Archives Project Essay

David Rodriguez
Dr. Luke Vasileiou
ENG 103
9 May 2011
Planned Shrinkage
Minorities, immigrants, and crime all on the rise led to the development of new policies to institute relief to slum plagued areas in New York City during the 1970’s. However this method of relief caused an outcry from the communities which were closely affected by its design and goal. This policy though thought at the time to be a way to move people out of these slums to a more vacant area really was a way for the city to turn its back on its public more so these slum filled communities.
It was the 1970’s in New York City the birthplace of a new public policy called “Planned Shrinkage”. This proposal was introduced by Roger Starr as a way to restructure decaying urban societies throughout New York City. Neighborhoods suffering from this urban decay included the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem; distinct neighborhoods of which was home to minorities at the time and was considered having the highest crime and poverty levels. In an interview with Robert Fitch on September 9, 1993 Roger Starr speaks about the reasons behind the “Planned Shrinkage” of the 1970’s and makes the statement “The problem is to fill the housing with tenants who are not destructive and who will pay their rent, and who we want to keep there forever because they are good tenants” with this statement you can assess that he had a problem with these high crime and poverty parts of town and the people that resided in them.
Slum clearance or “Planned Shrinkage” as Rodger Starr would have put it was the withdrawing of essential city services. These services such as police patrols, garbage removal, street repairs, and fire services were all removed from these neighborhoods suffering from urban decay, crime, and poverty. By the mid-1970s in the Bronx approximately 120,000 fires occurred per year. 40 percent of the housing in the area was destroyed. As the fires kept increasing the response time of the firefighters depleted less and less. They simply could not keep up with all the fires that were going on at the time. With cutbacks on such services many residents felt the city was doing nothing to help them. This caused many living in these poor neighborhoods to move and begin looking for new places to live. Going back to the report between Starr and Fitch, Starr talks about a conversation over at Randalls Island that he recalled having with Robert Moses and telling him “Bob, you don’t really think that you can treat people nowadays as though they were parcels in the package room.” When “Planned Shrinkage” became a reality in the 1970s it did just that. Areas affected by these cutbacks to public services began to see a decline within its population.
In an article from the Daily News dated March 1, 1976, the headline read as “Starr under fire for plan to shrink slum services” there is a given percentage of the decrease of the population and the areas most affected by it. The city was losing 1% of its population per year, (which since the introduction of the policy to the date that article in 1976 was published) there were approximately 400,000 people lost. These statistic show that cuts in services to these arson, crime and housing abandonment parts of town during that time is evidence that people where really forced to get up and leave. There were no other options but to do so. Now with these people relocated and most of the buildings vacant from fires it created extensive vacant land which held a higher redevelopment value, more so in the South Bronx. So what “Planned Shrinkage” did was not only cut off public services, it helped also clear the land to be available for redevelopment and economic growth. To this day if we take a look at Brooklyn and see how rapid the growth the change of the population we can assess that maybe in fact a plan similar to “Planned Shrinkage” is in effect just worded differently so we are not as aware.
Rodger Starr’s personal philosophy about human nature and its relationship to populations and housing could be seen as a negative one. In the report held between Starr and Fitch, Starr states that the theory that all people are alike set forth by the “Brook Amendment” was devastating. Starr believed that not all people were fundamentally good and decent. He believed you needed to worry about the character and quality of the people. He felt that people were assumed to be the ideal of the American wholesome family and knew this was in fact not the case. I agreed with his belief that not everyone is alike but I did not agree with his method of execution to deal with these populations.
The population at the time consisted of immigrants from all over. As time progressed these groups of immigrants both legal and illegal grew. South Bronx, Brownsville, and Harlem where home to these immigrants consisting of different minority groups such as Hispanic, Israelis, Chinese, African American and so on. Now taking a look at more article from the Daily News there were many people at the time who labeled Starr as a racist or genocidal lunatic, some even calling for his resignation. From what Starr says in an interview with Fitch he makes the comment of “I didn’t know that Nigerians were going to come over here and take over the sidewalks” the fact he says “come over here and take over” can lead to the understanding of him being seen as racists but I did not think it was in fact racist. The action of his policy thought to be racist was in fact more so a way of economic reforms it just so happened that these groups of people were living in these areas.
Housing had become a part of the problem. Edward Brooke during this time introduced a new amendment titled “Brook Amendment” which to Starr was the one thing that could have destroyed a federal program. With this amendment in place housing authorities all over the country had to take tenants who couldn’t pay the average going rental rate. So the maintenance of these public housing deteriorated very rapidly do to this amendment allowing anyone to just move in. Starr felt a major problem with the government process of taking in and filling these public housings with tenants whom were extremely destructive and you could not get rid of. With these tenants now living across from the “good” tenants it would just have led to more good rent paying tenants to pack up and move away.
So Starr by many was labeled a racist, a genocidal lunatic, and his idea of “Planned Shrinkage” was thought of as a way to just uproot and remove immigrant families and individuals from their homes. What I found is his approach though was not positive for these immigrants he was not targeting them out of malice but more so was aiming for a bigger picture of improving the city. I feel it wouldn’t have mattered really what race these groups would have been what mattered was if these neighborhoods where poverty stricken, crime infested parts of town. “Planned Shrinkage” was mainly designed to try to save the city and rebuild its economy what led me to this was in the report between Fitch and Starr, Roger says “In fiscal terms the city was in bad shape because it had borrowed all its money.” So what I get from it is there is no money to pay for extra services and cut backs needed to be made. The first place to go would be the slums. Move the people living in these slums to another location and get them out of sight out of mind really. Then rebuild whatever has been left behind in hopes to repair a city that was down in the dumps. Roger Starr’s concept behind this plan was to ultimately improve certain geographical areas but through his efforts he crossed lines of decency and treated the people living in these places as insignificant individuals as though herding them around to distant locations like cattle.