Everything we do as landscape architects is site specific—we enter the life of a place for but a few long moments, investigate its culture and history, and work to add an appropriate contemporary layer. The San Francisco office recently joined Gelfand Partners Architects to look at refurbishing the Ping Yuen public housing development in Chinatown, San Francisco. Composed of four buildings with 500 units and two acres of Chinatown property, this project has opened up a whole world of ideas that are not typically encountered in our office, and yet it also hits close to home for our team (principal Jim Lee was raised and married there, and went to Chinese School within a few blocks of the site).
We realized early on that we needed to educate ourselves about the history of Chinatown as well as the turbulent record of public housing. As it turns out, we entered this project in the midst of a quiet revolution for the San Francisco Housing Authority—the City is divesting itself of the responsibility of maintaining public housing to nonprofit groups. This transition is the result of mismanagement and corruption over a half century, including millions in graft each year, bribery schemes, drug cartel payoffs, and, most infamously, the Reverend Jim Jones, who used his role of the head of the SFHA for a variety of abuses. The task of governing the future of the Pings, as they’re called, is being handed over to the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), an organization that manages a variety of affordable housing developments and also advocates for the Chinatown and San Francisco Chinese diaspora community.
This turnover is not simply a matter of handing over the keys, as there are around 1700 residents in the Ping Yuens, many of whom are elderly and extremely impoverished. The buildings themselves were built between 1953 and 1964, and have received sporadic maintenance since then.
At the same time, the Pings are widely considered “successful” as a SF public housing project. They are comparatively low-crime and the tenants are well-organized. Part of this success is a direct result of ties with the wider Chinatown community. Amy Howard’s book, More Than Shelter, compiled years of research to explain the history and trends in SF public housing. One of the clear conclusions she made regarding the Pings is that its success is not owing to the “model minority” myth, but rather to a strong community infrastructure. Across the street from the Pings is cheap fresh produce; within a few blocks are over a dozen nonprofits dedicated to public health, integrating first-generation immigrants, and Chinese and English language schools. Chinatown began as a ghetto, a place where Chinese were forced to reside when in San Francisco. A history of institutionalized racism there begat a well-connected, ethnocentric community that supports its residents.
All of this information reveals an even bigger, positive trend: urban poverty (as opposed to rural poverty) in the United States registers higher rates of social mobility, especially with recent immigrant populations. The Pings are a part of a complex web of social, cultural, and historical constructs, and we are trying to envision how they can be improved while navigating the significant management and demographic changes they face in the future.
The more we learn, the more questions we have. Landscape architecture is more than specifying new playground equipment; to be diligent, considerate, and effective we must strive to understand the places we design as thoroughly as possible over the time we encounter them.
Posted by ChrisHardy and Yu-ChungLi in Community on