Informal housing in New York City : a spatial history of squats, lofts, and illegal conversions

Abstract

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the notion of informal urbanization- normally applied to discussions of cities in the developing world-is equally effective in describing a range of housing practices in New York City, one of the wealthiest, most prototypically urban cities in the globe. The model of a binary, or gradient, between the "formal" and "informal" cities has been remarkably productive in many contexts, but has seen little use in the study of U.S. Cities. The thesis provides a definition of informal housing, based upon that of the international development community, and applies this definition to three instances in New York City it proposes fit. By unifying diverse practices and histories, I argue that informal housing in the city has been a persistent element that can be found across classes, architectural typologies, geographies, and historical moments. The methods of the thesis include consulting from primary sources (news reports and planning studies), secondary academic planning texts, conducting interviews with participants and planners, and producing my own relevant photographs and maps. These materials are synthesized into four chapters. The first provides background on the notion of informality, and offers a modified definition of the phenomenon that unifies the New York examples with their international counterparts. Chapter two charts the birth of informality with the codification, in the late years of the 19th century, of moral and physical standards in the immigrant-populated tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It then charts the reoccupation of those same tenement spaces, without capital or legal tenure, by the often politically motivated squatters in the Upper West and Lower East Sides in the latter half of the 20th century. Chapter three provides a history, from 1960 to the present, of the informal transformation of commercial loft spaces to residences in SoHo and Brooklyn and describes the effects of these conversions on the neighborhoods in which they occurred. Chapter four demonstrates how the low density built form of Queens was developed in reaction to the tenement era, and how it is currently being informally reconstructed into a dense, urban space for marginal immigrants, despite some typical (and atypical) challenges to that informal use. The thesis concludes by arguing that in each case-despite differences in built form, geography, users' incomes and the historical context-informality, as understood in the developing world, is present in New York. Further, it argues that the official reactions to these liminal cases of housing- variously, repression, neglect, and accommodation-provides a history of the planning regime's shift from prescription to acceptance of unofficial action. It calls for a greater unity of discussion and collaboration between those planners, architects, and urban thinkers working on cities in the U.S. and those whose expertise centers on cities in the global south. Finally, the thesis closes by summarizing some potential lessons from the experience of informal housing in New York City over its long and varied history, and offers guidance, informed by these lessons, on how the city might address its present informal housing boom.