Out of a National Tragedy, a Housing Solution
New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller used the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to help create a superagency that would transform the state’s cities and suburbs. It didn’t last long.
Shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated outside his motel room in Memphis on April 4, 1968, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller issued a public statement. A true memorial to King, he said, “cannot be made of stone, it must be made of action.”
Five days later, the governor was in Atlanta to attend the civil rights leader’s funeral, and he expected to go to sleep that night having followed through on his statement.
Rockefeller had been elected governor in 1958; he’d already left his mark on the state, reinvigorating its public university system, creating the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (and taking significant planning power away from Robert Moses), and forming a State Council on the Arts, which later became the model for the National Endowment for the Arts. One particular idea, however, was a little too big. Rockefeller wanted to create a superagency that could plan and design cultural centers, stadiums, factories, parking garages, and—most controversially—tens of thousands of affordable housing units, from Niagara Falls to Montauk. And he understood that the fraught days after the King assassination would be his best hope to get enough votes to jam such legislation through.
It worked: Rockefeller’s New York State Urban Development Corporation was born on April 9. From 1968 through 1975, the UDC went for broke, building 33,000 housing units for 100,000 people in 110 developments until it ran out of money and political protection. High-rises, low-rises, urban, suburban, Brutalist, Postmodern; each existed so that non-wealthy New Yorkers could live a better life, whether in a struggling city or a thriving suburb.
Half a century later, the UDC projects that remain speak to the essential service they provide. The ones that no longer exist shed light on the realities that make it so hard to build and maintain high-quality affordable housing to this day.
The UDC was given the kind of sweeping powers that the NIMBYs and YIMBYS now going toe-to-toe over affordable housing construction might find hard to imagine. Its leaders could ignore all local zoning and planning restrictions wherever it went. Its money would come from selling bonds, collecting appropriations, and gathering subsidies. Unlike private developers, the UDC would have all of the financing it needed for a project starting on day one. The idea was that by making all of the funds for a project available in the beginning, planning and design wouldn’t have to be subjected to value engineering. After their work was finished, construction, ownership, and management would be undertaken by private companies.
And it would be run by Edward J. Logue.
A controversial—and ambitious—master builder
A city planner who “roared up and down the East Coast from the 1950’s to the 1980’s like an urban renewal whirlwind,” as The New York Times memorably described him in its obituary in 2000, Logue got his start in New Haven, where, in the 1950s, he brought in the most federal urban renewal funds per capita of any city. He also committed many of the same mistakes other U.S. planners made at the time—misguided neighborhood clearance, an expressway that divided the city, and downtown renewal that favored large-scale projects that catered to suburbanites. In 1961, he was put in charge of the powerful Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). Under his watch, the agency added 20,000 new housing units and rehabilitated more than 35,000.
But urban advocates and academics familiar with both cities at the time had no lack of criticism for his work and methods. In a 1970 Times feature on Logue, a Harvard urbanist recalled shoddy construction and tenant complaints in Washington Park; when it came to slum renewal in Boston, the planner “set the middle‐class blacks against the poor blacks,” an MIT sociologist said. “If you want to know what he does, ask the rioters in New Haven,” Jane Jacobs told the Times. “The poor were rooted out, and many of their businesses were destroyed or relocated out in the country in order simply to give the city a better image.”
In 1966, New York Mayor John Lindsay asked Logue to help him reconsider the way the city did housing and development. After Logue suggested merging the city’s planning and development functions, Lindsay backed off bringing in the master builder out of fear he’d merely become the next Robert Moses.
At the invitation of Rockefeller in January 1968, Logue—fresh off of an unsuccessful campaign to be Boston’s next mayor—examined a draft of the UDC charter and helped the governor, a fierce rival of Lindsay, beef it up into something no mayor could stifle. “Logue remembered every trick in the book that he’d run up against and we’d load that into the bill,” Robert Douglass, an adviser to the governor, recalled in Richard Norton Smith’s Rockefeller biography, On His Own Terms. “By the time they were through, it felt like we were presiding over local plumbing codes.”
Not surprisingly, the UDC’s disregard for home rule would make it impossible to pass under nearly any circumstances. But using King’s assassination, the ensuing riots, and a sense that government would now have to make some meaningful progress towards addressing King’s civil rights goals, Rockefeller would find a way.
On April 9, he called in from Atlanta for an update on a vote he was assured would pass. Rockefeller found out that while the senate fell in line, the assembly did not. As retold in On His Own Terms, Rockefeller ordered the state police to launch a dragnet to round up wayward legislators, who “were tracked to theaters, restaurants, and other favorite haunts.” As Smith writes, “one by one, the dissidents were brought to the second-floor office, where Douglass served as Rockefeller’s chief enforcer.”
Douglass told one Rockland County legislator, “I know you don’t like the bill, but you’re on the list of guys who are going to vote for it.” He also threatened to have an Air Force base runway extended through the legislator’s district (or house, depending on who’s retelling the story) if he didn’t change his mind.
Just before midnight, the assembly vote had been reversed in favor of the UDC. Quietly, it turned out, the governor also approved a new pension plan that allowed lawmakers and staff to retire at half pay after 20 years of employment.
Dawn of a superagency
The agency established a “70-20-10” housing formula: 70 percent middle income units, 20 percent low income, 10 percent elderly. But funding was not as easy as the UDC hoped for. It could sell bonds to secure local property tax exemptions, but that would still not be enough to subsidize low-income units. Luckily, the U.S. Housing Act of 1968 passed that August, establishing a new federal rental housing subsidy program that the UDC would lean on heavily.
Letters from mayors across the state arrived at Logue’s desk in 1968, expressing enthusiasm for the new agency and an eagerness to get going on already selected sites targeted for infill and redevelopment.Mayor Lindsay in New York was not nearly as thrilled, but he eventually assigned eight projects to the UDC, seven of which were understood to be on topographically difficult sites. Logue accepted these less-than-ideal sites for the prize of Roosevelt Island. There, he would build a car-restricted, dense, and modern “New Town” geared to serve working families.
In suburbs across the state, the agency was met with deep mistrust and suspicion—particularly in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst and in Lysander, outside Syracuse, where the agency wanted to build New Towns. A year after the UDC’s creation with little to show, WCBS-TV in New York City ran a station op-ed in 1969 challenging its lack of results. It referred to the UDC as a “reluctant giant” facing heavy resistance from affluent suburbs and questioned Logue’s conciliatory approach at the time. Never known for being passive or cautious, Logue said to BusinessWeek about the criticism, “I think I’m going to enjoy that one for a while.”
As confident as Logue always seemed, there was already a sense that the agency would be neutered or killed off by Albany before it could fulfill its ambitions. Bills to limit the UDC’s powers had been introduced at every single legislative session since it went into law—held off only by Rockefeller’s political maneuverings.
Setting high standards for design
In 1970, the UDC rolled out its biggest ideas for a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Another Chance For Cities.” The show catalogue declared that by the end of the decade, “135,000 new residential units will be needed annually in New York State. Without new approaches it seems likely that 45,000 of these will not be built. The UDC expects to try to fill over half of this gap.”
As the Whitney show demonstrated, the ambitions of the UDC were not limited to the volume of units it promised to build. Its projects also emphasized design. Logue’s work in New Haven and Boston showed a bias towards post-Miesian design, embracing brick and concrete over glass curtain walls and exposed steel. (A 1986 WGBH tour of Boston with Logue best demonstrates his disdain for glass buildings.) Throughout his time at the UDC he kept clippings of Ada Louise Huxtable’s architecture columns for the New York Times to help keep up with the design discourse, and his agency hired a wide range of talented architects in age and style.
This was apparent in “Another Chance For Cities.” There was Davis, Brody and Associates’s Harlem River Park project, which demonstrated a much needed twist on the brick towers that were ubiquitous in New York City’s public housing. James Polshek, Richard Meier, and Giovanni Pasanella did the same in their Twin Parks housing projects for the Bronx. Upstate, Paul Rudolph used varied scale and setbacks to create Shoreline apartments, a humane and textural project in Buffalo surrounded by a busy commercial street and elevated highway. Werner Seligmann and Associates, meanwhile, would design modern apartments to blend into the hills outside of Ithaca that would not look out of place in Switzerland.
Architect Ted Liebman, now a principal at Perkins Eastman, joined the UDC in 1970 as its Chief of Architecture. “Every 10 minutes,” he recalled, “there would be a groundbreaking and Ed Logue would say, ‘Why aren’t we doing more? We don’t need housing anymore?’”
High-rise construction had become the de facto solution for affordable housing in urban America, and the UDC didn’t shy away from it either. That didn’t sit right with Liebman. “I was upset with a high-rise that was being built and thought that we should be building very dense low-rise housing,” he told CityLab. “Conceptually, Ed liked the idea but he said, ‘I’m not ready to fight the world on high rises.’”
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