Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 26

Innovative and attractive as they were, neither Forest Hills Gardens nor Jackson Heights offered housing to the wage earner of modest means. That became a pressing concern after the war when the city faced a severe housing shortage. Writing in the New York Times in early 1920, Walter Stabler, Controller of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, described how state and federal tax laws were pushing investors to municipal bonds which, while they may have had a lower rate of return than real estate investment, were not taxed. Investors “surely cannot be expected to leave their money in highly taxed mortgages or make new investments of this kind when there are many other perfectly safe securities which will pay twice as much because of tax exemption.” The solution, he argued, was legislative action to relieve “this best of all investments from income taxes for a period of years long enough to enable us to build what we must have and what we cannot get without this relief.”²²

New York Governor Al Smith was well aware of the housing situation. In 1919 he created a Reconstruction Commission to examine a range of economic and social issues, particularly housing. This was not political pandering on Smith’s part, for he was genuinely concerned with the limitations facing the state’s poorest citizens. He was, after all, a child of the tenements. Smith expressed that commitment in his introduction to housing advocate Louis H. Pink’s 1928 book, The New Day in Housing. “What could be of more vital concern to all public spirited citizens than the subject of decent, adequate housing,” he wrote. “Children are still being brought up in dark, ill-ventilated, over-crowded, unsafe tenement houses.… The social ills and moral dangers consequent upon our neglect of housing have been ably presented by the courts dealing with juvenile offenders, by church, social and civic bodies of every kind.” Unless remedied, the government ultimately would have to bear the cost of that neglect.²³

Architect Clarence S. Stein volunteered to serve as the secretary of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission. Educated at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he had worked for a time in the office of Bertram Goodhue.²⁴ Addressing the question of providing quality homes for families of modest means defined Stein’s career for the rest of his life.

In the committee’s report for 1920, Stein wrote: “It is economically unprofitable now, it has been economically impossible for many years past to provide a large part of the population of this State with decent homes according to American standards of living. Decent homes and wholesome environments in which to bring up children cost more than most workers can afford.” The solution was to obtain cheap land where it would “be possible to build apartments far less congested than existing apartments.” Furthermore, such sites would increase in value as development commenced, enabling the funding of additional housing. It was essential, he believed, that any such program had “to permit conservation of the increment of land values for the benefit of the community.”²⁵ Given his mildly socialist tendencies and his dedication to Ebenezer Howard’s garden city idea, Stein could not accept that speculators would be allowed to capture that inevitable rise in land values.

Stein was also secretary of the City Planning Committee of the City Club of New York, which submitted a memorandum discussing Stein’s own report. They endorsed the idea of using tax exemptions to encourage new construction, arguing that rent regulations alone would do nothing to stimulate building. At the same time, Stein suggested that “temporary relief of taxation of buildings or mortgages will only help the speculating system that has created our slums.” The private sector could not possibly solve the housing problem on its own, he concluded, but neither should the public sector be absolved of responsibility, for “the provision of adequate housing in decent surroundings for all people is a public service.” From that guiding principle, Stein introduced the possibility of municipal housing, arguing that as “speculative building cannot, under the most favorable conditions, supply us with sufficient homes,” cities should be empowered “to build and operate housing.”²⁶ Stein and his associates at the City Club could only advance such proposals and hope to influence public policy, recognizing, of course, that such a scheme of publicly built housing was unprecedented in American cities.

From the perspective of Stein and his City Club associates, thus far all efforts at solving the housing problem had been defensive, that is, enforcing restrictive law to redress unhealthy and undesirable living conditions. They wanted New York State to take the offensive, proactively funding or even erecting new housing built to higher and more generous standards.²⁷ As much as Stein may have desired government leadership and investment in this problem—and he and his circle certainly had great faith in the capacity of government to solve social problems—he recognized that this idea was not practical in the current climate. The solution would have to come from the private sector and philanthropy.

What Stein termed “investment housing” was already established in New York. The City and Suburban Homes Company of New York was formed in 1896 to erect model tenements on the East Side of Manhattan. Rents were fixed so as to yield a 5 percent return to investors representing the cream of New York society, including Bayard Cutting, Caroline and Olivia Stokes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Darius Ogden Mills. Elgin R. L. Gould, author of The Housing of the Working People, was appointed president. “The broad underlying principle on which the company is founded,” he wrote, “is that the housing problem can only be solved by economic methods. Philanthropy is powerless to do much, because the field is altogether too vast. But there is a middle ground between philanthropy and pure business. We may call it investment philanthropy; that is, a philanthropy made seductive by co-ordination with a reasonable commercial dividend.”²⁸

In September 1920, Governor Al Smith called a special session of the legislature to address the housing crisis. In that brief session, the legislature passed several measures for “the relief of housing evils,” including new protections for tenants and a ten-year exemption from local property taxes for new houses and tenements. That enabling legislation required action from the city, but not until the following February did the Board of Aldermen finally act. Republican Fiorello La Guardia, president of the body, led the opposition, arguing that the bill was nothing more than a gift to the real estate men. Rather than lose $8 million in tax revenue, he argued, the city should embark on a program of municipal housing.²⁹ Such publicly built and publicly managed housing for workers was being advanced in Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Amsterdam, but that idea had very little traction in the United States at the time.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had strenuously lobbied in Albany for that tax-exemption bill, and it had a provision inserted permitting insurance companies to invest up to 10 percent of their assets in real estate. In 1922, the company began building model tenements for working-class families on that basis, financing construction of several thousand apartments and investing in other construction companies, including the Rickert-Brown Company and the Queensboro Corporation. By 1924, only two years after Governor Al Smith signed the law, Met Life had built apartments for 2,125 working-class families in Sunnyside, Woodside, and Astoria, sites selected because the land was relatively inexpensive. For their architect, the company tapped Andrew J. Thomas, who had designed the first buildings in Jackson Heights. During the war, Thomas worked with the Emergency Fleet Corporation, as did Frederick L. Ackerman, Henry Wright, and Robert D. Kohn. He generated a plan almost identical in outline to Linden Court, the garden apartments he designed in 1919 in Jackson Heights, but on a less generous scale and with more Spartan appointments, of course.³⁰

The fifty-four identical U-shaped buildings featured modern kitchens, central heating, hot water, and excellent ventilation, with windows in every room opening onto either the street or the landscaped courtyard. Separate entry stairways opened to only two apartments per floor, an arrangement affording greater privacy to residents while also eliminating public corridors, a waste of nonrevenue generating space. Repeating the same design kept the costs low, as did the uniform fixtures and trim. The design also demonstrated the “advantages gained by big scale planning of the city block as a whole—the highest point which housing economies can reach.” The rents, $9 a room by law, were still sufficient to cover the operating expenses and provide a 6 percent return on investment.³¹

The hopeful spirit of this enterprise was expressed best by seven-year-old Alberta Glenn, daughter of the project’s construction foreman. At the groundbreaking ceremony in July 1922, the little girl stepped from the flag-draped bucket of a steam shovel and, presenting a shovel to Haley Fiske, president of Metropolitan Life, said: “We the children of New York want to thank you ever so much for these beautiful homes. Now we needn’t be shut up in the dark old tenements where we haven’t any place to play; but we will come here to live in sunshine and see the wonderful garden and flowers all day. We hope that every little child in New York may have as fine a home as these.”³²

Forest Hills Gardens, Jackson Heights, and the Met Life Houses may have been worthy examples of the application of the garden suburb ideal in Queens, but they were nonetheless exceptions. It was in this context that Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and their colleagues launched their own enterprise.