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Taking A.C.T.I.O.N. at The Point


Joseph Gilmore is what they call a “Point Baby.” He started out at the Point Community Development Corporation in 1996, when he was 10 years old. He participated in the art programs at first and later went on to do photography and community work.

Today, Gilmore, in his early 20s, is an aspiring photographer and credits The Point. “It gave me an opportunity to learn certain things that weren’t available in public school and urban areas of the city. With photography I learned my own business, gaining clientele through networking,” he said. Now, Gilmore volunteers at The Point, having gone from youth participant to adult organizer.

The Point is based in Hunt's Point. Even though that area of the South Bronx is going through a remarkable renewal, there is still ample room for economic and social improvement. In 1994, Maria Torres, Paul Lipson, Mildred Ruiz and Steven Sapp founded The Point and brought a new vision to community development in the Bronx. They wanted to treat program participants not as receivers of "aid" or "charity" but as active agents of change within their community. After 13 years, The Point is an integral part of the Hunt’s Point community and its renewal.

The founders’ vision can be seen in “Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood” (A.C.T.I.O.N.), a teen community leadership program. While many after-school programs keep youths off the streets by occupying them with activities like sports and music, A.C.T.I.O.N. involves them in issues that affect their lives. This helps them deal with the negative influences they may encounter and enables them to be activists, who not only recognize problems but work to find solutions. For example, instead of just grousing about not having enough parks, they find out how they can create new parks.

Conflicts and Resolutions

Police in the Schools:
A uniformed presence has made schools safer – but at what cost?

Hanging Out and Hurting Business:
Teens on the street scare away customers.

Breaking the Cycle of Violence:
A program in East New York tries to stop the mayhem by helping young people respect themselves.

Taking A.C.T.I.O.N. at The Point:
In Hunts Point, young people do not just complain about problems in their community, they try to solve them.

Cutbacks After School:
Reductions in government funds will force shutdowns of programs that keep young people active and occupied.

Recruitment is done by word of mouth. Program participants, about 20 each year, come from all parts of the Bronx and even from Westchester. “Any after-school program is self selecting. Students with the ambition to dedicate extra time to something like this after school are already ahead," said Adam Liebowitz, director of A.C.T.I.O.N. But he said that four of the young people involved did leave high school and are now trying to get their GEDs.

From his time as a participant at ACTION, from 2001 to 2004, Gilmore remembers one project especially. In 2002-2003, the group worked to help clean up South Bronx brownfields, contaminated lots of land that had to be cleaned before it would be fit for further use. A.C.T.I.O.N. participants helped document the location and previous uses of these lots in order to spur their redevelopment. Today, he says, Barretto Point Park and Hunt’s Point Riverside Parks exist partly because of A.C.T.I.O.N.’s efforts. “I actually remember documenting both of those parks,” Gilmore said.

What is now Barretto Point Park, a hidden gem on the Hunt’s Point waterfront, was previously occupied by an asphalt plant, then remained unused for many years before the Department of Parks and Recreation acquired the lot from the Department of Environmental Protection in 2001. Hunt’s Point Riverside Park is the first new Bronx River access point in the South Bronx in over 60 years and one of only four canoe launch points in all of the Bronx. It used to be occupied by a fur-dying plant.

This year, A.C.T.I.O.N. have been fighting to stop the city from building a new 2,000-bed jail at Oak Point. In collaboration with the American Lung Association and City Councilmember Joel Rivera, A.C.T.I.O.N. has also been working to pass a measure that would prohibit the sale of flavored tobaccos in the city. The attorneys general of 38 states, including New York, had reached an agreement with RJ Reynolds in October 2006 in which the company would restrict its sales of flavored tobacco products. Under the agreement, RJ Reynolds could not market cigarettes in flavors such as Twistaberry and Mochalime that were plainly targeted at kids.

But then RJ Reynolds came out with a new line of Camel Signature Blends, a “cool” new breed of Camel cigarettes, with richly colored packaging and suave-sounding flavors like “Frost” and “Infused.” In response, Intro 433 would ban the sale of any flavor cigarettes besides menthol in New York City.

As long as their efforts benefit the community, A.C.T.I.O.N. does not care if they help politicians as well. “If it’s mutually beneficial, if it’s a cause that we’re championing and we both look better then fine,” said Leibowitz.

Generally, the people A.C.T.I.O.N. members encounter – educators, other people in the community, politicians -- react well to the teenagers. “They love it,” Leibowitz said, adding “when you see youth doing it, it gives you pause and makes you really consider something.” And, Leibowitz says, the program can benefit both the young people and the politicians. "If it's mutually beneficial, if it's a cause that we're championing and we both look better then, fine," he said. "We won't just do it for no reason."

 

Programs for Safer Homes


Unbeknownst to many residents, the basement of the building at 312 Manhattan Avenue in West Harlem was the site of cockfights and a marijuana lab, complete with a secret growing room with dozens of plants. Amid rumors, confusion and innuendo, residents finally learned of the goings on from each other and from the media. Ultimately the building’s superintendent at the time, who allegedly had been connected to the illegal activities, lost his job.

The people who lived at 312 Manhattan Avenue could have acted earlier to curb the fights and drug use. At the next tenants’ association meeting, community affairs officer Victor Peña of the 28th police precinct told the residents of how they can work for improved safety in the buildings.

A variety of programs exist to help New Yorkers keep their apartment buildings safe. Such programs are not, of course, exclusive to Harlem, or only to buildings or neighborhoods with particular kinds of problems. They are available to buildings throughout the five boroughs, to condominiums and co-ops as well as rental buildings, and are in place in all 343 New York City Housing Authority developments. While buildings that have been the site of illegal activity get preference for the programs, other buildings can get help as well.

But like the residents of 312 Manhattan Avenue, many tenants are not aware of the assistance or do not know how to get access to it. There is no centralized place for New Yorkers to get this kind of information. And many buildings do not have enough residents who are willing to put in the time and effort to make things happen. It takes an incredible amount of energy and persistence to clean up some buildings, but, according to observers who have seen buildings once written off, even by their residents, turn around, the effort can certainly pay off. Civil libertarians, though, stress that these anti crime campaigns can infringe on residents’ rights and lead to false arrests – and worse.

Changing a Building

The Manhattan Avenue affair is relatively mild when compared to other area buildings that Officer Peña has seen turn around.

“One particular building that comes to mind,” Peña says, was on West 123 Street. It had only four tenants in a building with 40 apartments. And Peña recalls, “Two of those tenants were legal tenants. The other two were not.” The building was infested not only with rodents, but with crack dens, heroin and prostitution. There were several cases of people dying from overdoses in the building, and the garbage piles in the back of the building, Peña says, were “five or six feet deep.” The owner had been given several warnings to clean up the building but didn’t comply.

In early 2006, a man fell off the roof to his death while trying to get into one of the apartments. This incident and the subsequent investigation allowed the police to put together a MARCH operation: Multiple Agency Response to Community Hotspots. Peña coordinated the three-month effort, which eventually involved seven or eight agencies, including the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Department of Sanitation, and the Department of Buildings.

Their efforts got results, Peña says. The tenants were all legally evicted. The owner, who was cited for thousands of dollars in violations, now has new tenants and a building that has been cleaned up both literally and figuratively. The effects extend to the entire block and beyond.

“By turning that particular building around,” Peña says, “we wiped out about 75 percent of crime in that neighborhood.”

What Help Is Available

Government agencies offer a number of programs to improve and protect apartment buildings. These include: --Trespass Affidavit Program: Provides patrols within buildings by uniformed members of New York Police Department. --Graffiti Free NYC Graffiti Removal Program: Run by the mayor’s office, removes graffiti, free of charge, by using solvents, painting over it, or by using high-pressure technology. The owner/managing agent/or custodian of a building must enroll the building in the program. --Narcotics Eviction Program: Targets drugs dealers operating out of private apartments. Upon establishing that an illegal activity is taking place, the District Attorney’s Office can demand the landlord evict all people who knew or should have known of the illegal activity. While the program provides assistance to the landlord, if a landlord fails to act, the District Attorney’s Office will step in. In general, private buildings where an investigation into illegal narcotic activity has lead to an arrest or search warrant are supposed to be enrolled in the program. --Landlord Training: Will provide a series of workshops on how landlords can improve the value of their properties.

Pro and Cons of Police Access

Along with providing needed help to tenants and landlords, building safety programs raise a number of troublesome issues, including the question of police access.

So-called vertical patrols grant local police permission to enter a given building. Typically, the officers have keys to the buildings and can patrol the building from “rooftop to basement” at any time.

“Anyone not authorized to be in the building is arrested,” Pena says. That includes people who are not tenants, workers, or guests of tenants. “You pretty much have a gut feeling for the guys who aren’t where they’re supposed to be.”

Of course, gut feelings can sometimes be wrong. Timothy Stansbury, 19, was fatally shot by an officer on just such a patrol in January 2004. According to published reports, Officer Richard Neri and another officer attempted to open the door to go downstairs at the same time Stansbury and friends, unarmed, were opening the door to get to the roof of their Bedford Stuyvesant building. When Stansbury pushed open the door to the roof just as Neri pulled it, the officer fired without identifying himself of issuing a warning.

Sainsbury’s death was a particularly tragic incident, but the patrols pose other dangers as well. “For many years, we have been concerned that law-abiding building residents and visitors are being falsely arrested in vertical patrols,” says Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “While having the police in buildings can promote public safety, overly aggressive patrols run the risk of creating unnecessary tension between the police and community.”

Others argue, though, that the police presence can prevent more tragedies than it creates. Take, for example, the building on West 111th Street that Bonita Lloyd Nettles has called home since 1988. In the early years, she recalls, “it was basically kind of Grand Central Station in the building. There were all of those crackheads and crack dealers running up around the block making much ado about nothing. Outsiders had keys to the building.

“We had no intercom, no secure front door, and drug activity from basement to rooftop,” Nettles continues. “Windows needed to be replaced in public hallways and apartments. There was structural damage within the apartments and in the public areas---all of that I was able to address.”

Part of the problem, she said, sprang from people who worked in the building and so a sense of resigned hopelessness prevailed. “When you have people who live and work in the building cooperating with outsiders, it’s extremely difficult to get rid of those people,” she said. The super at the time “ruled by the threat of physical force” and tried to make sure the building did not change.

Finally, Nettles and her husband confronted the problems on multiple fronts. They sent out letters, made phone calls, attended meetings -- and had their tires slashed in apparent reprisal. But they persevered for 15 years. “Whatever program was available, we made sure we were involved in,” says Nettles, who was a member of her local community board in the early 1990s.

Finding the right programs was key. Nettles got the information through community board meetings and the monthly community meetings with the local precinct. .

Today the building is much improved. One visible sign? The graffiti that once defaced the interior and exterior of the building is gone. Before, Nettles says, “The graffiti inside and outside was unbelievable. That helped to make it easier for the drug dealers to remain there because the graffiti is used as a form of communication.”

In taking care of this and other problems, “I never accepted no for an answer,” Nettles says.

If people like Nettles work in tandem with the programs, agencies, and officials, little by little, things can change, the police department’s Peña says. “We have had numerous buildings in Harlem, that, because of these programs—the transition has been phenomenal,” he says.

“If people want to enroll in these programs or more, they should reach out to their local precinct and get in touch with the community affairs officer or ask for the community policing unit,” Peña says. The efforts are clearly worth it. The difference in Nettles’ building, she says “is night and day. You wouldn’t recognize it.”

Brenda Tavakoli is a licensed real estate agent and consultant in Manhattan.  

Albee Square: When the Mall's No Longer Home


To strangers unfamiliar with Downtown Brooklyn’s history, the Albee Square Mall at the intersection of Fulton Street and DeKalb Avenue appears unimpressive. But to locals, the mall is a landmark. People remember how early hip-hop artists like Biz Markie hung out there in the 1980s. Biz Markie even had a song about the Albee Square Mall in which he proclaimed, “So when I come in the Mall, and then I start to roam, you wouldn't think it's a store, you would think it's my home.” Older generations reminisce about the ornate Albee Square Theater, which was demolished in 1977 and replaced by the mall.

Brooklyn’s African-American community has a collective memory of this lively slice of downtown. But now this sense of shared past is threatened by a new development proposal for the site that would remake what is now an urban, discount-oriented mall into a sleek new tower with upscale retail and apartments.

The latest vision for the Albee Square site is just one of a slew of new development proposals prompted by the Downtown Brooklyn Plan (in pdf), a major rezoning approved by the city in 2004. Since then, development downtown has proceeded on a site-by-site basis, and so have the struggles to ensure that it happens equitably. When the proposal for the Albee Square site emerged early this year, advocacy groups and locals rushed to obtain information about who owns the land, what policies are shaping its future, and how purported benefits or drawbacks could potentially be distributed among different stakeholders.

The 2004 rezoning sharply raised land values by allowing much higher structures to replace the mostly low-rise buildings typical of Brooklyn’s 19th and early 20th-century past. This has encouraged landlords to begin demolishing swaths of older buildings in order to assemble parcels of land large enough for high-rise towers. To some people, this may appear as simply market forces at work, producing winners and losers. But the city’s decision to rezone in 2004 abetted the process, accelerating developers’ plans to transform Downtown Brooklyn from a “marginal commercial environment” into a 24/7 hub of upscale housing and consumption.

RESHAPING DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

The principal goal of the rezoning was to encourage office construction to help New York City compete with New Jersey for back office jobs. This was nothing new. In the 1980s, the move to attract investment bank back-office jobs to Downtown Brooklyn led to construction of MetroTech, the controversial suburban-style office complex built by Forest City Ratner.

Companies that made commitments to MetroTech received substantial subsidies. For instance, what was then Chase Manhattan was awarded $51,000 in tax breaks for every employee it moved to Brooklyn. Critics charge the MetroTech did not generate jobs for people in nearby public housing and that the subsidies were excessive or unnecessary.

Twenty years later, the initial fear that the Downtown Brooklyn Plan would repeat the mistakes of MetroTech has shifted. Amid a boom in luxury housing, community leaders are worried because developers are constructing condos instead of offices in the area. Condos, once they are built, do not bring jobs.

For its part, the city points out that the Downtown Brooklyn Plan was designed to encourage both residential and commercial development in a “24/7” community. According to this line of reasoning, more people living downtown in luxury condos will make the area more attractive to business, and, in turn, drive the creation of office buildings.

Undoubtedly eager to deflect attention away from critics’ accusation that the Downtown Brooklyn Plan is failing, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a private group that works closely with the city, has begun touting downtown as a new magnet for the “creative class,” including media, publishing, design, and entertainment workers. The partnership’s latest rhetoric also emphasizes “retail diversity.” A recent brochure released by the developer of Albee Square touts the project as the “center of the new, redefined downtown Brooklyn,” promising “a retail experience that will finally attract the affluent surrounding populations of Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, DUMBO, Park Slope and others.”

Groups like Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, or FUREE, contend that such a vision ignores the needs of the African-Americans and the Caribbean immigrants who currently patronize the shops and public spaces around Fulton Mall. These communities, FUREE argues, will be priced out of the housing market and are unlikely to be hired by corporate business — even if financial offices do move to the area. The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, with the city’s blessing, is reshaping Downtown Brooklyn at their expense, FUREE argues, deliberately paving the way for affluent newcomers unlikely to frequent downtown’s bustling crossroads of working-class social and commercial life.

THE FIGHT FOR THE ALBEE SQUARE MALL SITE

In the minds of many community and policy groups, such as FUREE and Good Jobs New York, the Albee Square Mall deal presented a unique opportunity for the city to redress the shortcomings of the rezoning because it rests on a piece of city-owned land.

The framework of the deal was set by the New York City Economic Development Corporation. In 2001, developer Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities purchased the ground lease on the Albee Square property from Forest City Ratner for $25 million. Under the terms of the ground lease, the leaseholder makes regular payments to the city, while the city retains ownership of the land. After the 2004 rezoning inflated the value of the ground lease, Sitt decided to sell. The current buyer, a development consortium consisting of the White Plains-based Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners and two smaller entities, agreed to purchase the ground lease from Sitt for $120 million.

Because the deal involved a lease agreement on a piece of city-owned property, a special public hearing was required before the developer could move forward. The poorly publicized hearing was rescheduled three times, finally taking place on May 25. The lack of notice made it difficult for community groups to organize their constituents. At the hearing, stakeholders were presented with a deal that had already been set without them at the table.

One proposed amendment to the lease agreement involved the terms of the purchase option for the land. During his tenure as leaseholder, Sitt had the option to purchase the land from the city at fair market value. Under the new terms of the lease, the current buyer can purchase the land from the city in 25 years for a drastically reduced price of $20 million.

FUREE and other groups argue that the city threw away what remaining bargaining chips it had by failing to demand more concessions from Sitt. For example, the city could have kept the purchase option for the land at fair market value. This could have let the city hold on to precious land or receive the land’s real value. That, in turn, would have generated money to reinvest into the community for more housing, workforce development, a requirement for living wages in all jobs generated by new development, or compensation for the small businesses that have held down the Albee Square Mall and are now facing displacement.

Instead, after first increasing the value of Sitt’s ground lease through the rezoning, the city, with the Albee deal, allowed Sitt to walk away with the capital. Now, Sitt has funds to put toward major development elsewhere, including Coney Island, where he already owns a vast amount of land, and where he plans to build a glitzy resort.

Another proposed amendment to the lease agreement gives the developer an exemption on PILOT payments, which are similar to property taxes, in return for the builder providing that 20 percent of the apartments be priced for moderate-income residents. But under a program to encourage housing construction, now awaiting Governor Eliot Spitzer’s signature, the developer would have been likely to build these comparatively less expensive homes anyway.

The new developers plan to replace the current structure at Albee Square with a 1.6-million-square-foot building, and are receiving $3.2 million in breaks on their city and state sales tax to subsidize the construction of 125,000 square feet of new office space. In addition, the developers plan a mall of about 475,000 square feet, and 650 apartments. At this time there are no further official opportunities for the public to comment on the project, and, barring any future obstacles, it will break ground in 2008.

While not opposed to more office space downtown, Good Jobs New York criticizes the use of subsidies for its construction, arguing that the city could have avoided them through a more creative approach to the rezoning. Instead, the city tied its own hands, forcing itself into a position in which subsidies are necessary in order to accomplish its economic development goals.

If the city was really serious about equitable development on its own land, it could have used a range of tactics at its disposal. For instance, in one of the more dramatic alterative scenarios, the city could have reclaimed the land from Sitt using eminent domain (which is already being used on other properties downtown), initiated a Request for Proposals process to generate ideas for the site and thereby created opportunity for more public input. FUREE was one group fighting for the expanded possibilities that might have arisen from such a scenario.

FUREE continues to press its idea for the Albee Square area, working to retain Brooklyn’s economic and cultural character. In its view, the Albee Square deal represents the city’s role in helping to accelerate the gentrification of Downtown Brooklyn, creating a domino effect that will replace one class of people with another. “It’s fat cats getting fatter, that’s all it is,” says FUREE board member Beverly Corbin.

Allison Lirish Dean is a journalist and urban planner, and is currently producing and co-directing, with Kelly Anderson, a documentary film about the effects of the 2004 rezoning on Fulton Mall.

 



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