Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Over time, Logue had watched with growing dismay as suburbs provided safety valves for escaping middle-class urban residents, who then raised the ramparts behind them to prevent others from following and disinvested from the cities whose economies made their own lives so comfortable. Finally, he thought, the UDC’s statewide mandate and extraordinary powers would make possible an assault on the barriers dividing city and suburb and open up new housing options for people with low incomes. As Logue looked north out the huge windows of his forty-sixth-floor UDC office, his eyes inevitably fixed on Westchester, the wealthiest of New York’s suburban counties and, not coincidentally, the historic seat of the Rockefeller family.186 What became known—and notorious—as the UDC’s Fair Share Housing program would soon emerge as its greatest and most controversial challenge to the socioeconomic status quo in New York State. Logue would risk a great deal in making this high-stakes bet, and the outcome would have repercussions far outside this one county’s borders, deciding the fate of both the UDC and its tenacious leader, Ed Logue.

  8.   From Fair Share to Belly-Up

  Logue began hatching plans for the Urban Development Corporation to build affordable housing in suburban communities very soon after he became its president. Only months into the job in fall 1968, he delivered a characteristically blunt message to a national audience of housing and redevelopment officials, provocatively targeting by name—for impact—one of the most elite communities in Greater New York. “In the enlightened state of New York,” he promised, “New York City is going to be able to count on the services of the state development corporation in rehousing some of its low-income families in Scarsdale.” In the same speech, Logue left no ambiguity that he meant to provide housing not only for the economically disadvantaged, but for racial minorities as well. “We have

  to face directly, in any way we can, the proposition that until the nation decides that low-income black people can have a place to live that they can afford, a place to send their children to school, outside Cleveland, outside Boston, we are just kidding ourselves.”1

  Fearing the hardening of racial lines on the parts of whites as well as blacks, who were increasingly attracted to Black Power and community control in place of integration, Logue called for urgent action. “Each year that goes by makes residential integration more difficult,” he warned in 1968.2 Logue took advantage of every opportunity to make this point, particularly with white audiences. For example, he titled his commencement address at Smith College “Fair Sharing—or Why Don’t We Do Something About It,” and asked the overwhelmingly white assembly if they were doing their “fair share” as suburban residents, employers, consumers, and Americans.3 Logue was reprising the message of white responsibility that he had first sent in his 1953 treatise, “Is One Hundred Years Long Enough?” composed in India a decade and a half earlier.

  Logue’s effort to have the UDC implement changes he considered necessary for the nation proved more difficult to achieve than he ever expected. Although he had anticipated a tough struggle, Logue had hoped that suburban New Yorkers could be convinced to voluntarily embrace a modest housing proposal that integrated their communities economically and racially. After all, similar agendas were very much in the air. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called for an end to exclusionary zoning in 1970, and the Republican secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney, had himself initiated an “Open Communities” program to withhold HUD money from suburbs that refused to accept integrated, subsidized low-income housing, though the initiative was short-lived, as Romney’s boss, President Richard Nixon, soon pushed him out of office.4

  Rather than the enthusiasm or even accommodation that Logue had sought, his suburban housing program incited bitter rancor. The UDC had intentionally kept its approach to what it called Fair Share Housing limited in scope, hoping to minimize its impact on any one community. In each of nine Westchester towns, one hundred units of low-income housing were to be built in low-profile structures, allocated according to the usual UDC formula of 70 percent moderate income, 20 percent low income, and 10 percent elderly low income. Priority would be given first to current town residents, then to town and school district staff, and finally to employees of local businesses, with Vietnam veterans favored in all categories. In its prospectus, the UDC promised that each development would be “marketed … with the objective of achieving a minority occupancy of approximately 20 percent,” a goal that the UDC considered conservative.5 With these stipulations, the UDC intended to put to rest any suburban fears of a large invasion of poor blacks from the Bronx and Harlem. Rather, the agency viewed the plan as a modest contribution to its signature goal of creating socially mixed communities.

  But what seemed measured to the UDC was hardly received that way in the nine Westchester towns. It soon became clear that the only way that the Fair Share Housing program could proceed would be if the UDC invoked its controversial power to override town zoning and building codes, which had been authorized for use only when public hearings and informal consultation with local officials failed to advance a socially important project.6 Literally from day one, Logue had insisted to Rockefeller that the UDC must have this override authority for just such a case as this one, where “the noble tool of zoning has been perverted to maintaining the character of affluent, lily-white suburbs.”7 To Logue’s mind, exclusionary local zoning laws had proved themselves “among the most powerful forces at work polarizing our society.”8

  Before the “Nine Towns” controversy, the UDC had usually worked collaboratively with municipal governments, using its eminent domain authority and zoning and building code overrides sparingly—and sometimes even at local request.9 In its 1972 annual report, for instance, the UDC reported that only in 4 developments out of a total of 101 had the agency gone forward with construction against the stated opposition of an elected legislative body.10 Moreover, the creation of subsidiary boards for the large projects of Roosevelt Island, Harlem, and Rochester had helped involve local communities in UDC decision-making, the agency claimed.11

  Very quickly, the confrontation escalated from debating the virtues of building low-income housing in affluent suburbs to the larger political question of whether the UDC had the right to impose its plan on a community that strongly objected, thereby making the UDC and its superpowers the issue. Echoing objections raised at the UDC’s founding, these Westchester towns and their allies argued that a state agency like the UDC had no standing to violate a community’s home rule or right to self-determination. Logue shot back that “a public statewide charter for urban development [could not] condone a policy which promotes, under other banners, an apartheid residential policy.”12 In Logue’s view, the UDC could fulfill its statutory mandate only if it did assert its override power to build low-income multi-family housing in suburban New York, regardless of a community’s local zoning. Robert Litke, a veteran of the neighborhood battles in Boston, explained how important this override power was to the UDC: “To be able to do things that we knew were right without the constraints was just very heady stuff.”13 It would turn out, however, that insisting on the UDC’s rightful powers was one thing. Exercising them and retaining them in the face of grassroots resistance—this time, not from poor white and black urban residents but from rich and powerful white suburbanites—would prove quite another.

  MOVING TO THE SUBURBS

  When Logue and his UDC colleagues looked around for the best place to put a Fair Share Housing program in Greater New York, they settled on Westchester for a number of reasons. To start with, the rural character of the central and northern part of the county, where the nine towns selected were located, meant vacant land was available, which was not often the case elsewhere in New York’s densely settled suburbs. Moreover, officials in Westchester, particularly County Executive Edwin D. Michaelian, were seeking more economic development to strengthen the county’s financial base. The UDC could offer assistance in constructing needed water and sewage infrastructure, w
hile also contributing more affordable housing to accommodate the labor required for economic growth. Although Westchester’s population had grown markedly in recent years, its housing supply remained inadequate and so expensive that even middle-income employees often found it difficult to live near their jobs.14 And, of course, Westchester was Governor Rockefeller’s home county, where politicians could, they hoped, be counted on for support. Michaelian, for one, was a Rockefeller ally.

  Logue consulted with Rockefeller before going public with the plan and happily received his enthusiastic endorsement. “We haven’t bought any land, we’ve just got it under option. If you want to stop it, you can stop it,” Logue recalled saying. To which Rockefeller replied, “Go ahead. What a wonderful idea. It isn’t going to hurt anybody too much.” During that morning briefing the governor even proposed that the Rockefeller family contribute a twenty-acre parcel of land from its Pocantico estate for a Fair Share development. “I left elated,” remembered Logue. But by mid-afternoon, the Rockefeller family’s lawyer called to withdraw the governor’s offer: “Forget it. It’s not Nelson’s property; it’s the whole family’s,” which perhaps should have put Logue on notice of the resistance to come.15 But at least for a while, it seemed that the Westchester initiative held great promise and even the possibility of further expansion in the future.16

  By the UDC’s second summer, in 1969, plans were under way. The agency had commissioned the Regional Plan Association to undertake a report on housing needs and opportunities in the New York metropolitan region, which not surprisingly revealed high demand for low-income housing and the availability of land in Westchester. Logue sought out occasions to speak to planners and reformers in Westchester to line up local allies. Although he asserted that he had “no taste for controversy just for the hell of it,” he was adamant that the state could not tolerate what was widely referred to at the time as “snob zoning”—permitting only single-family homes on large lots. Hoping to squelch criticism of too much top-down UDC control, Logue proposed that the Fair Share Housing program be implemented by a UDC subsidiary “to put into the hands of the residents and leaders of Westchester County the powers of the Corporation and the resources of this Corporation.”17

  When plans for the Westchester subsidiary stalled, the UDC decided to proceed without it. In January 1972 Logue met with the Westchester Association of Town Supervisors to unveil the Fair Share program of building a hundred units, mostly townhouses and garden apartments on wooded tracts of ten acres or more, in each of nine towns. In June more details were announced, including naming Bedford, Cortlandt, Greenburgh, Harrison, Lewisboro, New Castle, North Castle, Somers, and Yorktown as the selected sites.

  The response varied somewhat in each chosen community, but the overall pattern was much the same. Once word of the UDC project got out, it provoked citizen outcry, large and volatile public meetings, and vigorous organization by opponents. In town after town, something like a civil war broke out. In favor were civic groups like the League of Women Voters; all the black organizations in the county united under the flag of the Coalition of Black Westchester Residents; some local businesses and unions, including the AFL-CIO; and many clergy, inspired by the unequivocal message of the liberal Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, Jr., to his ministers: “You have my total backing in endeavoring to make decent housing possible in Westchester, even when such an effort brings you into conflict with some powerful members of the community or perhaps even the Church.”18

  The opposition was led by newly formed citizens’ groups—United Towns for Home Rule being the most visible—and the elected officials they put under increasing pressure. Raucous public meetings—a thousand people showed up at one forum, and police were necessary to keep order—were reminiscent of Logue’s Charlestown experiences a decade earlier, despite the dramatic social-class differences between the communities. Hostile speakers charged the UDC with ignoring the views of local communities and incompetence in selecting sites for the housing. They argued that an influx of new residents would put an undue burden on the local schools and school budgets and on the tax base more generally, given the UDC’s tax abatement. They claimed that this new housing would change the physical character of their semirural towns and, though rarely said explicitly, their class and racial character as well. Anything that smacked of “urban,” starting with the Urban Development Corporation, was deemed a dangerous threat. By no coincidence, the effort to emphasize the historical heritage of Bedford by creating a historic district—a move long opposed by residents resistant to restrictions on their property rights—now sailed through with the mission to “maintain the character of the historic district” and “regulate construction of new buildings.”19 It was clear that many ardent opponents feared that the UDC’s Fair Share Housing was the opening crack in the zoning wall that would lead to greater development and diversity.20 Observing the defiance as a young reporter for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse concluded that Logue had “pushed a button they didn’t know they had.”21

  Logue acknowledged in the UDC’s annual report in 1972 that “the intensity of the opposition was something to behold … The clamor, the outrage, the anger—and sadly—the hate displayed were disheartening.”22 Logue was personally targeted with death threats. Once, before an evening hearing, he got a call warning that if he showed up he’d be assassinated. He went nonetheless, bringing the UDC staffers Larry Goldman and Richard Kahan along with him, and sat in a front-row seat, crossing his arms and making himself “just as visible as you could possibly be,” recalled Kahan. “It was like, okay, here I am.”23 At one informational meeting called by the UDC, shouts of “Get out, we don’t want you in Bedford” drowned out more reasoned discussion.24 Another meeting had to be adjourned and rescheduled because of excessive “foot stomping and jeering.”25 A suspicious fire destroyed a handsome hundred-year-old barn in Bedford that the UDC had recently purchased to convert into a community center for its proposed housing development nearby.26

  The UDC struggled to keep the debate on a more civil level. It responded to opponents’ concerns about tax shortfalls with reminders that the UDC was making substantial payments in lieu of taxes and with calculations of how state allocations would cover much of the cost of additional students. It also promoted a bill in Albany requiring the state to reimburse communities for any financial losses sustained from a UDC development. Seeking compromise, the UDC conveyed a willingness to reduce the number of units, restrict tenant eligibility to town employees, and investigate alternative sites for the proposed housing. Many spots were in fact poorly located—too far from public transportation, on difficult terrain for building, and in open space—on the only land available for the UDC to buy. In truth, the UDC had made mistakes, such as not communicating sufficiently with towns before announcing its program and not seeking enough input on housing locations. Logue’s characteristic drive to fast-track likely rushed the consultation process. But a more politic rolling out of Fair Share Housing would not likely have made a difference. In the heat of battle, the UDC was willing to adjust the plan, but not to back down, arguing that doing so would only obligate more cooperative towns to bear a greater share of the burden. In the hallways of the UDC offices, bitter talk often turned to how racial and class prejudices were really at the root of the resistance.

  Many of Logue’s closest confidants urged him to give up the fight. The UDC general counsel Stephen Lefkowitz, who usually wielded great influence with Logue, advised, “There is more than enough to do in the cities.”27 The prominent psychologist Kenneth Clark—a close friend, a UDC board member, and chair of the board’s Integration Committee—argued against expending political and monetary capital on Fair Share. “They don’t want you … Don’t go!” Clark urged. He had built his academic reputation on exposing the limited opportunity in urban ghettos and was no fan of segregated communities. Nonetheless, he thought the UDC should keep its attention focused on the cities where black people already lived in great numbers and oft
en under inadequate conditions. Harlem leaders, eager for the UDC’s resources, not surprisingly sided with Clark.28 The UDC architect Tony Pangaro recalled that despite the chorus admonishing Logue that “it may be morally correct, but teaching people like that a lesson doesn’t really work very well,” Logue was unswayed. “He really, really, really wanted to do it. He thought it was absolutely the right thing.”29

  The controversy escalated. Opponents brought numerous legal suits. They lobbied elected leaders, including Rockefeller. Although the governor shared Logue’s enthusiasm for more socially integrated communities; valued the Westchester effort as a way of redirecting the UDC’s resources away from New York City, with its current claim on 55 percent of the UDC’s housing starts; and had expressed his support not only privately to Logue but also publicly, he became more concerned as the summer of 1972 wore on.30 Reactions were only growing more negative, particularly among Republican officeholders up for election in November. It should be noted, however, that two liberal Democrats running for Congress from Westchester districts—Ogden “Brownie” Reid and Richard Ottinger—were no more supportive.31 Typical was the town supervisor who said, “It would be political suicide for me in an election year to support UDC openly.”32 It is not hard to understand why, when anti-UDC supervisors were issuing such nasty statements as “we have some agonizing liberal supervisors in Westchester County who have seen fit to go to bed with the UDC dog and now they’re waking up with fleas.”33 In this maelstrom, Rockefeller decided he had no choice but to act. In August, he declared a moratorium on Fair Share Housing until January 15, 1973, giving the towns time to come up with their own alternative plans.