Jane Jacobs would be horrified to see her name and ideas used as a justification for New York’s City of Yes proposal. She was often amused that both liberals and conservatives, even libertarians, claimed her. She was none of those. But she was furious when her ideas were misinterpreted to support or encourage cataclysmic development. I know her ideas inside out; she was my friend for 30 years who encouraged and supported my books published before her death in 2006.

“A green light for cataclysmic development” is how Jane would characterize City of Yes, not the city of gradual change that she observed to be what strengthens cities. If approved, buildings will be constructed on tight lots, out of scale, and high in income. Design contortions will be invented to take advantage of the as-yet-unidentified empty spaces. Buildings will be razed and truly affordable units lost. The new “affordable” is a myth perpetrated by people who don’t know what it is to live on a limited income. Even that “affordable” is not required. City of Yes is a blank check to do all the things that used to be restrainable.

One of Jane’s bottom-line principles is that local people know best what is appropriate for their neighborhood. City of Yes eliminates the remaining remnants of a community voice. That has been eroding, of course, in recent years, but now it will be wiped out. She long decried the wisdom of city planners, ignorant of the communities they upend; now even good planners won’t have a say. This is a development bonanza. Anything goes. No effective public process. No wonder City of Yes is generously supported by the developer community.

Jane frequently pointed out that height and density are not the same thing. A block of tenements and small apartment houses with more than 60 units of existing affordable housing is slated for demolition—to be replaced with a 30-story apartment house with few, if any, so-called affordable units. That is height replacing both density and affordability. Many of those existing units are rent regulated, but that is precisely what City of Yes is out to erase. The Real Estate Board of New York has been on the warpath on behalf of its developer constituency for years to eliminate all rent-regulated, affordable units. City of Yes accelerates that trend. So-called advocates of affordable housing never rise to defend existing affordable housing; we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of such units in recent years. Hypocrisy at its worst.

It’s great that ADUs will finally be legalized. I’ve been writing about this for several years. Basement apartments should be legalized as well, with the kind of city subsidies now afforded only developers. Single-room occupancy, maybe. It truly depends how it is done and where it is placed. Sadly, there’s no room for appropriate examination of either under City of Yes.

I reiterate: BUILDING TALL DOES NOT MEAN INCREASED DENSITY. More housing does not automatically mean more affordability: trickle down, promoted by the developer community, has never worked. When apartments become vacant, the rent goes up, not down. And if you want to increase the number of affordable apartments on the market, add a special tax to units owned by private equity. Firms buy up groups of housing units, neglect upkeep, and raise prices. That should stop, or be taxed at a higher rate. Some communities are beginning to do that. And that is what President Biden suggested recently.

When someone writes: “Jacobs praises the urban design of architect Le Corbusier, whose vertical cities could house a large number of people, ‘but because of building up so high, 95 percent of the ground could remain open,’” then I know that writer has turned Jane Jacobs on her head. I almost expect her to rise from the grave to admonish the writer, as she was known to do when she was alive. Corbusier and all his many disciples would erase the fine-grained city that Jane revered. He designed for automobiles. Jane spent years fighting highways and advocating for more mass transit. Corbusier’s Radiant City was created on drawing boards by architects and planners; the people, the occupants, were secondary. The green space Jane advocated was within neighborhoods and great parks; urban sprawl was a separate issue, more complicated than to be attempted here.

One thing here is correct. Jane deplored free parking, and in recent years the Planning Commission has gradually diminished parking requirements. Until Robert Moses, the city had a variety of transit lines that he sacrificed for the automobile. Without congestion pricing, completion of the 2nd Avenue Subway (a Moses promise when he took down the elevated trains), and improved transit schedules, the car will be a fact of life.

Jane never decried historic preservation as stopping development. The term was not even around in the ’50s and ’60s. She extolled the virtues of old buildings, however, and would never have accused advocates of saving old buildings as stopping progress. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings,” she wrote. “New ideas must use old buildings.” As she further noted: “Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do.” She goes further about “feeders of the arts” and other desirables that “are inexorably slain by high overhead of new construction.” Jane wasn’t against new construction, but appropriate scale and use were a measure made laughable with most proposals these days. “You can’t build the ovens and expect the loaves to jump in,” she also said of new big buildings. 

Brownstones, in fact, are the most adaptable of urban building forms, convertible from single family to 10 units without impacting the community form. Jane acknowledged that it was precisely the families that moved into abandoned old buildings and low-cost brownstones, started block watches and street festivals, held house tours and opened new local businesses, that were the true regenerators of New York, when the city was at its worst in the 1970s and ’80s. I wrote about this phenomenon in detail in my first book, The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way. Jane’s blurb for it: “This is fresh and fascinating material; it is essential for understanding not only how to avoid repeating terrible mistakes of the past, but also how to recover from them.”

In Chapter 10 of Death and Life, “The Need for Aged Buildings,” Jane writes: “The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.” Clearly, City of Yes has no respect for this concept. Jane fought for the preservation of Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights in the early ’60s targeted by big Moses plans, long before there was a landmarks law. And to say Greenwich Village is frozen in amber, as many people do, is to be ignorant of the process of urban change. Since the Village was designated a historic district, new buildings must be reviewed by the Landmarks Commission. This sustains the village’s unique urban fabric and fundamentally protects its architectural heritage. New buildings have been built, but of a reasonable scale. Absorption of change is, for the most part, deliberative, incremental, and manageable, but change there definitely is. Ask anyone who lives in the Village. Prices have risen as high as they have risen elsewhere in the city, and many people are fortunate to still be in rent stabilized apartments that, if eliminated, would force them out of the city. There have been many changes in the Village, but most of the new buildings are more restrained in size than elsewhere because of a vigorous local watchdog community. Businesses change with the same tide flowing across the city, although the proportion of longtime businesses is probably higher here. Jane visited New York City and Greenwich Village a few years before she died. She was thrilled by what she saw there and, also, delighted by the mixture of new and restored buildings evolving along the Village waterfront following the demise of Westway, which she deplored.

It is too arduous to try to respond to all the claims made using Jacobs’ ideas to endorse City of Yes. An actual reading of her book Death and Life is a good idea for anyone interested. One has to remember, as well, that, although all her ideas are as applicable today, the city she describes is the city of the 1950s. My books in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s adjusted for that change but showed how the principles are the same.

The bottom line is this: The city I chronicled in five books since the 1980s was, for the most part, a city of positive change. The big developments—like Atlantic Yards, Willets Point, and Columbia University’s northern addition—have either failed at enormous public expense or erased rather than rebuilt neighborhoods. Hudson Yards is as sterile and anti-urban as a new development could be and is what Vornado would like to do, at an even bigger scale, with the still-urban neighborhood around Penn Station. That area has the classic mix of housing, small businesses, and thousands of jobs that any city should be glad to protect. Jane would advocate vigorously for that. But New York City has been plunging headlong into the City of Yes, year by year. The regenerated neighborhoods that people achieved have been the ones that developers have been exploiting step by step, mayor by mayor, nibble by nibble by big bite. Developers never lead positive change; they follow and take advantage of the gains led by citizen renewers. That diversified city, that city with so much of Jane Jacobs in it, that city of gradual change has been, in recent years, dwindling fast. City of Yes is just the culmination of what’s been coming year by year. With the developer class controlling every aspect of the city, how could we expect otherwise? Families are leaving; the public schools have lost 18% of their enrollment. Preservationists, affordable housing advocates, and community activists soldier on. Sadly, the city becomes a collection of tall towers for the super rich, from here and abroad. They add nothing to the city, occupy their apartments rarely, raise real estate values citywide, and benefit only the developers. The fine-grained city that once marked its greatness struggles to survive. Preservationists remain the favorite but false whipping boy of the develop-big-or-bust community, wrongly accused of stopping progress. But all of this is not because preservation of mixed uses and mixed buildings and mixed incomes has succeeded too well, but because cataclysmic development has failed so badly.

Featured image via Library of Congress.