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The recent debate about the rezoning plan in Greenpoint - Williamsburg, Brooklyn is one of many signs that there’s a revived interest in the city’s waterfront. For centuries the city's waterfront served as a gateway, connecting continental America to the rest of the world. But by the mid 20th century, many docks and piers were virtually deserted. Now suddenly, what was "an abandoned, seedy no-man's-land" (in the words of Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan) has seen the construction of new parks, recreational facilities, commercial space and luxury condos.
When he came into office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg admittedly did not consider homelessness a top priority. But in the last 12 months, homelessness and housing issues have gained progressively more attention. The mayor has said ending homelessness in the city is a top priority for his second term, if he wins one. The city’s policies to help homeless people began to shift as homelessness continued to surge
Not every homeless advocate in the city gives the administration glowing reviews. But at the annual conference earlier this month in Washington D.C. of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, those attending from across the nation seemed considerably more impressed as Linda Gibbs, the commissioner for the Department of Homeless Services, and others outlined what they have been trying lately.
Among the changes made in the city, three decisions stand out:
Late last year, the city ran out of Section 8 vouchers, the federal rent subsidy. To hear Linda Gibbs talk about it at the conference, this turned out to be a good thing.
“The housing authority gave us as many Section 8 vouchers as the city needed,” Gibbs said. “We got so good at what we were doing that we used them up. We were creating a draw into the [shelter] system." What she was saying was that because a person in a homeless shelter would be given preference for a section 8 voucher (which could be used to rent a real apartment), and because there were 150,000 people on a waiting list for these vouchers, the city came to believe that an incentive was thus created for people to enter a shelter just in order to get the voucher.
“We made a high-risk decision to de-link Section 8 from homelessness,” she told an audience of workshop participants (meaning stop giving preferences to people who were in shelters). The decision, she believes, paid off. “We saw a 20 percent drop [of the number of people entering homeless shelters] attributed to de-linking.”
The shelter system is very expensive – it costs about $35,000 a year to provide shelter services to a family of four – and that money could be used more effectively to help people pay rent.
With that in mind, the city introduced two new rent subsidies: Housing Stability Plus, whose aim is to increase the number of families leaving shelters for permanent housing, and the Family Eviction Prevention Supplement, which tries to prevent families from losing their housing and becoming homeless in the first place.
The subsidies are not nearly as generous as Section 8, and they have a time limit. Section 8 is available to working poor people, but the city’s Housing StabilityPlus program is only available to people receiving public assistance. (That means that at least one in five people in city shelters are not eligible.)
The Housing Stability Plus subsidy also declines by 20 percent each year over five years, leaving many to wonder how poor families would be able to pay such increases.
Gibbs did not appear too worried about that.
“Maybe landlords won’t act on evictions – when the rent goes down, they’ll let it go,” she said. “Our real fears are the years after that.
“Landlords will forgo some of the rent,” she said. “I think we are lucky in that we have a contingent of landlords who do care about homelessness.”
So far, 2,700 families have been signed up for Housing Stability Plus, Gibbs said. And, she added, “we’re saving money on the shelter side as we spend money on the rental assistance side.”
Dennis Culhane, one of the nation’s influential homelessness researchers, said while the city’s new subsidies were not as good as Section 8, they are a step in the right direction given current political realities.
“There was no cost containment in the New York City shelter system,” Culhane said. “I think they’ve gone far” by introducing the subsidies.
The Civil Court’s Housing Help Program, a pilot project in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, was also a subject of discussion at the national conference. Judge Fern Fisher offered promising statistical proof of the effectiveness of providing legal services to people facing eviction, combined with comprehensive social services to address other factors that lead them into a housing crisis. The project is working: Since it started, Fisher said, not one family has been evicted from housing in the 10451 ZIP code.
“We’re still only six months into this pilot,” Fisher said during a break at the conference. “It’s too early. And we cannot be satisfied with just one ZIP code; it needs to be expanded.”
At the national conference and for the first time, the city publicly released data about homelessness risk factors collected via its HomeBase programs, launched last September. The programs enlist community-based organizations in homelessness prevention efforts in the six community board districts that send more people to city shelters than any others. Each of the six organizations is receiving $2 million annually over the next three years to prevent homelessness in those areas.
The organizations meet regularly with the Department of Homeless Services to discuss their efforts. Each organization has hired case workers to help people facing housing problems in a wide variety of ways: They help pay their rent, help them find apartments, help them find better jobs, help them defend themselves in housing court cases, get them into job training programs, send them for substance abuse counseling and family counseling, and more.
Advocates at the conference welcomed the city’s HomeBase initiative and praised Gibbs for developing it. HomeBase allows the community-based organizations implementing homeless prevention programs leeway in how to do that – as long as they actually achieve that goal.
“One of the reasons the provider community gets so frustrated is because their hands are tied,” said Susanne Beaton of One Family, Inc., in Boston. “And here you have a commissioner saying, â€Be creative, you know this community.’ It’s an act of faith in the provider community. I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven.”
When people have sought help at HomeBase programs, the city has collected data about why they were facing becoming homeless. The answer is not simple – it’s usually a combination of factors. At the national conference, Jay Bainbridge, the assistant commissioner for policy and research at the NYC Department of Homeless Services, presented a list of “destabilizing events” that eventually lead people to seek help at city shelters:
Further, the data indicated that more than half the people seeking entry to city shelters had never had contact with any social service agencies prior to coming to city shelters. Massive outreach is necessary to address that problem, Bainbridge said.
In a workshop where researchers presented their views of what works and what doesn’t, providing rent subsidies was clearly emphasized as the most successful approach to dealing with homelessness. Addressing other issues a homeless person may be having might simply use up money that could be used to fund rent subsidies.
“My best prediction is that it’s not going to make a huge difference to expend resources on those factors," said Beth Shinn, a New York University researcher of homelessness. “But I think it’s really important to try. We need to see what works. I would love to be shown to be wrong.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â
Last month, by a 5 to 4 margin, the United States Supreme Court upheld the broad use of eminent domain (In PDF format) -- the power of government to take people's property in exchange for just compensation – to promote economic development, even where property will be transferred from one private owner to another. The court allowed the City of New London, Connecticut, to proceed with its plans to take the property of 15 homeowners who did not wish to sell them, in hopes of revitalizing their city’s moribund economy. New London plans to transfer the property to developers who will build office space (including research and development space related to a new Pfizer research center nearby), a hotel and conference center, new housing, and a riverfront esplanade.
New Yorkers interested in several recent and proposed development projects were watching the case closely.
In each case, existing owners (and neighbors) have fought against the takings, and were looking to the Kelo vs. New London case to restrain eminent domain for private development.
At least on first glance, opponents of these projects found little to cheer. The court upheld the broad power of cities and states to use eminent domain. Despite the arguments of Susette Kelo and the other owners that this taking was in violation of the Fifth Amendment because it was not narrowly for “public use” – a park, a school, or other municipal facility – Justice Stevens wrote for the majority of justices that since the 19th century, the court has “embraced the broader and more natural interpretation of public use as a â€public purpose,’” and that a carefully considered plan by local government to promote economic development meets that test.
Furthermore, the eminent domain sought on all three New York City projects rely on the slightly different claim (under New York law) that the areas in question are “blighted” – although it stretches credulity to make that claim: $1 million condos in Prospect Heights hardly constitute blight; Times Square is booming; several new businesses have opened recently in Manhattanville. Once an area has been declared blighted by a public agency, it can be taken through eminent domain, even if what will follow is exclusively private development, on the argument that the removal of blight serves a broader public purpose.
So Bruce Ratner, the New York Times, and Columbia don’t have too much reason for concern. And we can expect more eminent domain in New York City’s future economic development plans. The Department of City Planning’s recent Downtown Brooklyn Rezoning laid the groundwork for future takings there, and the city is now moving toward an economic development project at the corner of Boerum Place and Fulton Mall. The NYC Economic Development Corporation recently collected responses from developers for Requests for Expressions of Interest to redevelop the Willets Point area on the Flushing River (near the site for the new Mets Stadium in Queens), despite the fact that the entire area is privately-owned.
Still, Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn – which opposes Forest City Ratner’s proposal for Brooklyn Atlantic Yards, and who recruited lawyer/civil rights activist Norman Siegel to write a brief siding with Kelo against eminent domain – sees some hope in the concurring opinion of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy wrote to emphasize that while there was no suggestion in New London that the plan was intended to favor any individual developer, ''a court confronted with a plausible accusation of impermissible favoritism to private parties should treat the objection as a serious one and review the record to see it if has merit.'' Develop Don’t Destroy plans to argue that the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards site presents a case of the “impermissible favoritism” that Justice Kennedy was warning about. (This is assuming that the MTA awards the site to Ratner, rather than to their preferred developer, Extell Development Corporation, who recently submitted a bid that would build fewer and smaller towers, have no arena, include less overall and affordable housing, and involve no eminent domain.)
However, Paul Sonn of the Brennan Center for Justice, says that because Kennedy also signed on to the broader majority opinion, his concurring opinion will likely have little effect. Sonn also notes the unusual political alliance that emerged on this case. Norman Siegel and opponents of the projects in question (his brief was not only for Develop Don’t Destroy, but also for businesses in West Harlem opposing Columbia’s proposal) present a politically progressive case against corporate developers, but their champions on the Supreme Court were conservative Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, Scalia, and O’Connor. Much of the support for Kelo’s side of the case came from conservative property-rights advocates. Writing for Reason Magazine Online, Jason Sullum criticized the New York Times’ praise for the Supreme Court’s decision, writing that “property rights are human rights,” and in fact that “all rights are property rights.” And closer to home, Julia Vitulo-Martin of the market-oriented Manhattan Institute has blasted both the Supreme Court and Ratner, calling eminent domain for economic development “government theft.”
Is this an alliance of the political left and right? David Goldberg, formerly counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, says no. Goldberg has been collaborating with Community Rights Counsel, a DC-based group which works with community groups and municipalities seeking to preserve the power of the government to regulate development; for example, to require affordable housing or land conservation. They were concerned that the Kelo case was one more effort by right-wingers to weaken the ability of cities and states to guide development for public purposes. So Goldberg prepared an amicus brief for supporters of the Ratner project (the Carpenter’s union, Rev. Herbert Daughtry, and BUILD). Goldberg challenges the claims of Norman Siegel and others that these cases involve “differential impact” on low-income people. While the Robert Moses-style urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s often displaced low-income tenants – rendering “just compensation” meaningless since they did not own the property and usually received very little for their displacement – in these cases it is primarily middle-class homeowners and businesspeople, who are being paid fair market price for their property.
We do need local governments to have the power to promote planning and development that serves public purposes, beyond the vicissitudes of the market. If the highest value in the marketplace always determines what we get, we will lose an enormous amount of what we want and need in our (or any) city: universities, affordable housing, manufacturing jobs, even sports stadiums and the paper of record. Sometimes this will mean applying smart regulation (like inclusionary zoning or zoning that protects industrial jobs), and sometimes it will mean eminent domain. It will be better when the eminent domain begins with public planning, rather than behind-the-scenes moves by private developers; but even then, affected owners will often, of course, be opposed.
Now that the Supreme Court has reaffirmed that states and localities can decide what public purposes are good enough, we need a more robust debate in New York about what standards we want to place on publicly-supported development. Far too often, we give away the store to developers – applying eminent domain, and offering subsidies and tax breaks with too little public scrutiny or requirements. The public benefits in Ratner’s proposal come from the developer’s smart moves to gain support for the project, not from meaningful public process or standards.
New York City and State each took a half-step forward toward more accountable development last month. The City Council and Mayor Bloomberg agreed to increase reporting requirements for developers using subsidies from the city’s Industrial Development Agency, or IDA. And in Albany legislators agreed to a one-year extension of IDAs and public authorities statewide, rather than a full reauthorization, to give time to consider broader reforms that would better promote both accountability and minimum standards for subsidized development.
But we are still behind other cities and states seeking to insure that publicly-supported developments meet a minimum set of standards – living wages and benefits for the jobs, affordable housing, and broader community benefits. The plans for Willets Point and the site on Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn include no reference to job quality or affordable housing. Growth and development for their own sake are not an adequate public purpose in a city where development too often increases inequality and segregation, where too many of the new jobs pay poverty wages and offer no benefits, and where too many of the environmental burdens of development (solid waste, power plants) are borne by low-income communities. We need a better, more consistent process to insure that publicly-supported private development
• helps to reduce income inequality
• creates jobs that enable people to support their families and move toward the middle class
• creates affordable housing
• lives better within its “environmental footprint”
• addresses the challenges of traffic and transit
• helps create better neighborhoods
• and makes those neighborhoods places of opportunity.
This is a lot to ask, but it is a fair trade for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidy and the power to take people’s homes.
Brad Lander is the director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development
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