The towering red brick islands of Stuyvesant Town; the geometric blocks of the Williamsburg Houses—affordable housing in New York City is so often pictured from the outside, a series of buildings around which crime and despair and poverty abstractly swirl.
It’s a fraught system, and a changeable one. Yet while city government and advocacy organizations negotiate the need for progress against the scarcity of finances, one thing remains constant: these buildings are places that people call home.
However, media coverage of the projects “was handicapping every effort to make things better,” says Jonathan Fisher,who in 2010 came on as the techno-communications chief of the New York City Housing Authority. Headlines painted a grim picture of public housing. “Public Housing Repairs Can’t Keep Pace With Need,” wrote The New York Times. The New York Daily News: “NYPD busts lively heroin-crack business in Crown Heights housing project.”
[For more of this story, written by Ellie Anzilotti, go to http://www.citylab.com/design/...ing-projects/470988/]
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