When greater affluence thinned these buildings' populations out a bit, however, these New York tenements eventually turned out be potentially good places to live.
Today, urban renewal means Donald Trump building towers of affluence on the Hudson and East Rivers.
In perhaps another sign of increasing neighborhood affluence, Southbridge Towers, a nine-building 1971 complex with 1,651 co-ops, awaits state approval to leave the Mitchell-Lama affordable-housing program and become market-rate housing.
More than 100 years after Haussmann's death, old Paris has become the world's most elegant gated community — the sandblasted facades of its Haussmann-era buildings glistening with affluence.
Poorer countries need to make the delivery of basic services such as health and education to all their citizens the priorities; emerging economies need to ensure safety and protect human rights; richer countries need to face up to the problems of affluence, such as obesity, and work on building tolerant societies; everyone has a long way to go on environmental sustainability.
Yet if you look hard among the shadows cast by these monuments to affluence, you find some low-rise, people-friendly buildings which embody architecutural values that town planners hoped would become the benchmark for the bomb-ravaged east end after the second world war.
When construction of the George Washington began, in 1927, the city was characterized by feelings of affluence and optimism — it was the era that produced the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel; the Holland Tunnel had recently been completed.
Further testimony to the neighborhood's affluence is offered at the Henry Street Settlement, whose buildings include three adjoining landmark Federal houses at 263 to 267 Henry Street, near Montgomery Street.
"It's a statement about the affluence of America," said William Rawn, a Boston architect who is building residence halls, many of them with single bedrooms, at Northeastern University here in Boston, Trinity College in Hartford, Amherst, Swarthmore and Grinnell College, in Iowa.
It's not the first social network that caters to wealthy people only, and it won't be the last: Affluence is the latest company to take a crack at building a community site exclusively for the rich and famous among us instead of the petty riff-raff that make up the bulk of internet users.
