Neighborhood preservation in New York City

Written By H. Pike Oliver

On this day (June 23) in 1973, I went to work for the City of New York in what was then called the Housing and Development Administration (HDA) and is now the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Shortly after joining the city staff as a "quantitative analyst", I was assigned to the Neighborhood Preservation Program (NPP) that the Mayor (John Lindsay) created by executive order[1]

These were the days of massive housing abandonment in areas such as the South Bronx and East New York. The NPP was designed to try to prevent abandonment to spreading to nearby neighborhoods that had a solid stock of one to three-family ownership housing mixed in with multi-family structures experiencing disinvestment and deterioration. In a 1974 Fordham Urban Law Journal article [2], Philip Weitzman described the program, " .  . . as the first truly comprehensive effort in the nation aimed at preserving sound urban neighborhoods."

[1] NEW YORK, N.Y., ExEc. ORDER No. 80 (May 23, 1973), in 101 The City Record 2066 (1973)

[2] Weitzman, P. (1974). Neighborhood Preservation in New York City. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 3(3) 

 

 

 

H. Pike Oliver

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, H. Pike Oliver has worked on real estate development strategies and master-planned communities since the early 1970s, including nearly eight years at the Irvine Company. He resided in the City of Irvine for five years in the 1980s and nine years in the 1990s.

As the founder and sole proprietor of URBANEXUS, Oliver works on advancing equitable and sustainable real estate development and natural lands management. He is also an affiliate instructor at the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington.

Early in his career, Oliver worked for public agencies, including the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research where he was a principal contributor to An Urban Strategy for California. Prior to relocating to Seattle in 2013, Oliver taught real estate development at Cornell University and directed the undergraduate program in urban and regional studies. He is a member of the Urban Land Institute, the American Planning Association and a founder and emeritus member of the California Planning Roundtable.

Oliver is a graduate of the urban studies and planning program at San Francisco State University and earned a master’s degree in urban planning at UCLA.

https://urbanexus.com
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