Just City recalls Saul Steinberg’s famous March 29, 1976 New Yorker illustration, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” otherwise known as “A Parochial New Yorker’s View of the World.” In Jennifer Baum’s case, the world is viewed from West 96th Street in Manhattan — where, beginning in 1967, she was raised in the subsidized and integrated cooperative RNA House, a public housing project, through her high school years. Baum, who grew up in an assimilated Jewish family and cherishes “secular Jewish values,” relates that she was “fascinated by RNA’s socialist system and how it shaped my family, neighbors, and friends,” and her book conveys how blessed she was to have grown up in such a neighborhood. Vancouver, Canada, Phoenix, Arizona, and the other places where she subsequently lived simply paled in comparison. They lacked the sense of community, gritty street life, ethnic and racial heterogeneity, left-wing political activism, and museums, theaters, and other cultural venues that were so important to Baum, an aspiring film documentarian.
Readers who grew up in one of New York’s many cooperative housing projects and share Baum’s political outlook will be stirred by her memoir and will lament alongside her the transformation of the city during the last several decades. There is little left to remind us of the time during the mid-twentieth century when there were five major cooperative projects in the Bronx catering to Jews of various ideological outlooks, including Labor Zionists, socialists, and communists. Baum believes that the recent privatization of the city’s public services has adversely affected the less well-off, increased gentrification and income inequality, undermined the collective ethos at the center of New York City’s public housing, and transformed the city into “a playground for the rich.” She particularly abhors Michael Bloomberg, the city’s mayor from 2002 through 2013, who steered the city’s economic recovery after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Just City’s subtitle reflects Baum’s argument: “There must be a consensus, by the public and politicians,” she writes, “that housing is a human right, that earlier legislation funding affordable housing was beneficial to the common good and that we need similar legislation today.” Many New Yorkers would agree, but, as Baum notes glumly, “The unseen hand of capitalism is mighty strong.” Her book is an eloquent elegy for a golden age unlikely to return.
