The Urbanism of Choice: Jane Jacobs, Advanced Liberalism, and the End of Public Housing

Keywords: Jane Jacobs, public housing, advanced liberalism, neoliberalism, Hayek, housing choice vouchers, HUD, defensible space, HOPE VI, New York City.
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

As one of the most enduring scholars of cities and urban life, Jane Jacobs is perhaps best remembered for her scathing critique of midcentury planning schemes, her celebratory depiction of the intricate “sidewalk ballet” of her Greenwich Village street, and her successful activism against Robert Moses’ destructive proposals for Manhattan. Less discussed, however, is Jacobs’ intellectual affinities for classical liberal thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, whose 1945 article “The Uses of Knowledge in Society” serves as a primary influence for her beloved 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Embracing Hayekian concepts like local knowledge, decentralized planning, and spontaneous order, Jacobs articulates a unique and reflexive form of civic liberalism, ultimately advocating for what I term “the urbanism of choice.”
Placing Jacobs’ thought alongside that of Hayek and the Austrian School, as well as Karl Polanyi’s work on market embeddedness, this paper focuses on Jacobs’ writings on the provision of public housing in major cities. Analyzing Death and Life’s relatively undiscussed seventeenth chapter “Subsidizing buildings,” I highlight the intellectual orientation of Jacobs’ envisioned reforms for government housing provision, and connect them to broader strands of thought which would soon come to enable the turn to “advanced liberalism” in American public administration following the book’s publication. Finally, I describe how Jacobs’ prescriptions closely resemble various programs which now constitute major pillars of contemporary American housing policy, including the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), Bill Clinton’s HOPE VI, and perhaps most notably, housing choice vouchers.