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City policy then quickly shifted to rebuilding the Bronx, barely a decade after the “planned shrinkage.” Bronx community development corporations as well as citywide organizations worked feverishly to rebuild as many of the salvageable buildings as the city would fund.

At the time, I was working on the restoration of 23 vacant buildings—over 700 apartments— one of more than a half dozen such developments of comparable size. Amidst this massive construction site, I saw a small painted mural wrapped around the girth of one building. “Persistence of Memory,” it said as if implying to “not forget us; we lived here.” I began to think about the impact of the destruction of these buildings on Bronx residents and generations that followed.

WHEDCo, the Women’s Housing & Economic Development Corporation, was born in 1991, in the wake of this first wave of housing reconstruction in the Bronx. Scores of abandoned buildings had been rehabilitated into thousands of apartments. Yet by the mid-1990s the massive reconstruction had failed to fix or create anything more than apartments. Beyond the refurbished buildings, streets were bare, stores remained boarded up, schools barely functioned and other essential infrastructure was overwhelmed by the rapid re-population. Without the recreation centers, thriving schools, theaters and shops that had made the Bronx attractive generations earlier, the harsh memories of leveled neighborhoods persisted, even among newly raised residential buildings.

Rather than begin with a specific physical development project, WHEDCo’s formative years were spent gauging the temperature of the neighborhood. When WHEDCo did finally undertake its first development, it was the restoration of an abandoned city hospital (Bronx By Design: Why Beauty Matters, Shelterforce March/April 2004). The mammoth structure was viewed as an opportunity to respond to what we heard in the community: the need for doctors, good education for the children, and for the ability to earn a decent living.

For the past 12 years, the campus that houses that project, the Urban Horizons/Rafael Hernandez School, has occupied the one full city-block previously occupied by that hospital, replete with faux-Spanish tile roofs, immense arched windows, and detailed faade work. It towers over its neighbors and from the rooftop is a birds-eye view into Yankee Stadium. Inside, over one hundred toddlers attend the WHEDCo Head Start Center each year; a commercial kitchen we built to help incubate small food businesses is producing empanadas and vegan cookies. Two hundred WHEDCo-trained women operate home-based childcare businesses caring for over 2,000 children and collectively generating $8.1 million in revenues in 2008. Over 80 WHEDCo staff serve in the school as tutors, guidance counselors, art, chess, music and drama instructors, sports coaches, parent advocates, education mentors, and community watchdogs. The school’s 900 families, compounded over these years, have grown into a formidable constituency.

WHEDCo’s founding premise was that every family needs the same basic amenities in life and shares common aspirations for the individual and for children, regardless of disparities in wealth, race, or where we call “home.” Today, WHEDCo uses green building practices, while maintaining the importance of attractive design. WHEDCo builds physical space for key elements of opportunity: high quality early childhood and public education, business incubation, and multiple pathways to greater prosperity for parents. WHEDCo buildings are places where developers, architects and contractors alike can envision living. Building beautiful homes and landscapes reflects the belief that physical environments shape people, for better and worse.

Over the past five years, WHEDCo has worked on a challenging development located in one of the few remaining urban renewal sites left in New York City, in the heart of the “burning Bronx” that President Jimmy Carter visited in 1977. Buildings in this area were not simply abandoned; they were demolished block by block. Photos of the area became icons of urban decay.

By the time we began working on this project, now called Intervale Green, the rubble was gone. The surrounding blocks were filled with single-family homes, and two- and three-family low-rise buildings. All of this had been built within the past 25 years. It bore little resemblance to anything that stood before.
The neighborhood reflected a complete inattention to planning. While designing the new building, WHEDCo and the development team struggled to find nearby structures that might serve as architectural touchstones. We located some archival photographs of a building that stood on the site in 1915, and found it looked exactly like scores of other buildings that had escaped demolition and were restored in other neighborhoods. This was good enough. We decided to build a “typical” Bronx building: a characterization that initially drew some derision.

But by “typical” we meant contextual to what the place looked like when it flourished. WHEDCo built Intervale Green from the ground up, a red and blond brick building with decorative cornices, lintels and stone at the street. With courtyards for the residents and set on a flatiron-shaped lot, the building curves around the block with retail stores on one side and a public sculpture garden at the point. Intending to be “typical” of the lost grandeur of the Bronx, the building is in fact quite beautiful.

It is also “green” in that it features 128 new EnergyStar certified apartments and nearly a half-acre of green roofs and landscaped gardens. Building green has the obvious importance of lessening a building’s emissions and reducing expenses for those who can least bear the costs. But building green is also grounded in research showing that proximity to nature—to trees and grass—restores the very psychological resources likely to be depleted in the daily struggle to get by.