Technology Day 2003 - "Fast Times at MIT: What's New, What's Next - Now What?” Pt.1

BILL HECHT: Good morning. Are you all asleep out there? Good morning.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

BILL HECHT: Good, good, good. Welcome back to Saturday classes. Now, those of you who are my age and older know about Saturday classes. You young folks, you missed a great opportunity. Instead of sleeping in on Saturday morning, you would get up. You would go to the lab, and you would do an experiment, which undoubtedly was going to fail.

Now, it may have been failing because you were dead asleep. It may have been failing because you didn't do it right, and it may have been failing because the physics department intended it to to teach you a lesson about physics. On the other hand, we're not going to have any experiments this morning. Welcome. It's my pleasure to welcome you to what, believe it or not, is my last welcome for a technology day.

I've done this for 23 years now, and I've actually held the job for almost half of its historical history. And I'm finally going to go half time on July 1. So welcome back to tech. As you know, those of you who are my age and have a little gray in your hair, this place keeps changing, and for the most part, for the better. It's my pleasure this morning to do one thing, and that's introduce our president, Chuck Vest.

[APPLAUSE]

PRESIDENT VEST: Thank you very much, Bill. This being MIT, I carry some instrumentation around. It measures the relative humidity, and it works this way. When I make it from Gray House, the president's home, to Kresge in five minutes flat, and stand up to speak, it's a question of how quickly my glasses fog up. So just watch them, and you'll tell.

Before we begin this morning, I just really want to be sure that everybody heard what Bill Hecht just said. We've been remarkably fortunate as an institution to have an individual who has been so dedicated and so effective to maintaining the alumni family of MIT-- strong, and vigorous, and moving forward. It's been a terrific run.

Of course, as Bill said, he's held the job for the majority of its existence. He's held it for all of my existence as a member of the community, and, Bill, I just want to personally thank you and thank you on behalf of those thousands of men and women out there who owe so much to you. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

But being MIT, we have a new vice president, and one who will be equally extraordinary and wonderful in her tenure-- Beth Garvin, who is also with us this morning. Beth, welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

Well, I know she's here somewhere because I saw her a few moments ago, but let's get down to work. It's really a great time to welcome all of you back to your campus, because this has been an absolutely terrific year in terms of accomplishment and momentum on the part of our faculty and their students, as well as our staff and our alumni. I think you've had a look around at parts of the campus, and you can see steel, and brick, and metal, and some other materials you probably are wondering what they are rising here and there. These are the physical or outward symbols of an institution that is both bold and very confident in its future. And I think we have good reason for both that boldness and certainly for that confidence in our future.

The campus is continuing its transformation in the area of residential and community life this year alone we opened Simmons Hall, the magnificent new undergraduate dormitory just to the north of the playing fields. We opened a much larger residence hall for graduate students a little bit further to the north at the intersection of Sydney and Pacific Streets. And we opened the magnificent Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, which I hope all of you have an opportunity to have a look at while you are here.

I must say I've never anywhere seen or heard of a building that has had a more instantaneous transformational effect on a campus community as has the Zesiger Center-- the Z Center, as it is known in the vernacular-- with its magnificent Olympic pool, and workout rooms, and squash courts, and so forth. And it's just busy and humming 24 hours a day, and mixing together our staff, and our students, and our faculty in really an extraordinary way, and, of course, contributing to the wellness of our community.

In the agenda for research and teaching, we are in the final stages of what has been a horrendous, but very important project to renovate the chemistry building from top to bottom to really bring it up to modern standards of safety and so forth to allow us to continue the movement of chemistry into so many new areas-- nanoscale science, and biologically based chemistry, and so forth-- and to do so in a way that is safe, that minimizes the amounts of chemicals that need to be used, and so forth. It's just wonderful. About 2/3 of it is finished and occupied. We're doing the last phase even as we speak this morning.

And I hope you all have seen the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computational Information and Intelligence Sciences. That's rising at the site of the famous Building 20, and really in so many ways symbolizes the advance of MIT into a new century. It has two major elements, the Alex Dreyfoos Building and the Bill Gates Building. And I just hope you do have a look at Frank Gary's magnificent structure, which is about at the point you can begin to really sense what it's going to be like as a building. And I'm sure this time next year we will be holding some portion of these events within it.

Last week, we had the groundbreaking over the last two weeks for the new brain and cognitive science complex that will consist of three integrated buildings-- the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Picower Center for Learning and Memory, and the Facilities of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science itself-- a symbol of a very major intellectual advance for the campus. In terms of quality of life, we're slowly but surely working away at all the important infrastructure-- the terribly important things that you don't see-- life safety systems in the residence halls and so forth-- and also making some advances toward improving our streetscapes. You will see within the next year that at least the eastern part of Vassar Street-- that is to the east of Mass Ave-- is going to become the kind of thoroughfare that this campus and its people really deserve with nice paving, and trees, and bicycle paths, and a little less parking, and so forth. Going to be a great, great improvement.

In teaching and research, we continue to have the best there is. We celebrated two remarkable anniversaries this year. Back in the Fall, we celebrated the 50th year of the Sloan School of Management in a wonderful MIT combination of intellectual events and celebration. And just last week we had an extraordinary celebration of the 100th year of electrical engineering here at MIT with, again, a magnificent set of lectures, as well as celebratory events.

And I made this statement at the opening of that event that I'm going to repeat here. I do not believe there has ever existed an academic department in any institution in the world that has had as much influence on education and also on practice in its field as has MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Good. Fine.

[APPLAUSE]

I'll vote with that. At that time, it was announced that the laboratory for computer science and the artificial intelligence laboratory have merged to form a new entity, and also during the intervening week we opened the new Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology, which is a remarkable $50 million undertaking of our faculty and students on behalf of the US Army, which will also form an incredible platform for the young faculty from many different departments who put this program together to explore the new world of nanoscale science and nanoscale engineering.

Computational and systems biology-- again, a cross disciplinary group put together by an extraordinary group of young faculty here at MIT. It is something I think you will be reading about over the coming decade. They're just a remarkable group of people with wonderful ideas about how to blend the way engineers think with the way biologists and medical doctors must think as we enter this new century. We've continued innovation in teaching and learning at all levels. Our open courseware program will really ramp up this fall with about 500 subjects on it, and our pilot sites have had just remarkable responses from across the country, and especially all around the world.

But the heart of all of this is our remarkable faculty and their students. This Fall, the class of 2007 will arrive, and I have to tell you, every year these young men and women get better and better. It's going to be a truly remarkable group. This year, MIT faculty were recognized by receiving the highest awards in virtually each of our core areas. That began with the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology that went to Bob Horvitz of our biology department, our Cancer Center, and also the McGovern Institute for Brain Research for his pioneering work some years back in understanding programmed cell death, which has great importance, of course, to the field of cancer research and, as he is beginning to learn, to the field of neuroscience, as well.

The National Medal of Science went to Ann Graybiel of our Brain and Cognitive Science Department. And I have to tell you, I was fortunate to be in the White House for that event, and it felt really good to see eight men and one one woman on the stage, and she was the one from MIT. We're very proud of Ann.

[APPLAUSE]

The Draper Prize this year, the highest award an engineer can win in the United States, went to our own Bob Langer for his incredible work in biotechnology. And by the way, Bob was the cover boy of The Boston Globe Sunday magazine last week with a big banner headline that said the smartest man in Boston. How would you like to live up to that?

[LAUGHTER]

That's quite an accomplishment. The Turing Award, the highest computer science award given in the world, really, went to Ron Rivest, who shared it with two former MIT people for their seminal work on public key encryption some years back. But even more important to me is what's happening with our very young faculty. We had Sunil Mullainathan in economics-- won one of the so-called MacArthur Genius awards this year. And Angela Amon, a young professor in our Biology Department, won what, in many ways to me is the most impressive award in this entire list, which is the Waterman Award that the National Science Board gives every year to one scientist or engineer in any field for research accomplishments under the age of 35. And so the future, I can tell you, is at least as bright as the present and as our past.

And finally, this last week, it was announced that Kristin Forbes, a young applied economist here at MIT in the Sloan School, has been nominated to serve on President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors. So I'm through bragging for a little while, Mr. Lash, and I think it's time to get on with seeing the substance behind the bragging. We have a wonderful morning put together for you to sample a bit of the intellectual potpourri that is MIT. And to start that, I would like to introduce to you your president of the Alumni Association, my friend and colleague, Jim Lash. Jim?

[APPLAUSE]

JIM LASH: I am not the substance, just to be clear about that. You have, of course, your booklet, and the booklet outlines the program for today. My job is to try to keep it moving along. I will be introducing the speakers, and after I've introduced each speaker and they've given their talk, there will be a brief question and answer period.

You should have received, when you came in, three by five cards on which you may write your questions. We're not going to be picking those cards up. We want you to read the question from the card. Why would we do that? Well, it's because the speeches are to be given on the stage, not out there, and you're not to come on the stage. So we want you to try to keep it brief because we only have a short period of time.

The program this morning consists of five individuals-- or it's actually today-- consists of five individuals, one from each of our schools. The first is Dr. Lawrence Vale, head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and he will be speaking with us today on the subject of housing the lowest income Americans, the past, present, and future of public housing. You have his biography in your material, but I just wanted to give you a sense of how committed he is to this subject.

I have a long list of books and articles he has written on this subject, and they have titles like Urban Design for Urban Development, The Future of Planned Poverty-- Redeveloping America's Most Distressed Public Housing Projects. From the Puritans to the Projects-- The Ideological Origins of American Public Housing, Public Housing and the American Dream-- Residents' Views of Buying into the Projects. Without further ado, Dr. Vale.

[APPLAUSE]

DR. LAWRENCE VALE: At this time of reunions, when alumni and alumnae come back on their alma maters, I realize I'm something of a 20th century relic. I finished a graduate program here at MIT 15 years ago and forgot to leave, and I've never applied for any other job than the one I currently hold, a very strange notion. Although faculty members even here at MIT sometimes like to complain about salaries, my title today-- Housing the Lowest Income Americans-- is not meant to be particularly autobiographical.

Rather, I wanted to spend a few moments with you today talking about public housing, which, aside from prisons, I think is probably the country's most vilified and stigmatized domestic environment. If you ask people these days where it is that they think the lowest income Americans live, they probably don't give you an answer like slums or ghettos anymore. They probably would say public housing, and there are 1.3 million households-- about four or five million Americans-- living in public housing today. And the census showed that, during the 1990s, 9 out of the 10 economically most distressed neighborhoods in the country were, in fact, public housing projects, something that were largely the creation of direct federal policy, a strange notion.

The worst examples of public housing certainly deserve their dismal reputation, although most public housing, especially in smaller communities, is functioning quite well. We sometimes forget that there are 3,500 public housing authorities across the country, and we usually hear the most negative things only about the few in some of the largest cities that have gone so far astray, but they've failed so dramatically that it's understandable that that happens.

So my interest in this is to try and put some perspective on it, going both backwards and forwards, and I really have been struggling for the last several years with two questions in particular. How and why did public housing in this country fall into such ill repute? And second, what can be done to fix this? Both of them turn out to be fairly complicated questions.

Let me begin by asking you to judge a couple of books by their covers. They're up there. Probably not the best thing to do. Neither of these books is likely to become a bestseller, but at least displayed this way I can claim that they're the largest sellers. And I'll be sure to tell this to Harvard University Press.

The book on the left-- I'm reminded by the title of today being Fast Times at MIT-- you'll see whether I qualify. The book on the left started as research on my undergraduate thesis in 1980 and was published as a book a mere 20 years later. And the book on the right fared only slightly better. I began work on it during my first semester as a master's student and completed it this fall during my first semester as a department head. So I'm not a particularly speedy researcher, but these are problems-- these are really not problems that emerged quickly or that will be solved quickly.

The title of the book on the left, the first book, From the Puritans to the Projects is meant to suggest that the problem of public housing is embedded in about 350 years of past cultural practices, specifically notions about work ethics, and a sense that that poverty is usually caused by some sort of individual moral failing, and a belief that government, the town has an obligation to help those who are worse off, the people that I call in the subtitle public neighbors-- that the government would step in, the town if those people couldn't be supported by their family or by private charities. Here in Boston, that's the way things worked 350 years ago. In that view of the world, the single family home was the thing that really remained supreme even hundreds of years ago, as it does now. And multi-family housing, going back historically, was something that was associated with institutions.

The second project, which culminated in the book, Reclaiming Public Housing, is attempting to tell the story of public housing primarily from the viewpoint of its tenants. In other words, the first project is a long story about how various institutions managed poverty in cities, a tale of where people in positions of power chose to put the poorest citizens, and where poor people tended to need together, as well. Whereas the second book is a more of a bottom up kind of story. It's about the rise of public housing, a rise that many of the people in this room can remember was during a period of optimism about what the government could do for low income people in housing. But it's also about the collapse of public housing, and most importantly, it's about three ambitious attempts to try and revitalize particular housing developments, reclaiming them not just as buildings, but as safe and secure communities for continued occupancy by very low income households. The advantage of taking so long to write these books is that I was able to watch and observe the transformation of these places over a period of more than 15 years.

I asked you to judge these books by their covers, but doing so also means looking closely at what isn't there. Even those of you who are close up probably can recognize that people are not shown in either of these covers. The key ethical challenge for my work really is to make sure that I always remember that I'm not writing about buildings, or at least not just about buildings, but about the people who design, and manage, and transform and live in these buildings. More than 300 interviews were conducted with such people.

So my challenge has been to try and contribute to scholarship in history, and urban planning, and social science, but also to make sure that my books were going to do so in a way that paid full respect to the people that I was writing about. I call this the doing projects in the projects challenge. There is a glaring disparity here that I want to be upfront about with you. A researcher from the second richest institution in Cambridge-- well, maybe that's not right. Maybe Harvard is in Boston now. But anyway, coming from a place of wealth and privilege, I'm spending years studying some of the poorest people in Boston.

So what did these people gain from my study, right? How can I avoid the sort of intrusive exploitation that has characterized past generations of social science research? In other words, what's in this for them? I don't have time now for a full discussion of that question, but I want to emphasize that I began the inquiry with the public housing tenants themselves through slowly nurtured relationships with the leadership and others at the tenant organizations in the housing developments that I was attempting to analyze. The tenants themselves helped shape the kinds of questions that were asked of their fellow tenants and encouraged me to find ways to raise issues that were going to be important to them, as well as to me.

That was really the prerequisite for mutual trust, and it constituted the only hope that I had that the kind of interviews that were going to be done with these people who otherwise had no particular reason to trust me or my institution-- that they were going to be honest, and open, and candid. The most critical thing was a decision to actually hire public housing residents themselves to do much of the interviewing, and to train them, and to try and provide them with a skill to come out of this. Rather than the white male professor coming across the river to do his project in the projects, I was hoping that the tenants would be able to see this as something more of a joint venture. And I wanted them to see that most of the money that went to this research was going to them rather than to the MIT student RAs that they perceived as rich and privileged people, even though those same students regarded themselves as low income individuals on this side of the river.

So what I was doing was valuing their time at the rate of $10 an hour and implicitly valuing their viewpoints by doing that. So the result was 267 hour long taped interviews in four languages-- they were conducted in four languages-- that were really intended to get at broader range of opinion and viewpoint, not just the loud, activist, tenant spokesperson, but to try and get at what people who hadn't been asked about anything had to say about life in public housing and what could happen. It had a lot of downsides certainly, mostly due to the logistical complexity of that and to the highly variable interviewing skills of the people we hired. And I'm sure that it never really was fully viewed as the joint venture that I intended, but I still think it marks a small attempt to counter some of the stereotypes that still are prevalent about people living in public housing and the worlds they inhabit.

So let me just now with the aid of some illustrations spend a few minutes illustrating three aspects of American public housing struggle. First is the struggle to build public housing in a country that venerates homeownership and individual initiative. Second is the struggle to maintain the high idealism that initially characterized public housing construction, and third is the struggle to reclaim public housing projects for continued occupancy by low income people.

So if you look at what I tend to call the prehistory of public housing, arguing that it goes back 350 years and not just to the New Deal like most people think of it, there is a long term tension between two trends. One, a sense that, if government and the state are involved in any kind of housing provision for low income people, that it ought to be a reward for the best kind of people. It ought to be recognizing your contributions to the town, your service to country through veterans programs, through land grants and things like that. Or alternatively, it ought to be acknowledging that the federal government, or the state government, or some form of government has a kind of public obligation to the least advantaged, that it's a kind of way of coping with poverty, a coping mechanism.

So I always try to think of public housing in the context of its antithesis-- the private home. Some of you may not be able to read all of this, and I don't have the little laser pointer with me to show this, but what it says here is his castle. Home owning breeds real men. And then in the fine print at the bottom it says it's what puts the man back in manhood.

This is an illustration from the 1922 booklet by the National Association of Real Estate Boards called Own Your Own Home. Here, does Brown own his home? No, he rents. Haven't you seen him scratch matches on the wallpaper?

There is this inferior moral being out here known as the renter that is being vilified and stigmatized by this alternative. So the kinds of images of home ownership in the years immediately preceding public housing-- the homeowner as the most efficient workman and the most successful in business and the professions at the upper left. A home as the best known incentive to persistent and organized effort. Or down below, the woman in her garden, where it says what woman does not yearn for her own garden and flowers? The work of caring for them and the sunshine helped to keep her young.

[LAUGHTER]

And if the garden weren't enough, the modern kitchen of the owned home-- the little caption says no drudgery here.

[LAUGHTER]

So this is what you gain. Or finally for children, what it says here is every child has the right to a home of its own. The child raised in a rented house or apartment is cheated. It makes childhood happier.

So this is the sort of thing that's going on, and we know it well historically going back to the 19th century, the Homestead Act. There's one from Oklahoma on the left. And then here in Massachusetts there was an organization in the 19-teens called the Homestead Commission that was building houses for worthy upwardly mobile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the earliest forms.

So you have this kind of reward tradition on the one hand, trying to say that the way that government belongs in housing is to reward the people who are the most deserving, who are going to work the land, or who have served as veterans, or who have done one thing or another to gain from that. And alternatively, there's this other long tradition about housing and government involvement as a kind of coping mechanism. This is the alms house in Boston on Leverett Street right about where Mass General is now-- or part of it-- that was built in 1800 to replace the earlier almshouse on Boston Common. It was designed by Charles Bullfinch, the same designer as the new statehouse, and when they built the new statehouse, they didn't want the old almshouse across the street from it. And so it moved over, but got very prominent kind of thing.

So people that really couldn't afford to maintain themselves on the town were there, and then gradually went even further. Now that I have my pointer, that's the Boston peninsula that was there in the 19th century. And what initially happened was that Leverett house one was about as far as you could get to that point, and then that wasn't far enough or big enough. And so they moved it all the way out to Deer Island, which, at that point, was still an island, and built this thing by 1850 as an almshouse and house of industry, meaning able-bodied people should be put to work. It was actually almost a form of incarceration with visits only possible once every three months and it being an island. They didn't allow for anybody to elope-- was the phrase-- meaning escape from it at the time.

So you see, you had this kind of sense of put poor people in an institution. Of course, most people were left in tenements on the mainland, and this book that came out in 1893 is Boston's equivalent of the famous Jacob Riis book, How the Other Half Lives-- is called a Civilization's Inferno-- Studies in the Social Cellar. And what it was was a study of what happened while the people were dancing on the streets in the townhouses of Beacon Hill or the Back Bay, and the levels of poverty that existed. The worthy people looking for work over here, the widows and orphans who were poor through no fault of their own, and then the so-called social cellar, the world of vice, and illicit behavior, and all of the sorts of things.

And the attempt was to figure out which of these people you should care about. Do you care about these people and these people, but not those people? How do you distinguish what happens in the inferno of civilization? But it's not until the 20th century that people started to worry about this in any great detail.

This is a map of Boston and Cambridge, showing what they called to be sections in which are blighted areas that may be considered for rehousing projects. That was the phrase. So there's Main Street and where Memorial Drive would be running there. So we're just sort of in here. There's Mass Ave. And if you know Cambridge, you know that there are two very large public housing developments right here at that Main Street intersection over there that did get built.

So this is the idea, but the question was, well, what was meant by rehousing projects? The authority came to power. This is the way the Boston Housing Authority preferred to self-reference themselves. So these five guys and their descendants were in charge, self-appointed of picking who was going to go into public housing. Boston, shown here at the top, had two big bursts-- one pre-war and one post-war-- where all of the housing was built. This is the national picture, which also has the pre-war spike, a post-war spike, but it had more activity in the '50s and '60s. Boston stopped building the large public housing projects for families in 1954, ahead of most other cities, but did a lot of it very, very soon.

And what was happening, at least in the older days, is that there were neighborhoods being taken, like this one, with hundreds of individual structures, including homes that people owned and businesses that were owned that were simply being torn down. A line is drawn around it, and it's rebuilt. This is the Mission Hill District in Roxbury, one of the first one in 1940 that was taken.

And this question of rehousing project turned out that it was about building new housing over here, but not really about rehousing those people into this place. What happened when I looked back at it and looked at the population records, I found that between 50% and 70%-- or 50% and 80% of the people in these various neighborhoods that were being torn down expressed an interest in moving to public housing, but when they actually built it, only between 2% and 12% actually got in because these people had the wrong family size. They might have been single individuals, or they might have had an extended family. They might not have had a US citizen at the head of the household. They might have been the wrong race for a project that was going to be only for one race or the other, and it was a black-white issue in those days in Boston.

They might have not had a stable enough job, because public housing was a reward in those days. It wasn't a coping mechanism. It was a reward for the people who really had demonstrated good citizenship and good housekeeping, and were likely to make maximum advantage and move on as quickly as possible so someone else could take their place. That's the kind of thing that was happening.

The idea was, as the cartoon here says-- it says the man's holding the bag here of the slum clearance tool. And it says disease, dispiritedness, delinquency-- we hope you'll be gone with the slums. The idea was you tear down the slums, and you eliminate the problems, but what was lost in the equation was that, in fact, you were just inviting a very different group of people to return. Public housing in 1940 in Boston was more selective than MIT. There were 10,000 applications for 1,000 places in a public housing development when it opened.

I think MIT's selectivity has improved since then, but in any case, it was really this kind of sense of moral uplift. You can't read all the details here, but it says out of the shadows, into the sun-- the notion of back alleys here and then the kind of openness of public housing. And the sentence, which is too good not to read to you, says after the war there were eight shining developments rising fresh to the sun, where once in dreary dirt filled dilapidation slum dwellings had shambled in contaminating hopelessness against a gray and somber sky. In this day, public housing was intended to even fix the weather of Boston.

[LAUGHTER]

It really was there. So this was a period of optimism, and openness, and opportunity. When people took pictures of public housing projects, they emphasized things like flagpoles and the Bunker Hill Monument at the Charlestown development, or here in Mission Hill, the Mission Church almost looks like the town church on the Common. And the references were all to New England villages. People wanted it.

Here in Boston, every one of those circles is the site of a post-war housing development where every one of the city counselors said, well, what about ward 24? We didn't get ours yet. There were 17 of these built after the war to complement the eight that were done before.

This was a desired thing, but note, also, that the gray areas were the only areas where there was a majority non-white population in Boston. In other words, 23 of these developments-- or 22 of them-- were built in white neighborhoods and intended for white occupancy. And so some of the real challenges for housing has been, what do you do as the neighborhoods change and as the population of the town changes when you have done a housing stock like that? It's been a real question.

But the idea really was that these were slum neighborhoods like that map I showed here. This map is a close up of that area of South Boston, and the idea was this was a substandard area known as census tract M3. And the idea was it just cost too much to the city. There were all of these various kinds of expenses, ranging from street cleaning to health costs, and that this was a net revenue loss. And so the idea was you tear it down, and you put something else there, and you get other people.

So you got these dramatic before and after kind of pictures. That's the same neighborhood. They simply drew a little red line that you may be able to barely see, tore down hundreds of places, left the Lithuanian church that was in here, but destroyed the entire parish that was around it, and then rebuilt public housing for 972 units of housing, and handed it over to Irish American occupancy. The Lithuanian and Polish communities of South Boston have never forgiven this.

So the struggle, though, has been what do you do when this stuff starts to decline? And I don't have time to give you the whole picture, which is fairly well known, but increasingly you had needier people applying. All of those white upwardly mobile veterans were given all sorts of other opportunities through various federal initiatives and the way the housing markets were working under the FHA at the time, and increasingly didn't need or want to apply for public housing once the 1950s and '60s started. You had people that had much less stable employment choosing to apply.

The financial system of public housing was premised on the rents covering the operating expenses, and that was increasingly impossible when you had people bringing in lower incomes. The management failures and the maintenance failures are legion, and the design inadequacy of these places that had hundreds and hundreds of children-- thousands in some cases-- clustered on stairwells and reliant on unreliable elevators-- that sort of thing. So by the end of the 1970s in Boston and elsewhere, public housing had declined dramatically.

This is the same project in South Boston that I showed just a moment ago-- the aerial-- where nobody really knew what was public, what was private, what was street, what was asphalt, what was courtyard. This, I think, may have been the last tree, and there are not any tall beavers in South Boston in case you're wondering, but it's the kind of thing that was happening. And when I first started visiting, they actually had to annotate the public street sign to say private way, dangerous passing-- a very sad commentary.

So the question is, well, what do you do about that? The answer in St. Louis famously in the 1970s was to take the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project and blow it up. The problem, having done that, as the aerial photo of St. Louis taken at least 15 years later shows, is that there wasn't anything in there to replace it. This is the open field that is on the site of that that I took about two or three years ago when I went to visit it. There's even been a proposal for a golf course, but it's a very short sighted answer. This is the answer that says give up, but I don't think that's the way to do it.

The current thinking is under the federal HOPE VI program. It says hers-- these are some HUD brochures. It says HOPE VI, building communities, transforming lives, a promise fulfilled, the transformations of American public housing. These are all before, after, before, after the kind of dramatic transformation. And this one says principles for inner city neighborhood design. The idea being that you tear it all down, and you rebuild it as mixed income communities, and start all over, and try and attract a different set of people.

Here's a kind of example, again, in St. Louis, the code of public housing and the housing that's being replaced it. The catch in all of this is that it's asking a different kind of person to benefit. This is now public housing for those people, the kind of multiracial briefcase set. And it's not serving the people that public housing had become intended to serve. If you actually look at the figures, it's very disturbing about how few very low income people are now going into the redeveloped housing. It's being torn down and then replaced with a different kind of tenant, just like what happened in the 1930s and '40s during the slum clearance, when the new housing was not intended for those people.

So the alternative that I've been proposing is what I call reclaiming public housing, which means not just reclaiming buildings, but reclaiming the occupancy for very low income people. And so what I did was look at places-- and I'm just telling you about the most successful of them since time is short. The Commonwealth Development in Boston, which I think is probably the most successful turnaround of a severely distressed public housing development anywhere in the country, not just here. When it opened, it was for veterans housing-- 650 units here, and a lot of children, and a lot of milk trucks. This is 1951.

And it had mid rise buildings, and elevators, and all of these things that are not supposed to work in public housing. It worked pretty well for a while. It opened as an integrated, though barely integrated development in the early '50s, which was considered extremely progressive at the time and remained a tolerable place to live into the early 1970s. These fellows, Steven Brown and John Murphy, were best friends in the early 1970s, and a lot of the climate managed to miss the real tensions over busing that tore apart so much of the other city.

But by the end of the 1970s, for all of these reasons that I mentioned, Commonwealth declined dramatically. By 1980, it was 52% vacant. Only 14% of the households had full time employment. 94% of the households were headed by a single female. Only 11% of the people, when interviewed, said they felt very safe. The judge who put the Boston Housing Authority in receivership in 1980 said that the development was regarded by neighbors with fear and loathing-- were his words.

When people moved out, as they did often without notice, no one was able to secure the apartments. They were vandalized and then proved unrentable. So you ended up with things like this, and you ended up with the kind of picture that characterized the top of this, which is just at the beginning of the efforts to reconstruct it, but people didn't give up, nor did they give it over to wealthier people. What happened was a transformation from this plan to this, which may look very similar, except for the color to you, but note a couple of things. Instead of that building, here is a daycare center. Instead of that building, here is a management center and a community center. And instead of these buildings separate, they're connected over here in a special complex of housing to serve needs of the elderly. And another road was put through here so it didn't just seem like a single loop through it.

The tenant leadership was crucial. This man, Bart [? McDonough, ?] was the tenant leader at the time at the opening of the childcare center here. And they did a fabulous job of organizing themselves and working with people to assert their needs, especially their right to return to the redeveloped place. The design-- it's a little hard to read the one on the left, but what they did was they turned three story buildings that had had apartments on each floor into townhouse type things so that, when somebody was on a stoop, they could actually talk to somebody on the street. And it really transformed the design into something much closer to a normal streetscape.

And they landscaped it beautifully. As much as 10 feet of fill was put in here, and it became a place where people had a sense of what was private and what was semi-private, and where the public realm was. And lastly, they turned it over to a very first rate private management team that occupied part of this building along with the tenant offices. And it got to a point where a place that had been considered so dangerous that nobody would go near it in the late 1970s-- by the mid 1980s, they had to erect resident parking only signs because there were people from the suburbs that were coming and parking on site at Commonwealth development, and then getting on the green line to commute the rest of their way to their jobs. It's just a remarkable kind of transformation of a neighborhood and of an attitude done by this tremendous kind of thing.

It's ultimately, I think, a function of community. This was a sign I saw in the community center that some of the kids had put together. Welcome to our community room rules. No cussing, fighting, jumping, on tables, groping, stealing, ball playing, drinking, smoking, throwing, spitting, teasing, or running. One warning, then you must leave on number two. This was an effort to restore community in a place that was done so without a loss to a commitment to extremely low income people.

The redevelopment succeeded in fostering safety, and reliability, and quality management, and attractive conditions without replacing the population with a less needy group. I wish it were the national model, but it isn't. Instead a recent study of the $5 billion federal program known as HOPE VI-- some of you saw the Globe yesterday. It was a big discussion of it on page three. The program that's known as HOPE VI-- H-O-P-E six-- found that only 11% of those who had lived in the neighborhoods that were in severely distressed public housing that were being replaced by the HOPE VI program actually got back into the redeveloped housing or are slated to do so. In other words, it's that same kind of 10% people get back that we noticed in the '30s and '40s. So I don't make any friends at HUD when I suggest that the hope acronym really ought to stand for House Our Poor People Elsewhere.

Let me briefly conclude, then, by returning to this question of ethics. I began with a few words about methodology and about the need to address the power relations that are inherent in studying our fellow human beings, but clearly the ethical challenge in this kind of work is really a double one. It's not just a matter of method, but also of content. In terms of content, we really have to remember that the entire field of housing is infused with moral judgments. Each of us, consciously or not, is making moral judgments about a person based on where he or she lives, and to study public housing is about making studying societal judgments, about the place of poor people in cities.

So really at base I'm interested in the history of public housing not just because it tells us so much about who we were and who we are, but because it helps us explain and inform action in the present. That sentence alone is probably enough to keep me from ever having a joint appointment in a history department, but it's really an essential perspective to have for someone interested in urban planning. My field entails taking action in the world, building theory out of a close observation of practice. Ours is really a never ending kind of search to make sense out of the messiest parts of the world, and I thank you for letting me share a part of my search with you this morning.