| Throughout 1971 and 1972, New York City officials were locked in a heated battle with residents of Forest Hills, Queens over the construction of public housing for the poor in this middle-class and largely Jewish neighbourhood. The city had approved this project under its scatter site plan, which called for the building of low-income housing in middle-income neighbourhoods in order to foster economic and racial integration. Faced with growing community opposition, Mayor John V. Lindsay retreated from the original scatter site proposal, commissioning an investigation that resulted in the reduction of the project to one half of its proposed size, and its transformation to a low-income co-operative that would house the elderly and white working poor rather than underprivileged African American families.; While this case may appear to simply represent a manifestation of black-Jewish tensions or of white ethnic "backlash," the protests against scatter site housing were in fact more complicated than either of these portrayals suggest. Although Forest Hills residents' fear of poor African Americans certainly informed their opposition to the project, their protests were also directed against a style of government that had shaped New York City politics since the New Deal. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
