Valencia Gardens
By Tom Erikson
The next couple of years will see the construction of a new generation of urban subsidized housing on the Valencia Gardens site. Like projects already constructed on Cesar Chavez Street or in the Haight Ashbury, plans are in place for more user-friendly facility. It turns out the vast scale and utopian visions for subsidized housing that followed the Second World War didn’t take into account all of the problems and needs of the people who would end up inhabiting them. A system compromised from the outset became a troubling nightmare of segregation, crime and violence. Now after sixty years of trying to cope with a manner of housing low income people that turned out to be seriously flawed, sixty-six million dollars will be spent to try a new approach on Valencia Street.