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Rosanne Haggerty reinvents the flophouse as a clean, well-lighted place.
By Douglas McGray
The Metropolis Observed
April 2002
Rosanne Haggerty is the new landlord of the Andrews Hotel, a grim vermin-infested
joint at the corner of Bowery and Spring Street on Manhattan's Lower East
Side. She is also founder and executive director of Common Ground Community,
a nonprofit organization that has purchased and converted a handful
of historic buildings, including the Times Square Hotel, into some of New
York's most progressive low-income housing--work that last year earned her
a $500,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.
After four years of field research that took Haggerty and her staff
from the public shelters of New York to the capsule hotels of Japan, Common
Ground Community is set to begin transforming the century-old Andrews into
something they call First Step Housing. Working with New York architects
Marguerite McGoldrick and Gans + Jelacic, and more than 150 homeless men
and women who contributed feedback, Haggerty plans to combine elements of
the Bowery's dying flophouse tradition--$7 a night, no lease, no questions--with
smart management, on-site social services, and space-efficient modular
design. Recently she spoke with Douglas McGray about the project's design
considerations--and its lessons.
What made you decide to try to resurrect the flophouse?
Social scientist Christopher Jencks zoned in on the loss of the cubicle
hotels as a specific cause of the rise of single-adult homelessness. That
got me thinking, Why don't these places exist anymore? For years I'd get
close to the question and then recoil because these buildings were so squalid.
The quality-housing advocate in me couldn't comprehend how one could responsibly
advocate their resurgence. It finally occurred to me that until not-for-profits
started working on them, single-room occupancies had also been looked at
as substandard forms of housing. Then it clicked--it's more of a failure
of imagination on our part than anything embedded in the model.
What kind of space can you expect from a typical flophouse?
Basically a plywood sleeping unit that's about seven feet high--it doesn't
go to the ceiling--covered by chicken wire to prevent people from diving
over and stealing your things. The cubicles are typically three to four
feet wide--enough for a narrow cot and a locker. They often have a naked
bulb hanging down as the only light source.
When you set out to transform that, how did you begin?
We did a lot of research with individuals and clusters of homeless men and
women, asking what would get them to move in and showing them pictures of
different kinds of housing forms. We would say, "Take a look at this
Amtrak sleeper or this Japanese capsule hotel or this one-room cabin: Could
you see yourself living there?" And that really got the conversation
engaged; people became design critics.
Which pictures elicited the strongest reactions?
The Japanese capsule hotels didn't get much of a following. They were like,
"Oh my god, it looks like a morgue!" Also, a lot of these guys,
even if they're not that old, have health problems. The idea of having to
crawl up into a bunk--they didn't want any part of it.
What surprised you in these conversations?
It was fascinating to me how hardwired certain images of home are into our
collective psyche. You'd ask someone who had been living on the street for
years--probably always in the city--to draw a picture of what they had in
mind, and they would draw something like a kindergartner's picture of home,
a little pitched-roof thing. So our first iteration of the First Step was
that: it looked like Thoreau's cabin.
What are their biggest concerns from a design standpoint?
The main reason people are remaining on the streets is safety. They perceive
themselves to be more secure sleeping in a public space than in the city's
shelter system. People were very keen on the idea of metal detectors, very
concerned about what the roof material would look like--how secure it would
be. They were concerned about the strength of the lock and the durability
of the construction.
You've shown three rounds of prototypes to homeless men and women. How
has the design evolved as a result of their input?
Somebody had a very good line. He said, "You don't want it to be a
doll house, but you don't want it to be a cell either." A lot of these
folks have been in psychiatric hospitals or in jail, and they don't want
an environment that reminds them of that. Things as subtle as being able
to move the furniture around--not having it nailed down--being able to get
control of a degree of privacy in the space, having a window that opens
and closes onto a central corridor seemed to take something that could have
been viewed as institutional and make it cozy.
Can design do anything about squalor, or is that more or less up to good
management?
Frankly, design makes a significant difference in terms of the atmosphere
of calm and respect that you establish. People respond behaviorwise to being
in that kind of environment. Keeping maintenance costs reduced is also a
consideration. We need spaces that can be cleaned easily, panels that can
be removed and replaced without having to trash the whole unit.
The First Step units are prefabricated; they ship nearly flat and can
bolt together in almost any commercial space, anywhere. Why did you settle
on the Bowery?
When we first hit the road looking for sites and talking to community boards
about it, there was a real NIMBY kind of response, even in communities where
our work was known. It was just too radical a notion to do something that
wasn't a shelter but wasn't permanent housing. But on the Bowery we could
be heroes. Part of our organization's philosophy has been about preserving
buildings as well as housing people. When we looked at the Bowery, which
of course is where most of this housing was concentrated in the early part
of the twentieth century, we found that there were only a handful of buildings
left that still functioned as lodging houses, and that those that did had
quite a number of permanent tenants who were very vulnerable to becoming
homeless if someone other than a not-for-profit bought their building.
You spent two months in Japan researching this project--Osaka
is a long way from the Bowery.
Once I started thinking about how to revive something that would look like
that old lodging-house form, or operate like it, one of the challenges was
how to make very efficient use of nonresidential buildings--how to create
a comfortable interior dwelling unit to replace this squalid cubicle. And
no matter what I read, all roads led to Japan in terms of who was doing
the most interesting thinking about small, efficient space design. I loved
meeting with Shigeru Ban, who uses heavy-duty paper as a building material
because it's cheap and recyclable. If you coat it, you can even get a decent
fire rating. After the Kobe earthquake, Ban created 35 cabin homes that
were supposed to be temporary but lasted for ages. He's a huge intellectual
force in thinking about nontraditional ways to offer basic accommodation
to people. I was also fascinated by the flexibility of space. A traditional
room begins the day as a bedroom, then it's the eating area, then it's the
living space, then it's the family room, then it's the bedroom again. It's
not unlike the situation we have in our buildings, where there's a small
space in which people are expected to live their whole lives.
Are small accommodations like capsule hotels popular in Japan because
they exist already or because of different cultural attitudes about space?
A bit of both. I think because it's so crowded there, people have developed
a sense of personal space and privacy that's very different from ours. That
translates into a comfort with hanging out in a big common lounge and not
immediately atomizing out. Here I think our expectations of privacy get
in the way of our being able to offer basic, safe, sanitary dwellings to
the masses of people who are homeless. I think there needs to be more variety
of permanent housing that doesn't offer as much private space to individuals
but offers them enough--and security within that space. For example, I'm
open to the idea of doing three to four different capsule units to get feedback
from people about what works, and for how long a period of time. At the
Andrews, we have a chance to experiment.
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