How Socialism Kills: A Big Building Fire In New York
/The big front page story in the New York newspapers the past couple of days has been the fire on Sunday in an apartment building in The Bronx that has killed some 19 people so far — with as many as 30 more in the hospital with life-threatening injuries. This loss of life in a fire is the greatest in New York since a 1990 fire at a nightclub in The Bronx (which killed more than 80).
So what kind of apartment building was this? Is there anything we should know about it? Look up the coverage in the New York Times, and you will learn, unhelpfully, that the building in question was “a 19-story Bronx apartment building” at 333 East 181st St., that went by the name of “Twin Parks North West.” Nothing about how this building came to be built, or by whom. But if you know anything about The Bronx, you will realize that, outside of the small Riverdale district, there are almost no apartment buildings there that are as tall as 19 stories other than those built with extensive government subsidies.
Do a little research, and you quickly learn that this is a heavily-subsidized building, built according to the socialist model, for low income people. It was erected in 1973 (and thus is 48 years old), with funding provided by New York’s Urban Development Corporation (since re-named Empire State Development Corporation). As is inevitable in the socialist model, the building has been inadequately maintained. Nobody has had any incentive to keep it nice, let alone safe. Now, everything had become ripe for disaster.
Looking for some in depth background on the building, I find a lengthy piece from 2013 in something called Urban Omnibus, which is a publication of the Architecture League of New York. The piece has the title “Twin Parks Northwest 40 Years On,” and its focus is to consider whether, forty years after it was built, this particular project can or cannot be considered a “success” in the world of publicly-subsidized low-income housing. The authors, as well as the many people quoted, all operate in the world of public housing architecture, and their mindset can fairly be described as “we can finally make socialism work if only we can tweak the details to get the architecture right.”
The background is that 1973 was at the tail end of the era of construction of massive low-income housing “projects” in New York. As the early projects (dating from the 1940s) had already begun to fail, genius planners started blaming the failure on the grim model of dozens of identical “towers in a park” concentrating poverty in one small area. So Twin Parks would try a new approach, known as “scattered-site,” to integrate the project residents into the larger community:
Twin Parks [is] a scattered-site urban renewal project in the central Bronx creating over 2,000 units of housing in mid- to high-rise buildings integrated into the existing neighborhood fabric and its varied topography. . . . Designed by six different architects on 12 distinct sites, it marked a shift away from the modern “tower-in-the-park” planning ideal to a “scattered-site” and “contextual” approach. Twin Parks is one of the seemingly few examples in late-20th century U.S. housing where architectural quality was seen as integral to the quantitative socio-political goals of housing.
Two of the twelve Twin Parks sites were considered particularly innovative for their “sensitively framed . . . public open space.” One of these two was 333 East 181st St. Here is a description of a public space that it shared with its next-door neighbor, also a part of the complex:
From 184th Street, a single stair leads down to the center of the courtyard. Here, play and seating areas in front of the community and laundry rooms were organized around gradual concrete steps filled with grass, negotiating the terrain. Like the rug in a living room, the intricate pattern of pavers set among green created a focal point for the space, a visual attraction for residents, childcare users, and passers-by alike.
Cool. Here are a couple of pictures of 333 East 181st St., taken at or about the time of completion in 1973, from the Urban Omnibus piece:
Looks pretty ominous to me, but what do I know?
So how had it fared after 40 years? Here are a few notes from the Urban Omnibus piece. Keep in mind as you read this that the authors of the piece are desperate to find reasons to declare this particular project a success. Relating to that cool courtyard just described:
40 years after its completion, in the courtyard, most of the trees are still standing. However, their roots are now cracking a continuous field of concrete that has been poured over the original grid of grass and pavers. While the play equipment has been updated, the glass façade of the community room has been replaced by concrete block, preventing the visual connection between the interior and exterior. . . . The conversation suggested that current management either does not consider these original amenities something residents with lower than average incomes could appreciate, or that that the upkeep of these amenities is not a cost-benefit priority. Filling in windows and covering grass, while explained as cost-saving measures or responses to security and vandalism concerns, reveal a particular attitude about exterior spaces and common rooms.
Did the residents somehow not appreciate these wonderful open spaces?
The residents’ attitudes toward the open space seem split. Lo-Yi Chan recalls that from the beginning people threw debris out of their windows, and it even had a name: “air mail.” According to Webster, this is why all but one of the private patios off of the courtyard-level apartments go unused. Falling objects are also blamed for the tower’s empty back patio.
And now about the financial success of the project?
A month after our visit . . . New York State announced $163 million of funding to make necessary physical improvements to three Twin Parks complexes, including the courtyard and tower at Twin Parks Northwest, and preserve their affordability for another 40 years.
Even then the taxpayers were being forced to step in to keep the project from further deterioration. But it seems to have been an inadequate effort. Fast forward another eight and a half years to the present, you might think that $163 million for just three of the twelve Twin Parks complexes would get them into tip-top condition. But then read the news stories to find out why a small apartment fire turned into a mass-death event, and you find this:
First, the fire apparently got started from a malfunctioning space heater. Why was the resident using an electric space heater when the apartment should be adequately heated by the building’s system? From the Commercial Observer, January 10: “A . . . look at complaints made to the New York City Housing Preservation and Development show that tenants at 333 East 181st Street said they experienced heating [and] radiator . . . issues, while conditions ranging from infestations and other maintenance issues were commonplace in 2021.”
Next, once the fire started, it was supposed to get contained to the apartment of origin by an apartment door that would automatically close, and if that failed it would be contained to the floor of origin by a stairway door that would automatically close. Oh, nobody bothered to maintain those. From the New York Post, January 10: “City inspectors previously repeatedly cited the Bronx high-rise where 17 people died in a fire for failing to maintain its self-closing apartment doors — a key defense against rapidly spreading blazes. Fire Commissioner Dan Nigro singled out malfunctioning self-closing doors during a Monday press conference as a key reason smoke from the flames quickly engulfed much of the 19-story tower in the Twin Parks Northwest complex Sunday.”
And then, didn’t fire and smoke alarms go off promptly, alerting building residents to evacuate quickly before the situation became dangerous? From the New York Times, January 9: “Ms. Campbell, who lives on the third floor, said that the fire alarms in the building go off five or six times a day. When they do, she said, ‘I roll my eyes.’”
This is life in a subsidized low-income housing project. The residents, in this socialist model, are completely passive, bearing no responsibility for any maintenance issues, including basic fire safety. It’s “to each according to his needs.” So the maintenance issues are all left to a faceless bureaucracy, which somehow can quickly blow through $163 million, without managing to get to basic fire safety. Now they’ll probably get another few hundred mil to rebuild the place.