Journey into the heart of Nychaland

[alice wellintown]

My visit to the Linden Houses was part of a self-guided tour of what
I’d come to call “Nychaland.” As in NYCHA, the New York City Housing
Authority, a.k.a. the projects.




New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of
its own. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 “developments” spread from
Staten Island’s Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx—178,895
apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an
area three times the size of Central Park. The population of Nychaland
is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded
as too low, since most everyone knows someone living “off lease.” One
NYCHA employee says that “600,000 is more like it.” That’s about 8
percent of New York—with 160,000 families on the waiting list. If
Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous
in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of
Cincinnati.

http://nymag.com/news/features/housing-projects-2012-9/


On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 8:13 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The land that time and money forgot