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One of the things that’s really hard for our generation to wrap our heads around is that until quite recently, the US had such a severe housing surplus that homes were literally being abandoned because nobody wanted to live in them in big cities all over the country, incl NYC 1/
People obviously know about places like Detroit but take Charlotte St in the Bronx (made famous by Jimmy Carter visit). It had apartment buildings that were abandoned & burned out. Was rebuilt as suburban style houses. Nobody could imagine there’d ever be demand for apartments 2/
One of the most notable elements of Ed Koch’s mayoralty was that they renovated a lot of abandoned apartments into affordable housing. Many of the buildings had been seized by the city for unpaid taxes since they had effectively no property value. 3/
Detroit had the most extreme population decline (from 1.85M in 1950 to 639k today) and much of the land has been seized by the city, but the Bronx also went from 1.47M in 1970 to 1.17M in 1980. Notable because the housing stock was relatively recent and high quality. 4/
Other places like Manhattan lost population (2.33M in 1910 to 1.96M in 1950 to 1.42M in 1980) but at least that initial decline was reduction of extreme overcrowding and poor housing stock in places like Lower East Side. Still, even there apartment buildings got abandoned. 4/
But this is why artists could take over whole buildings in places like Soho. Declining industrial areas weren’t in high demand when even middle class people could live by Central Park. 5/
What caused this extreme surplus? The biggest reason was that the car and especially the expressway allowed people to commute much further and therefore live on houses built on previously low-value farmland far from the city center. 6/ bloomberg.com/news/features/…
The earlier dispersal from places like the Lower East Side was enabled by subways and elevated trains. Urban development is always driven substantially by transportation. 7/
Part of the reason for the huge generational disconnect is that boomers grew up in that world and it’s been a dramatic shift to a world of housing shortage so quickly. They really did once live in a world where building too many homes meant house next door could be abandoned. 8/
Of course that world was an artifact of a one-time transportation revolution and is very unlikely to ever happen again. That’s why we need policies that reflect the world we now live in, not the world of 1970. 9/
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