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Just off the Cross-County Parkway, which bisects Yonkers, New York (pop. 188,082), is the intersection of Midland Avenue and Wrexham Road. Midland, which meanders through much of lower Yonkers, is dotted here with luxury apartments, while Wrexham leads north to the Sarah Lawrence College campus. To a passerby, the five new Colonial-style garden apartment buildings that occupy one corner seem to fit in quite harmoniously.
To the city of Yonkers, however, this small development is a painful reminder of a lost battle, one that the city has spent millions fighting (it says $10 million, although some observers say it's twice that). the complex's 28 units, which were to be completed last month, are, in fact, public housing, built under order of a federal judge following his 1985 finding on housing and school segregation in Yonkers, and they were built over the city's strenuous objections.
For several of the parties involved in the case, U.S. v. Yonkers Board of Education, the apartments represent a victory. They are: the U.S. Justice department, which brought the case in 1980; the Yonkers branch of the NAACP, the "plaintiff-intervenor" that filed the complaint leading to the suit; U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Sand, whose rulings have been upheld 21 times; and architect and planner Oscar Newman, AICP, the housing advisor to the court, who has worked for almost five years to produce the low-rise, scattered-site units that reflect his idea of "defensible space," as outlined in his ground-breaking book of that title.
The battle isn't over yet. Judge Sand's 1986 housing remedy order and a 1988 consent decree required the city to build 200 public housing units and 800 "affordable" units outside of the southwest section, where 90 percent of Yonkers's subsidized housing had been built in the past and where 78 percent of its minority residents lived. (The city now has 6,800 units of public and other assisted housing.) The "affordable" units were to take the form of a 20 percent set-aside in new market-rate, multifamily projects, with a goal of at least 200 units a year. Today, though, only 75 percent of the public housing units are under contract, and only six of the affordable units have been built.
Give 'em an "F"
Asked to grade Yonkers on...