Rehabbing Housing, Rehabbing People

Published in Buildings & Landscapes 26, no. 2 (Fall 2019)

“Rehabbing Housing, Rehabbing People” examines the rehabilitation of a tenement block of Harlem’s West 114th Street in order to understand the nature of housing rehab as a common architectural practice in the aftermath of midcentury urban renewal. Rehabilitation became an antidote to renewal’s human and architectural costs in the late 1960s by promising the retention of buildings and the people who inhabited them. Sponsors intended the West 114th Street project to be a model for such approaches, generating extensive documentation in a book, documentary film, and local and national press. Yet a close reading of the project and this multimedia record suggests a more complex—and often fraught—history of rehabilitation. Despite promising to pursue architectural and social interventions equally on a block struggling with poverty and drug addiction, backers came to prioritize the physical at the expense of the social. Moreover, in their drive to showcase the architectural transformation that provided the most compelling images of this as a model project, rehab supporters espoused a physically determinist view that architectural change was itself enough to solve difficult socioeconomic challenges. Rehabilitation thus ultimately repeated many of urban renewal’s mistakes, leaving residents still struggling in homes whose physical improvements proved fleeting.

Header image: Tenements undergoing rehabilitation on West 114th Street, ca. 1966. Courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, photo no. 207-S-168-1-7.