Urban
Policy and Real Estate Development
Both real estate
developers and the city government employed
representations of the downtown scene as cultural
capital to legitimize neighborhood restructuring
practices and policies, to exculpate the social costs
of community displacement and to challenge the
validity of resistance efforts mounted by threatened
residents. First, the rhetoric of cultural renewal
facilitated various development policies that
encouraged real estate investment and threatened to
wrest control of public space away from low-income
residents. Second, symbolic representations
positively redefined the image of the East Village to
attract once-skeptical middle-sized real estate
developers, brokers, and large lending institutions.
Finally, East Village developers employed the allure
of downtown to attract mostly white, middle- and
upper-income, well-educated tenants as tenants.
The Koch
administration utilized its authority over a large
percentage of housing stock to leverage
entrepreneurial middle to upper class redevelopment
of housing in the East Village. In 1982, HPD
announced its plan to auction part of its stock of
TIL (Tenant-Interim Lease) buildings to the highest
bidders. Protest by community groups and housing
organizations thwarted the auction plan, forcing the
city reinstate a moratorium on sales. In a similar
vein, the city’s position on the urban garden
movement shifted drastically. In the 1970s the city
was supportive of gardens, often leasing unkempt lots
to residents to grow vegetables and flowers. With the
rebound of the housing market, however, the city
placed a moratorium on leasing lots to gardeners. In
1981-82, the Koch administration proposed the Artists
Homeownership Program (AHOP) to convert in rem
properties into artists' housing. The Lower East Side
Joint Planning Council mobilized against the plan on
the basis that its obvious intention was to heighten
the neighborhood’s allure to investors and
private developers.
Links (click to follow)
Click here to visit the New York State Department
of Housing and Community Renewal.
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The book upon which this
web site is based,
Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
directly through 
or order through 
Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
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