Nicholas Dagen Bloom

On his book Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century

Cover Interview of May 17, 2009

In a nutshell

Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago I identified the curious fact that the projects of America’s largest housing authority had not suffered the same disastrous fate as so much public housing elsewhere. New York City still housed more than 10% of public housing tenants nationally, and its housing authority had been founded in 1934, but was mysteriously never the subject of a comprehensive history. Why not? Why had it been ignored? In my opinion the answer was simple: it did not fit the conventional wisdom that public housing is always doomed to failure. What I found, as I researched in the archives of the New York City Housing Authority, was that New York had adopted an alternative management model that proved superior to those in other cities. The book looks in detail, over time, at the different elements of this management including politics, design, tenant selection, community planning, and daily maintenance.

polemics / america / government / public policy / urbanism / new york city / management / design / welfare /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009