September/October 1997

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

I was surprised to read Mike Miller's article about San Francisco's defunct Tenderloin Senior Organizing Project (TSOP), in the May/June issue. He writes that only lack of funding prevents TSOP from reviving, but I believe there is a good bit more to the story.

TSOP's final organizing project took place in four residential buildings owned by Hasting College of the Law with 167 units of affordable housing. For many years, a neighborhood-wide coalition had fought to preserve these buildings as low-income housing, while the law school planned to demolish the housing in order to expand. We feared the residents would be displaced and the housing resource destroyed.

Despite our preservation efforts, TSOP went in and organized a few tenants who insisted that the buildings be demolished. Although all the tenants would have received relocation benefits and financial gain, the community as a whole would have lost the housing forever. Needless to say, the community group fighting for preservation, which included dozens of other tenants, was aghast at TSOP.

In the course of inserting itself into this battle, TSOP lost their funding. Indeed, they had lost touch with the community.

In the end, all four buildings were saved, and two are now run as permanently affordable housing by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC), a community-based nonprofit. (The other two are owned by private entities.) TNDC has just finished thorough renovation of both buildings, and the rents will actually be lower than under the previous owner. Our waiting list is overflowing with people who want to move in. I think the preservation strategy has thus proved extremely successful.

To the Editor:

Kelly Cullen and his associates in the "neighborhood-wide coalition" were principally executive directors of Tenderloin's non-profits and public interest attorneys. Most are Anglo, middle-class, and don't live in the neighborhood. By "the community," he means them.

TSOP worked in buildings in which 51 percent or more tenants petitioned TSOP for assistance, thus assuring majority interest in TSOP supported tenant associations. TSOP sought to enable tenants to "have a voice in...the policies that affect their lives." TSOP's "community" was the low-income residents of the Tenderloin, not the professionals meant to serve them.

Cullen is in error when he says the [TSOP organized] tenants "insisted that the buildings be demolished." Exactly the opposite was the case! Further, the tenants wanted to ensure their basic right of direct negotiation with their landlord.

Cullen's CDC and others have built a substantial number of often excellent affordable housing units, while the total supply of affordable housing in San Francisco has declined. They don't effectively organize people to fight the larger forces at work in the housing market. This is a national CDC/HDC pattern. Isn't there something wrong with "victories"  in the context of graver defeats? Only through powerful "people's organizations" will the larger forces at work in the housing market be addressed.

Rather than involve the TSOP-supported tenant association, the "neighborhood coalition" chose to speak for "the community" because it had its interests at heart. This kind of paternalism neither builds the people power necessary to reverse present trends in America nor respects the right of people to speak for themselves.

Brother Cullen should know better. The Franciscan Order in this Province is noted for its support for organizing low-income people to speak in their own behalf.

To the Editor:

Oscar Newman's contention that 40 percent homeownership is a pre-condition for a safe neighborhood is something I never thought I would see in Shelterforce [#93]. It's all the stranger since Newman cites Carr Square Village in St. Louis as the prototype for his defensible space concept. Apparently, after years of refining his idea, and with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Newman has developed it into something that doesn't work anymore for people like the tenants in Carr Square Village, who initially inspired it.

It doesn't surprise me that a city planner would come up with this limitation and couch it in pseudo-scientific terms. How did Newman come up with his 40 percent figure anyway? Did his projects all fail at 39 percent and succeed at 41 percent? Did he correlate the proportion of "6-month to one-year" to his magic percentage? I was especially amused, in a grim sort of way, with the patronizing little exemption at the end of the paragraph – how there might be some extraordinarily stable tenants, somewhere, who aren't a blight on the community.

How did such garbage get into your magazine? During the 1980's I lived in Allston, Mass. and know many long-time tenants who were being forced out by condo conversion. The justification for this mass displacement was that replacing tenants with homeowners would stabilize the neighborhood. This idea turned out to be such a spectacular failure that I never expected to see it again, anywhere, let alone in Shelterforce. Of course, back then, Shelterforce was a tenants' magazine.

Dear Editor:

Mr. Gardner is confusing apples with oranges. In my article for Shelterforce I was not talking about public housing projects, such as Carr Square Village, but of the effectiveness of street closures in inner-city, privately-owned housing built on public streets.

Our work in the Five Oaks community in Dayton, Ohio and dozens of similar communities across the country indicates that if the residents of such communities are expected to take a proprietary attitude toward the newly created cul-de-sac streets, a prevalence of single family houses and private ownership is necessary. I'm not making the rules, I'm just citing our experience.

Public housing, where the developments are publicly held and all residents are renters, is a whole other story: the ownership, management, and siting are all radically different. It is not that Defensible Space will not work there, it is just that it must be approached differently. In fact, we have successfully modified public housing projects everywhere in the country through physical changes which give residents greater control of their homes and developments.

A full discussion of the details and the differences appears in my book, Creating Defensible Space ($5.00 from HUD User: 800-245-2691), from which this article was drawn. It is a how-to manual that carefully explains how to create Defensible Space in existing public housing, new public housing, and private sector neighborhoods based on three real examples.

After Mr. Gardner has had a chance to read my book, he will no doubt reply "Never mind."