Walter Thabit

Alum 2001

Walter Thabit was a leader among city planners in pressing cities to build low-cost housing and encourage diversity in blighted areas, a movement now known as advocacy planning. Walter approached urban planning as an activist. Projects should benefit a site’s residents, he argued, not politicians or developers.

Working as a consultant and offering his technical skills, he helped members of more than a dozen communities in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania create their own development plans in response to city redevelopment proposals that threatened to displace many residents.

For example, when New York City’s Committee on Slum Clearance set its sights on Cooper Square on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, neighborhood residents turned to Walter for help in drawing up a plan that they succeeded in persuading the city to adopt in 1970. More than 60 percent of the apartments that have since been built or renovated under the plan are low-income units, according to the Cooper Square Committee. In the late 1960’s he was New York City’s planner for East New York, Brooklyn, and he later described the area’s challenges in his book How East New York Became a Ghetto.

Walter died in 2005.