"Where Tenants and Tenets Don't Agree": Elisabeth Coit and the Planning Practices of the New York City Housing Authority (1934–51)

abstract:The postwar period of urban renewal in the United States has been critiqued for authoritarian planning that remade the landscape of cities without consulting residents. In the literature on New York City, the clashes between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs are often used to illustrate tensions between bureaucratic and grassroots understandings of cities. By examining the work of Elisabeth Coit, a principal project planner for New York City's Housing Authority (NYCHA), this article complicates such oppositions between top-down and bottom-up planning. Coit's overlooked practice shows how a progressive architect incorporated the wishes of working-class tenants into the design of postwar public housing projects.Coit traveled to cities across the United States to study the housing of workers during the Great Depression. On the basis of her research, she criticized prevailing trends in mass-housing design and argued that architects should plan spaces that suited how tenants used their homes. When Coit became a NYCHA planner several years later, she put a tenant-first ethos into practice in planning the Bronx River Houses (1951). This paper also argues that her deference to the wishes of tenants resulted in designs that were intended to facilitate conventional gendered divisions of domestic labor and leisure.