Blog 13: Draft of Archives Project Essay

David Rodriguez
Dr. Luke Vasileiou
ENG 103
2 May 2011
Planned Shrinkage
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 a report between Starr and Fitch, Starr talks about a conversation over at Randalls Island where 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.

(Page 2 work in progress.)

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 - Work in progress.)

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.