Ever been to East New York? It’s kind of incredible—like a loading dock for the whole city, a tangle of rail lines, on-ramps, and warehouses dispersed here and there across a landscape of low-rise residential buildings. It’s just the kind of place you might expect to find New York’s infrastructure-mad Justin Davidson—and sure enough, there he is.

Davidson writes in the magazine about a new housing development going up in the way-out Brooklyn nabe, designed by Edifavorite Alexander Gorlin. The architect’s reserved yet refined prefab row houses (above) get high marks from Davidson, and rightly so: Gorlin makes real all that “citizen architect” stuff we keep hearing about. Davidson continues with a look at Susan Rodriguez’s Schermerhorn House for Polshek Partnership, a similarly public-minded housing development done with verve and intelligence.

No question, Davidson is on the side of the angels here. Who doesn’t like affordable housing? But the piece concludes on a slightly sour note:

Both these versions of affordable housing reject the utopian visions that once fueled modernists’ social zeal and scarred our cities with towers for the poor. Instead, in their quiet, pragmatic way, they prove what the marriage of philanthropy and government can achieve…

Yes, Gordon Bunshaft could make a mess of public housing, and no, we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of the Pruitt-Igoe Houses. But Davidson forgets that a project like Gorlin’s new Nehemiah Houses represents a triumph of modernist design principles over a conservative alternative: the original Nehemiah Houses in the Bronx, built though a public/private partnership in the early 90’s, had pitched roofs and quasi-Tudor detailing. Part of Gorlin’s success is that he proves we can do the job of low-cost housing within a progressive, 21st century design idiom. It’s important to separate baby from bathwater.

Low-Income? You’re Kidding! [New York]