Jane Jacobs Quotes

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future - but it's never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project - so you're immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on.

More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities.

The slums will be but a memory.

… many social problems stem from poor housing.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

One of the best things I found out about Detroit is that bears have started returning to the city. When bears are gentrifying your neighborhood and opening Thai restaurants, that's a poor neighborhood.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement - publicly sponsored housing.

If those communities are left to decay, this city will decay.

There's a lot to be said for not displacing people.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that America has made - and maybe the world because this is, sort of, the core of communism and socialism - is that you can have perfect solutions to social problems like poverty, like crime. You're not going to eliminate all crime. Maybe you'll never eliminate all poverty.