Having done almost no promotion aside from a note in church bulletins, Father Jim O'Shea did not expect a large crowd to attend a session offering to help would-be tenants fill out applications for an affordable housing project in Bushwick. But though only 75 apartments were being built, 1,000 people showed up.
"We were overwhelmingly under-prepared," O'Shea said. "The need is so great."
If people want to see for themselves whether there is a crisis in affordable housing in the city - At last month's Rent Guidelines Board hearings, Marvin Markus, the chair of the board, said there was not - they could start by going to churches, synagogues and mosques around the city.
In nearly every neighborhood now, religious communities are getting involved in advocating for affordable housing. It's not that seminaries or theology departments are turning young men and women into advocates; parishioners and congregants are. Pastors, rabbis and imams simply cannot ignore the issue.
"Housing is essential to preserving someone's human dignity," said Rev. Marc Hallinan, an assistant for Social Ministries for Jesuits in New York. "So it's a part of our mission."
The advocacy efforts of religious institutions have grown naturally out of their efforts to provide services to those affected by the lack of affordable housing - mainly, the homeless.
"A lot of people are ready to move beyond the services," said Mark Greenberg, executive director of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing, a coalition of dozens of houses of worship across the city and housing advocates. "It's not that they don't want to help. They want to do more. They don't have compassion fatigue, they have compassion frustration," he said. "People are still compassionate, but their compassionate acts are not changing policy."
So, their acts are changing. In addition to offering shelter beds and food, religious leaders are helping their congregants organize meetings to discuss affordable housing among themselves and with political leaders and city officials. In O'Shea's Williamsburg parish, Churches United for Fair Housing, now just eight months old, has already had an impact, he said.
The group is pushing for all housing developments that benefit from tax breaks or other government incentives to have at least 40 percent of the apartments set aside as affordable housing. Inclusionary zoning, which allows for higher density developments that create affordable housing, is also on the group's agenda. One notable victory: A community board turned down a zoning variance because affordable housing was not included in the plan.
"I think the religious community is more ready now than it has been in a long time" to act on affordable housing and homelessness, Greenberg said. "The religious leadership is ready to move on this."
In contacts with political leaders, religious leaders are asking that the city take the issue more seriously, Greenberg said, mainly by putting money into resolving the crisis. They are advocating a holistic approach, seeking action to increase the minimum wage, adopt inclusionary zoning and encourage the use of food stamps, millions of dollars of which go unused because the city does not raise awareness of their availability, Greenberg said.
"If a faith-based institution believes in a particular issue they are not only prepared to commit their financial resources but their voting resources, too," said Don Matthew, general manager and chief executive of Brooklyn Ecumenical Cooperative (BEC) New Communities. "That's a force you cannot deny."
Religious leaders have "considerable influence at City Hall," Matthew said. "They pastor to a flock, to people that vote. And they have influence on these people. If pastors are doing what they're supposed to be doing - pointing out where government is falling short - that will have an effect."
The religious institutions' involvement in affordable housing is crucial, said Brooklyn Councilmember Diana Reyna, who has worked with Churches United for Fair Housing. "It gives (the issue) weight and leverage, it gives it a face. It gives the people an opportunity to come to the table."
Religious institutions have a long history of social advocacy in the city and many of the advocacy organizations across the city actually grew out of their efforts, said John Mulhern, executive director of South Side Community Mission in Williamsburg.
"When we were working in the1960s we were trying to stop buildings from being burned down," he said. "That's a big difference from now... It was a lot easier then."
While the religious groups and housing advocacy organizations may differ in what tactics to use, they are "natural allies," many said, because they share the same vision on addressing affordable housing and homelessness.
"Some of the community based organizations have lost their bases" over the years, he said. "They became agencies. That was the missing piece: the mobilization of the masses."
For the congregants to whom Hallinan ministers on the Upper East Side, the religious-secular collaboration was instrumental. A worker at a local community organization, the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, served as a catalyst, he said, and congregants of several churches, once they saw the bigger picture, wanted to get involved.
"We're very pleased that the congregations are interested and willing to work on these issues."
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.
"Shouldn't they have to look at what it's doing to the environment?" That is a frequent question from people concerned about new development proposals in the city, from the Hudson Yards to downtown Brooklyn.
Many people are surprised that the answer is "yes." Prompted by the growing environmental movement, laws on the federal, state and city level were enacted in the 1970s that required developers to conduct an environmental review of major new developments. In the reviews, developers must disclose potential negative environmental impacts and propose measures that address them. Here in New York, any proposed land use changes that come before the City Planning Commission and City Council must first undergo an environmental review, and if they are considered to have a potential negative impact, the developer must prepare a detailed Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
But most people never see the impact statement, much less understand it. The statement has become a boon for consultants who churn them out according to formulas as if they were SUVs on an assembly line. The environmental impact statement report for major projects like the Hudson Yards Plan is about as understandable to the lay person as a doctoral dissertation on civil engineering. Read on and you'll wonder whether the loss of trees to produce all that paper is worth the environmental benefit of the report. Many people who deal with the environmental impact statement - including community activists, planners and developers - recognize that after three decades it is time to review environmental review.
Fear of Litigation
Contrary to common belief, the environmental impact statement doesn't stop anyone from doing something that damages the environment. It only forces them to publicly declare it. From the start the environmental review process was skillfully designed to get around potential legal challenges by environmentalists who charged that the impact on the environment wasn't considered, and from developers who would undermine environmental laws saying they interfere with their property rights. In any case, the cost of doing an impact statement is minimal for big developers when compared to the litigation costs they could face. Neighborhood and environmental groups rarely have the time, money and expertise to challenge the impact statement, and courts are unwilling to second-guess the technical expertise brought before them when they themselves may not have it.
Once the developer discloses potential negative impacts in the statement, they have to outline ways they (or others, like local government) will "mitigate" those impacts - that is, deal with them in a way that will lessen the environmental damage. These mitigations, however, are voluntary. After the project is approved, it may take close oversight by local government (which is never guaranteed), and sometimes a lawsuit, to insure that the mitigation was carried out.
The mitigations that developers often propose can have a very limited effect. And they can even cause more environmental damage! For example, years ago a massive environmental impact statement was prepared by the city to look at the potential impacts of major new downtown Brooklyn developments. Mitigations included widening streets and moving traffic through downtown. This may have reduced the effect of some pollution-causing bottlenecks, but ultimately it will encourage more traffic, not less. A few minor improvements to mass transit were not enough to offset the environmental damage caused by the relatively small number of commuters who continue to use their cars to get to and through downtown. More effective mitigations might have included putting tolls on the East River bridges, restoring trolley service, widening sidewalks, and installing first class bicycle lanes and bike parking.
Often mitigations protect the owners and tenants of new development projects but have a negative impact on the surrounding neighborhood. For example, the developer of a new building complex may propose a ventilation system and windows that reduce the exposure of tenants to noise and air pollution, but the ventilation system itself can create more noise and pollution in the neighborhood.
Though it must be prepared according to official guidelines, the environmental impact statement is usually paid for by the developer. The city's mayoral agencies that oversee the process are traditionally boosters of development - real estate is perceived, wrongly, as the city's major industry -- and reluctant to make a fuss. In other words, the foxes are watching the chicken coop.
Local Impacts
People in the city's neighborhoods are usually among the first to raise questions about environmental impacts. Their questions are direct: Is a project going to pollute the air or create more noise? Will it affect our health? What will be the long-run effects on future generations?
The environmental impact statement doesn't really help answer these questions. The city's 59 community boards manage the land use review process but don't have the professional staff to thumb through thousands of pages of technical jargon, charts and tables to figure out what they're saying or pick out errors or omissions. The 60 days each board has to review the proposal, hold public hearings, discuss and vote on a project fly by faster than you can get through the first chapter. Community boards can sit in on the initial meeting that lays out the scope of work for the impact statement, but have no real power to set the agenda so that it focuses on their concerns rather than run thousands of numbers through formulas.
The environmental impact statement can't answer the most important questions because its methodology is flawed. It looks at environmental impacts as a series of simple short term cause-effect relations, not as a complex of interrelated factors. It doesn't deal with the cumulative impacts of many similar developments over a long period of time - spanning generations, not years. It looks at the effect of individual pollutants discharged in the environment, and doesn't consider what happens when pollutants interact with one another. It doesn't consider the impact of pollution on public health - i.e., how many more cases of asthma are likely to be generated by the added traffic? It doesn't consider the potential for creating more "sick buildings" that use materials and are managed in ways that produce health hazards for the people that live and work there. It doesn't consider the extent to which the environmental impacts fall disproportionately on one or another group - for example, people with low incomes. It doesn't look at the secondary effects of displacement set in motion by new development. It doesn't address environmental racism, the systematic foisting of environmental hazards on communities of color. It doesn't consider the extent to which the project will create new demands for energy that are unsustainable in the long run. It doesn't look at the effect on the level and quality of public services, which are very much a part of the quality of the urban environment. And it doesn't consider long-term multi-generational, non-local impacts such as global warming.
Yet another problem is that many large-scale projects evade the environmental impact statement entirely because they are "as-of-right" - that is, they require no zoning change or other official land use action. An as-of-right 500-unit apartment building in Manhattan can result in more traffic and noise in a neighborhood that's already overburdened, and there will be no environmental review. Considering that many millions of square feet can be built in the city right now as-of-right, it would be foolish to rely on the environmental impact statement alone.
Overhaul of the environmental review system is long overdue. Even more importantly, city government needs to develop a broad environmental planning framework that looks at long-term multi-generational indicators of environmental quality -- such as Seattle's Agenda 21. Right now, New York City jumps from one project to the next without a clear strategic plan. Every mayor seems to have a development plan made up of their pet projects. But we have never had an environmental mayor with a serious strategy for reducing energy use, waste, and pollution, or solving the city's chronic public health epidemics.
In my experience, community residents and businesses are better able to think about their environment in a holistic way than consultants and agency bureaucrats, whose mandates are narrow and short-term. Community boards and community-based organizations need to have the resources to plan for their futures and propose sustainable development strategies that reduce environmental hazards and make for healthy neighborhoods. The environmental impact statement alone, even a good one, will never do that.
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.
Citizens Union Foundation's * Forum opening statements |
The Bloomberg administration’s plan to redevelop the Far West Side of Manhattan by decking over the Hudson rail yards, expanding the Javits convention center and building a new stadium for the Jets, has won a ringing endorsement from an array of celebrities, including Donald Trump and actor Michael Douglas, in a new newspaper ad campaign.
But Sheldon Silver, speaker of the state assembly, earlier this month proposed legislation that would expand the Javits Center but that did not include the plans for the new football stadium.
And, late last month, the Independent Budget Office, issued a report disputing projects by the Jets of many jobs and how much revenue the stadium would produce. Even under an optimistic scenario, the office said, the stadium would create about 3,586 jobs, half the number predicted by the Jets. The Bloomberg administration has relied heavily on the Jets study in advocating the project.
The office agrees with the administration that tax revenue from new convention business generated by the project could cover the city’s share of the costs of the construction. But, it cautioned, “if the convention business projections prove too optimistic, the city could be left with insufficient funds to cover its entire investment.”
Such recent events have fueled what New York Times reporter Joyce Purnick has likened to the rancorous debate over Westway in the 1980s.
Purnick’s comment came at a June 24 discussion of the project, sponsored by Citizens Union Foundation, the publisher of Gotham Gazette, on June 24. To start off the discussion, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, an architect of the plan, said that, like Central Park in the 19th century, the project offered New York the opportunity to take bold action that could change the city. In his opening statement, former Metropolitan Transportation Richard Ravitch opposed the project -- taking what he said was his first public stand on a major municipal issue since he left government. (For excerpts from the opening statements by Doctoroff; City Councilmember Christine Quinn; Adam Barsky, deputy secretary to the Governor for Finance & Housing; James Parrott, deputy director and chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute; and Ravitch, click here.)
Following the statements, members of the audience questioned the panelists. While most seemed to endorse expansion of the Javits Center, many challenged Doctoroff’s support for the stadium. Panelists debated the process that will determine the fate of the project, as well as financing details and possible alternatives to the plan. (For excerpt from this discussion, click here.)
The discussion was the first in a series of Civic Conversations to be sponsored by Citizens Union Foundation.