The townhouses at the center of this tale are ten minutes from my house—a quick trip down the Saw Mill River Parkway, then a few more miles east. It is a short distance, which is why their story caught my interest in the first place. And, at the same time, it is a long way, an instructive, compelling journey between two worlds.
I am sitting in my house right now, gazing out at the nearby woods, as is my habit when I write. It is a calming, cozy view, and I am struck full force, as I have been so often while working on this book, by the primal power of home. I was a first-time homeowner and a protective new parent back in 1992, when I read a small notice in my local newspaper about a public housing lottery. I knew just a little about the townhouses at the time—that they were ordered into existence by a federal judge so that poor, minority public-housing residents could live on the white, middle-class side of town. I had been living back in Texas while the city of Yonkers fiercely fought that order, but even fifteen hundred miles away I had memories of the nightly reports on the national news, of the hundreds of people, chanting and screaming, faces contorted with hate. Now the housing was built. And it was near me.
The lottery would be held to determine which families would be allowed to move into the new townhouses. Out of curiosity—partly fear for my own life’s investment, partly a reporter’s sense that this might make a good story—I went. At the front of the room was an ancient bingo drum, filled with the names of the hopeful. I sat in the middle of the electric crowd, watching that fateful drum spin.
I met Alma Febles that night, a magnetic young mother, the same age as myself, and one of the women whose stories fill this book. I was moved as she talked of wanting a bedroom all her own, a place for her children, a haven, a sanctuary, a home. Her yearning, the yearning so palpable throughout the School Street gym that night, was familiar because it mirrored my own. I had felt an exquisite completeness when I moved my family into our house. Everywhere I looked, I saw not only the present, but also the future: the driveway where my son, still an infant, would someday ride his bike. The single sunny patch of yard where my husband would grow our vegetable garden. The porch where we would barbecue, the basement where we would assemble toy trains, the nearby woods—those sheltering, welcoming woods—where we would take long walks.
Touched by Alma’s dreams, I found myself rooting for her, fiercely. As the bingo drum grew emptier, and her name had not been called, I worried for her. Even as I did, however, I recognized the muddled impurity of my concern. I believed in the right of this woman to have her home. But what if bulldozers were to clear a site for that home in the trees so close to my own house?
It was this clash of dreams that I took home that night. I have carried it with me during five years of research and writing. During those years I have described the Yonkers housing experiment countless times to friends and acquaintances. Nearly every listener has asked the same question: Did it work?
It is, I have learned, a deceptively straightforward question with meanings that vary with the questioner. Did it work? Did the neighborhood fall to pieces? Did the lives of the tenants improve on the east side of town? Did property values fall? Did crime rates increase? Did the homeowners learn to accept the tenants? Did the tenants befriend the homeowners? Did the judge come to understand that he had done the wrong thing? Did the city come to understand that he had done the right thing? Were the results worth ten years and $42 million? Is Yonkers a model for the rest of the country? Or is it an example of good intentions gone wrong? Did it work?
Faced with this spectrum of questions, I had to answer a core question of my own: What did I mean by “Did it work?” Where would I look when deciding whether this broad-stroke experiment was a failure or a success? One luxury of journalism is distance—the ability to observe, record, judge, then move on. But the sense of home that led me to the lottery in the first place has also limited that freedom and made me wonder what my conclusion would be if I could not walk away.
Over time, I came to see the question as a single thought composed of two opposite but intertwined strands: Did it work for the people who moved in? And did it work for those who were already there?
“It’s all about home,” I answered. “If the tenants can find the comfort of a real home. If the homeowners don’t lose the sanctity of theirs. Then, it worked.”
That was the measure that guided my reporting, a measure I think of often as I look through my window and out into the trees. Did it work? Did it grant Alma a place to plant her dreams, and did it do so without trampling on other, equally passionate dreams that had already taken root? Did it allow the newcomers a chance to leave the past behind, while, at the same time, allowing the neighbors to keep it close at hand? Did it give a lucky few a safe spot in the world? And did it do so—is it possible to do so—without sacrificing the insulating, isolating woods?
Westchester, New York
September 1998