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Is It Fair to Ban Public Housing Tenants From Smoking?

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Federal officials enacted such a ban to protect public health but, in doing so, restricted what tenants could do in their own homes.

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Research Housing Market, Land Use, and Demographic Data 

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Research Housing Market, Land Use, and Demographic Data 

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New York City's housing and neighborhoods data hub, presented by the NYU Furman Center.

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Housing: Research the Housing Market in Your Neighborhood

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Housing: Research the Housing Market in Your Neighborhood

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Mapping Inequality allows visitors to explore over 150 redlining maps and about 5000 neighborhood surveys created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. These materials offer an extraordinary window into twentieth-century racial and wealth inequalities.

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Housing: Young Reporter Interviews Neighbors

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Housing: Young Reporter Interviews Neighbors

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Gentrification: Feeling Like an Outsider in Your Own Neighborhood | Radio Rookies | WNYC

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For kids growing up in fast-changing neighborhoods, the change can be destabilizing. Rookie reporter Corinne Bobb-Semple shares what the changes in Bed-Stuy have meant to her.

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Housing: From Low-Rises to High-Rises, Downtown Brooklyn

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Housing: From Low-Rises to High-Rises, Downtown Brooklyn

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Downtown Brooklyn, a neighborhood known for decades for low-rise buildings of modest economic aspirations, has recently witnessed a rising forest of "luxury" high-rises. How did this reversal come about? Read the full story at http://thenat.in/ZzPKej

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Housing: Stories from Longtime Residents of Gentrifying Areas

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Housing: Stories from Longtime Residents of Gentrifying Areas

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New York has always been a city of change, but as new replaces old, many of the city's long-time residents are falling through the cracks. Read the full story at http://www.thenation.com/article/how-... "Why We Stay" A film by Crystal Kayiza, Pete Quandt and Leroy Farrell

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Housing: Chicago Activists Fight Against Housing Discrimination

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Housing: Chicago Activists Fight Against Housing Discrimination

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When Clyde Ross, Mattie Lewis, and Ethel Weatherspoon settled in the West-side neighborhood of North Lawndale, they hoped to achieve the American dream of owning a home. At the time, however, federal policies known as redlining prevented blacks from getting real mortgages, forcing them to buy from real-estate speculators "on contract." The contracts, homeowners soon discovered, turned out to be a scam. In this short documentary, Ross, Lewis, Weatherspoon, and a community organizer named Jack Macnamara recount the story of how they formed the Contract Buyers League and fought back.

For more on the impact of housing discrimination in Chicago, read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic cover story, "The Case for Reparations."

If you wish to comment, you may do so here.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

About This Series

Original short documentaries produced by The Atlantic

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Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, Sam Price-Waldman, and Paul Rosenfeld

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Inside the Battle for Fair Housing in 1960s Chicago

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When Clyde Ross, Mattie Lewis, and Ethel Weatherspoon settled in the West-side neighborhood of North Lawndale, they hoped to achieve the American dream of owning a home. At the time, however, federal policies known as redlining prevented blacks from getting real mortgages, forcing them to buy from real-estate speculators "on contract."

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Housing: Nursing Home for HIV/Aids Patients Leaving LES

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Housing: Nursing Home for HIV/Aids Patients Leaving LES

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LOWER EAST SIDE - In an attempt to make up for the loss of nursing home beds at Rivington House, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday announced plans to build an affordable senior housing and health care facility in a city-owned building under the Manhattan Bridge.

First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris dropped the news while testifying before the City Council during an oversight hearing on the administration's controversial decision to lift two deed restrictions on Rivington House nursing home for HIV/AIDS patients - a decision that allowed the home to be hawked to a luxury condo developer for $72 million. The mayor's office later made a formal announcement of the plan.

But though Shorris claimed the new facility - a building operated by the Department of Environmental Protection at 30 Pike St. - will replace the "bulk of what was lost in Rivington House," the mayor's office has only said the home will provide housing for more than 100 seniors, while Rivington held 219 beds.

The mayor's office could not immediately clarify or speak with greater specificity to the number of beds the new facility will hold.

And because the property is zoned for commercial use, it must undergo the city's extensive, roughly seven-month Uniform Land Review Procedure (ULURP) before getting the green light for residential use.

Even after the conversion, at least a part of the building will continue to serve as a DEP facility, according to the mayor's office. The site currently serves as a repair yard and storage facility for DEP, and includes an underutilized parking lot that the city may build on, according to a mayoral spokeswoman.

The city will issue a Request for Proposals next year, said the mayor's office, allowing potential operators to bid for the property.

Elected officials continue to pressure the administration to return Rivington House to its original use, but nonetheless expressed gratitude for the new facility - and optimism the mayor's efforts will match the number of beds lost.

"My first wish is to return Rivington House to its previous use, a home for those who needed assisted living support, but I look forward to working with the Administration and the community to build an equal number of permanent affordable senior housing and assisted-living units in the neighborhood," said Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in a statement.

Shorris, when asked about the possibility of reclaiming Rivington, said that while the city no longer had any legal claim to the building's use following the deed lift, the administration was exploring its options.

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Health Care Facility to Replace About Half of Rivington House Beds: Mayor

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LOWER EAST SIDE - In an attempt to make up for the loss of nursing home beds at Rivington House, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday announced plans to build an affordable senior housing and health care facility in a city-owned building under the Manhattan Bridge.

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David Attie was still a student in his first ever photography course at the New School when he got his big break.

His instructor was Alexey Brodovitch, the famed art director of Harper's Bazaar, and he'd taken a liking to Attie's unique photo montages, which Attie created one night in a panic from film he'd accidentally overexposed. Brodovitch asked him to recreate the process to illustrate Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, which was to be published for the first time in the magazine.

Attie worked for months to make the images, but the novella didn't end up running in Harper's under a directive from Hearst, the magazine's publisher. Capote resold the novella to Esquire, but when it appeared in the magazine, only one of Attie's images ran alongside it.

Soon after, when Holiday magazine asked Capote to write an essay, "Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir," about living in the borough, Attie was again enlisted to provide the accompanying artwork. In March 1958, the young photographer, himself a Brooklyn native, and the young writer spent a day roaming Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo together. Capote posed for Attie and introduced him to some of the people and places he loved. Their work ran in the February 1959 issue of Holiday.

Eli Attie, David's son, didn't know about any of this until long after his father died. In 2012, he ran a Google search on his father and discovered that little of his decades of work had been remembered, at least online. Eli, who works as a writer for television, posted a comment on one of the few blogs that mentioned his father. Soon after, Brian Homer, a British photographer, contacted him and offered to help him get David's work out in the world. The pair, along with Eli's brother and mother, started looking through boxes of old negatives. On a subsequent trip, Eli found a box labeled "Holiday, Capote, A3/58," with 800 negatives inside.

"It turned out my mother had known he'd photographed Capote, but she didn't know a lot about it and hadn't seen the photos. In my childhood, Capote was a hugely famous person. Maybe that says something about my dad. Maybe he was just a guy who wasn't impressed with celebrity. If I had photographed the young Truman Capote, I'd probably walk around with sandwich boards proclaiming it on the street," Eli said.

Last year, a selection of David Attie's photographs were published by the Little Bookroom in a new edition of Capote's famous essay, Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With the Lost Photos of David Attie. Now, they're on display at the Brooklyn Historical Society in the exhibition " Truman Capote's Brooklyn: The Lost Photographs of David Attie " until next July.

"I think he'd be speechless. I think he'd be thrilled," Eli Attie said. "He was not an unsuccessful photographer. He put out some books. He was on TV once. But I don't think he ever got this kind of attention."

"I'm biased. I'm his son. If he took blurry Polaroids that were not framed properly I might think they were great. What's been incredibly gratifying for me is to see how many people have been touched by his work and have found something special in it," he added.

Marcia Ely, the Brooklyn Historical Society's vice president of programs and external affairs, said the photographs succeed, on one level, as a rare glimpse of a literary icon on the brink of fame. But they also serve as a detailed and loving portrait of two neighborhoods at a grittier and less affluent time in the borough's history, she said.

"As a son of Brooklyn who grew up in Bensonhurst, I think he'd be bowled over by how stylish and hip Brooklyn has become," Attie said.

As Attie has continued to explore his father's archives, he said he's learned a lot more about his life and work. He's uncovered photos of chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer, the composer Leonard Bernstein, and the actress Jayne Mansfield, among other gems. One day, Attie hopes, those, too, will see the light of day.

"I think there's 50 books in that archive. It's a question of finding it and shaping it. It's so fun for me because it's a journey into his life and a journey into all these different worlds. I think all of it probably speaks more powerfully now than it did in its time," he said.

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Brooklyn in 1958, as Truman Capote Saw It

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David Attie was still a student in his first ever photography course at the New School when he got his big break. His instructor was Alexey Brodovitch, the famed art director of Harper's Bazaar, and he'd taken a liking to Attie's unique photo montages, which Attie created one night in a panic from film he'd accidentally overexposed.

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Housing: Photo Essay on the Positives of the Projects, 2015

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Housing: Photo Essay on the Positives of the Projects, 2015

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During the Depression, New York City became the birthplace of public housing when it replaced unsafe tenements with towering apartment buildings to lodge the city's poorest residents. Today, there are 403,120 residents in more than 300 housing projects, all of which are managed by the New York City Housing Authority, the largest such organization in North America. But over the years, funding shortfalls have put NYCHA into a desperate financial bind-it would take $18 billion to cover operating needs-and the apartments have fallen into disrepair.

"We believe that that negative portrayal of the housing projects accounts, at least in part, for the government rolling back funding since the 1970s. Our hope was that if the narrative of life in the projects could be turned back to the residents who live there, it could make an impact on government support and funding," said George Carrano, who, along with Chelsea Davis and Jonathan Fisher, edited the book Project Lives, which was published in April by Powerhouse Books.

Margarita Curet

In 2010, Carrano, a Bronx native and retired MTA employee, started the Developing Lives program, a series of photography workshops that, over the years, put single-use Kodak film cameras in the hands of hundreds of NYCHA residents-mostly pre-teens and seniors-and encouraged them to photograph their everyday lives. The program began at the Manhattanville Development in West Harlem, through which Carrano had walked daily on his way to work, and by 2013 had spread to 15 projects throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Photos from that program fill the pages of Project Lives.

"The only direction they were given was to photograph what's important to them, to tell the stories of their daily life here," Carrano said. "What came back was an incredible portrait of American life, both the exciting parts of it and the unexciting parts."

But rather than photographing the busted toilets, broken elevators, and other signs of neglect that come along with funding deficits, as Carrano had anticipated, residents focused on their friends, their neighbors, and their homes. "That, I think, was the most surprising aspect of the whole project. You'd have expected to see examples of crime or disrepair and none of that came about," he said.

"I think it goes to the values of the residents. They place a higher value on their sense of community, their sense of sharing with their neighbors than complaining about disrepair. It's humbling," Carrano added.

In the images selected from among thousands for Project Lives, one sees depictions of daily life that are everyday almost to the point of being banal, which, Carrano says, is the point: Life in the projects, it should be known, can be as ordinary and sometimes dull as life anywhere.

"One of our favorites was a photograph of two women, one on the first floor of an apartment looking out the window talking to a neighbor on the street, which I think captures in one frame almost a novel about life in the projects-the sense of community, the sense of caring about your neighbors and your friends," he said.

Carrano hopes that by presenting this look at life in the projects, people in New York and beyond will see why they are worth funding and call for action.

"Affordable housing is a nationwide issue. It's a problem in every major city and since the 1970s, government support for public housing has diminished," he said. "I hope the book can be a contribution to starting a conversation about the importance of affordable housing."

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What It's Like to Live in New York's Public Housing

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During the Depression, New York City became the birthplace of public housing when it replaced unsafe tenements with towering apartment buildings to lodge the city's poorest residents. Today, there are 403,120 residents in more than 300 housing projects, all of which are managed by the New York City Housing Authority, the largest such organization in North America.

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Housing: Bringing Public Housing to the Suburbs, 1970s   

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Housing: Bringing Public Housing to the Suburbs, 1970s   

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How a little-known public housing program from the 1970s is changing housing policy today.

Where Does the American Dream Live?

In the 1970s, a landmark Supreme Court case named Gautreaux officially brought an end to segregated government housing in Chicago. But it also created a new challenge: how to undo decades of segregation. One part the solution was a relocation program that moved families from the city's housing 'projects' to the mostly-white suburbs.

The Gautreaux program showed surprising promise not just in ending segregation but also in creating upward mobility and helping children escape poverty. But when the federal government tried to replicate a similar program in other cities, the results were disappointing. Now, forty years later, new research is calling attention to the importance of where children grow up on their future success - and raising questions about what that means for the future.

Transcript

More on the Story

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Housing Bias and the Roots of Segregation The New York Times

Lessons of Housing Desegregation-From the 1960s to Today Planetizen

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How a little-known public housing program from the 1970s is changing housing policy today. In the 1970s, a landmark Supreme Court case named Gautreaux officially brought an end to segregated government housing in Chicago. But it also created a new challenge: how to undo decades of segregation.