For More on the Special Elections: • Staten Island’s North Shore •Central Brooklyn |
UPDATE: Republican Lou Tobacco won the special election with 70 percent of the counted vote. The unofficial returns did not include any votes cast for write-in candidate Todd Tabacco. Turnout was reportd to be low.
Voters on Staten Island’s South Shore may do a double take when they enter the voting both on Tuesday. The same candidate – John Mulia – appears on the Democratic, Conservative and Independence party lines. He is facing Lou Tobacco, who must content himself with one ballot line – the Republican one. But given the generally Republican politics of this district, that one line could be enough.
John Mulia is a registered member of the Conservative Party. But he says that, if elected, he will caucus with the Assembly’s Democratic majority “for the benefit of the people in the district.” The South Shore has had Republicans representing it in the Assembly for 25 years, Mulia said, and because of the way Albany works, has not been able to get its fair share from the state.
Traffic is the issue of biggest concern in the district, according to John Mulia, with residents of the area having among the longest commutes in the nation. He would work to get road improvements and repairs and would like to see another rail line on the island “up and running.”
On other issues, John Mulia is concerned that Staten Island will not get its “fair share” of the increase in state money for education in New York City. He also cited issues involving senior citizens as a priority and said he would work for laws to bring down the cost of medications for older residents.
Lou Tobacco is a pharmaceutical sales representative. If elected, he has said he would try to reduce taxes in the state and get a veterans cemetery built on Staten Island. In an effort to give the outnumbered Republicans in the Assembly a bit more clout, he would work to allow the ranking minority member of an Assembly committee to call hearings. Tobacco wants to see the death penalty restored in New York and would crack down further on sexual predators, including requiring repeat offenders to wear tracking devices.
But beyond concern about education, congestion and crime, the question of where Lou Tobacco has lived has emerged as a campaign issue. He lives in the district now – and was raised on Staten Island – but between January and June 2006, he reportedly lived in Arizona. The state constitution requires legislators to live in their districts for at least a full calendar year before the election. Tobacco, a former president of the Totenville Civic Association, said that he feared being laid off from his job in New York and went to work in Arizona for a while. But he didn't like the Southwest and was "homesick," so returned after several months.
A third candidate – Todd Tabacco (with an a) has entered the race as a write-in candidate. If he wins, Tabacco, who works for a financial firm, would be the first write-in candidate ever elected to the New York State Assembly.
Â
The Atlantic Yards megaproject proposed by Forest City Ratner in Brooklyn had all the appearances of a “done deal” when it was first announced almost three years ago. Brooklyn’s biggest developer boasted solid support from Governor George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. Basketball fans applauded the plan to build an arena for the Nets, the professional team owned by developer Bruce Ratner. And many advocates for affordable housing cheered Forest City Ratner’s pledge that half of the new housing packed into 16 giant towers would be “affordable.”
The general feeling among Manhattan-centric urban policy pundits seemed to be that Atlantic Yards was just a harmless piece of Manhattan-like development opposed only by a small group of narrow-minded Brooklyn brownstoners, and that, as Errol Louis of the Daily News has written more than once, the opponents would do best “to accept the reality of the plan.”
Indeed, in the beginning of March, the New York Post, in an article entitled Ratner Readies Wrecking Ball, reported that the developer plans to demolish 12 buildings, on Pacific and Dean Streets, and Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenues, “as he revs up efforts to being building his $4 billion Atlantic Yards project.”
But a new film, Brooklyn Matters, uncovers a deepening vein of displeasure with the project that spans a wide political spectrum, in Manhattan as well as Brooklyn, among community leaders and urban planners. In addition to the “resignation and bitter apathy” referred to by Brooklyn resident Jennifer Egan in her recent New York Times op-ed essay, there seems to be a warehouse of active resistance and also a minefield of new obstacles. Three new lawsuits against the project will tie the project up for a while. The Spitzer administration is looking closely at this and a host of other Pataki deals that left mushrooming public costs. Critics are attempting to expose the affordable housing package as something of a front for what they say is really a massive luxury project. And now community groups are working on expanding their own plan for the area that sets aside Ratner’s vision.
The film Brooklyn Matters was produced and directed by independent filmmaker Isabel Hill, who a decade ago produced a documentary entitled Made in Brooklyn, which took a critical look at the city government’s planning and zoning policies that undermine productive industrial areas. For the new documentary, Hill says she had hoped to include spokespeople for Forest City Ratner, but the developer did not respond to multiple requests for interviews. However, Bertha Lewis of ACORN, a housing advocacy group that supports the project, is interviewed in the film, as are other supporters, and many are shown in action at heated public forums. The urban planners and architects who voice their opinions include former city Planning Commissioner Ron Shiffman, architectural critic Paul Goldberger, and me.
Despite the impression that attitudes toward the project split along racial lines -- blacks supporting it and whites opposing it -- the film makes clear there are eloquent people of color in the opposition, from activist Bob Law to Councilmembers Letitia James and Charles Barron.
There are in fact unexpected harmonies among the diverse opposition chorus shown in the film. Julia Vitullo-Martin of the conservative Manhattan Institute (director of its Center for Rethinking Development) lashes out at the enormous density of the project and its failure to connect with the surrounding neighborhoods. Kent Barwick of the liberal Municipal Art Society blasts the use of eminent domain to transfer ownership of viable developed properties to a single large developer. Both left and right now seem to agree that this project is too large and dense (it would be the densest in the city), and that state officials are both abusing the government’s condemnation powers by using them to favor one powerful developer, and overriding the city’s normal public review process.
What this has meant is that the only opportunity for local residents and businesses to comment publicly on the project was through the environmental review process, mandated under state law. But this review was found in a report by the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, a coalition of over 40 local groups, to be “insufficient in both process and substance.” There were only two public hearings -- one in October of 2005 on what is called the “Scope of Analysis” for the environmental review (basically the outline of potential project impacts that would have to be analyzed), and one to receive public comments on the “Draft Environmental Impact Statement,” over 4,000 pages of detailed, highly technical analysis, which was held in August of last year, when many residents were on vacation and community boards were in recess. Those who missed that public hearing may find both entertaining and shocking the footage in Brooklyn Matters, in which hordes of hard hats from throughout the region shout down requests by neighborhood leaders for more time to evaluate the project’s impacts, and ACORN’s troops joined the chorus.
Despite many appeals for changes to the plan -- including calls by many project supporters for a reduction in size -- this did not happen.
For those on the liberal side of the spectrum, the developer’s promise of 50 percent affordable housing was certainly a most compelling one. No private developer has ever made such a huge pledge. It is understandable why ACORN, one of the largest advocates for affordable housing in the nation, would accept the developer’s invitation to sign a contract -- a Community Benefits Agreement -- that promised its support in exchange for the developer’s commitment.
Michelle de la Uz, director of Fifth Avenue Committee, one of Brooklyn’s largest non-profit affordable housing developers, tells Brooklyn Matters how, within weeks of the announcement of the benefits agreement, the developer added more residential units to their project in a way that reduced the percentage of affordable units to about 30 pecent. Then the developer defined “affordable” so liberally that it included a huge swath of “moderate-income” households that would be making far more than the median income for Brooklyn. In fact, less than 14 percent of the apartments in the proposed development would be affordable to households making less than the median income.
Opposition groups have filed one lawsuit and two more are lined up and ready to go. This may create more problems even should Forest City Ratner eventually prevail in court, since “market timing” may force the developer to alter its plan or postpone its completion indefinitely. Landscape Architect Laurie Olin, who was hired to make the project’s interior courtyards look as if they were public open space, recently told the New York Observer he thought it could be 20 years before the project is completed, twice as long as projected.
Forest City Ratner has requested permits to demolish buildings it owns in the area, even though it cannot build the first phase of the project, including the arena, as long as the project is tied up in court. Demolition might help Forest City Ratner create “facts on the ground” that favor eventual implementation of the project. But the history of giant urban renewal projects like this one is telling. New York City, including downtown Brooklyn, has had many large urban renewal areas that remained vacant eyesores for decades after they were cleared for redevelopment. Forty years after the clearance of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Urban Renewal Area in Boerum Hill, the vacant sites are just now being built on.
Meanwhile, neighborhood residents are also thinking long-term. The UNITY Plan (which stands for Understanding, Imagining and Transforming the Yards) was developed three years ago as an alternative plan after workshops sponsored by Councilmember Letitia James and coordinated by architect Marshall Brown. Brown, along with Ron Shiffman and I, are convening a series of workshops to update and expand the plan, so that it covers areas that are being blighted as Forest City Ratner buys and vacates properties. To the people attending the UNITY Workshops, Brooklyn matters, and nothing is a done deal until it is done.
Tom Angotti is professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.
Four seemingly disconnected announcements made news in housing in February. First, the city announced it would open the waiting list for Section 8 that has been closed for well over a decade. The long lines at housing authority offices for applications reflect the great need for housing help; the 22,000 vouchers will not come close to addressing it. Second, Starrett City, a housing complex in Brooklyn built with financing provided by the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, was sold for $1.3 billion (the sale is not final and requires state and federal approval). That was barely a month after Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, a large complex of mainly rent stabilized apartments set a record for real estate sales when it fetched $5.4 billion. Third, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced she would pursue a tax credit for renters and passage of a new law to allow tenants to sue their landlords in housing court for harassment.
The fourth announcement came from the MacArthur Foundation and sort of links all of these things together: The foundation will commit $25 million over five years to finance housing research – specifically aimed at shifting the debate on housing. The research would help advocates, policymakers, politicians and others develop a larger understanding of why housing is so important –--and, consequently, why public policy on housing requires a new sense of urgency.
In 1968, an advisory panel to then president Richard Nixon recommended creating a housing allowance program that would help low-income families pay their rents. It seemed a risky idea to many people. Among many concerns, one stood out: It would drive up rents – landlords would just raise rents if government helped people pay.
But the Experimental Housing Allowance Program was a success. “There was a lot of debate at the time,” said Ingrid Ellen, director of the Furman Institute for Real Estate at New York University. But research showed “there wasn’t much of an effect on housing prices. That research is probably the best research out there to this day, and it paved the way for the Section 8 program.”
Doing more research is critical to understand just how housing impacts people’s lives and to develop new housing policy. And now is the time to undertake new research, said MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton when he announced the foundation would spend $25 million to fund research on housing issues over the next five years.
“It seems to me that a policy â€window’ is opening,” Fanton told an avid audience when he announced the new initiative. “It is easier now than at any time in recent memory to imagine that critical financial and regulatory barriers to preserving and improving affordable housing will be overcome.”
More research would help everyone working on housing issues modify existing efforts and design innovative new approaches, Fanton said. It probably was not coincidental that he announced the initiative in New York City, and he pointed to the city’s housing acquisition fund, $200 million raised by the city to help finance affordable housing efforts, as a model new approach. The MacArthur Foundation has committed $5 million to the fund.
But the foundation’s effort is aiming for a more profound shift in how people think about housing.
“We need a new theory about how housing matters, and why it is a critical path toward other individual and community improvements to which we aspire,” Fanton said. “And that new theory must be more than a field of dreams; it must be built on high quality research that yields evidence to persuade across the political spectrum.
“Better and more knowledge about housing as it relates to schools, jobs, health, and economic growth will significantly change attitudes among policymakers and the public at large.”
The foundation’s announcement thrilled researchers.
“That’s outstanding, very exciting news,” said Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania, whose research is frequently cited in housing policy circles. Last year, when the city and state announced the third New York/New York agreement to build supportive housing, Culhane’s research showing that such housing is very cost effective was a persuasive piece.
“Housing is one of the most understudied issues in social policy,” Culhane continued. “It’s primarily an issue of resources. Health care and medicine has the National Institutes of Health, the physical sciences have the National Science Foundation, but the social sciences have very limited resources within NSF.”
Culhane went on to say that although the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development finances housing research, most of its research budget is eaten up producing its annual housing vacancy survey.
Research is critical, Ellen said, to not only rethinking housing policy but to making current housing policy efficient and effective.
“Research can only point our policies to be more effective,” she said. “It’s almost irresponsible to spend money on policies that don’t have the effects we think they’ll have.”
The MacArthur Foundation is clearly seeking to push research of the connections between housing and family and community health, broadly speaking, but there are lots of areas ripe for study, a panel including the city’s housing commissioner said after Fanton’s remarks.
“There has been a fundamental shift in the challenge of abandonment to the challenge of affordability,” said Shaun Donovan, the city’s housing commissioner. “The challenge for housing policy has more and more shifted away from this problem of urban revitalization to the fundamental challenge of housing affordability. The more the research can be focused on that, the better.”
“We don’t really know much about the role of housing in the lives of children and families and communities,” said Sandee Newman, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “To put it another way, we don’t really know how improving housing carries with it benefits above and beyond the value of the housing itself.”
Newman divided housing research into five categories:
“The good news is that in the last ten to 20 years we’ve started to build that base of knowledge,” she said. “The bad news is we have a long way to go.”
Given the financial means, researchers pointed to a number of areas for new research efforts.
“There are lots of areas where we could use a lot more evidence in ways that we could shape policy,” Ellen said. For example, “we don’t really what drives segregation” in housing.
“We’d like to know if we just provided someone with a voucher with housing location assistance, maybe we can open up new worlds to them…. We have no idea if (location assistance) makes any difference.”
The MacArthur Foundation and many researchers are clearly interested in knowing more about the fundamental impact housing has on families, children and entire communities. How important, for example, is housing to a child’s success at school? Does housing stability affect people’s health?
“That is precisely the direction it should go in because we all know from a common sense perspective that we wouldn’t live just anywhere or have our children randomly assigned to neighborhoods,” Culhane said. “We know intuitively that place matters. But social research has not really figured out how to elucidate those impacts.”
And Culhane said the dramatic impacts on policy that the foundation is seeking are clearly possible.
“Behavior is a function of the person and the environment, but virtually all the research today has been on the person and not the environment,” he said. “And I think that’s partly because the tools and the data we have have been very limited.
“Part of what the challenge will be for this new generation of research will be identifying new types of data, new methods of measurement and things that are longitudinal in nature that show impact over a lifetime.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â