History, Urban Experts, and Pluralism

No single profession is responsible for all of the past misunderstandings and omissions of hotels within the range of American housing types. Nor does any single group have the power to instantly expand the notion of home, one of the most complicated and deeply rooted ideas in culture. Yet designers and planners, past and present, have operated at an important nexus in preserving the status quo as well as in fostering change. In part, this role falls to designers because they are trained to think of the future. Unfortunately, they are rarely educated to understand the present or past, particularly not the ordinary environments of the present and past. This has caused problems in the history of hotel housing. During the Progressive Era, social workers and social hygiene experts most successfully focused on what existed; the designers fo-

cused resolutely on what ought to be and often relished the utopian role they wanted to have, rather than the social servant role they told themselves they were performing. Grounded in the dominant class and its culture—whose values and hopes they usually shared—they wrote the official rules and fashioned leading examples of what was and what was not acceptable housing culture. Mary Burki, Peter Marcuse, Robert Goodman, and others have written about this cultural imperialism that has haunted the public housing movement from its inception. Until the 1970s (and in many cases, continuing into the present), planners and architects defined ideal residential environments of both the suburbs and downtown based largely on their own rarefied personal experience and professional design perspectives.^[71] They ignored any conflicting evidence. In 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote that "learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect."^[72] This is still true.

Other housing professionals exhibit problems with understanding the ordinary past and present. In 1976, an official at HUD explained that his department refused to extend federal housing assistance to SROs because the agency's obligation was "not to subsidize or encourage the establishment of a housing environment which is in any way inferior to those standards of quality which our society has come to expect from the public as well as the private sector."^[73] Surely the official was unaware that his agency and its forebears had consciously worked to create those expectations and to foster an overly narrow view of the subcultures that have made up America's housing markets. Policymakers have not only omitted hotel housing and singled out apartments and houses as proper homes, they have also created for themselves an official illusion that all Americans, including all public housing clients, have always wanted houses with private kitchens and private baths. The United States now knows the cost of defining as "homeless" even those people who have lived happily and productively in a hotel for fifteen or twenty years.

The new positive SRO view has thrust housing professionals into a new role, that of cultural pluralist. More architects and planners are learning how diverse social groups live, especially those at the margins of society. Housing officials, who now know more about single-person households, are less likely to be disgusted by a thirty-five-year-old clerk who rents a room without a kitchen or private bath. These same offi-

cials now see their role, in part, as defending new and old subcultures and fragile people from unnecessary loss of a place to live. They cannot protect these people from any and all change, but they can direct change for the better interests of a greater variety of people. These new variants of professionals and officials seem to be arriving at a clearer grasp of three central realities in building or managing human environments: that people are diverse; that diversity requires flexible approaches and multiple solutions to problems; and that diverse environments are essential for maintaining important social and cultural options. No one solution can work for all Americans. These ideas mark a major shift from professional attitudes of the past one hundred years.

The misguided but well-meaning attempt to eradicate hotel housing from American cities reveals particularly well the importance of remembering the long-term and double-edged nature of expert ideals and ideology. The nineteenth-century ideal of housing urban Americans in single-family suburbs need not have caused a corresponding problem for downtown housing. These were not inherently incompatible environments. The new city of separate and single-purpose spaces might yet be built to coexist very nicely with the old city of social and commercial mixture, pedestrian convenience, and shared kitchens and baths. Had more housing studies been based on the full urban landscape—what existed and why it was there—the SRO crisis might have been averted or at least lessened, and millions of housing units would still be in service.

Hindsight always makes such lessons easier to see than the historical situations allowed. Yet constant danger springs from what Goethe called "active ignorance." The narrower our attitudes, the more rarefied and abstract our experts' education and values, and the less grounded they are in the total historic and geographic reality of how people use rooms, buildings, streets, and neighborhoods, then the more harmful will be the unintended results of well-meaning public policies. If professional knowledge and public vision are wider, more inclusive, and more pluralistic, the United States is less likely to repeat policy and procedural mistakes like those that caused the SRO crisis, the oversight of hotel life, and the temporary twentieth-century decline in living downtown.