This article is part of the FA special series Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons.   

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is New York City’s biggest landlord, with over 360,000 people living in public housing. In New York City, and in my neighborhood in particular, the housing projects are defining features of the landscape. Commonly referred to as “the projects,” the city’s public housing is usually made up of tall, nearly identical buildings of brown or dark brown bricks, which all have confined courtyards, typically with one-way-in and one-way-out pathways. The only thing that distinguishes many of these projects from one another are the names that are placed in front of the buildings—mostly of dead white presidents or other political figures, many of whom were racists, slave holders, or descended from families who enslaved people. 

What was forfeited when I first stepped foot inside of a prison cell, New York public housing had already begun to strip me of: opportunities for success and self-determination. Most of the signage in my neighborhood pointed to my future behavior or future demise: “Crack Is Wack,” “Call Crime Stoppers,” and along bodega walls, “R.I.P. Tommy, Juan, Maria,” the list of names goes on.

My neighborhood has many names: “Spanish Harlem,” “East Harlem,” and “El Barrio,” depending on one’s relationship to this multicultural space. It is located in the borough of Manhattan, but many people who aren’t from NYC don’t consider where I’m from to be part of Manhattan. I prefer the name “El Barrio” given its rich Afro-Latinx roots, and its history as a space where Blacks and Puerto Ricans have collectivized their struggle for equity and safety from police brutality. El Barrio spans from Pleasant Avenue east to Madison Avenue, and from about East 100th Street up to roughly 127th Street. In any direction within the space, one can easily count numerous NYCHA public housing projects.

I am not against public housing. I’ve spent numerous Christmases, family birthdays, and sleep-overs at my relatives’ public housing apartments. But in the US, the construction of public housing spread during the 1930s as part of the federal government’s effort to segregate the population, with white people moving into comfortable suburban housing and Black and Brown people given few options but to move into the projects. The US government’s vision for safe and clean housing never included poor Black and Brown people. Federal and state money to support public housing eventually dried up across the country. Today, Black and Brown tenants make up about 90 percent of NYCHA’s population. After decades of neglect, many cities tore down their public housing. New York City, on the other hand, did not, and as funding for operation and maintenance have dwindled, NYCHA residents have increasingly faced criminalization.

Arguably, NYCHA’s public housing initially sought to eradicate some inner city problems: poverty, crime, and drugs. In fact, some of the housing projects in New York City have mini police precincts in their basements. They offer free youth programming, while profiling and collecting information from the youth—surveillance cloaked as community-building. This surveillance doesn’t serve the tenants, but serves those who believe that being poor and Black or Brown is in itself criminal.

In El Barrio, a portion of the residents are on house arrest, or report to parole. Some are finishing up a jail or prison bid, or are on their way to serving one. Those who are out on parole are confined to “the hood” by electronic ankle monitors, reminiscent of the ankle shackles imprisoned people must wear anytime that they are transported to outside medical facilities, or from prison to prison. This device might sound benign, but it is a 24-hour surveillance tool that confines the wearer to a few city blocks. Replacing the walls of a prison cell, the ankle monitor allows the state to limit the range of where one is allowed to be.

After someone has completed their court-ordered sentence, the state still finds ways to track their whereabouts under the guise of public safety. This electronic ankle device plays a significant part in the culture of surveillance in the housing projects in my neighborhood, because it is also a visible reminder and extension of the far-reaching carceral complex. Visual echoes of prison only add to making my community feel like an open-air prison.

The New York state prison population hovers somewhere around 32,613, according to New York Department of Corrections & Community Supervision (“NYDOCCS”) Incarcerated Profile Report from December 2023. A large part of this demographic is made up of Black and Brown people, who, at the time I entered the system, came from five specific neighborhoods from across the city, including El Barrio. The industrial scale at which housing projects and prisons have been built reflects an assumption that both spaces have to accommodate high volumes of people. Both are spaces where the state can exert maximum control with minimal push-back from society. And so, the over-policing in NYCHA’s public housing ensures a steady flow of Black and Brown people through the courts, which leads to the filling up of prisons.

The architecture and socialization of the NYCHA housing projects and NY State prisons, in many ways, belong to continuums of containment, keeping public housing and prison communities socially isolated but connected through a pipeline that starts with social conditioning, over-policing, and abject violence. NYCHA and New York State prisons each have high gates, bullet-proof windows in the foyers, and multiple layers of metal doors to gain entry into the buildings. Noticeably, there are cameras everywhere, and they are not looking at me to keep me safe: in the eyes of the state, I – and people like me – have always been the problem. The likeness doesn’t stop there: NYCHA’s public housing projects and NY state prisons are both cheaply constructed, lit with fluorescent lighting, and covered in industrial finishes: 12 by 12 ceramic tile flooring, and cinder block walls over-painted in white, dull blue, or tan. Many of the fixtures and furnishings are produced by incarcerated individuals through Corcraft, the prison system’s manufacturing arm. I immediately noticed these features during intake into the state prison system, and the prison’s likeness to the projects became even more defined in each of the four rural New York state prisons I have been housed at. Pointedly, my Black urban body fuels the white rural local economy, which has historical receipts to what my ancestors endured in this country.

Left with limited resources and opportunities, and often marked with a criminal record, some of us commit crimes to escape poverty. It’s just a reality: people are going to find a way to survive – legally or illegally – and this is what thrusts us into the projects-to-prison pipeline. 

Both spaces, NYCHA’s public housing and New York state prisons, shape physical realities at the same time as seeking to erase social ties, culture, and individuality. The housing projects’ brick buildings are defined by what they keep in. Within the 30-foot walls, like prisons, the projects conceal a slow death, keeping the Black and Brown American body in bondage.

When living in captivity, be it physical or mental, an individual carries a weighty consciousness: there is always a sense of being tracked by eyes (electronic and otherwise), a fear of being harmed by residents or correctional officers, and an impending sense of doom lurking around every corner. To add to these indignities, the conditions of disrepair in prisons and in NYCHA’s public housing are structural and systematic, putting tenants at risk because the authorities do not value them. Some prisons (Auburn CF, as one example) have roaches, mold, leaks, and bats that fly about the corridors as if they were the facility’s house pets. When prisoners make an inquiry about the pests what usually follows is more injustice.

Similarly, residents in NYCHA’s public housing live with roaches, mold, leaks, and rats, and sometimes during cold winter months there is no heat or gas. There are NYCHA residents who live with the fear that if they report any unsanitary violations, they might be targeted and harassed by superintendents – or worse, the housing authority’s upper management. Many learn to live with these conditions, paying 30 percent of their income for a living space no person should have to endure.

In a sense, New York housing projects have been made into little more than prisons without prison guards. Like prisons, NYCHA’s housing projects are containing poverty, not solving it, and hiding away mental illness, not offering access to mental health services. Those of us who have lived in NYCHA’s public housing have subtly accepted the surveillance that comes with this form of socialization, while learning the boundaries between where our Black and Brown bodies are allowed, or not allowed, to exist.

Prison teaches these same lessons. There is an abundance of signage that tells me more about where my body does not belong, rather than where it does and what I am allowed to do with it: “No Talking,” “Stop Here,” “No Inmate Beyond This Point Without Correctional Officer.” Historically, our bodies have been reminders of our dehumanization. We, people of color housed inside NYCHA projects and New York State prisons, still struggle for better conditions, even while our minds and bodies are exhausted from fight fatigue.

Prison, like the projects, cells in the poor, the mentally ill, the uneducated, the unemployed, and the addicted. These spaces have been heavily politicized and demonized, and their design creates spaces for the devaluation of human life. Prisons and their architectural cousins, public housing projects, contain human potential while denying solutions for those contained. 

Prisoners and NYCHA residents both see the broader implications of eroding conditions: broken people coming home from prison bring back to their homes some of the fallout of their experiences suffered within captivity. Their facades hard and interiors cheap, the projects reinforce the ideas learned within the prison’s structure of physical and mental conditioning. The projects normalize punitive measures over creativity, diminished mental stimulation over autonomy, and a sense of being invalidated, instead of understanding one’s self as a valued member of society.

Perhaps the architecture of public housing and prison are telling us something worth listening to: that the stripping of opportunity and self-determination from the poorer sector of society does something irrefutable. Both spaces shape the lives of their inhabitants and facilitate a slow death that reconstructs and reconstitutes tenants’ and inmates’ self-image into the negative narrative America has of its poor and of people of color.