A decade has passed since the summer of contempt in Yonkers. It has been six years since the first tenants moved into the townhouses, and five years since Nicholas Wasicsko’s death. That is time enough to tackle the question: Did it work? The answer is as it has been since the beginning—it depends upon how one defines success. My measure, then and now, is double-layered: Did it transform the lives of the tenants without chipping at the dreams of those who came before?
For Alma Febles, the townhouses have been everything that she had hoped, a gift made all the more precious because it took so long. More than two years after the lottery, Alma was still waiting. Even the second wave of construction would not help her, she feared, because her lottery number was so high. I put her in touch with Mary Dorman, who took her on as a personal cause. There were many more two-bedroom townhouses than there were three-bedroom ones, Mary said, and she suggested that Alma write to Peter Smith, offering to accept one of the smaller units.
On October 28, 1994, Alma and her children moved into their new home. They threw a party. Knowing that the family had all the kitchen implements they could possibly need, my housewarming gift was a snow shovel, tied with a big red bow. The right to shovel her own walk, Alma had told me, had become one of her definitions of home.
She is past forty now, and she still does not have her elusive, solitary bedroom. She says she doesn’t mind. Virgilio has already left the townhouse; he joined the Marines. In another blink of the eye, Leyda will be gone, too; she plans to go to college and become a fashion designer. Alma knows her new home will be lonely with both of them away.
The townhouses have been Norma O’Neal’s salvation, too. Her health has deteriorated steadily in the years since she moved to the east side—she’s had a stroke, lost part of one foot to diabetes, and now requires dialysis twice a week. When she suffered her stroke, it was a neighbor from the townhouses who answered Tasha’s frantic call in the middle of the night and kept Norma breathing. A home health aide now comes—on time, every morning—and helps with the otherwise unmanageable tasks of her day. “If I were still living in Schlobohm,” she says, laughing with the relief of being alive, “I would be dead.”
It took far longer for the townhouses to bring contentment to Doreen James. Although her name remains on the waiting list for Dunbar, she is now less determined to make that move. In the years since Joe’s death she has lurched from one escape route to the next—to Schlobohm, to crack, to her parents, to the townhouses. In the years after Barbara’s death, she came to recognize the pattern.
She is still involved with READY, and proud of the changes the group has helped bring to the west side (they are not active in the townhouses). On READY’s watch, more than $30 million in federal, state, and city funds have been spent improving security in the high-rise complexes. And after years of lobbying, Sadie’s plan to allow current tenants to thoroughly screen prospective tenants is officially in effect.
But even as she is seeing the clout of grass-roots activism, Doreen is easing it out of her life. “Sadie says you can’t solve other people’s problems until you fix your own,” she says. Part of her new life plan includes a full-time job at a chain hardware store on the east side, and night school, where she hopes to take the courses that will allow her to become a social worker in Schlobohm.
And Billie Rowan? She sees the townhouses as a cruel municipal tease, a trinket given to her briefly, then roughly snatched away. The five-week-long trial of John Mateo Santos was front-page news in Yonkers. He did not testify, but his Legal Aid lawyer argued that he had struck up a conversation with Helen Sarno at a local deli, and that she had invited him to her home for a cup of coffee. At first he declined, and they each went their own way. Then John changed his mind and returned to the elderly woman’s apartment, only to find her covered with blood and near death. Perhaps he himself became bloody trying to lift her from the floor, the lawyer said.
Billie believed him. The jury did not. They believed the prosecution, who charged that “this guy, John Santos, stabbed Helen Sarno to death using an ice pick, and when her neighbors responded to her screams for help, he tried to talk his way out of it, and when that didn’t work, he tried to fight his way out of it, and when that didn’t work, he tried to run away.”
They found him guilty. Judge John R. LaCava gave him the maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life for what he described as a “cowardly, senseless, and inexcusable murder.”
It would be several years more before another court decided Billie’s own fate. She believes that Municipal Housing would not have worked this hard to evict her from an apartment in Schlobohm but for the spotlight on the townhouses. They had to “make an example of me,” she says. In time, Billie lost the last of her appeals, and was evicted in October 1995, nearly three years after the murder. Shortly before she moved, she told me, “I hope my kids remember this place, so they can find a way back here.” She fled Yonkers, and left no forwarding address. Wherever she is, I wish her well.
Despite fears that the ills of the west side would travel with the tenants, life is still relatively peaceful on the east side. There have been some problems that have brought the police to the townhouses—complaints of loud music, domestic squabbles, fights among the children. In April 1995 the boyfriend of a Trenchard resident set her townhouse ablaze while police officers waited downstairs to arrest him on another charge.
But in general, the police say, they are not called to the new housing sites more often than they are called to any other cluster of homes. Said Robert K. Olsen, who was the Yonkers police chief during the years after the townhouses first opened: “The doomsday scenario never materialized.”
In short, the townhouses do what Oscar Newman had hoped they would do—they blend into the neighborhood. Their construction is not perfect. The doorbells still don’t work, the window frames are warping, and the screens are peeling out of nearly all the screen doors—doors that Doreen worked so hard to get. The upkeep of the sites could be better, too. Without access to lawn mowers, most of the tenants have all but given up on maintaining their yards, and the insufficient closets inside have led many families to store things outdoors. As a result, some yards are unkempt and shabby looking, but no more so than the yards of some of the private houses nearby.
Those grips aside, however, Newman’s general philosophy seems to be working. The tenants think of their homes as their own, and care for them as well as they can. Lately there is talk of how they might eventually be able to buy the units. Even Peter Smith, who found Newman to be difficult and self-aggrandizing at times, gives him credit. In a summary report to Newman, Smith wrote: “For me, the best test of the Defensible Space theory was not the way the residents took over their own grounds and then began to defend the entire project. I kind of expected that. But it is the way they take care of their garbage cans next to their front walks. I, frankly, did not think that would work. Making garbage disposal an individual thing, and making it clear to the whole world that if there was a mess on their front yard, it was the tenant’s own doing, that brought something out of the tenants that showed the whole world how badly they had been prejudged.”
So, the lives of the tenants have changed for the better, and the worst fears of the east side homeowners have not come to pass. Is that success? Is it enough?
Norma O’Neal will grab a sandwich at the corner diner every once in a while, but she still will not eat at most of the other restaurants in her neighborhood. Doreen James will not fill her prescriptions on the east side because pharmacists there do not know the ins and outs of Medicaid. Instead, she travels across town to a pharmacy on the west side. Pam Johnson’s pediatrician has two offices, one west, one east. But only the office on the west side accepts Medicaid, so when her children are sick she takes them back to the old neighborhood.
In short, the tenants in the townhouses live in a bubble within a bubble. They are still visitors in their new neighborhoods, and they have almost no interaction with the white homeowners whose world they were sent east to change. Was this what Judge Sand envisioned when he wrote his 657-page opinion? Was it worth ten years and $260 million so that two hundred families could live in nicer homes and be ignored by their neighbors?
I asked Sand a version of this question when I interviewed him for this book, and it was the only moment, during hours of conversation, that made his tone go sharp. The number of townhouses—two hundred in a city of nearly 200,000 people—was chosen by the NAACP and the Justice Department, he said. He accepted their number, but he did not choose it, and he would not comment on whether it was sufficient to remedy the perceived wrong. What he did say was that the point of all this was never integration. It was desegregation, and the differences are not merely semantic. Yonkers is, technically, desegregated. A group of people, a category if you will, is now allowed in where before it was deliberately kept out. But Yonkers is not integrated. Black and white are not woven into the same fabric, the same community. Time might accomplish that. A judge cannot.
There is still anger on the east side. A walk through the neighborhood, a knock on random doors, finds that the anger is quieter than before, but it has not gone away.
“So far it’s not so bad,” says one homeowner, washing down his driveway with a hose. He lives two doors down from the townhouses. “But they’re still on their best behavior. I feel like we were screwed over. We were screwed over. I’m just too tired to fight about it.”
A block away, another neighbor points to the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign on her front lawn. It has been there for several months and she expects it will be there for several months more.
“I’m not selling to get away from them,” she says of the townhouses. “But it’s because of them that I can’t sell. Would you buy a house around here?”
It is, in fact, still difficult to sell a home in Yonkers—anywhere in Yonkers. But is that only because of the housing? Is it the presence of the townhouses alone that has lowered property values? Some, like Nicholas Longo, Peter Chema, and Hank Spallone, believe unequivocally that it is. Others argue, and I agree, that the real blame lies elsewhere. Yes, Yonkers has a black eye. But who threw the punch? The most lasting bruises were not inflicted by the townhouses. They were caused by the fight itself.
“All that publicity left people with a bad taste,” says Neil DeLuca, who has finally left government for the private sector. “Even people who don’t remember the details have this gut feeling this is someplace they don’t want to be.”
Says John Spencer, the current mayor: “The damage that was done, the people of Yonkers did it to themselves.”
John Spencer became mayor because of a backlash against Terry Zaleski. After Nick died, Zaleski’s “politics of investigation” came into new focus in Yonkers. Nay and Michael told Nick’s story passionately and publicly, emphasizing his fears that he was the subject of an inquiry by the Zaleski administration. Jim Surdoval vehemently (and, to my mind, convicingly) denied that Nick had been part of the IDA investigation, but the mere suggestion that the former mayor might have been driven to suicide by political shenanigans was enough to cause talk around town. It was one of a number of reasons that Zaleski lost his 1996 reelection bid.
Spencer is a former bank vice-president who had served two terms on the council and who had been Republican majority leader when Nick was Democratic minority leader. Despite their different political affiliations, the two men had been friends, and it was John Spencer who had secured Nay her job as deputy city clerk.
Spencer, by general agreement, is an outstanding mayor, and his greatest accomplishment is that he has coaxed, rallied, and dragged Yonkers toward maturity. It is time, he has said, to stop blaming Judge Sand for all that went wrong in the city, and to make things go right from now on. Betting all his political capital that his was a city transformed, John Spencer made sure that one of his first acts as mayor was to request a one-on-one meeting with the judge.
“Your Honor, it’s a new day,” he remembers saying. “It’s gotta be a new day. We’ve been through too much. I just got elected over-whelmingly in Yonkers on a vow of leadership, to lead this city. Leadership is getting people to work together.
“Philosophically,” he said, “I do not believe in government way, way up top shoving anything down the throat of the people. It doesn’t work.”
Answered Sand: “I share your philosophy, but how would you do this?”
Spencer argued that it was ill advised to insist that the city build the second stage of Sand’s plan, the eight hundred additional units of affordable housing. The new construction approach, he said, would entail yet another search for sites, which would stir up old feelings again. Why not use existing, unoccupied co-ops, condos, and homes? he asked. And why not allow the city to choose the units, with a minimal amount of intervention from the court?
It was not the first time the idea had been suggested, but it was the first time the judge had been this impressed with the messenger.
“Keep an eye on this guy,” he told me a few days after the meeting. “This is someone I can work with.”
The resulting plan, finalized in 1998, requires the state to designate a total of 740 units of affordable housing. Some of the units will already exist, some will be built from scratch, as decided by the city. The State of New York will pay half of the $32 million cost of the plan, per Judge Sand’s orders. In February of 1998, after his conversation with John Spencer, Sand ruled that the state’s Urban Development Corporation was partly responsible for the segregated housing pattern in the first place.
At the hearing to finalize the plan, Sand was both reflective and optimistic. “There have been many occasions since the outset of this litigation in 1980, when I sat on this bench experiencing frustration, and a failure to appreciate why, when the parties had the same objectives, it was so difficult to reach a consensus,” he said.
“I am very pleased,” he continued. “The goal of increasing housing opportunities in Yonkers will be materially implemented. There will, at long last, be an end to this phase of the ongoing saga.”
Judge Sand is not the only one impressed by the changes in Yonkers. In the spring of 1998, the Emergency Financial Control Board voted unanimously to disband itself, giving Yonkers full control of its own finances for the first time in twenty-three years. Said Spencer, immediately after the vote: “This is the best government meeting I’ve ever attended.”
News of this progress both heartens and saddens Nay. From where she sits, John Spencer, her ally and friend, is succeeding where her husband could not. Nay is still the deputy city clerk of Yonkers. On the wall of her City Hall office she has hung a framed newspaper from the summer of contempt and a poster Nick gave her called “Love’s First Kiss.” Since his suicide she has mended her emotional fences with Vinni Restiano, and each woman describes the other as a close friend. A scholarship fund has been established in Nick’s memory, and a west side park has been named after him.
Unable to sell the unfinished house on the hill, Nay abandoned it to the bank. She now lives in a three-bedroom co-op in northwest Yonkers. She took the WASICSKO LANE sign with her when she moved, but she left a pile of posters that said “Nick Wasicsko for City Council President” to rot in her damp garage. I salvaged one, and it hangs on my office wall, near my window, a reminder that heroes are rarely perfect.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development sees the townhouses of Yonkers as a success and a blueprint for the future. Sprinkling low-income families throughout middle-class neighborhoods is now department policy. Across the United States, in Newark, in Cincinnati, in Boston, Chicago, and Houston, boxy brick towers, once filled with hundreds of public-housing units each, are being declared failures and dynamited down to dust. There will be no more monolithic housing projects, not because a judge has ordered it, but because such projects do not work. From now on there will be only townhouses, like the ones built after all those years of protest in Yonkers.
“The lesson of Yonkers,” says Oscar Newman, who retired to create giant totem-pole-like sculptures in upstate New York, “is that it is coming soon to a town near you.”
To that end, the agency demolished 30,000 high-rise units across the country in 1996, and a total of 100,000 will be torn down by the year 2000. HUD has a budget of $46 billion over that same period of time to produce scattered-site housing in the communities that surrounded those high-rises.
The private sector is embracing this approach, too. Over the past four years, groups like Habitat for Humanity International, the Enterprise Foundation, and the National Neighborworks Network have spent $8.9 billion building 136,300 units in 1,940 communities, many of them middle class. In March of 1997 they announced a campaign to spend $13 billion to build 193,800 units in 2,400 communities nationwide.
Each of these communities would do well to learn the lessons of Yonkers, to hear this story of an experiment that ultimately worked, but which nearly destroyed a city along the way. It is a story of two views of the world, of the most logical and intellectual of judges, and the most emotional and self-protective of towns. Of a man who had a weekend house on thirty-three acres, and a city that looked north with envy at its leafier, wealthier neighbors. Of a man who struggled and reached the top, and believed that others should be helped to do the same. And of people whose struggles did not bring them as much, and who were fighting to keep out others who had even less.
Yonkers is what happens when these views collide. When a judge tells a neighborhood to re-create itself from scratch. When he sparks a metaphorical explosion, then orders those who live in the rubble to rebuild. Yonkers is what happens to the people of that neighborhood, both those who were there before and those who, with all eyes upon them, are chosen to move in.
Some of the lessons of Yonkers are practical: demand townhouses instead of high-rises; spend resources on architects, not lawyers; accept the inevitable and move on. But other lessons are less tangible, and more difficult to master. To succeed where Yonkers failed means accepting that no neighborhood stays the same forever and that protecting our children might be better done by letting strangers in than by keeping them out.
Yonkers is what will happen—is happening—everywhere, the result not of a court case, but of a demolition ball. In time, the townhouses will find their way into nearly every community and every neighborhood. In some places it will happen quietly, in others the shouting will be deafening. But everywhere, it will happen. And one by one each of those neighborhoods will learn what that means for a nation whose people preach diversity, but who are most comfortable when surrounded by others like themselves.
Has Yonkers itself learned these lessons? Some moments make me think so. Shortly after John Spencer’s election the new mayor paid a visit to Tony DiPopolo, who was housebound with ailments that would soon kill him. DiPopolo was so weak he could not speak above a whisper, and Spencer sat close so that DiPopolo might talk directly into the mayor’s ear. “Those people,” DiPopolo said, of the tenants in the townhouses, “they’re nice. They aren’t hurting nobody.”
But other moments bring doubt.
Mary Dorman is now a member of the city’s Civil Service commission, with her name painted in gold on the door of her office at City Hall. One morning, while out in her front yard, she was stopped by the driver of a passing car who was looking to buy a house in Mary’s neighborhood. Were there any in the area? Mary did know of one house, an attractive Colonial with a big yard and, from the looks of it, three or four bedrooms. She told the woman those things, then surprised herself by adding that the home was “across the street from the public housing.” She knew it shouldn’t matter. But she also knew that it does.
Alma Febles knows it, too. Shortly after she moved into her hard-won home, she worried aloud at a rumor that more of the same were to be built—on her new street. “They should build more, but I hope not right near here,” she said, with no hint of irony. “This is such a quiet, pretty block.”