"The Project Tenants Sound Off"

In order to ensure maintenance and control of Morningside Heights and all the surrounding community, Columbia University implemented a three-front approach to seizing control of neighborhood: housing, policing, and the social sciences. Their actions paralleled those of the New York City government as they sought to manage urban spaces in order to control those deemed to be “undesirables”: residents of the community, of low-income and mostly Black or Puerto Rican, who were not affiliated with the institutions and regarded as obstacles to the envisioned “Acropolis.” During the mid-1900s, the New York City government pursued an agenda of “urban renewal,” the physical ordering of urban spaces and thus people. This was followed in the post-1960s by a combined neoconservative and neoliberal governance strategy: the implementation of “order maintenance” as a way to control “undesirables” and marginalize them via such strategies as “broken windows” policing (Chronopoulos 2012: 2). The “broken windows” strategy was developed based on the notion that if a neighborhood was physically out of shape, residents would start to believe that committing crimes was permitted. This led invariably to increased police presence in neighborhoods deemed “blighted,” particularly in housing developments such as Grant Houses.