On impulse I ended up attending the Iowa Historical Society’s showing of “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City“with a friend, and left rethinking how I’d been approaching the apartment search. In the 1960s, writer/activist Jane Jacobs squared up for a David vs. Goliath match against city developer Robert Moses.

The film centers on Moses’ proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway project, which would require bulldozing most of Greenwich Village and the neighborhood now known as SoHo. The conflict went beyond a proposed road: Moses advocated housing the poor and displaced in tall, uniform superblocks — public housing projects, later infamous in national public consciousness for crime and neglect. 

“There is no logic that can be superimposed on a city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans,” Jacobs declared. 

It’s an uplifting documentary. It also hovers on the edges of what Des Moines is grappling with — something I see glimpses of when I flip through renter’s guides of apartments.

Not only are we wrestling with how to lure a car-dependent society into walkable neighborhoods that Jacobs pushed, we also have to recognize that the neighborhoods Jacobs fought to save no longer exist at the livable price at which original residents could manage.

We may need a few more voices like hers to prevent that here at home.