In a city with its share of eccentrics, Coney Island's annual Mermaid Parade is like an early-summer extravaganza: a chance for people of a creative and competitive bent to one-up each other while everyone else revels in how wonderfully strange New York City can get. This year's parade was no different. A 10-year old girl navigated the Boardwalk on stilts while a bearded man in a wedding dress, a fellow in a giant lobster suit, and assorted mermaids, pirates and sea monsters watched from below.
Most — but not all — of the attendees at a Department of City Planning meeting the following Tuesday had changed out of their parade costumes. The meeting was held to gather public comment on plans for the area's much-discussed redevelopment. A animated handful of Coney enthusiasts spoke against a controversial change to the city's earlier zoning proposal for the area. Mermaid Parade queen Savitiri D. deemed the event so important that she staged a hunger strike in a Surf Avenue storefront during the three days between the parade and the meeting.
Almost everyone who spoke agreed that the historic seaside amusement area is in need of radical change. The question is what those changes will entail and how much of the area's unique character will -- and should -- remain.
The latest controversy is over whether the city is giving developer Joel Sitt's Thor Equities enough room to construct a major amusement park — or whether the city and the developer hope to crowd out amusements with large-scale retail.
In 2005, Thor Equities announced ambitious plans for a part of the city that has been notoriously difficult to redevelop: Coney Island's century-old amusement zone. The victim of decades of decline, it went from being the home of Luna Park, Steeplechase and Dreamland to an economically flagging neighborhood dotted with public housing and high-rise apartments. Sitt's plans called for a major turnaround fueled by an indoor waterpark, hotels, up-market retail and new rides. He is gamblig that visitors' will trek to the fringes of Brooklyn for a Las Vegas-style, year-round entertainment district.
The project generated even more controversy in June when the Department of City Planning announced a revised version of a zoning plan first put forward in November of last year. Both the original and revised versions of the city's plan zoned the northern and western sections of Coney Island for mixed residential and retail uses. Meanwhile, the eastern side of Coney Island—the core area between the Parachute Jump and the Cyclone—would be redeveloped as a massive entertainment center, with new rides, a steel roller coaster, a waterpark and a hotel. Landmarks like the Parachute Jump, the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel would be preserved while the boarded-up Childs' Restaurant and the historic B&B Carousell and Shore Theatre would be renovated and reopened.
The city would take over the land that currently serves as the site of Astroland and would use the property for privately owned rides. The placement of the rides on public parkland would insure that the area remain an amusement park. A long-awaited community center and the expansion of parkland on the southern end of the amusement area were also incorporated into the plan.
The city's zoning plan intends to preserve the amusement area "in perpetuity," although the updated proposal reduced the zone mapped for open amusements from the original proposal of 15 to 9 acres (it now includes 60 acres though most of that is vacant), while expanding the section for enclosed amusements and "entertainment retail." Dick Zigun, the sideshow producer, self-appointed mayor of Coney Island and former director of the Coney Island Development Corp., sees this as a danger sign. He fears the city proposal would open the door for a "mega-mall" in an area that the earlier plan had designated for amusements only.
Zigun resigned his position as a director of the city's Coney Island Development Corp. in June shortly after the city announced the changes to its initial zoning proposal. In his resignation letter, he wrote that the revised proposal endangered the core of the amusement district. "There is almost unanimous dislike of the new plan among amusement park owners, workers and fans," wrote Zigun. "You underestimate the protests, yelling and lawsuits headed your way from a land where legit businesses call themselves Cyclone, Thunderbolt and Tornado."
At the June 25 meeting, opponents of the plan included Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, the president of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, performers from Zigun's Sideshows by the Seashore and the vice president of the American Coaster Enthusiasts. All of them claimed that a reduction of the amusement area would threaten the character of Coney Island and make it impossible to build a large, world-class amusement park. They also argued that "entertainment retail" was a backhanded attempt at building a mall, a point emphasized by the anti-consumerist Reverend Billy and others.
Coney Island Development Corp. president Lynn Kelly said that opponents of the revised plan have badly misrepresented it. According to Kelly, right now only five of the 60 acres currently zoned for amusements at Coney Island have rides and games on them, while the rest of the area lies unused. Amusements and other attractions in the "new" Coney Island would not be limited to the nine acres of outdoor rides, she said, but could extend into the eastern portion of the study area. "The fear that Coney East is going to turn into a mall is absolutely wrong," she said.
Purnama Kapoor, the Brooklyn head of the Department of City Planning says that "entertainment retail" will allow for year-round attractions that will complement outdoor amusements.
The real threat to the amusement area, in Kelly's view, comes from people dead-set against long-term change in Coney Island. She cited the anti-development attitudes that led opponents to cheer when pictures of vacant lots were displayed during a city planning presentation. This could be Coney Island's best chance, Kelly said, with the Bloomberg administration, Sitt and much of the community all lined up to support development. If the plan falls apart or Thor, Coney Island's largest landowner, gets impatient with the opposition, she said, the developer could sell its property or lobby the city to allow housing in the core area.
If that happened, it would not be the first time that a Coney landowner opted for housing instead of amusements. In 1964, developer Fred C. Trump (the father of Donald Trump) ordered the destruction of Steeplechase Park in order to construct luxury housing in the area formerly occupied by the decades-old amusement park. Although Trump could not get the area zoned for housing, he is notorious for personally throwing a brick through the glass façade of the park's beaux-arts Pavilion of Fun, leading a festive demolition of the building before it could be designated a historic landmark.
The loss of Steeplechase initiated decades of decline for an area that was once one of the country's premier amusement destinations—decades that would shrink the amusement area to 5 percent of its original size and see the demolition of other major Coney landmarks, such as the Thunderbolt roller coaster in 2000. Many in the local community support the city plan, seeing it as a means of maintaining the neighborhood's amusement zoning designation and restoring some of Coney Island's past glory.
"Nobody wants to see the loss of the amusement district" says Community Board 13 district manager Chuck Reichenthal. "The economy of the whole area can benefit as it's expanded and updated." He explained that the upcoming rezoning process has to ensure that the amusement industry has enough space to operate and that the neighborhood remains an affordable place to live and have fun.
Gregory Smithsimon, a professor of urban studies at Barnard College, agrees that any new development at Coney Island should appeal to as wide a socio-economic range as possible. Yet according to New York Magazine, Thor's prospective billion-dollar investment in Coney Island will only pay dividends if retail space and hotel rooms are rented at rates that would attract high-end retail and vacationers with disposable income.
Smithsimon believes that this speaks to one potential weakness in the Coney redevelopment. "It seems as if the only way we know how to do development these days is for upper income users," says Smithsimon. "But that's not urban planning, it's the Wild West."
According to Kelly, the development corportation has attempted to address that issue by including parks, beach improvements, a community center and affordable housing in the redevelopment project. Kapoor said redevelopment will bring overdue improvements to the neighborhood. "It will bring a new park," she says. "Right now the area mapped for the park is a parking lot for the Cyclones' stadium."
Although the rezoning has already generated heated public meetings, opinion articles and debate, the public review process that will allow developers to finally break ground on the new Coney Island has not started yet. In fact, a final zoning text has not even been formally submitted for review.
Prior to land use review, the city investigates the environmental impact of any proposed development and issues a document explaining how the project will alter its surroundings. Right now, the Coney Island redevelopment is midway through the environmental review, which should produce a final zoning text in December. After that, the local Community Board, the Department of City Planning, the City Council and the mayor's office all must approve the zoning before construction can begin.
This process takes around seven or eight months, which means that final approval could come in the spring of 2009, putting the latest of Coney's "master plans" only a few years away from becoming a reality. No matter what happens, it is likely that Coney Island will be a much different place by the project's predicted completion date in 2019.
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Question: Why it is safer to be accused of a crime and face prison, than to be a tenant facing eviction?
Answer: Because all criminal defendants have a right to legal representation and tenants do not.
It has been 45 years since the Supreme Court of the United States in Gideon v. Wainwright guaranteed defendants the right to counsel in all criminal cases. But this right has not been extended to indigent civil litigants generally, and the courts have repeatedly rejected an expanded right to counsel.
Those who can afford to pay legal fees, whether in criminal or civil cases, always have had lawyers available to them and always will. The constitutional right to counsel in civil proceedings -- whether the litigants can afford it or not -- largely has been limited to situations threatening loss of physical liberty and to certain Family Court and mental health proceedings, usually involving state action.
A resolution of the American Bar Association urges federal and state governments to provide legal counsel as a matter of right, at public expense, to low-income "persons in those categories of adversarial proceedings where basic human needs are at stake, such as those involving shelter, sustenance, safety, health or child custody, as determined by each jurisdiction." No state, however, has enacted the legislation that would create a civil right to counsel.
New York's Family Court recognition of the right to counsel is the broadest in the country, affording counsel in cases involving foster care placements and removals, and denial of paternity for example. A parent who could face jail for being delinquent in child support payments is entitled to counsel, but a custodial parent seeking child support is not.
But the biggest problem, according to Andrew Scherer, executive director of Legal Services of New York City, is in housing evictions and now foreclosures. Suffiicient legal resources, including attorneys, do not exist to meet the tenant demand for representation, and they do not exist partly because there is no right to legal representation.
There are 27,000 to 30,000 evictions in New York City every year, almost all them involving tenants without lawyers. Since there is no right to counsel, "all existing resources put together are not nearly enough to begin to meet the need," says Scherer.
"Government policy establishes when landlords can evict tenants and when they cannot. But then you need the courts, and courts cannot do their work fairly and accurately without counsel on both sides. We value fairness and without lawyers there is no due process," says Laura Abel, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law.
According to a 2001 study by the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, 98 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys in Housing Court. On the other hand 88 percent of tenants are not. But Abel cautions that it is misleading to think that means that even 12 percent are represented, because many tenants who would not have lawyers do not even try to fight their cases. In other words, a very small number of tenants have legal counsel.
Two bills introduced in the New York City seek to provide legal representation to tenants. Councilmember Rosie Mendez would create a mechanism for providing free legal services to indigent seniors (over 62) facing eviction or foreclosure. Councilmember Alan Gerson has introduced a similar bill that is not limited by age. No hearings have been scheduled or action taken on either measure. That may be partly for fiscal reasons since implementing either plan could cost $10 million to $15 million a year.
Abel believes the money would be well spent. "The city will save money or come out even," she says, "because the city loses money when people become homeless, families and children seek shelter, have increasing health problems, receive welfare, go to jail and are dislocated."
While housing is a particularly acute need now, it is not the only area where poor people need representation. "Achieving a right to counsel in civil legal matters involving human needs will correct a fundamental inequity in our justice system," says Scherer, a leading advocate for "a civil Gideon." "By virtue of being poor, you have legal problems." He estimates that one quarter of New York City's population is poor and so qualifies for free legal services in housing, welfare, unemployment, disability and similar issues.
Abel has described the situation as "an issue of democracy and fundamental fairness because a society is not truly democratic, and its justice system not truly just, when its poorest citizens have no access to the protection of its laws. When the result is that families are unable to meet their basic human needs, it can fairly be called an ongoing state of emergency."
While New York State has 147,096 lawyers, with approximately 91,727 of them in New York City (as of 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available), most represent fee-paying individual and corporate clients. Only about 500 to 700 have jobs representing the underserved population in civil cases, according to Scherer.
Although it is impossible to estimate how many would-be clients don't even try to get legal representation, Scherer says New York's Legal Services turns away four people for every one the organization is able to represent, with 225 lawyers handling 25,000 cases a year. The Legal Aid Society and some other specialized organizations serving particular constituencies based on health, jobs or other identities also provide counsel in civil cases.
While some provisions allow judges to appoint counsel when they deem it appropriate, it does not provide for those lawyers to be paid. This makes the statutes all but meaningless since judges have no way to recruit lawyers willing to work without pay.
Advocates of a "civil Gideon" appreciate help from pro bono volunteer lawyers. The volunteer help only goes so far, however. The privilege of having a license to practice law does not require lawyers to represent indigent New Yorkers or do any unpaid work.
Despite that, many large firms do provide some pro bono services, whether out of social commitments they may have or to assist recruiting, since recent law graduates may find these matters more interesting and compelling than their day-to-day assignments. The firms also are mindful of their standing with the American Bar Association and such publications as the American Lawyer, which rank firms' pro bono activity. The New York State Bar Association encourages all lawyers to devote 50 hours a year to pro bono service and offers "a certificate suitable for framing," as well as a pin and a ribbon.
Major firms may do protracted and complex litigation involving such issues as Guantanamo detainees, international trafficking in the sex trade and asylum seekers. Others may serve a particular nonprofit organization or community organization dealing with domestic violence or the arts, doing transactional work including contracts and leases.
However, these firms and their volunteer lawyers are not usually prepared to handle individual emergencies, such as evictions and foreclosures. They generally do not provide one-on-one services.
And pro bono work does not establish a right to counsel.
In 1975, the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, said, "Courts and litigants must make do with what exists and with what lies within the powers and capacity of the courts and the Bar." That remains true -- and it means that there is no meaningful right to counsel in civil cases.
Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court JusticeÂ
Public housing that works is a legacy that New York would be foolish to squander. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to build or preserve 165,000 affordable housing units by 2013 was a promising start to meeting the city's low-cost housing shortage. Even if the mayor and his successors meet this ambitious target, it will be a hollow victory should the New York City Housing Authority simultaneously fail. NYCHA, after all, still manages 178,000 public housing apartments for over 400,000 low-income tenants. This vast system is under fiscal strain, as it has been for decades. Its collapse, sometime in the future, is not out of the question.
The most frustrating dimension of NYCHA's current budget crisis is that by almost all accounts this should be the housing authority's golden age. After almost 75 years of comparative success, New York is one of a few cities in the world that has successfully managed high-rise public housing. New York's big bet on public housing has paid off.
Administrators have kept up the projects in spite of high crime, vandalism, aging structural and mechanical systems, and declining subsidies. Forty-five percent of NYCHA tenants are working families and only about 15 percent of families depend on welfare. The remaining 40 percent are seniors, veterans or the disabled. Project grounds are relatively well kept, the buildings solid if uninspiring, and the apartments impressively affordable. Billions of dollars have been spent in the last decade updating buildings, grounds and community centers.
The New York City Housing Authority is nevertheless at a crossroads. One of the secrets of New York's management since the 1930s has been solid staffing under a civil service model. Today there are still 12,500 employees, over 9,000 of whom clean and repair the authority's 2,600 buildings. These workers face major challenges maintaining housing developments at a decent standard, but by all accounts they have so far succeeded.
The down side of competent staffing is the costs generated by collective bargaining. This staff is entitled, as a result of state law, to generous pensions and regular raises. Fuel and other material costs have also skyrocketed in recent years. At the same time, federal subsidies, which comprise approximately half of the authority's annual budget, have dropped during the Bush administration. Republicans have no love for public housing, well managed or not.
As a result of these declining federal subsidies and increasing operating costs, for the past few years the authority has run an approximate 10 percent annual deficit. Annual cuts have been made in everything from staff to social programs. Administrators have eliminated 2,500 positions over the past decade. Declining subsidies within a few years will lead to even steeper cuts in the projects that could undermine tenants' basic quality of life.
The authority's recent announcement that it will close its community centers, and raise rents once again on the higher income tenants, signals the onset of serious consequences resulting from annual shortfalls. The city as a whole can scarcely afford to let its projects decline as they have in other cities. The city government, to its credit, has underwritten billions in bonds for building renovation, and until a few years ago provided an annual subsidy. State and city government, however, have had to spend little to maintain such an enormous system because the combination of federal subsidies and rents have covered most of the annual costs.
The time for procrastination by elected officials is over. Two proposals by NYCHA deserve serious consideration by the mayor and the City Council. NYCHA's request that the city government fund the community center program should be adopted. These community centers have been chronically under-funded since the 1930s because federal subsidies have only paid to build community centers rather than to staff them. Over the years NYCHA has nevertheless drawn on general operating funds to create America's most impressive system of urban community centers, one that offers both tenants and non-residents programs such as summer camp and after-school. The city government's assumption of costs for community centers would save these worthwhile services and reduce NYCHA's annual deficit by $68 million.
The end of NYCHA's annual payment to the New York City Police Department would save another $68 million dollars. This payment is the legacy of the time when NYCHA had its own internal police force; after 1995, however, the police department absorbed responsibility for NYCHA security. The NYPD Housing Bureau has become an effective crime fighting force in public housing but an argument can be made that crime control in public housing is in the interest of the city as a whole. These funds would be better spent on general maintenance by NYCHA staff rather than paying for a service, police protection, that most citizens consider their basic right. More broken elevators, for instance, as result of further staff cutbacks, would make the police's job far more difficult in towers that often reach 20 stories high.
These two actions, totaling $136 million a year, would not wipe out the entire annual deficit (estimated at $200 million for the coming fiscal year), but they would give NYCHA the financial breathing room that it needs. As a proportion of the total city budget (approximately $59 billion) $136 million is a small price to pay for the preservation of decent homes for 5 percent of the city's population.
Many New Yorkers, looking at public housing, would just like to see it disappear, but NYCHA is too big to fail quietly. Many neighborhoods will suffer if public housing falters because projects exist in every borough. Very few New Yorkers would want to live next door to crumbling projects similar to those that plagued Chicago or St. Louis.
Some housing advocates have cited anecdotal evidence of maintenance problems in some projects as evidence that the authority is already faltering, but New Yorkers don't understand what a failing project or housing authority really looks like. New York, as yet, has no project that rivals the disastrous tower blocks of Cabrini Green in Chicago or Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, which were demolished because even most poor people refused to live in them.
The housing market would also tighten should the projects fail. The loss of 180,000 apartments would certainly drive up costs for almost all renters in the city. Queensbridge Houses alone contains just over 3,000 units. Finding new accommodations for these families, perhaps by giving them vouchers, would create even more competition for existing affordable housing.
Multiply that number of families by 60 and you get some sense of the crisis the city will face should NYCHA collapse. Conservatives at think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute, who want to sell off the projects, conveniently ignore the logistical nightmare that would ensue. Most of the projects redeveloped in other cities were partially empty; New York's are full to bursting.
Finally, public housing serves as an important home for low-wage laborers in the city. As NYCHA has shifted more firmly to working families in the recent decade, the argument that projects are just for welfare tenants and thus a social liability, no longer holds true. Almost half of the families in the system have at least one working member and most of them participate in the lower end of the job market. Business leaders constantly complain about the high cost of operating here; losing public housing won't help this situation.
Preserving the authority at its current level of management will be far less costly, in both financial and social terms, than permitting its failure. Paying $136 million today will seem like a bargain in the future.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom is an associate professor and chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at the New York Institute of Technology. His new book, "Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century," is available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Â