A Memoir That’s a Cry for Housing Justice
The Upper West Side is a neighborhood that in some ways, is the capital (or a capital) of the Jewish diaspora. In a memoir that Publishers Weekly called “informative and nostalgic,” Jennifer Baum braids together a history of housing policy with a memoir about her childhood, when the neighborhood was very different. She spoke with Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Lilith contributor and author of Devil’s Mile, itself a history of the Bowery.
Just City is about many things (New York, your childhood, your parents, social housing.) Talk about each, and tell Lilith what you’d say the main thesis is.
Just City is about my experience growing up in RNA House, a subsidized, integrated Mitchell-Lama cooperative on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that shaped my social justice identity. When I moved away from New York City at age 25, I came to realize that values fostered at RNA House, that I took for granted — integration and collectivism, for example — were exceptions, not norms. I felt emotional dislocation, and longed to return.
Just City is also a love letter to my parents; it’s about the social justice values they held dear, and lived in their day-to-day lives. But they were not perfect. They gave my sister and me freedom to explore and experiment, but they neglected us too. This was the 1970s laissez-faire style of almost every Upper West Side parent I knew. Just City is also about grieving my father, who died suddenly when I was ten, and being raised by a single mother.
Finally, as homelessness reaches Depression-era levels, Just City is a cri de coeur for affordable housing. Mitchell-Lama housing serves as a model for how subsidized housing succeeds. The good news is that the New York State legislature recently passed long overdue housing reform legislation dubbed Mitchell-Lama 2.0.
I appreciated Just City as a snapshot of a vanished NYC, a NYC that you idealize. Tell me what was wonderful about it—and not wonderful.
In those days, one of the best things about New York was its affordability. You didn’t have to be rich to enjoy city life. I grew up in well-maintained subsidized housing a block and a half away from Central Park. Riverside Park was just three blocks away. Museums, art house cinemas, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center were easily accessible. We weren’t dependent on a car. We could walk or take public transportation everywhere. But in other ways, the quality of life was terrible. New York had some of the worst air pollution in the country and was in the throes of a fiscal crisis. Garbage collection and subway service were sporadic. Public schools were overcrowded and dangerous.
But RNA House parents — especially the mothers! — were committed to improving our local public school, PS 75. So were mothers from other Upper West Side Mitchell-Lamas and in the neighborhood. The neighborhood was integrated, and economically diverse.
I see your book as deeply political…am I right?
Yes, you are. In my book I explore our transition from a country that once believed in the common good to today, where it’s every person for themselves.
“How can we expect to sell democracy to Europe until we prove that within the democratic system, we can provide decent homes for our people?” President Truman said in 1948, when the US was busy rebuilding a decimated Europe. His 1949 Housing Act built working class public housing en masse throughout the country, and nowhere more than in New York City, which was the first city in the nation to integrate its public housing.
Initially, public housing was well-funded and well-maintained. But In the 1970s, collectivist principles of social housing for all started to erode. Nixon saw public housing as “monstrous depressing places —rundown, overcrowded, crime-ridden.” He ended new construction for public housing projects and terminated federal support for the Mitchell-Lama program. With the Reagan administration the social safety net continued to unravel, and today the wealth gap has ballooned. We’re in an affordable housing crisis, and must return to the ethos of the common good and build affordable housing en masse.
As a Baby Boomer whose parents completely bought into the post-war suburban dream, I love that yours rejected it. Tell me more about them. Were they red-diaper babies?
No, they weren’t red-diaper babies. I’d say they were New Deal Democrats. They believed in a just society, in the common good, in social justice, in advocating for the marginalized, the disadvantaged. They were also intellectuals. Their dream was to live in forward thinking, cultured, diverse Manhattan, and thanks to RNA, they achieved it. My mother grew up in a very entrenched Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, and attended Barnard College. My father came from the Bronx. He was an eccentric, warm, loving, astronomer, engineer and mathematician who brought his homemade telescope downstairs to show the neighborhood kids the stars. He and my mother believed fiercely in the advantages of city life, in people of all economic and socio/cultural backgrounds interacting and learning from each other. My mother, especially, was an activist, and had a career as a public education advocate. She worked to make New York City’s public schools good not only for her children, but for all the city’s children.
Can you talk about the Jewish angle of your narrative? Do you see your parents’ progressive values through a Jewish lens?
My parents’ progressive values were implicitly Jewish, and inherent to who they were. I think they believed in the notion of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, although probably not consciously. My mother was fiercely secular, and my dad was more observant. I think their values also fit within the tradition of the Society for Ethical Culture, founded by Felix Adler, an affluent German Jewish émigré, in 1876 to promote ethical humanism, integration, universality, and social justice.
My mother identified more as a Manhattanite, or an Upper West Sider, than as a Jew, though she was proud of her cultural Jewishness. She wanted to be with all kinds of people, not just Jews. My parents didn’t think in terms of what was good for the Jews or bad for the Jews. The multicultural and integrated Upper West Side was where my parents felt most at home.
Is Just City a Jewish story? And does the progressive Jewish world that you capture so well still exist?
Yes, Just City is a Jewish story in so many ways. Growing up in RNA House, everywhere I turned, there were Jews, Jewish ideas, Jewish superstitions. My father chose number 18 for our subsidized parking space because 18 in Hebrew is Chai, life. My mother equated an integrated building dance party with the euphoria of dancing the Hora. The whole RNA House community was suffused with Yiddishkeit, with notions of community, sharing, helping, doing and protesting.
I’m not sure if the progressive Jewish world I depicted still exists. I just moved back to the city after decades away, and I don’t feel like I have a pulse on New York City the way I once did. But despite rampant gentrification on the Upper West Side, remnants of a progressive Jewish spirit survive. But how healthy and strong it is, I cannot say.
You mention your parents’ “embrace of modernism,” that is, architecturally. It’s an interesting point.
My parents embraced modernism architecturally. At their core, they believed in the Bauhaus ideology of “architecture as the collective, satisfying all vital needs with the exclusion of personal demands,” which could “create a human brotherhood, with organic community ties.” On their tall functional bookcase, they prominently displayed a black and white hardcover tome titled Bauhaus the way others exhibited a bible.
Today, in my Brooklyn apartment, in honor of my parents, I, too, display the same Bauhaus book. Modernism really was their religion. They believed functional design bred equality.
I loved how you examine the issue of privatization, in all its complexities, in the context of RNA house. You admit at one point that you have “mixed feelings.” Can you expound on this?
Politically and philosophically, I believe my building should remain public. But when my mother died 11 years ago, I had to relinquish our apartment, and I found that to be emotionally very tough. My family was the first one to move into the building in 1967, and we knew the Mitchell-Lama contract didn’t allow us to inherit the apartment. Still, we felt like the apartment was ours. We lived there with my father, before his sudden death at age 46, and cherish our memories of him there, with us.
So my desire to hold onto the apartment wasn’t to sell it at a profit and make millions. Rather, it was about my attachment to the home I grew up in. Still, I understand that RNA House must remain public for the common good, and I feel that as long as it remains public, my mother’s spirit will live on in the building.
