Nicholas Dagen Bloom: His Optimistic History of Public Housing Drawing Notice
Its operating budget deficit this year is $170 million. In May, it outraged tenants by threatening to shutter hundreds of community centers, senior centers and popular programs to cut costs. Three months later, a 5-year-old boy fell to his death at a Brooklyn complex after trying to escape from a stalled elevator, focusing the attention of the press and lawmakers on the agency’s elevator maintenance and oversight.
But at a small gathering on Thursday night at a [NYC] Housing Authority conference room in Lower Manhattan, the hot topic as people ate cheese and crackers was not elevator safety or budget deficits but something else entirely: A new book sure to find its way onto the bookshelves of managers across the agency, “Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century.”
The book, by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, an associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology, is a rare burst of good news for the agency, detailing its 74-year history and, as the title implies, praising it as “America’s largest and most successful public housing system.”
Mr. Bloom, who spoke on Thursday at a “book talk” attended by Housing Authority workers and others, told the audience that he tried to be both honest and upbeat in the book. One of its themes is that the story of public housing in America has not taken the New York City model into account, and that the Housing Authority’s successes have been overshadowed by the failures of high-rise public housing in other cities like Chicago.
“Even without overly praising NYCHA, the New York example throws a monkey wrench into the well-oiled gears of public housing history and criticism,” Mr. Bloom writes in the introduction.
Mr. Bloom, whose grandfather was the head of the St. Louis housing authority in the 1960s, worked on the book for six years, aided in large part by Housing Authority records held at the La Guardia-Wagner Archive at La Guardia Community College. He said Thursday that decades of strong leadership and project management, an architectural variety in housing styles and the income diversity of tenants have been some of the reasons for the agency’s success....
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But at a small gathering on Thursday night at a [NYC] Housing Authority conference room in Lower Manhattan, the hot topic as people ate cheese and crackers was not elevator safety or budget deficits but something else entirely: A new book sure to find its way onto the bookshelves of managers across the agency, “Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century.”
The book, by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, an associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology, is a rare burst of good news for the agency, detailing its 74-year history and, as the title implies, praising it as “America’s largest and most successful public housing system.”
Mr. Bloom, who spoke on Thursday at a “book talk” attended by Housing Authority workers and others, told the audience that he tried to be both honest and upbeat in the book. One of its themes is that the story of public housing in America has not taken the New York City model into account, and that the Housing Authority’s successes have been overshadowed by the failures of high-rise public housing in other cities like Chicago.
“Even without overly praising NYCHA, the New York example throws a monkey wrench into the well-oiled gears of public housing history and criticism,” Mr. Bloom writes in the introduction.
Mr. Bloom, whose grandfather was the head of the St. Louis housing authority in the 1960s, worked on the book for six years, aided in large part by Housing Authority records held at the La Guardia-Wagner Archive at La Guardia Community College. He said Thursday that decades of strong leadership and project management, an architectural variety in housing styles and the income diversity of tenants have been some of the reasons for the agency’s success....