First Houses: A Monument of the Past, A Model for the Future
A Lecture with Warren Shaw

This year marks the 73rd anniversary of the very first publicly-sponsored housing for the poor: the landmarked First Houses housing development in the East Village. First Houses inaugurated the era of Urban Renewal—the decades when the United States saw the construction of more than one million units of subsidized housing.

Since the late 1960s it has been fashionable to deride urban renewal as an aesthetic and sociological failure. But with real estate inflation squeezing more and more Americans; with such bastions of affordable housing as Stuyvesant Town going “up-market;” and with recent earthquakes in the financial and real estate markets, it’s time to re-appraise the legacy—and the value—of public housing and urban renewal.