On a hot summer evening in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, several tenants gathered at a community-based organization to discuss the housing conditions in which they are forced to live. “We have been living with very bad housing conditions for too long. My apartment’s bathroom does not even have a showerhead, and we have been taking baths with a bucket for over a decade,” explained MarĂa Quintanilla, a native from El Salvador who moved to Bushwick sixteen years ago.
Other tenants shared their stories as well. “Last spring, my daughter was bitten by a rat that came into our apartment through a gaping hole in the ceiling. She still has a scar from it,” said Claudia LĂłpez, also a resident of Bushwick. “Our landlord leaves the trash in the basement and refuses to fix the holes in our walls, ceilings and floors. The building that I live in has 94 housing code violations, and they are not being fixed,” Lopez continued.
Hazardous Housing Not Uncommon
Quintanilla and LĂłpez are not alone. Hundreds of thousands of low-income families in New York – many of them immigrants -- are forced to live in shockingly squalid conditions because of landlords who take advantage of lax housing code enforcement. Of all the community districts in the city, Bushwick has the greatest number of serious housing code violations and has seen an increase in housing code violations over last four years, according to the State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods 2005, recently issued by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. In 2004 alone, Bushwick had more than 184,000 serious housing code violations.
The problem seems to be getting worse. An investigation of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development by New York City’s comptroller revealed that more than half of the 250,000 violations that the agency issued went unanswered by landlords. Even worse, an estimated 40,000 violations are fraudulently claimed to be resolved each year.
Rising Rents Limit Mobility
While New York City is seeing record levels of new construction each year, the number of units that are safe and affordable for low- to mid-income families has decreased dramatically. From 2002 to 2005, the median monthly rent for unsubsidized apartments in the city increased by 20 percent (8 percent after adjusting for inflation), while the citywide median income fell by 6.3 percent, according to the Furman Center report. Furthermore, the median share of income spent on rent by New York City renters increased from 28.6 percent in 2002 to 31.2 percent in 2005 – exceeding the 30 percent threshold that is considered the maximum rent burden households should bear.
With immigrants making up two-thirds of the low-wage workers in New York City, this disparity between income and rent has left many immigrants with no choice but to remain in substandard and dangerous housing provided by negligent landlords. Strong housing code enforcement then becomes even more necessary to ensure that all immigrants can live in safe and healthy housing conditions.
Legislative Fix
The New York City Council currently is considering legislation that would address this issue. The legislation would strengthen enforcement on problem landlords by requiring the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to re-inspect any building found to have a class C, “immediately hazardous,” violation (the most severe kind) in order to ensure that repairs have been made. If repairs have not been made, the bill mandates that the agency immediately make the repairs itself and then require the landlord to cover the agency’s cost of re-inspecting and repairing their buildings. The bill’s sponsors argue that this would ensure that low-income tenants would no longer have to wait months or even years for immediately hazardous violations to be fixed. The legislation could also give tenants the leverage they need to stand up to landlords who look to take advantage of them.
The Role of Language
Immigrant advocates believe that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development must also increase its capacity to conduct outreach to the diverse communities that it serves. In May of this year, the Urban Justice Center, in collaboration with the New York Immigration Coalition (the organization for which I work), and various community groups published a report entitled, Hear This: The Need for Multilingual Services in New York City. Our findings, which are based on 697 surveys conducted between July 2005 and February 2006, showed that many immigrants and tenants with limited English proficiency are living in unhealthy and unsafe living conditions, and yet, more than 60 percent of them do not know that there is a city agency dedicated to addressing their housing needs. Immigrant communities are not using the services as much as they could –and even when they do try to use them, they are often unable to communicate with agency staff members in the language they understand, and so give up.
Javier H. Valdés is a housing advocate and special projects coordinator with The New York Immigration Coalition.
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Though the mayor’s aides saw them as rude, the Queens politicians who rolled their eyes behind the mayor’s back in the middle of last month’s blackout may actually have been reacting more civilly than most people from western Queens would have done, given the circumstances. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was holding a press conference in which he said that Con Edison and its chief executive officer, Kevin Burke, deserve our thanks.
It would be difficult to find any New Yorker who has been feeling that way lately. (Even the mayor has changed the way he talks about the utility.) First, there was the 10-day blackout in Western Queens – which is home to some of the city’s largest power plants -- that shut electrical power for perhaps 100,000 people. Then, as soon as power was restored in Queens, a series of substantial power outages began on Staten Island.
A few days later, Bloomberg declared a heat emergency for New York City, and on the third day of 100-degree weather, the strains on the electrical system were clear. There were scattered outages in all five boroughs (as well as throughout the region) and Con Edison reduced electrical loads in particular in Midtown and the East Side, sending workers door to door to encourage area businesses to conserve energy. Con Ed also reduced voltage in all of Brooklyn and Queens, and began to power its own headquarters with a generator rather than from the grid.
As of this writing, assuming that no widespread blackouts occur in the next few days, it is clear that Con Edison did a much better job of mitigating risks to the power supply in August than it did in July.
What is less easy for sweltering New Yorkers to admit is that Con Edison can only shoulder part of the blame for what’s been happening.
Although residents of western Queens may not agree with this assessment, New York City has one of the nation’s best electrical systems. Indeed, Con Ed won an award in 2002 for being one of the eight most reliable utilities in North America.
Approximately 70 percent of the system’s wiring is underground, and thus is less vulnerable to many severe weather conditions. The system is designed so that other cables can pick up the slackwhenever a cable fails.
The 2006 blackout is not easily compared to the 2003 blackout, which was a cascading international event that affected the entire city. A closer parallel to the 2006 Queens blackout is the 1999 blackout that affected Inwood and Washington Heights in Manhattan. That only went on for about 30 hours –- enough time for then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to sue Con Ed.
During the 1999 blackout, Con Ed realized that so many cables had failed that there were not enough left to handle the load. The utility decided to shut down the entire system for Inwood and Washington Heights temporarily, reasoning that this would lead to less disruption in the long run. Con Ed did not make the same decision in Queens, and the result was much misery. Once the August heat emergency hit—-particularly on August 3—-Con Ed took preventative measures just as it had in 1999, and again avoided widespread blackouts.
The lesson seems clear, but Con Ed is hesitant to acknowledge it. On August 2 the utility released its first report about the Queens blackout. It offers the most detailed chronology to date of what occurred during those days, but does not address the underlying causes. Con Ed’s CEO, president and chairman Kevin M. Burke says that that analysis will take a “couple of months” to complete.
Charitably put, Burke’s refusal to provide a definitive cause for what happened in Queens reflects his deliberative nature as an electrical engineer. Even granting this, it is another sign of Con Ed’s tone deafness about this entire event.
In addition to the frustration of being without power, the extremely low initial estimate of affected residents infuriated people in Queens. Con Ed originally claimed that around 2,000 customers (or 8,000 people) lost power. The more than ten-fold increase offered later, coupled with a refusal by Burke to state definitively when power would be restored, only stoked the outrage. Con Ed did expedite the process for claiming reimbursement for food spoilage, which can be up to $350 for households and $7,000 for businesses. But otherwise, their public relations has been disastrous.
It strains credulity that only around 2,000 customers would be affected by a blackout that hindered a major airport. Although it is possible that Con Edison deliberately deflated the estimate—-thereby risking the scorn it now faces—-the more likely explanation is that it simply does not know how to measure its customers.
The “rule of thumb” that 1 customer = 4 people is merely a guess. There does not appear to be any scientific technique for measuring how many people utilize particular portions of the electrical grid. Because Con Edison insists on framing estimates in terms of the number of customers rather than of the total population affected, it inevitably looks disingenuous.
Another flaw in Con Ed’s approach is relying on the complaints it receives by phone as its primary measurement of the extent of damage. What about the people whose only phone is powered by electricity? What about the fact that many people probably did not call because they assumed somebody else had called already? When Con Ed conducted a block-by-block canvas on day four of the blackout--something that could have happened on day two or even day one—-it finally recognized the extent of the problem.
The comments of City Council member Eric N. Gioia effectively convey the outrage. During the crisis Gioia stated of Burke, “I think he has put lives at risk and potentially cost lives.” Both Gioia and state Assemblymember Michael N. Gianaris have called for Burke’s resignation, and grilled him during City Council and Assembly hearings on July 31 and August 3. US Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has called for Con Edison to offer much greater compensation than $7,000 for affected businesses. Finally, William M. Flynn, chairman of the State of New York’s Public Service Commission, has come close to accusing Con Edison of lying during their investigation of what happened. At the Assembly hearing, Flynn stated, “With every word that they give us from now on, we’re going to go back and verify for its veracity.”
Mayor Bloomberg was the one prominent defender of Con Edison during the crisis, to the great anger of Queens residents and politicians. He defended the utility against a chorus of complaints, and at one point even proclaimed, “I don’t think that I could have gone in and done any better.” It now appears that this was a strategic move to smooth relations with Con Ed while the crisis unfolded. Following Con Ed’s release of the chronology on August 2, Bloomberg said, “Am I satisfied? Of course not…we are going to find out what happened and what steps we can take to make sure it does not happen in the future.”
Mayor Bloomberg should want to prevent any repeats of the Queens 2006 blackout. But the sobering reality is that this prolonged blackout may not be our last.
Con Edison deserves criticism for its decision not to temporarily halt power and prevent a prolonged power outage, and especially for its absurdly low estimate of affected New Yorkers. But the larger forces that brought about the blackout are beyond the control of any utility.
The months of January through June of 2006 were the warmest first half of the year in the continental United States since 1895. On July 17, the day the blackout began, New Yorkers joined many other Americans in coping with oppressive heat.
Add to the rising temperatures the fact that New York will experience significant population growth over the next 20 years. The extent of the growth is up for debate, but our population will definitely increase. More people and hotter days will inevitably lead to more blackouts, and also cause greater strains on other parts of the city’s aging infrastructure.
The long-term solution to maintaining a thriving city will require modernizing our infrastructure and reducing global warming. The first part of this equation is more directly within the control of New Yorkers, but we can act on both fronts.
Four years after the Bloomberg administration outlined a new strategy for disposing of the city’s garbage, the City Council, on July 19, 2006, approved the mayor’s plan. The new Solid Waste Management Plan (referred to by officials as SWMP) looks ahead to the next 20 years, and promises big long-term savings and better air quality for the city. But perhaps its greatest impact will be in the waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The new plan would funnel most waste to eight transfer stations located on the waterfront in each of the boroughs. Barges and trains would then take the waste out of the city, avoiding the use of thousands of tractor trailers and the significant traffic and environmental impacts they give birth to. Over time the plan would save the city money by streamlining operations, though in the short term costs will go up. The plan would also move responsibility for recycling into a separate office, sheltering it from the Department of Sanitation’s institutional distaste for recycling that has in the past led to the abolition of the entire program. Recycling will now expand and greater emphasis will be placed on the education of residents and businesses.
Most news reports failed to recognize the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods (OWN) as one of the intellectual authors of the new strategy. This group, a coalition of 26 community organizations that got together over a decade ago to fight the concentration of private waste transfer stations in their neighborhoods, came up with the idea of retrofitting some of the city’s existing marine transfer stations, combining both household and commercial waste in a single plan, and insuring that no one borough had to bear the burden for the rest of the city. OWN’s members include neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx that take some 70 percent of all waste (excluding construction waste). OWN’s plan, prepared with the help of the Consumer’s Union and released in 2000, has three major components:
In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, facing a rising budget for the Department of Sanitation and cries from impacted neighborhoods, announced a new city strategy that followed the main lines of the OWN plan. The OWN plan is the first city-wide plan generated by neighborhood groups.
Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE (United Puerto Ricans of Sunset Park), a member of OWN, was elated at the City Council action. “We were delighted that the mayor pushed for this plan and the Speaker had the wisdom to work with him.” Yeampierre, who also chairs the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance , was quick to note that Brooklyn’s Sunset Park “is one of the city’s environmentally burdened communities” yet it “has accepted its responsibility” since one of the large marine transfer stations is located there. “We’re still trying to get the capacity of this facility reduced,” she said. When asked what she thought about the continuing opposition of Upper East Side (Manhattan) residents to a smaller facility in their neighborhood, Yeampierre replied that “environmental burdens have to be shared.”
The concept of “sustainability” mentioned by Yeampierre deserves some careful consideration and could point the way towards greater progress on waste. Sustainability generally means planning to meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. Up to now, solid waste policy has been driven by short-term pragmatic steps that failed to look at long-term consequences. For about a century, the Department of Sanitation’s role has been literally to take out the trash. First it was stuffed into landfills and when landfill space ran out, it was exported. In 1987, the city increased the fees at its last remaining landfill, Fresh Kills in Staten Island, without planning for the rash of new privately-owned waste transfer stations that sprung up, principally in low-income communities of color. Most of the city’s waste wound up going through these neighborhoods.
The assault on these neighborhoods by trash dealers was combated by a nascent environmental justice movement, which claimed that these communities were getting a grossly disproportionate share of the waste. Many of these neighborhoods were already burdened with polluting facilities and had exceptionally high levels of asthma that could be related to diesel truck fumes, traffic, and poorly managed waste facilities. They pressured City Hall to adopt strict regulations governing private waste transfer stations, as required under Local Law 40. When local activists went into battle, they soon linked arms.
When Mayor Rudolph Giuliani closed the city’s last landfill in 2001, the city’s sanitation agency kept on doing what it had been doing in the past, taking out the trash. Once all of the city’s waste was exported the Department of Sanitation budget grew rapidly, nearly doubling in amount.
The one part of OWN’s agenda that advanced very little with the new solid waste management plan was waste reduction. While city government has taken some important steps to reduce its own waste, legislation will be required to tackle the enormous trash flow resulting from unnecessary product packaging, the outdated bottle return law, and the low cost to manufacturers for making rapidly obsolescent products that can’t easily be recycled. Groups like INFORM and the NYC Waste Reduction Coalition have been in the forefront of proposing methods to reduce the total volume of waste. Looking forward, their efforts need to be linked with the efforts of the neighborhoods and government to deal with the more fundamental issues of sustainability. A lot more can be done to reduce the sheer volume of waste that’s exported. New technology may allow for decentralized systems to compost organic waste from kitchens, including the restaurants that produce most of Manhattan’s commercial waste, but it may take legislation and more innovation in government to make this happen.
Related Articles, Reports And Sites
Taking Out the Trash, OWN/Consumers Union
Newly Approved Trash Plan Puts Emphasis on Recycling by Winnie Hu, 7/21/06 NY Times
City Council Backs Mayor’s Trash Disposal Plan by Winnie Hu, 7/20/06 NY Times
New York City Environmental Justice Alliance
NYC Waste Prevention Coalition
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.Â