43 Small City Anchor Institutions • Feature • Myers of infrastructure. And that’s very appealing at a time when cities seem unmanageable and beyond control.” During this period, Jewish immigrants and black migrants moving north during the Great Migration settled in the city, becoming the backbone of the workforce. Many people lived and worked along the Erie Canal, often in dense, overcrowded housing near industrial sites. These tenement conditions, marked by poor sanitation, fire risks, and weak building standards, intensified as demand for housing grew. This internal densification which are tenements where crowded conditions create unsanitary and unsafe from fires and poor building codes. “So even before public housing ever happens, you have this idea that a concentration of poverty like really packed into these structures creates,not only like physical unhealth and unsafety, but it also creates “moral decay.” To the city, this framing justified intervention: improving housing conditions was cast as a way to reform residents themselves into more “moral” urban subjects. As Jess notes, this was a deeply paternalistic logic, rooted in the belief that wealthy reformers could reshape working-class populations into “ideal citizens,” effectively denying their agency. In this way, the city both produced the material conditions of poverty and used those same conditions to rationalize intervention. The narrative of moral and physical decline positioned elites as saviors while obscuring the structural forces and internal contradictions. This logic culminated in an urban renewal effort to create a scientific dream for the city in which the 15th Ward was officially labeled “blighted,” clearing the way for the construction of a public housing project, Pioneer Homes. “The blight that the city identified on these eight blocks almost two decades after Allen had marked up the city map, was a blight that the city itself had manufactured in its first racial zoning scheme. It was also a blight that built off of local fears related to the movements and visibility of Black and Jewish communities.” The project was labeled as a “transformation” project to alter the conditions the city produced in the 15th ward through racialized zoning, while promising the possibility that displaced residents could return. The project, however, resulted in widespread displacement and the remaking of the neighborhood from a desire to paternally uplift the moral and physical conditions
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