then
and Now. San Diego: Thunder Bay
Press, 2001.
Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier:
Gentrification and the Revanchist City.
New York: Routledge, 1966.
Weitzer, Ronald John. Sex for Sale:
Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex
Industry. New York: Routledge, 2000.
in memoriam by Anthony Weiss
Resurrecting Death and Life
Why Jane Jacobs’ followers still misunderstand her most important
contributions to urban thought
THE DAY AFTER HER DEATH IN APRIL,
newspapers across North America eulogized
Jane Jacobs. Reporters and op-ed writers
praised her masterwork, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, as the most important
book on cities in the 20th century. Planners,
architects, critics, developers, and govern-
ment officials in every major North American
city spoke about how Death and Life changed
the way they looked at cities, and changed
their lives.
Revolutionary when it was published,
Death and Life has since become settled doc-
trine. The book has spawned a cottage indus-
try of planners dedicated to advancing the
ideas that Jacobs set down almost 50 years
ago. They took her notions of mixed-use
neighborhoods, 24-hour street life, and walk-
able downtowns and condensed them into
hard formulas—a fixed prescription for
mixed-use developments of shops, offices,
and apartments, clustered around down-
towns, oriented towards walking, and ideally,
connected to a transit station.
Some of these planners call themselves
New Urbanists. Others stand for Smart
Growth or Transit-Oriented Design, and some
don’t bother with labels. But one and all, these
apostles reverently sprinkle quotations from
Jacobs throughout their writings. Their work,
indirectly, is Jacobs’s great legacy, writ large
across the landscape of North America.
Yet their approach to planning misses the
fundamental point of Death and Life. Jacobs’s
great power as a writer and thinker was root-
ed in her tremendous talent as an observer,
and Death and Life is a work of reportage.
Her critique of contemporary planning rested
upon a simple premise: the planners of cities
did not understand how cities worked. More
precisely, they did not understand how peo-
ple actually lived in cities because they had
not bothered to observe city life.
page 9
illustration by Rebekah Brem
Her approach was scientific, not in the
sense of formulas and statistics, but in the
classic mode of the scientific method: she
observed, developed hypotheses, tested
hypotheses, modified them, and drew con-
clusions based on what she had seen. “Cit-
ies are an immense laboratory of trial and
error, failure and success, in city building
and city design,” she wrote. “This is the lab-
oratory in which city planning should have
been learning and forming and testing its
theories.” She also stressed that her obser-
vations were site-specific: “I hope no reader
will try to transfer my observations into
guides as to what goes on in towns, or little
cities, or in suburbs which are still subur-
ban,” she warned. “Towns, suburbs, and
even little cities are totally different organ-
isms from great cities.”
Too many of her would-be followers have
ignored this precaution. They have adopted
Jacobs’s conclusions without applying her
careful methods. They build according to
models for how neighborhoods and towns
and suburbs should work, and how people
should live, rather than how people do live.
Just as the conceivers of modernist towers-in-
the-park wrongly assumed that tenants
would stroll through the grass because it was
there to be strolled through, contemporary
planners too often believe that if a place
looks like a 19th-century town, it will func-
tion like one.
The contemporary visions of Smart
Growth, New Urbanism, and town centers
are not so much rooted in Jacobs’s work as
they are superficial readings, mixed with ele-
ments of late-19th- and early-20th-century
urban centers. Architects have criticized
these movements for being stylistically retro-
grade. The problem is not their style, howev-
er, but that they are in a sense nothing but
style. Today’s planners believe they can plop
down a visual model of town centers and
shopping villages just about anywhere on the
map. But appearances don’t dictate function,
nor do they create markets from thin air.
Jacobs wrote Death and Life specifically to
attack this way of planning. Instead of dream-
ing up imaginary cities, she observed real cit-
ies, and from those observations arrived at
her own model for how cities work. Now
some of her adherents have reverse-engi-
neered her observations to create just another
set of visual models. Fifty years ago, the plan-
ners’ doctrine was light and air and grass.
Today, the doctrine is bustling streets and
front porches and community. Both are sim-
ply visual styles—design masquerading as
planning.
Jacobs wrote, “There is a quality even
meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,
and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask
of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or
suppressing the real order that is struggling to
exist and to be served.” The living spaces of
today are admittedly a confusing jumble—
people own cars, shop online, have jobs in far-
away office parks. But the most complex liv-
ing spaces are precisely the ones that should
be our laboratories. These are places to
observe and learn, rather than mere problems
in need of prescriptions. Honoring Jacobs’s
legacy means uncovering the order beneath
the disorder in cities and suburbs. All this dig-
ging may not produce a pretty picture, but it
will be a critical step in developing livable
spaces that are honest about the needs of mar-
kets, geography, and—most of all—the people
they are created to serve.
planning text and photos by David Gest
Engineering the Perfect Suburb
A California naval base becomes an experiment in suburban living
IN THE HEART OF ORANGE COUNTY,
California—the poster child for postwar sub-
urban sprawl in the United States—lies a
1500-acre former military base, one of the
last remaining major development sites in a
3-million person county with little room to
grow. The choices made by local residents
and builders in redeveloping Tustin Marine
Core Air Station (MCAS) show that Orange
County can no longer be stereotyped as the
land of endless freeways, widely scattered sin-
gle-family detached homes on large lots, and
homogenous neighborhoods of wealthy, con-
servative white people. But neither will
Orange County necessarily become a place of
inevitable, dense urbanization. The innova-
tive development plan proposed for the Navy
base, called Tustin Legacy, aligns with a new
planning theory—New Suburbanism—that
promotes the acceptance and reuse of the
suburban form. By merging some of the ide-
als of the anti-sprawl, Smart Growth move-
ment that currently dominates urban plan-
ning theory with the culture of one of Ameri-
ca’s most important suburbs, Tustin Legacy
may become an important model for the
infill development of aging and crowded sub-
urbs across the country.
A New Look for Orange County
The air base began as a Navy blimp
repository in 1942, and after WWII converted
to a Marine Corps helicopter station. Over the
years, its surroundings changed rapidly—
with single-family homes and business parks
to the north, low-lying industrial parks and
strip malls to the west and south, and the
master-planned, ultra-manicured city of
Irvine to the east. In 1991, the federal
Defense Base Closure and Realignment
Commission slated Tustin MCAS to close.
The Tustin community was deeply invested
in redevelopment plans and, in an unusual
move for a military community, insisted on
page 10
the closing. In 1999, the military relocated
operations to another air base and granted
the property to the city.
The property is a uniquely valuable devel-
opment parcel in a county where the median
home price is over $700,000. The former
base has easy access to freeways and the com-
muter rail “Metrolink” station, linking the
site to five surrounding counties, including
Los Angeles to the north and San Diego to
the south. John Wayne International Airport
is also nearby for connections further afield.
The redevelopment plans for the base—
already about fifteen percent built out—call
for a wide array of uses, including approxi-
mately 2,500 new homes, a “community
core” of mixed-use buildings; an “Advanced
Technology and Education Park” with a range
of educational facilities; and a retail and
entertainment center, including several
national retailers, restaurants, and a multiplex
movie theater. A park intended to serve as the
premier recreation facility for the area will be
at the center of the development, linked via
bikeways and walking trails to a system of
smaller linear and pocket parks. The project
will also include two unique features: a fami-
ly-oriented homeless shelter and job training
facility called the Village of Hope, the most
comprehensive capital project ever undertak-
en by the Orange County Rescue Mission;
and two of the largest wood-frame structures
in the world: the massive blimp hangers in
the middle of the property, each more than
1,000 feet long and 300 feet wide.
Even more unusual than these behe-
moths are the project’s proposed density and
(relatively) tall buildings. Most mixed-use
development in Orange County is horizontal,
according to John Buchanan, Redevelopment
Program Manager with the City of Tustin.
Tustin hopes to enlist a well known architec-
ture firm to erect “mini skyscrapers” that will
give the city a noticeable profile against the
low-lying buildings spread over the county.
“The challenge,” says Buchanan, “is to create
enough density and energy with vertical
mixed-use development, on a 24-hour basis…
Although there probably won’t be anything
over ten stories tall. We’re looking to create
something that’s more of an Orange County-
type environment than Manhattan.”
Poster Child
for New Suburbanism?
What does this kind of infill project rep-
resent for the county, and for suburbs as a
whole? “Orange County is going back to the
initial suburban ideal,” proclaims Joel Kotkin.
Kotkin is a proponent of a movement called
“New Suburbanism” and the author of a
2005 paper of the same name. Whereas its
more established counterpart, New Urban-
ism, takes cues from “traditional” town plan-
ning—epitomized by older European and
American cities with narrow, walkable
streets, public squares, vernacular architec-
ture, and front porches—New Suburbanism
references the Garden City movement of
Ebenezer Howard, which envisioned a har-
monious balance between housing, industry,
and open space in the suburbs. New Urban-
ism advocates dense, pedestrian-oriented city
centers (in the form of infill projects in older
cities, or concentrated, axis-oriented “green-
field” designs such as those in Seaside, Flori-
da). New Suburbanism, on the other hand,
accepts car-oriented, single-family-home-
dominated development, but aims to inte-
grate it with denser, self-sufficient suburbs,
some including large apartment buildings
upwards of 10 units per acre (not just stereo-
typical collections of single-family homes)
and employment, shopping, and entertain-
ment within suburb limits.
Many New Urbanists decry Kotkin’s New
Suburbanist terminology, claiming that he
has simply tweaked New Urban ideas for his
own purposes. Whether or not Kotkin’s ideas
are wholly original, the New Suburbanism
concept seems accurate: critics note that
many walkable New Urbanist communities
are ultimately car-dependent, often in the
form of suburbs lacking links to a regional
transit system. Whatever these relatively
dense and self-sufficient (but still car-depen-
dent) communities are called, they represent
a new form of suburban development.
Tustin’s thoughtful planning could thus
qualify the Legacy as a poster child for New
Suburbanism’s brand of suburban reuse.
While few communities have the luxury of
“newly created” wide-open space, as in Tus-
tin or the nearby decommissioned El Toro
Marine Corps Air Station, increasing subur-
ban density and intensity of use may be the
most viable solution to America’s rapidly
crowding suburbs. Tustin Legacy’s design
represents an important middle ground
between New Urbanism’s focus on the city’s
urban form, and developers’ market-driven
subdivision expansion farther and farther
away from city centers. “People aren’t going
back to the corner store,” asserts Kotkin.
“Especially when you’re shopping for fami-
lies, you’re going to shop at the big box
retailers.”
page 11
In large part, Tustin residents established
their vision through an extensive planning
process preceding the redevelopment.
According to Christine Shingleton, Tustin’s
Assistant City Manager and Tustin Legacy
Project Coordinator, city planners and a team
of outside consultants started out analyzing
the redevelopment successes and failures of
then-recent base closures across the country.
They began devising a plan to incorporate
“livable community” and “sustainable
design” techniques similar to those promoted
by New Urbanism. But while the evolving
plans “played off of New Urbanism and those
other ideas,” says Shingleton, considerable
input from residents helped shape Tustin’s
own version of a livable community: “[The
plans] became ours, and we embraced
them.” The goals for the property and the
community articulated by residents included
the creation of a new destination with a dis-
tinct sense of place; an architectural and
economic diversity of housing types; a com-
munity-inspiring layout featuring intercon-
nected open space or parkland, human-
scaled buildings and social and recreational
activity centers; and proximity to jobs, in
order to cut down on commute times and
decrease area traffic.
Community involvement in the early
planning has paid off in that very little, if any,
controversy surrounds the complex endeavor;
most area residents are “on board” and look-
ing forward to completion. Almost all of the
1,153 buildable acres have been designated for
particular developments, and the Navy will
provide funding and labor for environmental
cleanup efforts to remove hazardous materi-
als from the site. Shingleton hasn’t taken the
success of the project to date for granted. “It
is like rocket science!” she joked. “It’s not like
developing a vacant piece of property—this is
infill, brownfield development!”
Planning with Open Arms
In addition to the balance of housing,
schools, and parks planned for Tustin Legacy,
the city has ensured a diversity of residents
by hiring a variety of homebuilders and
enacting “inclusive” zoning through different
affordable homeownership plans. The city
mandated a 25 percent housing affordability
provision, higher than anywhere else in the
county, meaning that they will lose about $40
million of land value in exchange, according
to Shingleton. The economic variety of resi-
dents drawn from the surrounding county
will most likely mean an ethnic diversity as
well: as of 2000, whites represented about
half of county residents, with approximately
one-third Hispanic, fifteen percent of Asian
descent, and the remaining portion African
American.
British homebuilder John Laing Homes
has completed the first housing on the site,
the 376-unit Tustin Fields I, and is nearing
completion of another group of homes.
According to Dan Flynn, Vice President of
Acquisitions at John Laing, their slice of
development at Tustin Legacy includes a
variety of architectural styles and pricing
plans. Densities range from ten to eighteen
units per acre, primarily in the form of com-
pact, attached row houses, and homebuyers
may pay from $74,000 to more than
$500,000, depending on housing type, for
adjacent units.
Affordability has drawn county residents
to Tustin Fields, but would they prefer a
detached home with a big yard and a picket
fence? Flynn suggests not: “In Orange Coun-
commended by President Bush, provided
nearly 1 million meals to the hungry and
35,000 homeless in the county during the
last fiscal year. While the Mission does accept
non-Christians, according to Melanie McNiff,
Director of Communications for the Mission,
participants—mostly homeless—must set
self-sufficiency goals and accept the organiza-
tion’s faith-centered mission. Slated to open
in summer 2006, the Village will incorporate
existing Navy buildings and new construction
to house 192 family members and individu-
als, along with a medical center, job training
facility, and chapel, all using $25 million
raised by the Mission. “There has been no
controversy surrounding our project,” says
McNiff. “The Rescue Mission has a good rep-
utation in the county, and we hope to estab-
lish partnerships with a lot of the other busi-
nesses and schools coming in [to Tustin Leg-
acy], so that they can be a part of the commu-
nity helping the homeless.”
can rehabilitate as a recreational facility or
museum. Other aspects of the project, from
subsidized housing to a network of parks and
schools, may serve as a model for suburban
infill and the reuse of brownfields or other
open space. As built-out suburbs become the
focal point for expanding American cities,
whether considered “New Suburban,” “New
Urban,” or community and market-driven
urban planning, Tustin Legacy demonstrates
that careful planning can overcome persistent
problems of finding ways to provide afford-
able homes and also meet the frequent com-
munity objections to any kind of serious
development in desirable suburbs.
John Laing Homes, Orange County
www.johnlainghomes.com/
orangecounty/
History of Tustin MCAS
www.militarymuseum.org/

ty there’s a pent-up demand for the urban More Than Just a Pretty Base MCASTustin.html

lifestyle. Residents are looking for more con-
venience: no yard to maintain, adjacent to
amenities like retail, entertainment, and dry
cleaning. They’re willing to sacrifice the big-
ger house and bigger yard for that conve-
nience.” Alex Alix, who will move into Tustin
Fields II with his family, concurs: “The build-
ings here are more distinct, more bold, than
the blander homes in Irvine. There is a
noticeable design difference; Tustin has more
Christine Shingleton emphasizes the
Orange County Rescue Mission’s
unusual partnerships that have defined Tus- Village of Hope
tin Legacy to date. “In addition to involving www.rescuemission.org/1programs/
and engaging the community” in the plan- voh/intro/intro.htm
ning process, the city has worked collabora-
Tustin Legacy (City of Tustin)
tively with the development community on
www.tustinlegacy.com
project designs, Shingleton says. “As opposed
to working in isolation to develop plans that Tustin Legacy news from the Orange
don’t reflect reality, we’ve tested the market County Register
to create something that can be replicated www.ocregister.com/community/

character.” anywhere. Partnering with the private sector tustin_news/legacy/

But not everyone agrees. Jack Denny,
another recent addition to Tustin Fields II,
does not consider Tustin Legacy an ideal
home, but “you have to pick and choose what
fits best” in a county where affordable hous-
ing is not prevalent. “There are lots of com-
muters here, so I haven’t had much time to
spend with the neighbors, and the housing is
a little tight,” says Denny, but at least the
planned high-rises will be reserved for office
space, not homes.
Beyond planning the site’s subsidized
housing, the City of Tustin has taken subur-
ban “inclusionary” housing to people with far
lower incomes than are typically served by
such affordable housing programs by build-
ing the Village of Hope. The city’s partner in
the project, the Orange County Rescue Mis-
sion, a 50-year-old “faith-based” non-profit
and responding to the market are reasons
why this project will be successful.” Working
with a variety of experienced suburban devel-
opers, including John Laing, Shea Homes,
Centex Homes, and Lennar, which also has
base reuse experience, the city has assured
Tustin Legacy a diversity of home types pro-
duced by massive, market-tested homebuild-
ing companies.
At first glance, Tustin Legacy could be
labeled simply as a base reuse project, the
kind receiving frequent press coverage fol-
lowing each round of military closures. But
the city’s “bottom-up” site planning—involv-
ing community feedback and incorporating a
variety of partnerships between the public,
private, and non-profit sectors—offers broad-
er lessons. The colossal blimp hangars repre-
sent the kind of unique features that a city

page 12
Historic
Preservation

page 13
 historic preservation
Paving Paradise:
The Century Building
Debacle and the Future
of Historic Preservation
It isn’t every day that the National Trust for Historic Preservation steps into
a local development debate with this advice: turn a massive marble-clad downtown
building into a thousand-unit parking lot
IN THE LATE-NIGHT HOURS OF OCTOBER 20, 2004, bulldozers
began demolishing one of the finest buildings in downtown St. Louis.
Fearful that an injunction might halt his pet project, Mayor Francis
Slay took a page out of the Richard Daley playbook and ordered crews
to commence work under cover of night. By the morning, efforts to
save the Century Building were moot. The damage had been done.
The demolition of the Century Building resulted from a perfect
storm of bad decisions, and the episode offers a case study of what
can go wrong in historic preservation despite decades of accumulated
wisdom in best practices. For most preservationists, the destruction
of irreplaceable pieces of the historic urban fabric is unacceptable
unless it clears the way for exceptional new architecture worthy of
future preservation efforts. Local and state officials should act as stew-
ards of their built heritage, and the National Trust for Historic Preser-
vation should provide guidance and leadership to promote innovative
adaptive reuse projects.
In the case of the Century Building, these roles, responsibilities, and
best practices were ignored. City officials lined up behind a tragically
short-sighted demolition scheme while squelching viable alternatives to
appease developers. Demolition made way not for exceptional new
architecture, but rather for a bland, unnecessary, one-thousand-unit
parking garage. Most shockingly, officials at the National Trust—looked
to for leadership in preservation efforts—provided the financial support
to make the project possible, betraying their own long-term constituen-
cy. The ramifications of this reversal for historic preservation—and for
the cities salvaged through its practice—appear grim.
Fracturing
Previous page: The Century Building, prior to the Civic Landscape
demolition. Alan Brunettin ©2004. This page: Anyone who has been to St.
Construction of the parking lot on the site of the
Century Building. Photo taken July 2, 2006.
Louis knows two things about it:
Alan Brunettin ©2006. it is a city rich in architectural
page 15
by Joseph Heathcott photos by Alan Brunettin
heritage, and it has destroyed that heritage with reckless abandon. St.
Louis is renowned for its superb trove of late-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century architecture. In the decades following World War II,
however, the city lurched into decline, suffering catastrophic losses in
population, jobs, and capital. Land values plummeted through the 1970s
and 1980s, and the reduced tax base left the city with few options but to
defer maintenance of infrastructure. Desperate to compete with auto-
mobile-oriented suburban malls and office parks, city officials used
urban renewal funds to demolish superb old buildings for surface park-
ing lots.
The news was not all dismal. Beginning in the early 1960s, citi-
zens coalesced for an all-out fight to save the Wainwright Building,
Louis Sullivan’s terra-cotta-clad masterpiece situated in the heart of
the city’s business district. Declared a National Landmark in 1968,
the Wainwright Building catapulted historic preservation into the
public eye, and St. Louisans took a fresh look at their built heritage.
In the 1970s, preservation enthusiasts began to make use of feder-
al—and later, state—tax credits to finance the rehabilitation of
houses, shops, and whole neighborhoods. By 2005, the Landmarks
Association had facilitated the listing of hundreds of individual build-
ings on the National Register, and thousands more through inclusion
in historic districts. St. Louis had emerged as one of the leading cities
in the national preservation movement.
Despite their best efforts, however, preservation activists have
regularly seen their labors in one neighborhood counteracted by
large-scale demolition in another. The city’s downtown has been
particularly gutted. The Washington Avenue Loft District has had
some improvements, but the downtown as a whole retains a listless
quality, drowning in a dull sea of surface lots and parking garages.
Faced with their city’s fragmentation, St. Louisans cherish the great
public buildings still standing. These structures connect them to a
rapidly disappearing past and represent options for adaptive reuse
in the future. With indications
that St. Louis is now adding
population for the first time
since 1950, the availability of
unique, beautiful, solid build-
ings is emerging as the city’s
foremost advantage.
Anatomy of a
demolition from a local battle into a
national scandal was the role of the
National Trust for Historic Preserva-
The demolition of tion. Distraught over the city’s
actions, St. Louis preservationists
the Century Building looked to their national allies for
resulted from a perfect support. After all, the National
Trust’s own advertising asserts that
storm of bad decisions, “No one looks back fondly on the

and the episode offers

Preservation Fight time they spent in a parking
When the Downtown Now! garage.” Preservationists naturally
Coalition released its Down- a case study of what assumed the Trust stood by its

can go wrong in
town Plan in 1999, there was words.
reason for optimism. Noting the When first confronted with the
ugly history of demolition and
fragmentation behind them,
historic preservation DESCO-DFC plan, the Trust
unequivocally opposed the sacrifice
planners clearly recognized the despite decades of of the Century Building. In a Janu-
path forward was in adaptive
reuse of the city’s remaining
accumulated wisdom ary 2001 letter to the Missouri Gen-
eral Services Administration (own-
historic buildings. Unfortunate- in best practices. er of the OPO), Midwest Trust
ly, the Francis Slay administra- Director Royce Yeater challenged
tion quickly betrayed the vision the parties to find a new parking
laid out in the Downtown Plan solution. Yeater concluded, “preser-
and in 2001 began to work vationists never like the prospect of
feverishly for the demolition of trading one potentially historic
one of the city’s greatest com- building for another.” Besides,
mercial structures. alternative parking provisions
The buildings under fire were the Old the new home for the Missouri Eastern Dis- abound in downtown St. Louis, with ten
Post Office (OPO) and the Century Build- trict Court of Appeals and an extension of underused parking facilities in the ten blocks
ing. Designed by federal architect Alfred the suburban campus of Webster Universi- surrounding the Old Post Office.
Mullet and constructed between 1877 and ty. They would demolish the Century Build- Like all demolition schemes that involve
1884, the Old Post Office is a somber pile of ing to erect a parking garage. According to federal money and historic properties, the
grey limestone in the Second Empire style. It officials in the Slay administration, the OPO plan triggered a routine Section 106
served as the city’s main postal station until future tenants demanded adjacent parking review in court. During the hearings, Land-
1937. Across the street from the OPO stood “within view” of the OPO. The decision to marks Association representatives argued
the Century Building, designed by the firm of “sacrifice” the Century to this end was a that the developers should be barred from
Raeder, Coffin, and Crocker and completed “tough choice,” they said, but was the only receiving tax credits because the project
in 1896. With its massive Beaux-Arts façade, way the project could work. included the demolition of a building listed
the Century was one of the few remaining Preservationists didn’t buy it. The Land- on the National Register. The city and the
marble-clad buildings in the United States. marks Association of St. Louis—the group developers countered that the demolition of
But for preservationists, the Century’s real that had originally saved the Old Post Office the Century Building and the redevelopment
value was its part in an ensemble of superb from the scrap heap in the 1960s—found the of the Old Post Office were technically sepa-
buildings, comprising a remarkably intact, idea that the Century Building had to be rate projects. Since the tax credits would only
early-twentieth-century civic landscape in destroyed to save the OPO patently untrue. fund the renovations of the OPO, the city was
downtown St. Louis. The adjacent area was already in redevelop- therefore free to dispense with the Century
Recognizing the buildings’ potential for ment. Viable alternatives did exist, and repu- Building as it saw fit. Though a cynical politi-
adaptive reuse, the city’s Downtown Plan pro- table developers advanced efforts to save the cal maneuver, it fell just within the law. The
vided explicit directions to reject all future Century, but the Slay administration courts ruled in favor of demolition, and the
demolitions within a three-block radius of the squelched them. The city had chosen its project was clear to proceed.
OPO. But the Slay administration soon defied developers and would not budge.
the recommendations of its own committee. To seasoned preservationists, such A Betrayal of Trust
In 2001, city officials announced that they intransigence on the part of city officials was Throughout 2003 and into 2004, preser-
had chosen a development team—DESCO, a routine feature of St. Louis political culture. vationists in St. Louis stepped up efforts to
Inc. and DFC, Inc.—to renovate the OPO as But what transformed the Century Building save the Century Building. Unable to sway

page 16
city officials and DESCO-DFC from their sin-
gle-minded devotion to demolition, preserva-
tionists turned to their old allies at the
National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Top: With a wrecking ball poised above its corner, the Century Building waits. Bottom: A local
They were shocked, however, to find that the architectural salvage company at work, with permision to remove the historical ornamentation from the
Trust had become complicit in the scheme. Century Building prior to demolition. Both images by Alan Brunettin ©2004.
In June of 2004, the Landmarks Associa-
tion discovered that the National Trust had
decided to provide gap financing for the proj-
ect: $6.9 million in tax credits. Not only had
the Trust refused to intervene in support of
its old allies; it was actively working against
them, backing a local redevelopment coalition
that was openly hostile to the local preserva-
tion movement. As policy analyst Kevin
Priestner put it, the Trust’s move constituted
an “egregious act of mission drift.”
St. Louis preservation advocates were
bewildered. “For the National Trust to capitu-
late to the expediency of the moment simply
makes no sense,” noted Landmarks Associa-
tion Executive Director Carolyn Toft in a St.
Louis Post-Dispatch article. Toft charged that
National Trust president Richard Moe’s actions
undercut two decades of close collaboration
and mutual support between local preserva-
tionists and the National Trust. After all, Toft
explained, “we know the building, we know the
neighborhood, we know the downtown.”
Over 3,500 preservationists around the
country signed an online petition in protest.
Many resigned their membership in the
National Trust, charging that it had abdicated
its responsibility not only to St. Louis preser-
vationists, but also to its national constituen-
cy. In his comments on the petition, Michael
Tomlan, director of the Historic Preservation
program at Cornell University, reflects the
exasperation of long-term Trust members:
“The project violates everything the National
Trust is supposed to stand for. They have
gone terribly wrong.”
The Trust closed ranks in response to the
national outcry. Moe released a statement
that demolition of the Century for a parking
garage was the key to revitalizing the entire
OPO district. St. Louis preservationists con-
tended that Moe was relying solely on the
assertion of Mayor Slay, the very person most
zealous about demolition. Most cynically,
Moe parroted the city’s earlier argument that
the National Trust’s award of $6.9 million in
tax credits would only pay for the renovation
of the Old Post Office, not demolition of the

page 17
Century Building. Preservationists around
the country, according to St. Louis Post-Dis-
patch columnist Robert Duffy, regarded this
last point as transparent semantics: everyone
knew full well that the Trust provided the
crucial piece of gap funding for a project that
included demolishing an historic treasure.
Finally, Moe claimed that since neither
the mayor of St. Louis nor the Old Post
Office developers exhibited the political will
to locate the parking garage elsewhere, he
had no alternative but to support the demoli-
tion plan. Opponents countered that the
Trust also lacked political will, as it refused
to challenge a redevelopment scheme that so
clearly contravened the principles and best
practices of historic preservation. The Trust,
they argued, could have easily demanded
retention of the Century as a condition of the
tax credit award. But Trust officials were sin-
gularly focused on saving Alfred Mullet’s
Landmark Old Post Office at the Century’s
expense.
The best efforts of preservationists in St.
Louis and around the nation were to no avail.
DESCO-DFC moved ahead with the demoli-
tion of the Century Building, and once again
the city of St. Louis lost a piece of itself that
can never be replaced.
Historic Reckoning
The decision by the National Trust to
oppose local preservationists and to back the
city’s redevelopment scheme is one of the
most significant in the history of the organiza-
tion. The Trust’s actions left the Landmarks
Association high and dry, setting the local
preservation movement back twenty years.
Virtually any other major city would have
treasured the Century as an opportunity for
innovative adaptive reuse. Portfolios of his-
toric buildings are fueling the current renais-
sance of cities like Boston, Milwaukee, Pitts-
burgh, and Providence. In Providence, for
example, the city government has committed
substantial resources to historic preservation
and has established progressive cultural and
housing policies that encourage socio-eco-
nomic diversity. In fact, as urban journalist
Roberta Gratz argues, most cities today view
parking shortages as a sign that their down-
towns are on the upswing.
But St. Louis is a city mired in old ways
of doing business. Still in shock over its cata-
page 18
strophic population loss, city officials have
been slow to move beyond the strategy devel-
oped in the 1960s and 1970s of competing
with the suburbs by providing ample parking
in its dense urban core. The Slay administra-
tion in particular has demonstrated an out-
moded preference for prioritizing short-term
real estate deals over long-term planning and
stewardship.
Whether or not one cares about the Cen-
tury Building as a unique architectural
accomplishment or as part of the historic
urban fabric of St. Louis, its demolition sets a
dangerous precedent. By funding the OPO
project, the National Trust has clearly sig-
naled its departure from its original mandate,
and that it is now in the business of backing
local redevelopment schemes however wit-
less, myopic, and ill-conceived. Worst of all,
the actions of the Trust have emboldened
opponents of historic preservation and left
the movement vulnerable to serious attack.
The question now is, if preservationists can
no longer trust the Trust, who will be the
advocate of last resort?
Duffy, Robert W. “National Trust Backs
Plan to Raze Building.” St. Louis Post-
Dispatch 29 June 2004.
Duffy, Robert W. “Battle of the
Century.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 4 July
2004: B01.
Gratz, Roberta Brandes. “We Don’t
Have Enough Parking.” Planning
Commissioners Journal 48 (Fall 2002).
www.plannersweb.com
Landmarks Association. “Thousands
Rebuke National Trust Over Support
for Demolition of Historic Building.”
Press Release. 12 July 2004.
www.prweb.com
Moe, Richard. “Saving Landmark
Buildings Can Require Tough Trade-
offs.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 14 July
2004: B07.
Prost, Charlene. “Raze a Building and
Get Tax Credits.” St. Louis Post-
Dispatch 4 July 2004: B05.
Prost, Charlene, and Tim Bryant. “Suit
Seeks to Protect Building from Razing
in Old Post Office Project.” St. Louis
Post-Dispatch 29 May 2003: B2.
Shinkle, Peter, and Charlene Prost.
“Developer Charges That Threats
Killed Proposal.” St. Louis Post-
Dispatch 22 July 2004: B01.
Opposite page: photo by William Herman Rau,
January 21, 1896. No. 534. The Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection.
 historic preservation
Will Bethlehem Turn
Steel into Gold?
By the end of the year, Bethlehem’s famous abandoned steel mill could be a casino—but
does the city have even better ways to bring in cash?
IF THE SLOW DEATH OF BETHLEHEM STEEL WAS TRAGEDY,
then the imminent slots-and-lofts redevelopment of its idled riverside
steelworks is farce.
Located in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, the company operated its
hometown plant until 1996. The acres of abandoned industry were, for
a few short years, the stuff of coffee-table nostalgia and regional despair.
Despite the downer vibe and lost-hope dereliction, outside developers
(and city boosters) saw potential and began circling covetously.
Today, a consortium of developers led by casino giant Las Vegas
Sands plans to turn 120 acres of abandoned foundries and blast fur-
naces into a theme-park mix of stores, apartments, and a casino
hotel. In just a decade, “The Steel” will have gone from functioning
industrial plant to a haven for yuppies with lattes, waylaying plans
to preserve it as a symbol of post-industrial American decay. By tak-
ing advantage of the surrounding area’s boom, redevelopment of
the steelworks may compress the transformation process many old-
er industrial cities have experienced, skipping the stage in which
hipsters and artists make a neighborhood attractive enough that
they will no longer be able to afford to live there.
The Steel’s Rise and Fall
The Steel emerged in late-19th-century Bethlehem, a city domi-
nated by the Moravian Church, which had settled there in 1741. Its
two anchor institutions gave the city a bipolar character: starched
and ecclesiastical north of the Lehigh River, grimy and profane to
the south. The divide was mirrored in the Bethlehem population,
with the old Pennsylvania Dutch settlers to the north, and Eastern
and Southern European steel immigrants to the south.
by Jeff Pooley
For most of the 20th century, Bethlehem Steel was a Fortune 500
icon, the world’s second biggest steel company. Its workers supplied
the steel for many of the bridges, tunnels, and skyscrapers that occu-
py our collective memory—the Golden Gate and George Washington
Bridges, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, the Lincoln and
Holland Tunnels, among others—and armed the nation for both
World Wars. The Steel lavishly compensated its executives: in 1956 it
paid nine out of the twelve top salaries in American business. Its
thousands of laborers were not treated as well, but they won union
recognition during World War II, and by the mid-1970s were among
the highest paid industrial workers in the world. By then, the compa-
ny employed 115,000 workers, and its Bethlehem operations
stretched for five miles along the Lehigh.
But then the hemorrhaging began. A combination of factors,
including overseas competition, reduced demand, upstart American
firms, and the company’s gilded executive culture, left Bethlehem Steel
reeling by the late 1970s. In August of 1977, over 7,000 blue-collar
workers were laid off—though it was, tellingly, the September 30 layoff
of 2,500 white-collar workers that is remembered as “Black Friday.” Bil-
ly Joel’s 1983 single “Allentown” made the Bethlehem layoffs infamous:
“Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time / filling out forms / standing in
line.” (The song was reportedly inspired by Bethlehem, not nearby
Allentown, but a song named for Bethlehem would, presumably, have
been read as heavy-handed religious allegory.) By 1984, the company’s
employee ranks had plummeted to 48,500.
The company limped along until 2001, when it finally declared
bankruptcy. Its remnants were purchased by the lean, privately owned
International Steel Group shortly after bankruptcy allowed the com-
pany to shirk its pension obligations, a move
since echoed by other faltering companies.
The international steel market had trans-
formed the Bethlehem works into a vast
brownfield.
City Slicker
The city’s current post-steel revival is the
product of another outside market—New
York City. New York is just 60 miles down I-
78, a drive lined by in-built and pricey New
Jersey suburbs. Real estate arbitrage—the
large gap between New Jersey’s overheated
housing market and the Lehigh Valley’s still
modest costs—has exerted its predictable
magnetism over developers, resulting in the
same farms-to-McMansion makeover that
has transformed the outlying districts of most
large American cities in recent years. In the
Valley’s case, the especially steep New York
prices and proximity to Philadelphia have
accelerated the acre-devouring sprawl, mak-
ing it the fastest-growing region in Pennsyl-
vania. The Valley’s average home price
jumped 60 percent in the last five years, to
$218,000, in the first half of 2006. And the
trend shows no sign of cooling.
Many of the Valley’s new residents are
well-off professionals, who have pushed the
region’s average household income to over
$71,043, according to the Lehigh Develop-
ment Corporation. The newly attractive
demographics have yielded four separate pro-
posals to build “lifestyle centers,” the indus-
try’s euphemism for upscale malls that mim-
ic traditional streetscapes. The Lehigh Valley
has become, almost overnight, one big exurb.
Most exurbs, though, don’t have three grit-
ty, post-industrial cities (Bethlehem, Allentown,
and Easton) in their midst. The same kind of
arbitrage pressure that produced the Lehigh
Valley housing boom began to act on the cities
themselves: “used” homes in the city cores
started to look like bargains compared to the
new developments on their outskirts. Bethle-
hem capitalized on the region’s new edge-city
dynamism to start its own renaissance. Initially,
Bethlehem survived the lost jobs and decreased
tax dollars by shifting attention from the steel-
works to its Moravian community in the north.
With careful preservation, the stewardship of
the Moravian Church, and savvy marketing, the
city successfully re-branded itself as “Christmas
City,” complete with seasonal pageantry, an
page 20
arts-and-crafts “Christkindlmarkt,” and an 81-
foot-high “Star of Bethlehem” atop the city’s
South Mountain. Today, the Moravian’s 18th-
century church and namesake college buildings
are the core of a picturesque boutique-lined
downtown. A postcard in stone and mortar, it is
surrounded by a well maintained residential
district of 19th-century mansions.
The city’s “South Side,” home to the
steelworks, Lehigh University, and crowded
working-class rowhouses is now experiencing
its own revival. Artists began moving to the
South Side in growing numbers over the last
decade, in a now-clichéd pattern played out in
the aging, post-industrial districts of other
Northeastern cities. The South Side, in the
first years of the new millennium, started to
look like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, ten years
ago: vinyl siding neighbored restored brick,
goateed hipsters frequented art galleries, and
cheap restaurants were opened in buildings
exhibiting signs of recent distress. Vacant
industrial buildings were renovated for lofts
and street-level bohemia.
Packaging Nostalgia
For all of the city’s good news, north and
south, the steelworks remains a brownfield.
A number of ambitious plans for redevelop-
ment had been proposed after its final, mid-
1990s shuttering, but each fell apart.
Even as development stalled, the same
years witnessed steady growth in packaged
nostalgia for the Steel, its industrial legacy,
and the steelworks themselves. Two glossy
photo collections have, in the last few years,
joined John Strohmeyer’s classic account of
the company’s demise, Crisis in Bethlehem.
The local newspaper published a thick com-
memorative, “Forging America,” in late 2003
and followed it up a few months later with a
slickly produced DVD. A former Steel execu-
The familiar, stage-by-stage progression
of gentrification—first, the edgy pioneers,
then the young professionals who love
them, and after a long interval, the
boutiques and brick sidewalks—has, in
Bethlehem’s case, collapsed due to the
rapid boom of the surrounding area.
tive, meanwhile, launched ambitious plans
for a “National Museum of Industrial Histo-
ry” to be housed in the colossal Machine
Shop No. 2, which, when it was erected in
1890, was the world’s largest industrial
space. The NMIH even earned a first-ever
Smithsonian “affiliation,” though that didn’t
translate into federal funding.
In 2004, the National Trust for Historic
Preservation named the steelworks as one of
America’s eleven “most endangered historic
places” and profiled the site in its May/June
2005 Preservation magazine cover story. A
grassroots advocacy group called “Save Our
Steel,” formed out of the steelworker commu-
nity, has pursued the tightwire goal of a “his-
torically sensitive redevelopment” of the
site—lending cautious support to developer
proposals that, at one time or another,
appeared on the cusp of groundbreaking
In the fall of 2004, after a decade of
scrapped plans and false starts, city officials,
NIMH backers, and local preservationists
alike applauded the announcement that a
prominent, New York-heavy development
team calling itself “BethWorks Now” had
bought the 120 core acres of the site from
Steel corporate successor ISG for a reported
$3 million. The buyers included Barry Gosin
and his gargantuan New York-based New-
mark Group. Gosin is famous for his trendy
makeovers of aging New York industrial
neighborhoods, including, almost single-
handedly, DUMBO in Brooklyn. And Gosin
has been effusive in his public pronounce-
ments. This summer, for example, he told a
group of prominent Lehigh Valley business
leaders that he was “overcome by emotion”
when he first visited the site. “I want to some-
day be able to bring my granddaughter there
and say, ‘I did this,’” said Gosin.
The development plan pressed all the
The now-empty Number 2 Machine Shop, one of the largest industrial buildings in the world when it was built. This is the building they are
proposing to make the centerpiece of the industrial museum for exhibits. Photo ©Shaun O’Boyle.
right historical buttons. There was, for exam-
ple, a pledge to preserve the iconic, seven-
teen-story high blast furnaces, the Machine
Shop No. 2, and the iron foundry. The plan,
to be sure, called for a predictable mix of the
upscale and voguish development that would
make it profitable—with over 700 lofts, an
entertainment center (with “cool bowling
alleys”), one or two hotels, and the requisite
“lifestyle center.” Still, the group’s preserva-
tionist bona fides and ready capital assuaged
the concerns of most steelworks stakehold-
ers. Save Our Steel almost immediately
endorsed the developers and their proposal.
An Unexpected Plot Twist
Enter the Las Vegas Sands Corp. Just
four months after the original BethWorks
plan was announced, the $16 billion casino
giant quietly revealed that it planned to join
page 21
the existing investors. This was, to put it
mildly, a bombshell. Here was the fastest
growing gambling company in the world pro-
posing a $350 million slots parlor and con-
vention center as the centerpiece of a
revamped plan, now worth $879 million.
Las Vegas Sands is best known for its
“Renaissance Venice”-themed Venetian Casi-
no on the Las Vegas Strip, which boasts a
full-scale Ducal Palace, working gondolas,
and a Guggenheim Museum franchise.
While Bethlehem is a long way from Las
Vegas, recent Pennsylvania legislation autho-
rizing slot gambling gave the two cities some-
thing in common. Legislators voted in 2004
to award fourteen slot licenses across the
state. Since twelve of the licenses were effec-
tively spoken for, the new law has set off a
statewide scramble for the two remaining
stand-alone licenses. In addition to the jobs
and investment, host communities are guar-
anteed, by law, an annual $10 million pay-
ment from each slots operator.
Thanks to revenue projections and the
New Jersey border, the Lehigh Valley has
been widely viewed as an odds-on favorite for
one of these two licenses. The prospect of all
that one-armed Lehigh Valley banditry
attracted not just Las Vegas Sands, but three
other out-of-state gambling concerns with
their own elaborate proposals for develop-
ments in Bethlehem and nearby Allentown.
By May of 2005, Las Vegas Sands had
unexpectedly acquired a majority stake in the
BethWorks Now investment team. The new
plan, in addition to the hotel casino, called for
at least 400 more lofts—and Disney-esque
touches like climbing walls, boat rides, a
restored elevated railway, and light shows
said to evoke the steelmaking process.
 Fewer historic buildings would be pre-
served under this new Sands-led plan. Machine
Shop No. 2 would be saved, but no longer set
aside for the industrial museum; instead, the
“steel cathedral,” as it has been called, would
house a mix of lofts and high-end retail. The
museum would move to a much smaller near-
by structure. “We’ve talked to the retailers,”
Gosin told the local newspaper at the time.
“They tell us, ‘If the Venetian comes, we’ll
come.’ ... If I tell them the Museum of Indus-
trial History is going to be the anchor tenant,
they’re not going to come.”
Resistance Mounts
Preservationists were frustrated by the
revamped plans. “We were very disappointed
because they were quite a bit different from
the earlier sketches, which looked pretty sensi-
tive to the history of the site,” Mike Kramer,
the local arts community for a future arena
and performing arts center.
More than 1,400 residents on both sides
of the slots issue crowded into two Council
forums that summer. At the July forum, the
Reverend Gary Straughan, president of the
Eastern District of the Moravian Church in
North America, spoke on behalf of Citizens
for a Better Bethlehem. “We all know that
there is something inherently evil about
gambling,” he said. “Don’t exchange the Star
of Bethlehem for the neon lights surround-
ing slot machines and beckoning those
instant riches.”
The City Council, after a summer of bitter
debate, voted 4-3 to reject the anti-gambling
zoning proposal in September. Gambling
would be permitted in Christmas City, and now
both sides awaited the state’s decision.
high-end makeover already underway and
entomb the once grand and gritty Bethlehem
Steel works in market-tested urban chic and
glittery casino lights. More people may be
taking their Christmas breaks in Bethlehem
in coming years—not for the city’s carefully
cultivated religious imagery, but rather for
the irresistible spectacle of a flashy casino 60
miles from New York City. One hopes for
Bethlehem’s sake that five years from now a
new casino developer does not find an even
sexier site a few miles closer in, with a bigger
climbing wall and longer boat ride.
“Forging America: The History of
Bethlehem Steel.” The Morning Call 14
Dec. 2003: S1.
www.mcall.com/news/specials/

co-founder of Save Our Steel, told local report- Bethlehem’s Star Ascends bethsteel

ers. “It looked to us to be a basic mall design.”
More worrisome to the Sands and its
partners was the growing and organized
resistance of religious groups. Polls taken
over the summer of 2005 showed city resi-
The Lehigh Valley rarely surfaces in the
Hurley, Amanda Kolson. “Industrial
national media, so The New York Times’ late- Strength: Can the Remnants of
December 2005 story on the region’s resur- Bethlehem Steel Be Reborn?”
gent cities stood out. Headlined “Shaking Preservation May/June 2005: 32-37.
Off the Rust, New Suburbs Are Born,” the www.nationaltrust.org/magazine

dents split on the gambling proposal—with
some calling the slots parlor a threat to
Bethlehem’s carefully cultivated (and sea-
sonally lucrative) “Christmas City” image.
In the wake of the Sands deal, two anti-
article claimed that the Valley’s cities were
Save Our Steel
attracting “an influx of middle-class New
www.saveoursteel.org
Yorkers” who were “bringing their cosmo-
politan tastes with them.” In breathless Strohmeyer, John. Crisis in Bethlehem:
prose, the story cited $1,200 designer quilts Big Steel’s Struggle to Survive.

gambling groups formed: “Citizens for a
Better Bethlehem” and “Valley Citizens for
Casino-Free Development.” Neither group
is explicitly religious, but personnel and
non-profit records reveal that both have
clear ties to the Moravian Church and the
Valley’s evangelical community.
Also during the summer, two Bethlehem
City Councilmen—one a Moravian minister,
the other an attorney for the Catholic Diocese
of Allentown—proposed a zoning change
that would ban gambling on the steelworks
site, which was backed by the two activist
groups. In response, BethWorks and the
Sands hired a veteran Harrisburg, Pennsylva-
nia, lobbying firm and launched a charm
offensive that included a twelve-page news-
paper insert, door-to-door canvassing, and an
automated telephone campaign (complete
with phone patch-throughs to the City Coun-
cil switchboard). The investor team gave
$50,000 to the city’s popular MusikFest, and
donated 3.5 acres of Bethlehem Steel land to
and $800 end tables made of steel beams Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1994.
on sale, as the Times put it, in the “shadow
of the hulking industrial carcass” of Bethle-
hem Steel.
While the steelworks project remains in
limbo, Bethlehem’s South Side continues to
gentrify. The familiar, stage-by-stage progres-
sion of gentrification—first, the edgy pio-
neers, then the young professionals who love
them, and after a long interval, the boutiques
and brick sidewalks—has, in Bethlehem’s
case, collapsed due to the rapid boom of the
surrounding area. One local developer envi-
sioned his $30 million South Side loft reno-
vation as a rental property, but as it nears
completion, over half of its units have already
sold as condos. The developer expects to sell
them all before opening—and his is just one
of many upscale projects underway in the old
steelworkers’ sloped neighborhood.
Pennsylvania is expected to award the
coveted slots licenses in late 2006. A victory
for the BethWorks team would accelerate the

page 22
 historic preservation
Preservation in the
Progressive City:
Debating History and
Gentrification in Austin
A city taskforce, spurred on by activists, planned to save East Austin by rolling back
historic preservation laws
MOST RESIDENTS CONSIDER AUSTIN, Texas, an enlightened,
progressive city. Home to one of the nation’s premier research uni-
versities, a renowned live music scene, Lance Armstrong, and the
homegrown Dell Corporation, this blue dot in a red state has consis-
tently ranked high in various surveys of “best places to live in Ameri-
ca.” But its political maverick status has frequently put the city on a
collision course with conservative state legislators, who seem to have
a penchant for passing bills that reverse city ordinances.
One such case recently led to a major battle in Austin over gentri-
fication and historic preservation—a five-year long public controversy
that generated several task forces and expert studies, as well as
uncounted pages of newspaper coverage. In the process, the debate
nearly terminated the city’s 30-year-old practice of protecting historic
properties, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and brought into public
discourse some unpleasant realities about modern American urban
life from which most Austinites probably imagined themselves
immune. The story of this debate underscores the complex relation-
ship between gentrification and preservation, and how difficult it can
be to measure their relationship. Ultimately, the Austin debate out-
lines ways in which preservation can be used to combat displacement
and a loss of cultural identity, but it also demonstrates the limitations
faced by an individual municipality attempting to counter national—
even global—economic and political forces.
A Fractured City
The population of Austin has roughly doubled every twenty years
since the city was founded in 1836, and that rate of growth is expected
to continue. It is now larger than Boston, Seattle, or Washington,
D.C. The city has sprawled westward across its scenic yet ecologically
fragile hill country landscape, which overlies the Edwards Aquifer, a
major source of drinking water for the region and of the many
springs and creeks that nourish native flora and fauna. To control this
growth, Austin’s voters in 1992 adopted the growth-control Save Our
page 23
by Jeffrey Chusid
Springs (SOS) Ordinance through a citizen initiative. State lawmakers
and local developers, however, passed legislation rendering the SOS
ordinance largely ineffective. At the end of the decade, Austin
responded by adopting a set of planning incentives under the rubric
of Smart Growth; instead of restricting development in ecologically
sensitive areas, they would reward developers for building in non-sen-
sitive areas.
Smart Growth, however, had a rocky reception. Initially, historic
preservation advocates perceived it as a devious strategy for develop-
ers to gain access to historic districts, and as a threat to neighborhood
character across the city. But the more resounding outcry came from
community groups in East Austin, who perceived that Smart Growth
encouraged construction in their neighborhoods—neighborhoods
that are poorer and have larger minority populations than elsewhere
in the city.
East Austin lies on one side of Interstate 35, a major north-south
artery that bisects Austin geographically, historically, and socially.
West of the line, the fragile, dry, and rocky landscape advances toward
the High Plains, while to the east, rolling prairie and bottomlands
mark a landscape of deep soils and plentiful water. Cotton and South-
ern Plantation culture, which included slavery, ran from the Atlantic
all the way to Austin’s central divide. West of the divide, where ranch-
ing predominated, was populated in large part by liberal free-thinkers
who had fled the 19th-century revolutions and counter-revolutions in
Central Europe. As a result, I-35 has come to represent Austin’s politi-
cal and cultural divide, helping to explain its vacillation between con-
servative and liberal viewpoints.
It also explains the divisions between multi-cultural and Anglo-
dominant communities. Minorities have always been part of Austin’s
history. African Americans, both slaves and freedmen, had a signifi-
cant presence in Austin since its founding. Hispanics historically
accounted for a much smaller percentage of the population, and
when their numbers started increasing in the late 19th century, the
East Austin is characterized by tree-shaded neighborhoods made up
of modest homes with long, rich histories. Photos by Natalie Charles.

page 24
city drove them out. Despite several well
established freedmen communities in the
western part of the city, including Clarksville,
which would later become one of Austin’s
first National Register Districts, in 1928 the
city adopted a new Master Plan that segregat-
ed public facilities, and which urged that “all
undesirables”—meaning both industrial uses
and minority citizens—be moved to East
Austin. City officials implemented the plan
successfully, and most blacks who had been
living in the western half of the city were
“relocated” back to the former plantation
lands, on the other side of I-35—what was
then a broad boulevard called East Avenue.
Austin became a segregated city, with an
eastern half composed of isolated pockets of
European settlement, such as Swede Hill,
surrounded by growing communities of Afri-
can Americans and Hispanics.
Clashing Perspectives
on Neighborhood Growth
Fast forward to 2000. Austin is Richard
Florida’s poster child for the New Creative
Class. Its citizens have the 9th highest medi-
an income in the country according to 2000
Census figures. In East Austin, Smart
Growth has been adopted, a redevelopment
agency has been established, and the city air-
port has been moved ten miles to the south-
east while its former East Austin site is mas-
ter planned as a “New Urbanist” community.
At the same time, in just 30 years, Austin
has gone from the city with the best hous-
ing affordability index in the country to the
most expensive housing market in Texas,
and one of the most expensive of any large
non-coastal U.S. city. East Austin neigh-
borhoods, only a few blocks from a grow-
ing downtown and an enormous universi-
ty, are increasingly seen as hip and
funky—the place to go for entertainment,
great food, and a cute, affordable house.
Crime rates are relatively low, and gang
activity is negligible, and although the
schools are poor, that doesn’t seem to deter
musicians, grad students, or young profes-
sionals from contemplating a move east.
Inadequate local services and a dearth of
supermarkets matter little to residents
with cars, and improved goods and servic-
es are following the new populations to the
area anyway.
page 25
This widespread and benign public per-
ception of East Austin was soon loudly chal-
lenged, however, by People in Defense of the
Earth and Her Resources (PODER), a group
of local activists. Formed in the mid-1990s to
force the removal of a leaking gasoline tank
farm endangering the health of East Austin
residents, PODER, in an unrelenting drum-
beat of press releases, testimony at public
hearings, special events, and interviews,
painted a completely different picture of East
Austin development. PODER described an
“influx of wealthy whites” who were “displac-
ing the traditional black and Hispanic com-
munities.” East Austin, they claimed, had
been “marketed to affluent, largely Anglo,
home buyers,” and growing real estate val-
ues, combined with the historic preservation
and Smart Growth policies, had resulted in
“gentrification.”
PODER’s Exhibit A was the wholesale
rehabilitation of historic residences, which
not only allowed whites and “well-heeled pro-
fessionals” to play with bargain-priced attrac-
tive homes, but led to a rise in property val-
ues that “mess[ed] with everyone’s tax base …
as much as a mile around,” said PODER
founder Susana Almanza, in an interview in
a Ford Foundation newsletter. This drove out
the very working-class population that built
East Austin’s neighborhoods. According to
PODER, new owners of historic properties
also received huge, permanent, historic prop-
erty tax exemptions, while poor folk sur-
rounding the upgraded homes not only had
to pay more for the enhanced value of their
own, less attractive, houses, but then had to
make up the missing tax revenue lost to the
exemption. “That’s the main thing that is dis-
placing people and making them feel that
they have no choice but to sell out,” said
Almanza.
PODER’s anti-gentrification, anti-historic
preservation campaign got results. Several
Austin City Council members took the claims
seriously, and the city held a series of public
hearings and Council discussions on the top-
ic. Publicly, everyone in City Hall expressed
dismay at the situation. Preservation groups
and city staff, however, quietly pleaded for a
more careful analysis. Mayor Will Wynn, an
architecture school graduate and former
board member of the Heritage Society of
Austin, the city’s main preservation group,
listened, as did several other council mem-
bers. Over the next several years, the city
established two citizen task forces and con-
ducted at least two internal staff studies of
the matter. They examined gentrification in
East Austin, the impact of historic designa-
tions and other preservation policies on hous-
ing prices and displacement, and whether to
rewrite or abandon historic tax exemptions—
or even scrap the city’s historic preservation
ordinance altogether. A steady stream of arti-
cles in the Austin American-Statesman, the
weekly Austin Chronicle, and the University
of Texas’s Daily Texan kept the issue in the
public’s consciousness, and other public and
private entities entered the fray, from the
Heritage Society, which hosted a public sym-
posium on gentrification, to the Capital Met-
ropolitan Transit Authority, which issued a
large report in 2005 on “best practices” to
combat gentrification.
Upon Closer Examination
Many of PODER’s alarms seemed real at
first. East Austin’s African-American popula-
tion had dropped by over 25 percent since
1980, while the white population in at least
one neighborhood near downtown increased
by 30 percent. Property values—and property
taxes—doubled in East Austin between 1990
and 2003, with the values of historic homes
in East Austin increasing even more. Over
the next several years, however, as the city
staff studies analyzed the meaning of these
numbers and their relationship to gentrifica-
tion, a different picture began to emerge.
The African-American population in Aus-
tin had actually been in decline for years,
marked by a steady flight to surrounding sub-
urbs. This exodus began well before 1990
and had actually resulted in scattered areas of
vacant houses throughout East Austin. In a
perverse way, the effective end of segregation
in the 1960s and ’70s made many of the
community’s cultural institutions, from jazz
clubs to black colleges, both less necessary
and less viable. At the same time, neither
true integration nor a new set of institutions
rose in their stead, leaving the community
adrift. As one ex-resident said in a radio inter-
view, “There’s nothing here for us.”
Meanwhile, the supposed white influx
into East Austin was actually an overall
decline during the 1990s, from 24 to 17 per-
cent of area population. East Austin did expe-
rience a significant increase in Hispanic pop-
ulation, however, from 30 to over 50 percent
of area residents, doubling in actual num-
bers. Property values did skyrocket, but they
still lagged behind increases in the rest of the
city, and East Austin homes, at a 2005 medi-
an price of $103,000, remained considerably
cheaper than the city’s median home price of
$155,000. Despite increases in property val-
ues and taxes, East Austin homeownership
levels remained roughly constant at 44 per-
cent throughout the boom, a proportion that
still leads the city.
Most importantly from the point of view
of the preservation community, historic
homes turned out to be irrelevant either as a
factor in tax assessments or as a drain on the
public weal. In fact, only 28 properties in East
Austin were designated as landmarks and eli-
gible for a tax exemption, out of a total of
13,823 parcels.
Overall, the various city staff studies sug-
gested that historic preservation played a rela-
tively minor role in East Austin’s evolution.
One study even concluded that preservation
could help in conserving ethnic communities
and their institutions, and in maintaining
affordable housing. Evidence of this phenom-
enon came from property value assessments
in two East Austin National Register Historic
Districts. National Register districts in Austin
adhere to voluntary design guidelines and
oversight from the city’s Landmarks Com-
mission, but the properties do not get tax
breaks. Even though residents of the two dis-
tricts pulled a higher number of building per-
mits than the rest of East Austin, home pric-
es actually rose slightly less than the area
average. In fact, the historic district status
mitigated market pressures because it disal-
lows the high-density construction that their
proximity to downtown would suggest as the
“highest and best use” for the land.
The protection from skyrocketing hous-
ing prices has not been lost on other inhabit-
ants of East Austin. Since the adoption of
Austin’s new Neighborhood Planning frame-
work, all of the five plans produced by East
Austin neighborhoods have called for updat-
ed historic resources surveys, increased des-
ignations of individual buildings and local
districts as historic, rehabilitation incentives,
and preservation education. One plan explic-
page 26
Preservation Taskforce” to further investigate
the matter. In fact, the new taskforce had a
clearly broader charge than East Austin gen-
trification. It included, explicitly and implicit-
ly, reviewing how much the city was losing by
granting preservation tax abatements, and
finding ways to change the Landmarks Com-
mission to make them less obstreperous and
more sympathetic to developers. For almost a
year, the taskforce, primarily made up of city
commissioners, developers, and lawyers,
examined every aspect of historic preserva-
tion in Austin and seemingly came extremely
close to recommending an end to preserva-
tion as a city policy. Several taskforce mem-
bers were not terribly subtle about seeing
their job as putting a halt to a string of recent
preservation victories. Only an enormous
Gabia Alejo with her parents, Jose and Tomasa, in front of the East effort by a handful of preservation advocates
Austin home that Gabia is fixing up. Photo by Natalie Charles.
and professionals, working nights and week-
ends, holding meetings, writing letters and
white papers, and attending public hearings,
influenced the taskforce enough to keep pres-
Ultimately, the Austin
ervation policies in Austin alive.
debate outlines ways in The taskforce made several significant
which preservation can changes to Austin’s preservation regulations;
be used to combat however, the degree to which the resulting
displacement and a loss changes in the preservation ordinance have
of cultural identity, but weakened preservationists remains to be
it also demonstrates the seen. The city greatly reduced the automatic
limitations faced by an tax exemption granted to all new historically
individual municipality designated properties. (Interestingly, the 1981
attempting to counter Austin Preservation Plan had predicted this
national—even global— change, identifying the practice of tax exemp-
tions as divisive and a disincentive for the city
economic and political
to designate properties.) The taskforce also
forces.
recommended reducing the number of mem-
bers and eliminating seats reserved for spe-
cific professional representatives on the
itly identifies districts as powerful mecha- Landmarks Commission. More importantly,
nisms for maintaining affordable housing, the city significantly tightened the criteria by
because they prevent indiscriminate demoli- which a property could become an Austin
tions and unsympathetic or out-of-scale addi- landmark.
tions and infill construction. An East Austin While PODER, developers, and most
community leader has stated that historic dis- elected officials were trying to weaken preser-
tricts may also halt the influx of sub-standard vation in Austin, many neighborhood associ-
housing built by absentee landlords. ations and community groups used the task-
force as an opportunity to expand preserva-
Turning a Taskforce tion protections considerably. Austin’s four-
to Better Ends teen National Register districts bestow pres-
Despite early results from the studies tige on the city and a measure of protection
revealing little connection between gentrifica- from federally funded projects, but what Aus-
tion and historic preservation, in 2003, the tin had always lacked was a local historic dis-
City Council decided to form a “Historic trict designation, which is the only real pro-
tection for a neighborhood on a day-to-day
basis. Local designation can be enforced
where it counts: at the building department
where demolition and alteration permits are
issued. The head of the taskforce had long
opposed local districts, however, so it was a
bit of sweet irony for Austin preservationists
that there was near unanimous support for
these districts on the taskforce; they were
both recommended and implemented.
Now all existing Austin National Register
districts can become local historic districts once
they fulfill the new regulatory requirements,
such as preparing design standards for new con-
struction and alterations in concert with the
city’s historic preservation officer. The local ordi-
nance thus provides a much greater incentive
for neighborhoods to create their own districts.
In East Austin, these districts could potentially
include a dozen or more individual neighbor-
hoods. A sampling of potential local district
resources include areas of larger, well estab-
lished homes dating back to the 1870s; shotgun
houses or simple craftsman-style workers cottag-
es from the early 20th century; the campus of
historically black Huston-Tillotson College; the
old Oakwood cemetery; 19th century commer-
cial buildings lining the old railroad tracks; and a
variety of tranquil streetscapes where winding
roads line wild creeks.
Addressing Gentrification
One Neighborhood at a Time
In the end, the taskforce’s final report
reflected the preservation community’s active
campaign of education and lobbying, and
reemphasized three points made by the other
studies. First, preservation can be of assis-
tance to communities facing gentrification by
saving community institutions and cultural
practices, stabilizing property values, valuing
and protecting affordable working-class hous-
ing, and providing financial and technical
support to low-income owners of historic
properties. Second, significant structural
issues still impact East Austin, making it vul-
nerable to gentrification. Ignoring them in
order to attack preservation has served no one
well—least of all the vanishing African-Amer-
ican community. Thirty years ago, just when
Austin was described as “most affordable,”
the city changed its zoning regulations so that
only uses specifically permitted in an area
could be constructed. Consequently, housing
page 27
could only be built in areas specifically zoned
as residential. That helped subdivision devel-
opers, but not the cause of affordable hous-
ing. The final major issue is the clouded legal
title of much East Austin real estate, a legacy
of Mexican land grants, the Civil War, and
poverty. Legal questions make homeowners
ineligible for regular mortgages, and even
more importantly, for the myriad property tax
exemptions offered by city and state. While
preservation can provide a powerful set of
tools and design approaches for urban design
and economic development, it is still only one
relatively modest part of the kind of compre-
hensive, multi-pronged strategy needed to
combat gentrification.
Today, although both PODER and the
preservationists remain polarized, they share
a common desire to save communities: their
physical character, traditions, institutions,
and inhabitants. The mere mention of gentri-
fication has so inflamed the discussion in
Austin, however, as in other cities around the
country, that stereotypes and political grand-
standing have obscured the facts and tangible
impacts on real people. Austin succeeded, at
least in part, in detaching itself from much of
the hyperbole by conducting a set of separate,
relatively rigorous studies on the intersection
of gentrification and preservation. The city’s
efforts have suggested that the answer to gen-
trification is not found in broad-brush gener-
alizations, but rather in analyzing each neigh-
borhood’s specific economic and social con-
cerns, understanding them as inextricably tied
to a complex local history, and devising appro-
priate solutions and strategies responsive to
the community’s needs and aspirations.
Bingamon, Brant. “PODER vs. H-
Zoning: Ready for Round Two?” Austin
Chronicle 1 Nov. 2002.
www.austinchronicle.com
Carlson, Neil. “Urban Gentry: What
Happens When a Neighborhood Starts
to Sell Its Soul?” Ford Foundation
Report Online Spring 2003.
www.fordfound.org
City of Austin. “Gentrification
Committee Report.” 14 June 2001.
www.ci.austin.tx.us/housing/
publications.htm
City of Austin Neighborhood Housing
and Community Development
Department. “Community Preservation
and Revitalization Program
Implementation: Recommendations.”
Draft Report. 28 July 2005.
www.ci.austin.tx.us/ housing/
publications.htm
City of Austin. “Staff Task Force on
Gentrification in East Austin: Finding
and Recommendations.” 13 Mar. 2003.
www.ci.austin.tx.us/ housing/
publications.htm
Economic & Planning Systems, Inc. “A
Review of Best Practices for Mitigating
Gentrification throughout the
Country.” 15 June 2004.
saltillo.capmetro.org
Kennedy, Maureen, and Paul Leonard.
Dealing with Neighborhood Change:
A Primer on Gentrification and Policy
Choices. Washington, D.C.: The
Brookings Institution Center on Urban
and Metropolitan Policy, 2001.
www.brookings.edu
PODER
www.poder-texas.org
Sadowsky, Steve. “City of Austin
Historic Preservation Task Force
Report to City Council.” 25 Mar. 2004.
www.heritagesocietyaustin.org/
taskforce_rec.pdf
 historic preservation
Looking East
The Asian megacity is set to become this century’s predominant urban form, which
means Western preservationists have much to learn from Bangkok, Dhaka, and Mumbai
THE HILLS AND BEACHES OF TODAY’S Indian megacity Mumbai
were for centuries little more than a series of sleepy islands populated
by fishermen and traders plying the eastern shores of the Arabian
Sea. Even under British colonial rule (1661-1948), the city was largely
characterized by its grand Victorian public buildings, graceful sea-
front boulevards, and arcaded shopping districts, particularly around
the Fort district, once the colonial hub of the city and today its central
business district. Not until after Indian Independence did Mumbai
grow into the financial, cultural, and entertainment capital of the
world’s second most populous nation. By 2020, the Population Insti-
tute projects Mumbai’s population will reach 28.5 million, surpassing
Tokyo as the world’s largest city.
Mumbai’s massive growth in the past 50 years exemplifies
Asia’s urban expansion: constantly straining all available resources and
services, resulting in vast unregulated development in the form of
shantytowns and other illicit construction. As Mumbai and other Asian
cities grow, their historic colonial and vernacular architectural heri-
tage have received little attention. Real estate speculation, infra-
structure development, and a preference for modern forms have
prevailed over preservation.
Local historic preservationists, however, have become increas-
ingly adept at working in these booming environments. Bucking
conventional top-down legislative approaches, community-based
organizations have pioneered more effective tactics for preservation
in Mumbai and elsewhere. Successful strategies from Asian cities
may foretell a new era where Western cities follow their Eastern
counterparts’ lead in many aspects of urban management, includ-
ing historic preservation.
Constructing Cultural Significance
In Mumbai, community-focused projects have concentrated on the
southern Fort district and the adjacent Kala Ghoda district, bustling
commercial areas teeming with street hawkers, employees of the near-
by Bombay Stock Exchange, and middle-class residents from the Cola-
ba and Marine Drive neighborhoods. The area boasts a dense collection
of colonial-era buildings, including Victorian Neo-Gothic gems such as
the Elphinstone College (completed in the 1880s), the David Sasson
Library (1870), the Indo-Saracenic Prince of Wales Museum (1914), and
the cast-iron Watson’s Hotel, now called Esplanade Mansion (1869).
Despite municipal preservation legislation passed in 1995 and the
numerous agencies charged with monitoring Mumbai’s historically
significant architecture, real estate pressures, community neglect, pol-
lution, and poor maintenance all take heavy tolls on the buildings.
page 28
by Robert Garland Thomson
Perceiving the inadequacies of the official process, a local organiza-
tion, the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), has rallied local plan-
ners, community leaders, and citizens to take the initiative in preserva-
tion efforts. The historic value of the area, however, has proven the
major impediment to engaging community support. For many Indians,
buildings dating from the British period of rule conjure grim recollec-
tions of racism, exploitation, and exclusion. At the same time, the swell-
ing urban populace of Mumbai largely consists of newcomers who
might regard the 150-year-old British buildings with disdain or disinter-
est. Since the historic value could not suffice as a rallying cry for preser-
vation efforts, the UDRI had to find creative ways to inject new cultural
significance into the old Fort neighborhoods.
The UDRI initiated a detailed survey of Kala Ghoda and discov-
ered that the district held Mumbai’s densest collection of art galleries.
Seizing upon this distinction, the UDRI helped to establish the Kala
Ghoda Association, an organization of art enthusiasts, business own-
ers, and concerned citizens, to enhance the district’s visibility and
encourage appreciation of its built fabric. The annual Kala Ghoda Art
Festival, launched in 1998, has been an important tool in this effort,
raising money for preservation efforts and community-based projects
throughout the district. Since its launch, several buildings, including
the Sasson Library and Elphinstone College buildings, have received
façade cleanings and some interior restorations. More recently, the
UDRI and Kala Ghoda Association have begun negotiating with the
owner of Watson’s Hotel—which suffered a partial collapse in 2005
and which the World Monuments Fund placed on its 2006 World
Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites—to stabilize
and restore certain public areas of the much deteriorated building.
Preservation efforts, in short, embraced the rapidly changing
nature of Mumbai. By “constructing cultural significance,” UDRI
executive director Rahul Mehrotra argues, preservationists can use
public advocacy to invigorate a community’s appreciation for build-
ings whose origins are so far removed.
Eighteen hundred miles away, in another rapidly developing
regional hub that has struggled to preserve historic buildings, the
Bangkok Forum has employed similar grassroots techniques. Founded
by Chaiwat Thirapantu, a German-trained local activist, the Forum is a
citizen’s group that organizes street-level events and public action,
often around preservation issues, using the publicity from these events
to advance a more pluralistic urban planning process in Bangkok.
Unlike Mumbai, Bangkok has no colonial legacy—the Kingdom
of Siam, under King Rama I and his Chakri Dynasty, famously evad-
ed European rule. Rama established Bangkok in 1782—then known
Top: The Teachers’ Council (Khurusapha) Printing House (1930s) in Bangkok’s Banglamphu district in the foreground was the target of the Bangkok
Forum’s community-level activism. Photo courtesy Marc Askew. Bottom: The David Sasson Library (1870) is an excellent example of the eclectic
Colonial-era architecture of the Kala Ghoda district in Mumbai’s Old Fort. Photo by author.

Even in the face of powerful

interests — including development
pressure, neglect, and top-down policy
making — organized citizenry can
reclaim the process of urban change
in their cities.
as Krung Thep—across the Chao Praya River
from its predecessor capital, Thon Buri.
Absolute monarchy ended in 1932, but the
Chakri Dynasty has persisted to this day,
holding a place of prominence over the
decades alongside Thailand’s autocratic and
democratic leaders. The Thai government has
traditionally used historic preservation as a
vehicle for promotion of the monarchy. As a
result, historic preservation activity in Bang-
kok has traditionally been of a top-down
nature, focusing on royal monuments and
Engaging the public in planning decisions by
bestowing new significance on a historic
urban space, however, proves not only a high-
ly effective preservation tool, but can give a
voice to citizens in the dynamic Asian urban
environment.
Challenging the Very Notion
of the City
As the Australian urban designer Richard
Marshall points out in an essay on Asian
megacities, the current urbanization in the
Askew, Marc. Bangkok: Place, Practice
and Representation. London:
Routledge, 2002.
King, Anthony D. “The Times and
Spaces of Modernity (or Who Needs
Postmodernism?).” Global Modernities.
Ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and
Roland Robertson. London: Sage
Publications, 1995.
Logan, William S., ed. The
Disappearing “Asian” City. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.

frequently neglecting vernacular architecture
and informal urban spaces.
One neighborhood full of such architec-
ture and spaces is the Banglamphu district.
An exceptional example of Bangkok’s early
urban development, Banglamphu contains a
diverse assemblage of temples, mosques, roy-
al palaces, shophouses (hybrid commercial/
residential spaces), and vernacular wooden
buildings.
Beginning in 1997, the Bangkok Forum
began working with a broad coalition of local
residents, students, and business people to
organize and promote a festival in Banglam-
phu. Their aim was both to galvanize com-
munity participation in the district’s future,
and to draw attention to a particular building
threatened by demolition: the old Teachers’
Council (Khurusapha) Printing House, which
dates to the 1930s. Though lacking official
historic or aesthetic distinction, the building
nevertheless occupied a prominent position
in the neighborhood. The Bangkok Forum’s
coordinated campaign, aided by Silpakorn
University students who gave presentations on
the building’s early history, ultimately persuad-
ed the building’s owner, the Treasury Depart-
ment, to cancel demolition plans. The Khuru-
sapha Printing House was converted instead
into a multi-use community center, supporting
a cafe, library, and performance venue.
Like the Kala Ghoda Association and
UDRI, the Bangkok Forum’s objectives were
not preservation of historically or architectur-
ally significant buildings per se, but rather the
empowerment of local communities to direct
change in their surrounding built environ-
ment. Frequently in Mumbai, Bangkok, and
other emerging Asian megacities, the rapid
pace of development, hegemonic role of gov-
ernment, and market forces often rob citi-
zens of their voice in planning decisions.
East can only challenge “the very notion of
Marshall, Richard. “Asian Megacities.”
the city—what it is, how it works, and the
Shaping the City: Studies in History,
kind of urbanities it is capable of support- Theory and Urban Design. Ed.
ing.” Although he does not mention it specif- Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward
ically, one of the “urbanities” that the new Robbins. New York: Routledge, 2004.
megacity must support is the historic built
Mehrotra, Rahul. “Constructing Cultural
environment. Mumbai and Bangkok demon-
Significance: Looking at Bombay’s
strate that even in the face of powerful inter- Historic Fort Area.” Future Anterior 1.2
ests—including development pressure, (Fall 2004): 24-31.
neglect, and top-down policy making—orga-
nized citizenry can reclaim the process of United Nations Department of Economic
and Social Affairs, Population Division.
urban change in their cities.
World Urbanization Prospects: The
To be sure, many challenges remain. In
2001 Revision. New York: United Nations,
Mumbai, a city where over half the residents 2002.
live in slums or on the street, participation in
an arts festival might not represent the most
sustainable model for engaging large por-
tions of the population in historic preserva-
tion. Nor do the success stories above repre-
sent the norm in the Asian megacity, as any-
one observing the sad fate of Beijing’s
Hutong neighborhoods or Yangon’s colonial
architecture has witnessed.
Nevertheless, as Asian cities come to
define the urban norm in the 21st century,
preservation strategies that work in them
must be highlighted, refined, and shared
throughout the region. Tactics developed in
the new Asian megacities also have the
potential to make their way back to North
America and Europe, challenging the tradi-
tional conventions of historic preservation
practice there. The emerging emphases in
Bangkok and Mumbai on community-level
(rather than top-down) action, on negotiat-
ing the relationship between the dynamic
populace and the static urban environment,
and on accommodating the shifting values
of new constituent communities, all repre-
sent worthy objectives in the West, as well
as the East.

page 30
 historic preservation
Saving High-Rise
Public Housing
After imploding many of its most loathed towers in the 1990s, the Chicago Housing
Authority decided to save two historic developments from the scrap heap
MOST PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE UNITED States is decrepit and
getting worse. Today, tenants of crumbling garden apartments or
dreary high-rise towers occupy units dating back, in some cases, to
before the Second World War. The architects and planners responsi-
ble for these developments were fueled with purpose: to replace
squalid tenements with innovative and humane housing. To this end,
they integrated ideas from the progressive Garden City Movement
and International Style architecture into their work. Elements of these
design trends survive in decaying public housing complexes from
coast to coast, representing important aspects of America’s architec-
tural heritage.
But “the projects” are rarely considered design heirlooms. Years
of neglect have taken a toll on garden apartments and “towers in the
park” high-rise clusters, stigmatizing both residents and their homes.
The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), however, has realized that
preserving and rehabilitating some of its historic buildings is a via-
ble—and valuable—option. In partnership with the Illinois Historic
Preservation Agency (IHPA), the CHA is demonstrating a new strate-
gy to restore some low-income public housing projects to their former
glory. According to Anne Haaker, Deputy State Historic Preservation
page 31
by Sharon Maclean
Officer for the IHPA, the city’s public housing is “important not only
to the history of Chicago, but to the whole country.” In light of the
Bush administration’s many recent cuts to federal housing program
budgets, Chicago’s use of historic preservation tax credits to help
fund housing efforts may signal an alternative for other cities.
Preservation: A New Strategy
One of the largest housing authorities in the country, CHA man-
ages 78 properties and 25,000 tenants, including residences for fami-
lies and seniors. Traditionally, dilapidated public housing in Chicago
has fallen victim to the wrecking ball, or perhaps worse, to unappeal-
ing exterior alterations. Much has been written about CHA’s razing of
large-scale high-rises, such as Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor
Homes, and their subsequent “rebirth” as lower density townhouse
developments. But CHA’s new strategy, as detailed in their “Plan for
Transformation,” approved by the federal government in 2000, is to
preserve and revitalize a mid-century housing stock once thought
incorrigible.
Proponents of continued spending on site-based public housing
have largely supported the Department of Housing and Urban Devel-
opment’s HOPE VI program, which funds
demolition of the worst projects and their
replacement with a combination of affordable
public units and market-rate dwellings—a
“mixed-income” approach—often in the New
Urbanist design style. HOPE VI requires
public-private partnerships to leverage funds
from a variety of sources. But critics say
there’s actually been an overall reduction in
the total number of public housing units
since the program’s inception in 1993.
Fiscal conservatives instead prefer the
Section 8 voucher initiative started in the
1980s. Apartment-seekers enrolled in Section
8 receive federal subsidies to pay rent. Some
economists believe the market demand
expressed through voucher use triggers an
increase in private sector affordable housing
production—which should reduce public
spending. But Section 8 also has critics, who
claim the program destabilizes neighbor-
hoods and lets some landlords charge unrea-
sonably high rents in low-value areas. While
CHA hasn’t abandoned Hope VI and Section
8—the Plan for Transformation includes
strategies involving both—its new preserva-
tion-based option presents an intriguing
opportunity for both Chicago and the nation.
In redesigning America’s decaying public
housing stock, planners and policy makers
have, in recent years, focused on a New
Urbanist approach with traditional neighbor-
hood development (TND) concepts to provide
a mix of residential and small-scale commer-
cial land uses, walkable neighborhoods, and
centrally located public space. This approach
is more popular than modernist develop-
ments because it can minimize sometimes
stark visual differences between public hous-
ing and surrounding areas—while address-
ing the physical deterioration and stigmatiza-
tion that may have struck both. Yet at the
same time, constructing neighborhoods from
scratch has required the demolition of histor-
ic buildings—eliciting protests not only from
preservationists but also public housing advo-
cates concerned with tenant displacement.
Housing advocates are more generally critical
of TND as well, decrying any initiative that
fails to expand the nation’s affordable hous-
ing stock.
In 1999, the National Park Service (NPS)
inserted itself into the debate, producing a
guide for listing public housing on the
page 32
National Register of Historic Places, which
NPS administers. The guide recommends
that states and cities evaluate a property’s
impact on social or design history, and the
existence or absence of other local examples.
As an initial step in implementing the Plan
for Transformation, IHPA undertook an
assessment of every CHA-owned property
and identified six developments with signifi-
cant social or architectural history.
The preservation approach to public
housing consists of retaining, rehabilitating,
and physically integrating a portion of the
original residential building into newly built
mixed-use components, including residen-
tial, commercial, and service units, as well as
recreational amenities. IHPA has focused
preservation requirements on exterior fea-
tures, allowing the developers to reconfigure
the interior apartments—typically too small
for today’s standards—even at the loss of cer-
tain historic elements. This approach is a
compromise. According to Anne Haaker,
IHPA recognizes “the need to balance preser-
vation with the authority’s primary goal of
providing affordable housing.”
While the majority of properties identi-
fied by CHA and IHPA for preservation are
garden apartments, like the 454-unit Trum-
bull Park Homes, or mid-rise buildings dat-
ing from the late 1930s and early 1940s, Chi-
cago’s focus on historic preservation has
opened more recently built affordable hous-
ing structures to rehabilitation efforts. In the
early 2000s, developers approached IHPA
regarding the Hilliard Homes, constructed in
1966. Designed by noted architect Bertrand
Goldberg—who was also responsible for
Marina City, a landmark mid-century office,
apartment, and parking complex located in
Chicago’s Loop district—the Hilliard Homes
consist of two 22-story arc-shaped apartment
buildings that encircle a public space, and
two cylindrical 16-story buildings for seniors.
Developers successfully lobbied to list the
Hilliard Homes, located on South State Street
near Chinatown, on the National Register of
Historic Places. This qualified the project for
a Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit of twenty
percent, which can be applied to substantial
rehabilitations and adaptive reuse of private
properties provided that “character-defining”
features are preserved. By comparison, the
federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit
alone only offers developers a maximum nine
percent credit per year (with a limit of ten
years) for acquisition, rehabilitation, or new
construction of rental housing targeting low-
er-income households. The Hilliard Homes
project effectively combined the low-income
and historic preservation credits.
The first phase of renovations to the Hill-
iard Homes started in 2002 and has been
completed, with two more phases remaining.
Improvements to landscaping, parking, con-
nections to the street grid, lighting, and recre-
ation areas, are planned as part of a mixed-
income community. Jonathan Fine, Presi-
dent of Preservation Chicago, a non-profit
advocacy group for the preservation of the
city’s history, supports the Hilliard rehabilita-
tion because of the architectural quality and
social significance of Goldberg’s design.
“There is not enough appreciation for the
designs of more recent architects, and they
are not viewed as historic,” he says. One of
Preservation Chicago’s major initiatives
includes preservation of structures designed
by notable architects of the recent past,
including Goldberg.
CHA and IHPA have also met joint suc-
cess in rehabilitating Trumbull Park Homes,
a two-story complex on the city’s Far South
Side. Like Hilliard Homes, this project com-
bines low-income and historic preservation
tax credits to upgrade the property. According
to CHA’s Press Secretary, Karen Pride, a
mixed public/private finance deal is pending
for the project, which will retain key exterior
features, such as its terraced entrances. Interi-
ors, however, will be upgraded to satisfy mod-
ern building code requirements. D. Bradford
Hunt, a public housing historian and Assistant
Professor of Social Science at Roosevelt Uni-
versity in Chicago, advocates preserving and
rehabilitating low-rise row house public hous-
ing projects. He believes that the Trumbull
Park Homes rehabilitation works primarily
because it is small, not that dense, and has a
strong tenant organization. In 1953, Trumbull
Park was the site of a notorious standoff
between mostly white residents, who opposed
an African-American family moving in. By the
1980s, Trumbull Park had become predomi-
nantly African-American.
“As a community, it works,” says Hunt.
“Many high-rise buildings in the city do not
work. They have elevators, combined with
Counter-clockwise, from top left: Three archival photos of the Trumbull Park Homes.
Top right: archival photos of the Hilliard Homes. All images courtesy the Chicago Housing Authority.
high densities of children, which makes
enforcing informal social controls a problem.
Trumbull Park has two-bedroom apartments,
and there are rarely more than two to three
kids in a family.”
The Troubled Legacy
of Urban Renewal
By the late 1930s, federal legislators began
to create public housing for the very poor, not
just for people temporarily displaced by the
Depression. Despite this, a strict tenant selec-
tion process remained in place, favoring com-
plete families with an employed head of house-
hold. Federal agencies created the system of
local housing authorities that exists today, and
increased standardization of materials,
designs, and policies, leaving less room for
design creativity.
By the 1950s, new federal housing acts
were significantly changing the urban land-
scape. First they permitted construction of
private housing on land that had previously
been called slums, and later, they funded
housing that was strictly built in conjunction
with urban renewal programs. These policies
resulted in large-scale displacement of poor,
often minority, populations while relaxing
tenant standards, marking a shift away from
the creation of model communities and
toward providing housing for larger numbers
of poor families.
During this period, new public housing
construction mirrored the evolving Interna-
tional Style, centering on unadorned con-
crete or steel and glass high-rises. The new
designs radically changed the relationship
between residences and their surroundings.
Even though garden apartments and row
houses had proved to be successful public
housing types, architects and reformers want-
ed to explore other designs that would maxi-
mize usage of land. The resulting high-rise
projects saved money—a crucial factor in the
face of a dwindling federal housing budget—
but yielded less livable environments. Parents
living in upper-floor apartments could not
easily monitor children’s play areas at ground
level, and cost cutting led to reductions in
security and maintenance services, creating
darkened hallways and stairwells, dangerous
places ripe for gang activity.
By the 1960s, with little new public hous-
ing built and funds still low, the oft-neglected
page 34
existing housing began to fall apart. It
became increasingly hazardous, spurring
sociological studies on crime, poverty, and
their relationship to the physical environ-
ment. Large-scale public housing creation
officially ended in 1974 when President Nix-
on banned new construction. Since that time,
the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) has focused on private
management of publicly subsidized housing,
and on serving elderly and disabled popula-
tions, in addition to HOPE VI and voucher
programs. While the popular press has
focused on the relatively infrequent demoli-
tion and New Urbanist reconstruction of the
HOPE VI program, the Chicago Housing
Authority has been quietly at work imple-
menting some of HUD’s lesser known, yet
critically important, recommended changes,
with potential ramifications for the vast
majority of its public housing stock.
While the possibilities for revitalizing
older public housing have their limits, the
coordinated redevelopment of an overall com-
munity would allow some historic features—
buildings, landscapes, and site plans—to be
saved. Renovating and retaining existing
units is an economical alternative to building
new affordable housing that may also be less
disruptive for residents. Rather than continu-
ing the cycle of demolition and displacement
that began as part of the urban renewal era, it
may be more appropriate and feasible to con-
serve public housing and keep communities
intact while retaining affordable units. As
CHA’s rehabilitation of Trumbull Park and
the Hilliard Homes shows, careful evaluation
of the potential to reuse existing properties,
partnerships with local, state, and federal his-
toric preservation agencies, and combined
use of available tax credits could prove an
effective strategy toward improving the lives
of public housing residents across the coun-
try—all while preserving an important part of
our nation’s heritage.
Bristol, Katharine G. “The Pruitt-Igoe
Myth.” Journal of Architectural
Education 44.3 (1991): 163-171.
Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American
Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and
the American Dream. 3rd ed.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1995.
Chicago Housing Authority
www.thecha.org
Congress for New Urbanism,
Principles for Inner City Neighborhood
Design: www.cnu.org/cnu_reports/
inner-city.pdf and www.cnu.org/cnu_
reports/inner-city2.pdf
Davis, Sam. The Architecture of
Affordable Housing. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.
De Wit, Wim. “The Rise of Public
Housing in Chicago, 1930-1960.”
Chicago Architecture and Design,
1923-1993: Reconfiguration of an
American Metropolis. Ed. John
Zukowsky. Munich: Prestel-Verlag,
1993. 232-245.
Fuerst, J. S., and D. Bradford Hunt.
When Public Housing Was Paradise.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2005.
Illinois State Historic
Preservation Office
www.state.il.us/hpa/
Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space:
Crime Prevention through Urban
Design. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Preservation Chicago
www.preservationchicago.org
U. S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development
www.hud.gov
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the
Dream: A Social History of Housing in
America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.
Opposite page: Couch, New Orleans, LA, 2006.
Photo ©Will Steacy
Katrina:
One Year Later
 katrina: one year later
Crosses from Rubble
After Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Christian groups stepped in
where government agencies left off. Here, the tale of a tenacious widow,
a transplanted family, and three Matts on a mission
EMMETT WALLACE IS 49 YEARS OLD.
Until last fall, the farthest he had ever
moved from his hometown of Bridge City,
Louisiana, was five miles down the road to
Marrero, another small, impoverished com-
munity across the Mississippi River from
New Orleans. Wallace was living in Marrero
with his wife Gloria, 29, and their six chil-
dren, all under the age of 11, when Hurri-
cane Katrina struck last August. The family
did not evacuate.
“Me and my daughters were at my house
at the time,” Mr. Wallace told me this spring.
“First it was just raining hard. Then we all
decided we were gonna lay down and go to
bed. But it started raining harder. Five min-
utes later the ceiling fell down in the living
room.”
When the rain subsided on the next day,
father and daughters returned to their house,
but as Mr. Wallace said flatly, “We couldn’t
even stay there. It was a total disaster.” The
next few days became a whirlwind tour of
temporary residences. Mr. Wallace’s wife and
four sons were at his mother-in-law’s house
at the time, so they stayed put. It began a
nearly four-month-long separation for the
family.
Mr. Wallace and his daughters were not
the only ones to flee Marrero. Even the local
operators of emergency pumping stations
had deserted—a controversial decision that
ultimately destroyed the Wallaces’ neighbor-
hood. The family tried their luck carving out
space in a trailer owned by one of Mr. Wal-
lace’s sisters in nearby Napoleonville. But
after a week, the trailer filled up with other
relatives, and so the three Wallaces once
again moved on. They ended up at a tempo-
rary shelter at Nicholls State University in
Thibodaux, a small bayou town 60 miles west
of New Orleans. They stayed for a little more
page 36
by Emily Weiss
than three weeks—the longest stop on their
continuing journey.
During that time, Mr. Wallace grew
increasingly desperate, unsure how to pro-
ceed. How would he be able to care for his
family once the shelters shut down and the
handouts stopped? Unable to support his
wife and children adequately before the
storm with the wages from his $5.70-an-hour
garbage truck “hop” job in New Orleans, he
was looking to make a fresh start, but he
didn’t know how to go about it. All he could
do, he reasoned, was wait, and pray.
Parting the Red Tape
Wallace wasn’t the only one. In the wake
of Hurricane Katrina, victims throughout the
Gulf Coast region were waiting and praying.
That strategy proved at least as effective as
relying on any kind of secular or public sup-
port network. In the days, weeks, and months
after the hurricane, as the media told indig-
nant stories of communities let down by
shortfalls at every level of government, it was
Christian groups who were quietly picking up
the pieces.
One of the most striking examples of this
religious outreach was Campus Crusade for
Christ International, an evangelical mission-
ary group that has organized more than
15,000 volunteers to travel to the Gulf Coast
region since last September. At first, its volun-
teers provided manpower at relief centers and
feeding stations, according to the group’s web-
site. Later, they expanded their efforts to
removing debris from victims’ homes,
schools, churches, and parks. More recently,
the group brought more than 10,000 college
students to the region to spend their spring
breaks cleaning yards and installing sheetrock.
Then there is God’s Katrina Kitchen,
located halfway between New Orleans and
Biloxi, in the appropriately named town of
Pass Christian, Mississippi. Started by Ken-
tuckian Greg Porter, funded entirely by dona-
tions, and led by a team of Christian volun-
teers who, according to Porter, “answer to
God first and foremost,” God’s Katrina Kitch-
en bills itself as, “amidst the devastation and
debris, a place of peace, hope, caring, love
and comfort… the result of God’s calling peo-
ple … to serve.” When Porter first arrived in
Pass Christian last September 14th, “High-
way 90—a four-lane highway—looked like it
had been hit by mortars.” Undeterred, Porter
set up in the middle of the road, cooking and
serving over 120 hamburgers that day for
lunch. With its cadre of volunteer cooks, serv-
ers, and skilled and unskilled workers, God’s
Katrina Kitchen has been serving three meals
a day to local residents and workers every day
since. Although G.K.K. is non-denomination-
al—their motto is “Many Churches, One
God”—their shared faith and hopes of evan-
gelism bind them together. As Porter
explained to me in an email message in June,
“We have never been about feeding and dis-
tribution only—we are here to show God’s
Love to the People of the Gulf Coast.”
Beyond such notable large-scale opera-
tions were the efforts of congregations across
the nation, whose members “adopted” Gulf
Coast churches; collected and delivered dona-
tions of food, water, and clothing; and sent
carloads of volunteers to destroyed neighbor-
hoods. Interviewing hurricane victims about
their experiences, the stories of religious
charity grew familiar: a Canadian group
called Samaritan’s Purse sent ten men
equipped with chainsaws and Bobcats to a
neighborhood on the Mississippi coast to
clear trees from yards. Three church girls
from Pennsylvania showed up one weekend
to drag muddy rugs out of an elderly wom-

an’s house on the Mississippi gulf coast. “If
the religious groups had not come to help, I
think we would’ve been back three or four
months ago waiting on government assis-
tance,” Mississippi hurricane victim Ginnie
Smith told me. Deanne Kimball, a parishio-
ner at Bible Fellowship Church, whose mem-
bers have housed numerous teams of volun-
teer relief workers in its hurricane-ravaged
home of coastal Mississippi, concurred. Also
in agreement was Jane Griffin, an Auburn
University sophomore and Louisiana native
who spent a weekend last fall doing Katrina
relief work as part of a college church group:
“The government… took a long time deciding
what to do, whereas the church groups
jumped on it and found ways to help [the
Katrina victims]: they cared, gave, fed,
clothed, loved, and served.”
The Damage Done
in Pass Christian
Nowhere do these statements ring truer
than in the tiny fishing village and retirement
community of Pass Christian. Pronounced
“Pass Kristy-Ann,” the town takes its name
from a local deepwater pass, which in turn
was named for Nicholas Christian L’Adnier, a
French property owner who moved to nearby
Cat Island in 1745, just before the start of the
French and Indian War. When Katrina hit,
the town caught a 30-foot surge of water,
pushing many historic houses out to sea and
knocking others right off their foundations.
Ginnie Smith, an 80-year-old widow and
longtime Pass Christian resident was
page 38
This page: Emmett Wallace. Previous page: Wallace’s daughters, Moniquequa and Gloriadeidra.
Photos courtesy Dr. John Griffin
unharmed by the storm, but her house, a ren-
ovated gardener’s cottage that sat behind a
huge historic house on the beach, was com-
pletely decimated. According to Mrs. Smith’s
daughter, Cecette Bassett, “The house literal-
ly floated off its foundation and moved inland
about eight feet, destroying it and everything
in it.” The “sweet little” wood-framed
home—including the full-length gallery
Smith had added across the front, with
French doors, rocking chairs, and ceiling
fans—had become, in Bassett’s words, “noth-
ing but rubble, matchstick rubble—I mean
just trash.” Although it has gotten scant
media coverage compared to larger cities in
the area, Pass Christian has been in rough
shape since last August. Four months after
the hurricane struck, most of the 6,700 resi-
dents were still without running water. The
only groceries were at a local distribution cen-
ter run by missionaries, or at stores in Gulf-
port, 30 miles away. Hundreds of residents
were camping out in tents, and according to
the local Clarion-Ledger, as of late December,
“tons of debris remain[ed] to be cleared” and
80 percent of the city was still “in ruins.”
Although 3,000 homes were destroyed or
severely damaged, only 160 building permits
had been issued for rebuilding, and the town
was “still trying to provide basic services.”
Contributing to the town’s slow recovery
process was its mayor, Billy McDonald,
whose leadership style in the months follow-
ing the hurricane was described by a local
alderman as “absent.” In mid-December, in
fact, the board of aldermen voted to slice the
mayor’s salary by ten percent due to his “lack-
luster” performance. (The mayor later vetoed
the motion—but he could not veto the senti-
ment behind the decision.)
Mrs. Smith was in a particularly harrow-
ing situation. “I’m 80 years old, and I don’t
have a house,” she said, a week before Christ-
mas last year. Her insurance company
claimed she should have had a flood insur-
ance plan that the government had told her
she didn’t need. Her bank was clamoring for
mortgage payments on a house that was no
longer livable, and her worldly belongings
had been destroyed. Her FEMA relief check
came in at a mere $2,000, so Mrs. Smith
found herself in a position that she—the wid-
ow of a Texas oil executive—never would
have imagined. “I never thought I’d be home-
less when I’m 80,” she said last December.
She began eating three meals a day at God’s
Katrina Kitchen.
Three Matts on a Mission
While Emmett Wallace and his daughters
were idling at Nicholls State University, the
answers to his prayers for deliverance—in the
form of three men named Matt—were climb-
ing into a van in Ohio.
It was Matt Pardi’s idea to adopt a family
of evacuees. Pardi, 37, is the pastor of H20
Ministries in Bowling Green, Ohio, a college
town an hour and a half south of Detroit.
H20, a non-denominational church that is
part of an umbrella organization, Great Com-
mission Ministries, is composed almost
entirely of young people—95 percent of
members are college students—and its mis-
sion, according to staff member Matt Olsze-
wski, 25, “is to effectively communicate and
live out the transforming power of Jesus
Christ.”
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Pastor
Pardi felt that God was telling him to go
down to New Orleans. So Pardi, Olszewski,
and another staff member, Matt Hilderbran,
31, set off for Louisiana in Pardi’s van. The
three Matts were uncertain about what would
happen during their trip. The three men
spent the twenty-hour drive on their cell
phones, calling Louisiana shelters in search
of someone who needed their help while
phoning contacts in Bowling Green to make
arrangements for spare apartments in case
they found a family to bring back.
What they saw on their drive encouraged
them. “We drove down one street in Slidell [a
town on the northeast bank of Lake Pontchar-
train], and each church it seemed had at least
30 to 50 people that they were feeding and
finding places for them to sleep,” said Hilder-
bran. After a couple of days of calling around
and bouncing from shelter to shelter without
success, one of the Matts received a call from
the Nicholls State gym: a single, 24-year-old
French Quarter prep cook, Don Williams,
was interested in their proposition. Although
the H20 team was still hoping to take home a
family, they followed this lead to the shelter
in Cajun County—to a university that sells
sweatshirts reading “Harvard on the Bayou.”
When the Matts arrived to pick up Williams,
they spoke to a Red Cross worker who made
an announcement on their behalf over the
loudspeaker—“something like, ‘There are
some individuals here from a church in Ohio,
and they are willing to help out a family that
may want to relocate to Ohio. If you are inter-
ested in this, come up to the info table,’” Matt
Pardi recalled. The Red Cross worker
explained the arrangement: six months of an
all-expense-paid new life in Bowling Green,
Ohio, with no pressure to stay permanently
or attend church—“and you will need to be
willing to work.”
Emmett Wallace and his daughters heard
the announcement. So did Wallace’s distant
cousin, Michelle Burnside, 44, who was stay-
ing at the shelter along with her daughter Tif-
fany, 26, and Tiffany’s three young boys. It
was Burnside, a widow, who approached the
page 39
Matts, expressing interest in going back to
Ohio with them. “But,” Emmett told me, “the
only way she was gonna leave was if her cous-
in Emmett was going with her.”
Nine people was a little more than the
Matts had bargained for. “I was nervous
about the enormity of the project,” Pardi said.
“We initially imagined one family and
guessed about six to eight thousand in
expense. Now with three families we were
looking at over $20,000. That was a little
scary!” The three men drove a couple miles
down the road, bought a cheap minivan and
loaded everyone up for the trip back to Bowl-
ing Green.
Following the long drive, the church
workers ushered Wallace and his family into
a furnished two-bedroom apartment, stocked
the refrigerator, and set him up with what he
described as a “nice job” in a warehouse,
packing print labels for a food safety system
for $8 an hour—nearly 50 percent more than
he’d earned in Louisiana. Soon after arriving,
he sent for his then-estranged wife Gloria—
they reconciled—and his six-year-old son,
Terry. The rest of the couple’s children
remain with Gloria’s mother, who relocated
to Arkansas.
Every day for months, H20 church
members gave the Wallaces rides, taking
them grocery shopping and to football
games. They told Emmett they would con-
tinue to do so until he figured out how to
pay the outstanding Louisiana speeding
ticket that he claimed was delaying him
from getting an Ohio driver’s license. “They
all are wonderful people, they truly are,”
Mr. Wallace told me last December.
Though the Matts made it clear that the
Wallaces’ coming to church wasn’t a condi-
tion of their staying, the Wallaces came any-
way. “We go to church with the organization
that came and got us,” Wallace explained.
And compared to the chaos in Marrero—
where, eleven weeks after the storm, many
residents were still homeless and FEMA was
half-heartedly handing out trailers—Emmett
Wallace was finding that he actually liked life
in Ohio. In fact, in some ways, things were
better than they had been before Katrina.
“My family feels great, and so do I,” he
told me last December. “It’s a blessing to me,
because I’m able to take care of my family the
way I wanted to. Really, in Louisiana, I
couldn’t.” The other evacuees that the Matts
had taken back with them—Michelle and
her family, and Don—were unable to take
root in this small Midwestern town, and so
they all returned to New Orleans in January.
As of late June, however, Emmett was still
living with his family in Bowling Green,
working full time as a cook. He has stopped
receiving financial assistance from H20—
“If he was in a bind we could help him, but
Emmett knows that we can’t support him,”
Hilderbran says. “We’re not one of those big
mega-churches that have a lot of money to
throw at things.” Over time, the men’s roles
have changed: from rescuer and victim, to
friendly neighbors with separate lives—or in
the case of Pardi, who still talks to Emmett
several times a week, “now that there are no
strings attached,” it has become “more of a
friendship.”
A Cross of Rubble
In Pass Christian, the government—
starved of sales tax revenue after losing 100
percent of downtown buildings—has strug-
gled to rebuild infrastructure. Running
water and a primitive sewer system were not
restored until early spring. Residents are
wary of the fast road to recovery through pri-
vate redevelopment, as in neighboring
oceanfront town Biloxi, where thousands of
companies are bidding to come in and build
large condominium high-rises and casinos
along its shore. Still, the severe need for
housing has changed many locals’ attitudes
toward developers.
Town officials have accepted an offer
from Wal-Mart to turn the once-historic
downtown, formerly a strip of antique shops,
boutiques, and health food stores shaded by a
canopy of 300-year-old live oaks, into an area
to be known as Pass Christian Wal-Mart Vil-
lage. According to the Mississippi Renewal
Forum, a consortium started last October by
Governor Haley Barbour, the retail giant has
partnered with a New Orleans-based real-
estate development company called Historic
Restoration, Inc. “to develop the mixed-use
housing portion of the project.”
Meanwhile, the missionaries at God’s
Katrina Kitchen can at least offer spiritual
continued on page 42
 katrina: one year later
Fifteen Minutes With…
Brent Warr, Mayor of
Gulfport, Mississippi
The mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi talks about his city’s lowest moments after Katrina,
the importance of casinos, and the tremendous help he’s gotten from outsiders as his city
digs out from one of the most devastating storms in history
WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA STRUCK
the Gulf Coast last August, most TV camer-
as were trained on New Orleans. That focus
only intensified after the city’s levee system
failed and left whole neighborhoods under-
water. But other Gulf Coast cities were
arguably just as devastated. A 27-foot storm
surge wiped out most of the buildings along
the Mississippi coastline. More than 200
Mississippians were killed, including 30
people trapped in one beachfront apartment
complex in Biloxi. In nearby Gulfport, the
state’s second-largest city, 4,000 homes
were destroyed, sewage overflowed into city
streets, and the storm knocked out all but
six traffic lights.
Brent Warr, the Republican mayor of
Gulfport, who had never before held an elect-
ed office and had only been mayor for seven
weeks prior to the storm, was in for the ride
of his life. His own home was damaged, as
was his business, Warr’s Men’s Clothing in
downtown Gulfport. In the days after Katrina
hit, his main goal was to get food and water
to some 72,000 residents. Another goal was
to help his overwhelmed police force main-
tain order as looters ransacked stores and
drug addicts, looking to stave off withdrawals,
started raiding hospitals and medical centers.
Yet within ten days after the storm, most
Gulfport residences and buildings had power
restored. The Senate commended the city for
its efficient removal of 4 million cubic yards
of debris, and now, though Gulfport has lost
approximately 3,000 jobs, it has also man-
page 40
by Jess McCuan
aged to attract new investors who are plan-
ning commercial, residential, and mixed-use
developments that will revive—and even
improve—this devastated coastal area.
“I don’t deserve a nickel of credit,” Warr
told a crowd recently as he accepted an award
for his leadership during the disaster. “I was
just the linchpin. The city employees were
the ones carrying the weight.” But many see
Warr, whose booming voice and southern
drawl give him the air of a preacher, as an
unsung hero of the Gulf Coast’s rebuilding
efforts. Warr spoke with The Next American
City about the lowest moments, the impor-
tance of casinos, and the tremendous help
from outsiders as his city digs out from one
of the most devastating storms in history.
TNAC: After Katrina hit Gulfport, you
resorted to some fairly unconventional
methods for helping people out. I read
one story that said you asked your
police chief to hotwire a truck, and you
ordered someone else to steal a stove.
Was anyone in Gulfport alarmed?
The important part about that stove is, we
gave it back. And we gave it back cleaner
than we got it, that’s for sure. These were
things that we had to do. We had to feed
ourselves and other people. What we took
was a stove that you’d use for a big barbe-
cue. I knew where it was because I’d driven
by it so many times. Really, everybody was
doing the best they could. We had to siphon
fuel out of wrecked vehicles to run pumps
for generators. It was just necessary to keep
things going.
With the city in chaos, what did you
decide to fix first?
We made sure we had pumps going for wells,
and we made sure the hospitals had water
and were able to keep running. We have 157
lift stations for sewage in the city, and 54 of
them were submerged. They melted down to
nothing. They still had electricity running to
them when they were underwater. We had to
try to get generators to bypass pumps to run
those lift stations, so that we could get water.
Another concern: if you put water in but
you’re not pumping the sewage out, you get
dysentery, especially in August and Septem-
ber. So that was something we watched very
closely. At one point we were told by the
Department of Health, the local authority, to
quit pumping water. But we refused to do it.
Was there a time in the days after the
storm when you felt panicked?
There was one particular day—within the
first week. We weren’t able to get control of
the looting, or of the traffic. Our police forces
were totally overwhelmed, and they were
doing everything they could to maintain
order. We just couldn’t gain any ground.
Things were slipping away every day. Mayor
Joe Riley, the mayor of Charleston [South
Carolina], sent in 54 police officers. He didn’t
call; he didn’t ask if we needed them. He just
knew to send them. I was driving through the
city that day, and I saw a uniform I didn’t rec-
ognize. A young lady who was a Charleston
police officer was standing in one of the busi-
est intersections in Gulfport directing traffic.
That really meant everything in the world to
me. He’s an incredible leader.
How long were city employees in crisis
mode?
Lord have mercy, we worked out of tents set
up on the front steps of city hall. People were
sitting in the corners of these tents on the
steps of a 100-year-old building. That proba-
bly went on for two and a half months. Our
public works director, Kris Reimann, is an
incredible talent. He himself was in there
with his whole department, fixing sewer lift
stations and sleeping four to five hours a day.
He and the policemen and firemen were out
doing search and rescue constantly. We need-
ed water first, then food, then we started wor-
rying about infrastructure. All this time I had
dozens of contractors coming in wanting to
talk about debris removal. We had millions of
cubic yards of debris. That was quite a com-
plicated issue. I didn’t know anything about
it. That was something we figured out as we
went along.
Who do you think were the most impor-
tant people in Gulfport’s recovery and
rebuilding effort?
Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, and Haley Barbo-
ur—I don’t know which I’d put on top of the
list. Those were the go-to people that we
called with problems. If we needed a genera-
tor, they would get us a generator. Also, Con-
gressmen Chip Pickering and Gene Taylor.
On the local level, the guy that I have so
much respect for is our coroner, Gary Har-
grove. Can you imagine what his job was
like? He was having to find places to store
bodies. He did it with a lot of respect and dig-
nity, and he gave a lot of respect to the vic-
tims of the storm. That could have been very
mishandled. He was kind of an unsung hero.
There was also a North Carolina Baptist
Men’s group that was unbelievable. They
made a commitment to come into Gulfport
and rebuild over 600 homes for free, provid-
ing labor and materials at no cost. It’s amaz-
ing the way this worked. I think God just did
this for us. We got an old armory given back
to the city by the National Guard about four
page 41
weeks before the storm. It was just sitting
there: a bunch of bunk houses, warehouses,
and a kitchen. We agreed to give the NC Bap-
tist men the use of this for two years. They
came in and built us another big warehouse
and brought in trailers for showers and plac-
es to sleep. They’ve got 400 volunteers on the
ground all the time down there rebuilding
these homes. They come to people and say,
“Look, we’re going to put you a new roof on.
It’s not going to be a 20-year shingle, it’s
going to be a 30-year architectural shingle.
What color would you like?” They go around
saying things like, “That tub is dirty—let’s
pull it out and put you a new one in for free.”
What was their connection to the Gulf-
port area?
They’re just wonderful Christian people.
They came in and said, “We’d like to help.”
Before they came in with construction crews,
they had set up the largest feeding facility on
the Coast. They fed—I can’t remember how
many meals—well over 50,000 meals in a
very short amount of time. They came in on
buses, slept on cots, and they’re still down
there, feeding people and praying with them,
taking them meals and asking nothing.
Was it a big blow to the city and the
local economy when the two casinos
shut down?
It was. But not as significant a blow as some
people think. The gaming revenue was about
5.8 to 6 percent of the general income for the
city. More important than that, there were a lot
of local jobs that were tied to the gaming indus-
try. They’ll be able to find other jobs, we hope,
and hang on until we have the new casinos
open. Harrah’s, a big player, decided to sell
their assets in Gulfport, rather than rebuild.
They had one in Biloxi, and they decided to
take their interest money and move to Biloxi.
Are both Gulfport casinos back up
and running?
Nope. The other one bought the Harrah’s
property and they’re working on it. Late sum-
mer they’ll be open, and we have other casino
properties coming in.
How many jobs were lost?
Probably 3,000. Some of them were able to
draw unemployment for some time, and they
have been able to go work at other casinos.
There are three open in Biloxi now. A lot of
people who weren’t from the coast and
worked at casinos left and moved back to
where they were from.
Do you think it will be a big part of the
plan for moving forward, attracting new
casinos and getting the current ones up
and running?
It’s part of the plan. We’re not going to have
as many casinos as Biloxi. That’s not our plan
or our desire. We’d like to have enough to
have them as a good added amenity, but we
won’t have a dozen.
What will it take to draw people back in
to the Gulfport region?
We have only lost about 2.5 to 3 percent of
our population. It’s already happening. Peo-
ple are coming in, wanting to work, wanting
to participate in all the new economic activity.
The government opportunity zones and tax-
incentives are huge. We have a lot of labor in
the city, a lot of activity, that wasn’t there
before. A lot of sophisticated investors are
coming in now, looking for prime opportuni-
ties and prime pieces of real estate. They can
really build a quality product now, and they’re
very attracted to Gulfport.
Did you feel that, in the aftermath of
Katrina, the media and the public over-
looked cities like Gulfport to focus main-
ly on New Orleans?
They did, and I think everybody would agree
that that happened. But I think there are
practical reasons for that. We weren’t as
vocal about what had happened to us as
some other cities were. One of the reasons
for that is that we had seen storms before.
No one in New Orleans had ever lived
through a levee break and the city flooding.
I’ve been through all the hurricanes since
Camille in ‘69. I knew what I was going to
be looking at when I walked out of the
house after the storm. I had no idea it was
going to be as bad as it was, but I knew what
blown-down trees and cars on houses and
damaged houses looked like. Folks that lived
over in New Orleans—I don’t know if there’s
anybody alive that’s lived in the city when the
levees broke.
Did you feel that residents of Gulfport
dealt with the crisis well?
Oh God, they were just as devastated as
people in New Orleans. There’s no ques-
tion about that. Everyone was trauma-
tized and heartsick. They were scared,
upset, sad. But they moved on with an
incredible amount of dignity. They didn’t
complain; they just got to work.
Why has Gulfport rebuilt so much
more quickly than other cities?
We’ve begun the rebuilding process.
We’re not rebuilt yet. But everyone who’s
there, they love it. It’s their home. Many of
them have other options for places to go.
They’re not going to do it. They’re not
support to a commu-
cont’d from page 39 nity whose churches
were universally
destroyed. At some point after the storm,
according to Cecette Bassett, Ginnie Smith’s
daughter, the missionaries built a huge cross
on the beach out of trash and started holding
free services every night at 8 p.m. Large busi-
nesses have kicked in too: Robin Roberts of
Good Morning America, who happens to be a
Pass Christian native, organized fund-raising
efforts involving Salvation Army, Home
Depot, Staples, and AmeriCorps’ parent com-
pany, the Corporation for National and Com-
munity Service.
You might think that someone like Mrs.
Smith, an 80-year-old widow without a home,
tinues to be spent on housing volunteer
teams from all over the U.S.
“God has met the needs in amazing
ways,” Kimball told me. While most volun-
teers stay only a short while, “the few long-
term volunteers I’ve spoken with have no
immediate plans for pulling out—even with
another hurricane season looming.”
Campus Crusade for Christ
International
www.ccci.org
God’s Katrina Kitchen
www.godskatrinakitchen.org

willing to let the storm win. Katrina took a
whole lot from us on that day. But it’s
kind of like—she won the battle, but we’re
going to win the war.
Knabb, Richard D., Jamie R. Rhome,
and Daniel P. Brown. “Tropical
Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina,
23-30 August 2005.” Miami, Florida:
National Hurricane Center, 2005.
www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-
AL122005_Katrina.pdf
would have wanted to flee all this chaos. But
Great Commission Ministries
she wouldn’t even consider the thought. International, Inc. (the umbrella
In the end, her house was unfixable; it organization for H20 Church)
had to be completely torn down and rebuilt. www.gmci.net
Despite her lack of flood insurance, the gov-
Historic Restoration Inc. of New
ernment is helping, providing Mrs. Smith
Orleans
with a federal grant tailored for homeowners
www.hrihci.com
outside the “flood zone” who nonetheless lost
property, and a small-business loan. So now Mississippi Renewal Forum:
Mrs. Smith has hired a contractor to rebuild Governor’s Commission on Recovery,
her house on the same footprint as it was Rebuilding, and Renewal (includes
information about the Pass Christian
before. In the meantime, she lives in the gar-
Wal-Mart Village)
dener’s cottage of a friend’s house and is try- www.mississippirenewal.com
ing slowly to rebuild her life. I called Mrs.
Smith in late April to see how she was doing. Pass Christian Historical Society
“I just got a telephone yesterday!” she report- www.frogbellies.com/
passchristianhistory
ed triumphantly.
Bassett is impressed by the vivacity of her
Samaritan’s Purse International Relief
mother and her mostly elderly, widowed www.samaritanspurse.org
friends: “It looks like Afghanistan bombed
their town, and they’re still partying up a Schmucker, Jane. “3 B.G. Men Give
storm,” she told me. “It’s amazing, all these Shelter from Storm: Church Leaders
Travel to Louisana, Drive 10 Victims
women who refuse to leave—they’re just gon-
back to Ohio.” Toledo Blade
na live there, stay in their community. They 3 Oct. 2005.
all feel like they’re Scarlett O’Hara: ‘The www.toledoblade.com
South will rise again!’”
As of late April, God’s Katrina Kitchen
was still set up on the beach in Pass Chris-
tian, distributing Clorox and gloves, three
meals a day, and other needed supplies.
Scott Kimball, a parishioner at Bible Fel-
lowship Church in Pass Christian, continues
to be impressed by the revolving crew of vol-
unteers. His small congregation’s initial goal,
after Katrina hit, was yard cleanup for mem-
bers and their neighbors. But eight months
after the hurricane, most of their energy con-

page 42
BOOK REVIEW by Carly Berwick
Planet of Slums
By Mike Davis. New York: Verso. Cloth, 228 pages. $24
An urban scholar looks into the earth’s future and sees a heap of filth
ORDINARY CITIZENS OF BEIJING SHOULD
worry: the 2008 Olympics are coming. To
beautify the city before the eyes of the world,
the slums need to go. At least 350,000 people
are being moved for one stadium. Maverick
historian Mike Davis, in his most recent
book, Planet of the Slums, calls the relocation
projects an unnecessary forced march so the
rich do not have to see the massive numbers
of desperate poor.
Within a year or two, a majority of the
world’s population will live in cities. But
these are not Jane Jacobs’s cozy villages with-
in the metropolis: they are sprawling masses
of misery, where a huge proportion of the
populace—currently 1 billion of the world’s
3.2 billion city-dwellers—live in slums. There,
the poor colonize available land with hand-
made shacks and shanties, plumbing is
scarce, and governments and landlords can
sweep aside established settlements at their
convenience. In the meantime, anyone who
can afford it retreats to private communities
with names like “Beverly Hills” (near Cairo)
and “Long Beach” (north of Beijing).
In past writing, Davis’s unorthodox prose
and unexpected comparisons—between
action movies and patterns of urban settle-
ment, for instance, in Ecology of Fear—have
made even the gloomiest prognostications
page 43
eminently readable, drawing him a much
wider audience than most neo-Marxists could
ever hope to enjoy.
But Planet of Slums lacks Davis’s charac-
teristic flamboyance—most of it reads like a
dry policy report. In fact, he does draw much
of his data and observations from such
reports, most notably the United Nations
Human Settlements Programme’s 2003
report, “The Challenge of the Slums.” Statis-
tic after statistic pummels the reader with a
manic global tour of widespread suffering:
the slums, despite the noble efforts of their
residents to make them homey, are misera-
ble; they are growing; and their growth is in
large part due to neo-liberal policies of First-
World lending institutions. In one paragraph
we move rapidly from Beijing to Bangalore to
Shenzhen. It’s dizzying, and difficult to dis-
cern any narrative other than that most lives
anywhere other than North America and
Europe are currently looking particularly nas-
ty and brutish.
Davis’s most impassioned and gripping
examples come in the chapter titled, “Slum
Ecology,” when he revisits a theme prevalent
in earlier books: how human expansion and
environmental degradation propel disastrous
feedback loops. Squatters often settle in dirty
or polluted areas where lack of state-provided
sanitation creates even more dirt and pollu-
tion. In Rio de Janeiro and Caracas, slums sit
on unstable hillsides, whose recurring disso-
lution has killed thousands.
Most disturbing are the examples of mil-
lions of people literally “living in shit.” Kin-
shasa, in the Republic of Congo, has a popu-
lation of 10 million and “no waterborne sew-
age system,” Davis says, leaving us to imag-
ine gutters by the road filled with excrement.
Worse are the examples of Indian slums with
approximately nineteen latrines for 100,000
people. People relieve themselves outdoors,
which—in addition to the obvious health
problems in crowded areas—creates particu-
larly onerous burdens for women, who wait
for the cover of early morning or dark to
excrete in public.
But why exactly have these states aban-
doned their citizens to lives of squalor? Davis
explains: “As Third World governments abdi-
cated the battle against the slum in the 1970s,
the Bretton Woods institutions—with the
IMF as ‘bad cop’ and the World Bank as
‘good cop’—assumed increasingly command-
ing roles in setting the parameters of urban
housing policy.” Slums are born out of
“structural adjustment, currency devaluation,
and state retrenchment.”
Unfortunately, no further discussion of
Bretton Woods or structural adjustment, a
term frequently bandied about by critics of
neo-liberalism, follows his explanation.
Three-quarters of the way through a book
devoted to critiquing structural adjustment
programs, Davis finally defines them as “the
protocols by which indebted countries sur-
render their economic independence to the
IMF and World Bank.” What are those proto-
cols? A detailed example would do wonders.
It is also unclear if solutions lurk within
Davis’s assembled facts and exposés. Peruvi-
an economist Hernando de Soto has advocat-
ed making property owners out of slum
dwellers, but Davis tells us it would do no
good: newly empowered property owners
simply evolve from slum dwellers to slum-
lords. ‘Titling,’ Davis further admonishes, is
ultimately a nefarious scheme to undermine
slum solidarity. So is the very concept of pri-
vate property flawed? Can self-organized
slums somehow demonstrate the virtues of
settlement without property rights? Is Davis’s
critique of ‘titling’ actually a plea for state-
sponsored housing—unlikely as that seems
given his skepticism of corrupt governments
and substandard public housing projects?
We simply don’t know what he thinks
because he never tells us, moving quickly
on to his next example of slum deprivation.
Davis once stood out among socialist crit-
ics because he was able to entertain lay read-
ers. But Planet of Slums reads as if addressed
to a seminar of grad students or New Left
Review subscribers. If Davis means for it to be
a wake-up call, he is ringing the morning bell
in the commune of the already converted.
Still, the book is not entirely without its
pleasures. Davis returns to form in the final
chapter, offering the unexpected, off-the-
wall, and trenchant cultural and political
analysis that first made him famous in the
classic City of Quartz. He suggests that the
U.S. military may be the First-World insti-
tution best prepared to pragmatically
answer the challenge of the slums, since it
is from the slums that the next generation
of terrorists and so-called freedom fighters
will emerge.
The slums are growing at a ferocious
pace; North Americans, Europeans, and the
wealthy of Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Rio
ignore them at their peril. Despite its lapses
and ellipses, Planet of the Slums is an impor-
tant goad to other writers and thinkers to
pick up the cause.
page 44
BOOK REVIEW by Mariana Mogilevich
Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster:
Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan
M. Wachter. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
A new collection of essays offers lessons for rebuilding
after Katrina, but may be a bit too late
THE PUBLISHED PROCEEDINGS OF A create a realistic model for the city’s short-
conference held at the University of Pennsyl- term recovery.
vania in early 2006, Rebuilding Urban Plac- From their multiple perspectives, these
es, aims to “draw lessons for the present and valuable essays examine questions of who
the future from our experience to date with must take responsibility for rebuilding and
the aftermath of Katrina.” Contributors reach how. They offer many promising suggestions
from as far back as the Lisbon Fire of 1755 to and means for preventing, predicting, and
more recent disasters in the United States— reacting faster to such devastation in the
the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco future. Considering the missteps already
earthquakes of 1906 and 1989, and Hurri- made, and the growing challenges to replen-
cane Andrew’s destruction of the Florida ishing housing and devising resettlement
Coast in 1992—for strategies and lessons in strategies, however, the lessons come too late
rebuilding the places where people live, work, for New Orleans. At this point, the city might
and find meaning, in the wake of terrible benefit more from a companion volume
destruction. Sadly, the lessons learned, tech- addressing how to rebuild after disastrous
niques developed, and suggestions proffered rebuilding. In light of the overwhelming nat-
may be more relevant for the country’s next ural, social, and economic challenges posed
major disaster than to the struggling city of by the problem at hand, historic preservation-
New Orleans, about which the contributors ist Randall Mason’s argument for the central-
are realistically guarded, if not pessimistic. ity of cultural preservation in rebuilding pro-
In the first essay of this interdisciplinary vides a much-needed perspective. Emphasiz-
volume, a bioengineer and environmental ing the import of cultural values over eco-
scientist set the tone, arguing that “New nomic ones, and highlighting the power of
Orleans can not be protected from a repeti- New Orleans as place, he reminds us why we
tion of Hurricane Katrina.” The reasons are must continue to search for solutions that
simple: either a major flood on the Missis- respect the past but are viable for the imme-
sippi system that originates higher in the diate future: We cannot simply move away to
watershed or the inevitable diversion of the drier ground or on to the next problem.
Mississippi into a new distributary, the
Atchafalaya River, will bring new destruc-
tion to New Orleans in the not-so-distant
future. Establishing New Orleans’s unfit-
ness for human habitation in the long term
starts the collection on a gloomy note. But
in the contributions that follow, thinkers
from the worlds of design, public policy,
education and economics—as well as a folk-
lorist and sociologist—offer what they can
to help others learn from the disaster and
BOOK REVIEW by Anika K. Singh
The Place You Love is Gone: Progress Hits Home
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Hardcover, 208 pages. $25.95
An unapologetic sentimentalist takes on sprawl—and loses
WHY DID MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON
write The Place You Love is Gone? In a series
of meditations on displacement by new
forms of development, Pierson preaches to
those already baptized as haters of sprawl,
strip malls, and big-box-lined highways. She
bemoans suburban sprawl and urban gentri-
fication for wreaking havoc in the places she
once called home, but her book sheds no new
light on this much observed phenomenon.
At war with any force that has altered places
she loves, Pierson repeatedly casts herself as an
unapologetic sentimentalist, “nostalgic,” and a
“hypocrite,” to shield herself from criticism that
her book is just that: an indulgent exercise in
nostalgia and a hypocritical critique of the
American lifestyle, which she herself lives. It’s a
neat trick—embracing one’s flaws in the hopes
that doing so will neuter others’ criticisms. It
might even have worked, were it not that Pier-
son is, in addition to begin overly sentimental,
also dull, repetitive, and melodramatic.
Pierson begins by telling her childhood
story not as a chronological narrative, but
through the lens of place. She grows up in “a
small snow globe of suburban happiness.”
Specifically, the places she means to evoke
are downtown Akron in Ohio, Daddy’s office,
page 45
and the Akron City Club. To the extent that
there is a story here, it goes something like
this: Melissa Holbrook Pierson had a happy,
upper-middle-class, white childhood. The
place where it happened no longer exists as it
did in the 1950s and ‘60s. “They change
everything (thus a retroactive version of
you),” she tells us, “and they didn’t even ask
if they could. The bastards.” The reader is
expected to empathize.
The story might be somewhat more com-
pelling, despite the melodrama, if we knew
who “they” were. But Pierson’s villains seem
not only abstractions but, worse, drawn from
the standard “Who’s Who in Suburban
Sprawl”: cars, interstate highways, and malls;
Wal-Mart and Bed, Bath & Beyond; Red Lob-
ster and Friendly’s. Pierson attempts to make
the reader complicit in her attack on “prog-
ress.” “We are a generation weighed down by a
sadness we do not know we feel,” she tells her
readers. But just who is a member of Pierson’s
“We,” mourning for her lost childhood?
In her twenties, Pierson finds herself in
Hoboken, New Jersey. Pierson’s 1980s Hobo-
ken is both bohemian and dingy. Her
description of a one-bedroom apartment
would sicken an exterminator. Beyond the
rodent-infested, unheated apartments shared
with duplicitous roommates and failed
romances, Pierson finds yet more fault with
how New Jersey gradually changes: how an
upscale gourmet market supplants a grocery
founded by Italian immigrants at the turn of
the century, for instance. Despite her disdain
for the city’s humble beginnings, Pierson
mourns Hoboken’s renaissance, a gentrifica-
tion and displacement presumably jumpstart-
ed by an influx of white, “artsy” college grad-
uates, much like Pierson herself.
Pierson finishes by describing her cur-
rent home in New York’s Hudson River Val-
ley. This Eden, too, has fallen prey to outside
forces, specifically New York City’s need for
water and homes. Residential development
replaces woods and farms. Eminent domain
claims private property for reservoirs to
quench the thirst of downstate inhabitants.
Not that Pierson’s sympathies are for her
neighbors’ private property rights; rather, she
wishes she could undo their choice to sell a
particular property to a developer so that she
could continue to go on hikes with two
mountain views.
Pierson’s understanding of urban devel-
opment is painfully simplistic. She hates the
cars, highways, and malls for their failure to
appreciate Akron’s urban center. She is
equally disdainful of the gentrification that
evidences a renewed interest in Hoboken’s
urban charm. In the end, Pierson offers her
reader nothing but the sense that America
would make better use of its land if it would
simply let her make all land use decisions.
Pierson’s book is an apt example of what
critics of the anti-sprawl and New Urbanist
movements despise. She is patronizing and
contradictory; she yearns to live in open spac-
es but despises others who want the same for
getting in her way. Whether you want to live
in an urban downtown or a rural town center,
Pierson can and will critique your choices in
long, melodramatic sentences, brimming with
nostalgia but devoid of the sort of intelligent
sensitivity that might make her work useful.
CONTRIBUTORS
Carly Berwick writes about art and culture for
Bloomberg.com, ARTnews, New York, and Travel
and Leisure, among other places. She recently
traveled to Hong Kong, which made her New
York-area home look green and spacious by
comparison.
Rebekah Brem is a cartoonist and illustrator who
is currently making a painted graphic novel,
Misericordia. She lives in Brooklyn.
Rebekahbrem@gmail.com
Alan Brunettin is a multi-media artist now living
and working in Chicago, having recently
relocated from St. Louis. While he is an
experienced photographer and works in new
media/motion arts, he is primarily a painter of
the urban landscape as well as a portraitist.
Video projects he’s produced include an elegy to
the lost buildings of downtown St. Louis and an
animated art piece that created a spinning
Gateway Arch. <www.urbis-orbis.com>
Jeffrey Chusid is an architect specializing in
historic preservation and a professor at Cornell’s
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. His
recent research has focused on three areas: the
fate of historic resources in areas of cultural
exchange and conflict; the conservation of
Modernist Architecture of Southern California;
and cultural landscapes.
Doug Giuliano received his Masters of City
Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and
works on planning and policy issues for downtown
Brooklyn. A Philadelphia expatriate, Doug now
lives in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of
Brooklyn and still roots for the 76ers.
David Gest, originally from Washington, D.C.,
graduated from Yale in 2003 with a degree in
architecture and urban studies. He then moved to
Los Angeles, and has been wearing shorts for most
READ PAST ARTICLES | JOIN THE EMAIL LIST | HEAR ABOUT UPCOMING EVENTS
americancity.org
page 46
of the past three years. After working as an
architectural consultant specializing in historic
preservation, he joined the staff of Planetizen full-
time in late 2005.
Joseph Heathcott is an architectural historian,
writer, and educator living in St. Louis. He is a
graduate faculty member in the Department of
American Studies at Saint Louis University,
where he teaches history and theory of city
planning and urban design.
Stephen Janis is a reporter for the Baltimore
Examiner and an adjunct professor for Johns
Hopkins School of Communications and
Contemporary Society. His first novel, Orange,
will be published this summer.
Frank Klein is a freelance photojournalist living
in the Baltimore-Washington area. Klein is
the recent recipient of a 2005 award for a photo
feature from the Society of Professional
Journalists.
Sharon Maclean works as a community planner
in New Jersey and is originally from Pittsburgh.
Her work and research focus on using historic
preservation to revitalize communities.
Shaun O’Boyle received an Education BFA in
Architecture from Parsons School of Design.
O’Boyle is interested in architecture, entropy,
and the dissolution of industrial systems; of
particular interest are recent ruins of industrial
and institutional architecture and infrastructure.
<www.oboylephoto.com/ruins>
Jeff Pooley is an Instructor of Media History and
Communication at Muhlenberg College. He has
worked as a researcher-writer and editor for the
Let’s Go travel guide series, and as a staff writer
and columnist for Brill’s Content, the media
affairs monthly.
LEARN HOW TO VOLUNTEER | SEND US FAN MAIL
Anika Singh is a staff attorney at the Community
Development Project of the Urban Justice Center
where she practices community development and
consumer protection law. She is a senior editor and
the submissions editor at The Next American City.
Will Steacy is a photographer who has been
documenting the city of New Orleans in a state
of transition in his project titled, “When Night
Becomes Day.” His work will be exhibited in
New York, Hamburg, Toronto, Seattle, Houston,
Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Sun Valley, and Las
Vegas this year. He lives and works in New York.
<www.willsteacy.com>
Robert Garland Thomson is trained as an
archaeologist and historic preservationist. His
work in education and training programs in
cultural heritage management has focused on
several sites in the U.S., South and Southeast
Asia, and the Balkans. Based in San Francisco,
he currently works at the Getty Conservation
Institute in Los Angeles.
Anthony Weiss is a freelance writer and works
as an urban planner for Alex Garvin &
Associates. He lives in Brooklyn, works in
Manhattan, writes where he can, and is kind to
old ladies and small children.
Emily Weiss, an education policy analyst and
former Teach For America corps member, lives
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has family in
the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana.
 for a few months, take temporary
continued from page 48 shelter in an office building in the
vicinity of a recent natural disas-
ter. Most of their communication happens through paperwork. When
they communicate verbally, it is through acronyms. A complex code
determines if you belong:
“Are you URS?”
“Umm, I don’t know.”
“ERPMC?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“What’s your code?”
“I thought you were gonna tell me that one.”
“Do you have an I-pass?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You shouldn’t be on this floor.”
The small staff of permanent FEMA workers reproduced and
increased exponentially. New staffers consisted of people like me, who
had no preparation and only knew where to show up. We received
computers and phones and badges and cameras and parking passes.
The outfitting is only one small task for FEMA, whose broad
instructions boil down to: wait for a disaster, staff it, outfit the staff,
send them to the field. Just this simple task is like waking a hungry,
hibernating bear and making it catch a deer for dinner. Not impossi-
ble, but awkward.
For the next three months, I was careful not to expect anything. I
spent every day as if it might be my last in that town. The branch I
found myself working for was called ESF-14, Long Term Community
Recovery. After a storm event, various branches of FEMA respond,
and many federal agencies assist in different aspects of recovery.
ESF-14 helps communities make sense of all the agencies. In theory,
we were fashioning a plan to coordinate applying for and disbursing
funds. Of course, each member of the twenty-person ESF-14 team
had their own idea about what this plan actually was.
After a while in Jackson, a few team members were sent south to
Waveland, Mississippi, to attend a town meeting. Waveland had been
decimated, and Robert Orr, a designer of the New Urbanist Shangri-
La, Seaside, Florida, would be unveiling his plans for the new town.
We arrived at night in a gigantic, gold Infiniti SUV donated by a local
Nissan plant. In the town of 2,500, you would be hard-pressed to find
ten habitable homes. Airplanes flew overhead spraying for mosqui-
toes. Two hundred people showed up to attend a meeting in a modu-
lar home that could hold fifty.
The next day we attended a planning symposium at the Imperial
Palace Casino in Biloxi, one of the few usable spaces in the area. One
hundred FEMA employees gathered to hear Andrés Duany introduce
yet another New Urbanist solution for the Gulf Coast. It directly con-
tradicted the plan the FEMA mitigation staffers had in mind. FEMA
wanted to designate a strict flood zone that called for a town built on
stilts. Duany warned the audience that they should be wary of FEMA’s
presentations. “You cannot live in a town where everything is raised
ten feet,” he said. The experience would be unsatisfying, he said, and
the cost prohibitive.
After this stand-off, I was told to meet my field team of five at a
McDonald’s in Wiggins, Mississippi, the seat of Stone County. Wig-
page 47
gins is 50 miles north of the Mississippi coast and sustained little
hurricane damage, but was nonetheless part of the long-term recov-
ery plan: any responsible long-term plan would recognize the town as
the receiving area for an evacuation; it would also be a logical place to
encourage well planned development.
At the McDonald’s, I met Steve, a former full-time FEMA
employee and now consultant. He was our team leader and seeming-
ly the most capable person in all of Mississippi. He managed to be
professional and thoughtful while maintaining a sense of humor
amongst all the frustrated and disgruntled FEMA staff. Steve scrib-
bled some words on a Steno sheet that would kick off the intense ten
weeks of recovery work I had long anticipated. On the sheet was a list
of who’s who in Stone County: mayors, aldermen, sheriffs, wardens,
business owners. We would interview them to suss out their visions
for their county’s future. We would consult experts in the field. We
would create and release this plan in three months so that Stone
County would have a beacon in the fog of recovery.
In the next ten weeks, people came and went, rumors circulated,
plans were drafted, forms were filled out, permission was given and
taken away, relationships were built. And nothing happened.
By January all that was left of our team was Gary, a retired sheriff
from South Dakota, and myself—an unlikely pair. Gary gained the
trust of skeptical townsfolk instantly. We spent a month of twelve-
hour days alternating between meetings in the town and our “office”
in the back of an old supermarket in Wiggins, next to the Piggly Wig-
gly. This was 50 miles from FEMA’s Mississippi operations base, but
it may as well have been 1,000. Communication with the rest of our
branch was nonexistent.
We looked for work every way that we could. Everyone in town
was sick of seeing us. FEMA culture severely discouraged us from
talking with any FEMA workers outside the branch, and nobody with-
in the branch had a clue what was going on. I waited every week for
Saturday, when I would drive the two hours to Biloxi to meet with our
branch. There was always the hope that this would be the day that
they would take the leash off and let us go to work.
We did this for about a month. We lobbied. We said that our
county, being the farthest from the coast and hit with the least dam-
age, could complete a plan the fastest. It would act as a model that
other counties could follow. But everyone was told by FEMA higher-
ups to wait and not step on anyone’s toes. We were told that the state
would provide direction. Finally, they did. They said that they would
prepare the long-term recovery plan, and we should all go home. We
had a week to get out of town, maybe less. That was it.
I still have no idea what happened. By that point, I was more than
ready to go home.
Personally, I had little to show for my time in Mississippi except
a speeding ticket and a new appreciation for buffet lunches. The work
was difficult—not just because of the grueling hours or living out of a
hotel—but because a talented, capable staff was denied the opportu-
nity to contribute.
LAST EXIT text and photos by Doug Giuliano
An Outsider Peers into
the FEMA Trailer
Our hero sets out to do a good deed by helping FEMA rebuild the Gulf Coast. But he
finds himself waylaid for weeks by a strange tribe of nomad bureaucrats in an outpost
near a Mississippi Piggly Wiggly
LAST FALL I MADE A PHONE CALL TO TEST THE FEMA WATERS.
I was quickly pulled into a riptide of inertia.
A few months after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania
with a master’s in city planning, I still had not found the Philadelphia
planning job I wanted. It was November 2005, and a friend was doing
debris cleanup after Hurricane Katrina in Florida. FEMA volunteering
seemed like a way to use my degree, get a basic per diem, and help some
people out. My friend connected me with Mark, an engineer in Chicago,
who told me that I would be on a team of ten to twenty planners, archi-
tects, and engineers creating a Hurricane Katrina recovery plan for the
Mississippi Gulf Coast. Days later, Mark called me at my temp job and
asked if I wanted to go to Mississippi. I had to be there in three days.
I showed up at the airport with only a driver’s license and got a
ticket to Jackson, Mississippi, courtesy of the engineering firm. At the
Budget Rent-a-Car, I gave my name, used the magic word “Direct-
Bill,” and received the keys to a car. The same routine worked at the
hotel in Jackson. Pretty soon I was watching cable TV and drinking a
High Life with the A/C on 60.
The next day I went to the address Mark had given me to look for
my contact, known to me only as Michelle. After getting through
security—no easy task—I found her. I told her my name and expected
all the secret FEMA doors to open.
“It’s Doug Giuliano.”
[Blank stare.]
“It’s with a G. G-I-U...”
Michelle turned her back on me and asked her colleague: “Why
do they keep sending me these people? I have no idea who this is.
Why do they keep sending me this shit?”
Michelle then began to openly sob in her cubicle.
This was my introduction to government bureaucracy. The next
few days felt like an anthropological field study: I had uncovered a
new tribe of nomadic North American bureaucrats who, once a year
continued on page 47
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COMING UP

ISSUE 13
IMMIGRATION
* THE DAY-LABOR DILEMMA
* THE SOMALIS OF LEWISTON, MAINE
* IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE:
THE SHOWDOWN AT SOUTH
CENTRAL FARM
* WHY MONTREAL IS GHETTO-FREE

PLUS:
WHY CARS NO LONGER MEAN
FREEDOM FOR WOMEN

AND:
THE GREAT PUBLIC TOILET DEBATE