You call That [Columbus, Ohio] a city: REO & No Vagrancy

[Fiona Shnapple]

The population of Columbus is growing, the 15th largest city when
measured by population, according to Pew, but still only the size of
the population of people who live in Public Housing in NYC.

There are 334 developments holding 178,895 apartments in 2,602
buildings situated on an area three times the size of Central Park.
Officials site the population at 400,000, but because there are so
many people living "off-lease," actual population is around 600,000.
An additional 160,000 families are on the waiting list. If Nychaland
were its own city, it would be the 21st most populous city in the
nation, bigger than Boston and Seattle. And, when we add in the
un-sheltered, we havea population equal to that in Columbus. And that
population, is growing at a faster rate than the population in
Columbus, in part, because people have been moving West of NYC, first
to NJ, then Penn., and now to Ohio, and some of them, yes, this is
unbelievable but true, commute  to NYC form Ohio. And I'm not talking
about Rich Wall Street people in helicopters.


Here is the rest of that stuff on the LES.

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Several housing groups and organizations were active on the LES.
Within the JPC, the Cooper Square Community Development Committee,
founded in the 1950s to oppose  urban renewal, was a major force. Its
primary objective was the protection of vulnerable lower income and
lower rent residents. The Cooper Committee articulated an historical
view of the LES as a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, immigrant and working
class poor community and organized a multifaceted public campaign that
involved protest, building, and alternative planning. Another
important organization that was active on the LES was the neighborhood
branch of the Metropolitan Council on Housing. Met Council focused on
the city’s rent regulation system.

In the second half of the 1980s the LES-based housing movement
experienced major changes in both composition and direction. As the
city’s economy improved, the LES housing movement turned further
inward and focused on saving the neighborhood against gentrification.
Two competing factions emerged; JPC groups evolved into the



pragmatic wing focused on the JPC development plan, and radical
activism focused on homesteading, squatting, and Tompkins Square Park,
where activists attempted to prevent the eviction of homeless
encampment. By the end of the decade a clear division between the
militant and pragmatic wings, was evident. Both were determined to
save “their” Lower East Side. But whose LES is it really? And how does
anyone save it?

The Lower East Side is known for the tenement buildings built to house
the immigrant workers in the early twentieth century, for its historic
identity as a poor, densely populated, predominately Jewish area and
for an associated tradition of political dissent. In the 1970s and
1980s, as Janet Abu-Lughod writes, its decaying residences stood in
emphatic contrast to the evident affluence, power and symbolic
skyscrapers of the financial and governmental centers nearby
(Abu-Lughod 17). In other ways, however, it has come to comprise a
multi-ethnic, diversified district, typical of inner city metropolitan
neighborhoods. Such zones, Abu-Lughod argues, “have lost their common
culture and have become instead the contested turf of diverse groups
and sub-groups who pursue different life styles and conflicting goals
in the physical proximity of the same area” (Abu-Lughod 5). Her study
details the emergence from this uneasy diversity of a temporary
alliance of residents, squatters, and the homeless in a ‘battle’ with
the City authorities over the occupation of Tompkins Square, a long
time site of radical activity and the symbolic focus for a
confrontation in the early 1990s between the local community, so
constituted, and the City over the ‘ownership’ and the destiny of the
area (Brooker 141).





Abu-Lughod does not comment on the gay or lesbian presence in the
neighborhood, not their involvement in the issues surrounding Tompkins
Square (Schulman 220-222). Sarah Schulman views the LES primarily as a
lesbian urban space, at times as a lesbian community. In a sense this
is only to confirm aspect of her account. The ‘same’ place is not the
same but coded and read differently, by residents and writers alike,
as a meta-text upon the available semiological text of buildings,
streets, parks, and public places.  The same physical area is a
cultural stage, so to speak, busy with meaning: less inert backdrop
than a script of signs, scenes, and characters active in different
dramas, whether of the homeless or of gay and lesbian and artistic
life. If Abu-Lughod sees such ‘subcultures’ as being at odds, however,
in Schulman they both clash and coalesce. Meanwhile, these internally
differentiated stories and perspectives have been overlaid in the LES
as elsewhere, by other influential and ‘grander’ narratives: those
framed as economic policy and planning projects (Brooker 143).

Various reputations and popular cultural notions about inner-city life
do not exist simply as inadequate impressions with insubstantial
consequences for urban change. The significance of cultural
representations lies in the ways they are employed by stakeholders in
the struggle over neighborhood restructuring. A constructed popular
knowledge of place influences critical aspects of social actions that
are taken to change place, including investment, disinvestment,
development policies, and community resistance. In any given
historical period, dominant cultural representations of the Lower East
Side have shaped the contours of struggle over urban restructuring,
influencing the ways changes in land use have been proposed,
rationalized, legitimized, and contested.



Popular place images, rhetoric, and symbols have been employed to
frame proposed land-use changes as desirable, inevitable, logical, or,
conversely, imperfect and unjust. [...] For the real estate sector and
the state actors, the necessity and desirability of urban change are
conveyed primarily in two ways. First, popular notions of the
inner-city are drawn on to define the neighborhood’s status quo
condition as unacceptable and plan for urban restructuring as
beneficial. Thus, representations that emphasize the Lower east Side
as different and inferior factor into these stakeholders’ legitimacy
claims for (dis)investment and the presence or absence of development
policies.  In addition, constructing the status quo as intolerable and
restructuring as logical (and even natural) often neutralizes
residents’ public protest of the social costs of changes to their
community. Second, symbolic representations of place are employed to
target redevelopment toward a preferred market of consumers. Real
estate capitalists typically employ cultural symbols and signs to
attract upscale consumers to newly constructed or renovated commercial
and residential spaces. Place-marketing or more historic forms of
civic boosterism demonstrate how myths, legends, or other desirable
notions are concocted to communicate and build support for plans to
renovate, rebuild, tear down, or modernize a neighborhood’s built
environment (Mele 17-18).



            It’s an historical building. It’s a sacred space. It’s a
representation. Good social history and good politics do not
necessarily mesh. At the LES Tenement Museum, the theme of common
ground elides the unique history of individual groups while it does
little to elucidate the complexity of ethnic interaction particularly
during the initial stages of integration into American society. A
variety of ethnic groups did live in the Lower



East Side over the span of the past two centuries, but they were
somewhat less co-territorial then their representation in the Tenement
Museum would suggest, and when they did interact, relations were as
likely to be fraught with tension as they were cooperative. The
Tenement Museum is clearly more interested in the latter and its
representation of the past replicates a nostalgic trope stemming, in
part, from the life stories it has collected that, in other respects,
it seeks to subvert among the members of its audience. Invariably,
social history takes a back seat to personal and political agendas,
not to mention the practicalities of securing public grants for its
installations or contracts with the department of education for school
trips—the bread-and-butter of any small museum (Kugelmass 197-98).

            The struggle against gentrification has, for the most
part, been lost, but the struggle to represent the Lower east Side
continues.





























Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Janet L., ed. From Urban Village to East Village: The
Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell,
1994.

Brooker, Peter. Modernity And Metropolis: Writing, Film and urban
Formations. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Diner, Shandler, Wenger. ed. Remembering the Lower East Side: American
Jewish Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate
and Resistance in New York City. Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota
Press, 2000.

Schulman, Sarah. My American History. Lesbian and Gay life During the
Reagan / Bush Years, London: Cassell, 1995.

Sites, William. Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the
Politics of Urban Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l