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The Community Service Requirement In Public Housing


The James Weldon Johnson housing development on 112th Street in Manhattan may not be the best place to live in the city, but as part of the city's public housing system - the largest in the nation - it is among the more affordable. The development will have a new recreation center in coming months to make it nicer.

Ethel Velez lives in one of the development's 1,307 apartments, and as president of the development's tenant's association and director of a citywide alliance of public housing residents knows more about public housing problems than most people.

Security is the most pressing issue, she said; maintenance is another. The federal government could help out with either one, but instead Congress is making things worse, she said. Many advocates, New York City politicians and tenants agree.

In 2004, public housing may be the most important front in the battle to protect affordable housing in New York City. A new community service requirement for residents of public housing is a reflection of an intense anti-public housing sentiment in Congress, advocates said. They expect any new policy ideas from Washington to be worse.

Thousands of people will face eviction now that the new rule - requiring eight hours of community service a month - has gone into effect January 1, 2004. And thousands of other people will be fighting the rule, which has already become a rallying cry among advocates, elected representatives and tenants.

Many advocates believe that the new rule is yet another indication of a disturbing change in the role the federal government plays in housing - and one that is exacerbating homelessness as a record number of New Yorkers are crowding city shelters.

"Why should public housing residents have to do this at all?" said Judith Goldiner of the Legal Aid Society, which represents many New York City Housing Authority tenants in Housing Court. If the requirement is in return for receiving subsidized housing, she said, "then why not the farmers who get subsidies? Why not the people who get a tax deduction? Why is it poor people? It makes no sense."

A 1998 law, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, included the community service requirement. But some members of Congress, led by New York Rep. Charles Rangel, prevented it going into effect by blocking its funding. But this year, the law has gone into effect.

Emile Milne, Rangel's press secretary, said the community service requirement was reflective of more than just a hostile attitude in Congress toward public housing.

"I think there's an overarching hostility attitude toward poor people overall," he said. "The attitude is about getting as many benefits to wealthy people at the expense of poor people. You can see that by just looking at the tax bills. It's a pattern."

Many of the estimated 500,000 public housing residents in New York City will be exempt from the new requirement. Tenants older than 62 and younger than 18 will not have to meet the community service requirement, nor will pregnant women with doctors' notes, the disabled, people receiving Social Security Insurance or welfare, or people working more than 30 hours a week.

But as many as 60,000 people will have to prove that they have worked eight hours as volunteers for non-profit organizations, tenant associations or other agencies that take volunteers.

The housing authority has sent notice to tenants and is currently establishing procedures to enforce the requirement, said Howard Marder, the agency's public information officer. The new policy is not popular at the agency, he said, although he added that the agency had increased the number of exemptions from five to 20 and most people would not be affected.

"Anytime you have an unfunded mandate, it puts a burden on us," Marder said. "We'll have to take people away from other work" to enforce the new rule.

The Legal Aid Society is already preparing to file suit in court because the authority is not exempting people who should be exempted, Goldiner said.

Calling it outrageous, City Councilmember Charles Barron of Brooklyn said he would soon introduce a resolution against the rule.

"People are already living under challenging conditions in public housing," Barron said. "To now enforce an eight hour rule is an attempt to get some cheap slave labor. This will add to homelessness.

"As long as people meet the requirements (for public housing), there shouldn't be a free labor requirement," he continued. "This is setting up a catastrophe, a condition where you're going to create homelessness. It makes no sense whatsoever. It's almost genocidal."

Tenant leaders like Velez adamantly oppose the rule and are preparing to fight it.

"Slavery's back," she said. "When folks are financially strapped, it shouldn't be something that's held against them."

"When I think of public service, the language itself is insulting," she said. "Mandatory volunteer community service? It's demoralizing. And at the end is eviction if you don't do it. So then you make someone homeless."

Many public housing residents already volunteer, Velez said, patrolling their complexes and cleaning public areas. "I think it's insulting that now you'll have to get a thing signed when you've already been doing this of your own free will."

The only positive side to the new rule may be its usefulness in organizing tenants, she said in the James Weldon Johnson's tenant's association office recently, its walls covered with pro-public housing literature, announcements and calls for action.

"We might turn this whole thing around and use it while it's on the books," she said. "Until we can fight it off and get it eliminated, then let's use it as a positive."

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linda Stone Davidoff, 1941-2003


 

When Riverside South park opens in the spring, sun bathers and ball players will find a wooden sign in the park telling them that the area between 65th and 68th Street has been named "Linda's Lawn." This is in tribute to Linda Stone Davidoff, the urban planner, activist and former director of Citizens Union and Citizens Union Foundation, who died December 31 at age 62.

Among her many achievements in more than 40 years of activism, Davidoff developed the plan that led to the creation of this new park on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She also ran political campaigns and launched the national effort that resulted in the passage in 1993 of the National Voter Registration Act. Known as "Motor Voter," it requires states to provide voter registration forms to citizens when they apply for drivers' licenses and other services.

At a memorial service in the Prospect Park Picnic House on January 4, about 250 family, friends and colleagues remembered Davidoff as a woman who liked to win but was never afraid to embrace losing causes, and who threw herself energetically into everything that engaged her -- from the fight to end the war in Vietnam to her final battle against leukemia. But Davidoff was also honored for her fierce devotion to her family and for the personal example she set for her wide circle of relatives, friends, colleagues and comrades in arms.

Born in Washington, D.C, Linda Stone Davidoff grew up in Pittsburgh, the daughter of a Steelworkers Union employee and a teacher. She graduated from Radcliffe College and received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her long history of political involvement started in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. It was then that she embarked on a lifetime of working for losing political candidates. While living in Larchmont, New York, she struggled mightily to elect liberal Democrats to replace entrenched Republicans in Westchester County. Later, she would manage Elizabeth Holtzman's losing campaign for Senate in 1980 and Ruth Messinger's unsuccessful New York City mayoral campaign in 1997. But despite so many fights for the losing side, her friend Libby Moroff said in her eulogy, Davidoff always hewed to an "implacable, unshakable conviction that something could be done." A fitting motto for her, said Moroff, could come from the "Lord of the Rings": "Death is certain. Victory unlikely. Let's fight."

Despite her affinity for politics, Davidoff saw herself primarily as an urban planner. In a series of articles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she and her first husband, Paul Davidoff, developed the concept of advocacy planning. This idea held that planners should not be merely technicians but instead should consider social and political values in their work. Paul Davidoff died in 1984.

After heading several non-profit organizations (including the Parks Council, the New York League of Conservation Voters, and Citizen Action of New York), Davidoff in 2000 became executive director of Citizens Union and Citizens Union Foundation, the publisher of Gotham Gazette. In less than three years, she expanded the group's budget and staff and led it into greater activism and involvement in communities across the five boroughs of New York City.

While speakers at the memorial service remembered Davidoff's many political crusades they also spoke of her personal warmth and intensity. Noting the large number of Manhattanites in Brooklyn on a rainy Sunday morning, Adrian Benepe, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, said, "It would take someone like Linda Stone Davidoff to get the Upper West Side to relocate to Prospect Park."

After being diagnosed with leukemia in August, Davidoff kept a firm grip of life, spending time with her husband Harold Stone, whom she married in 1997, and her children, stepchildren and their children. Anne Mackinnon, her "step-daughter-in-law," recalled how, less than a week before her death, Davidoff plunged into Christmas Day, exclaiming over how delicious the coffee was, marveling at the croissants and seeing the humor of atheists tearing open Christmas stockings.

She was, it seemed, following the advice she had given her loved ones two months before on Rosh Hashanah: "It's definitely time to give thought to ... saying good-bye, NOT being sadder than we have to be, keeping a sense of humor and perspective and, especially, of the sweetness of a good life."

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests that contributions may be sent to Citizens Union Foundation or to Howard Dean for America. A larger memorial celebration will be held this spring, at a date to be announced.

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• Read the obituary from the New York Times

The 'Food Justice' Movement: Trying To Break the Food Chains


One of the great, often unspoken, forms of oppression that low- and moderate-income communities suffer through is the lack of access to healthy food. When I moved back to Central Brooklyn in 1985, I was stuck by its barren nutritional landscape. It wasn’t just that options like fresh produce and organic foods were hard to come by. But the storefront food provision systems themselves - “bullet-proof” fast food joints, poorly stocked and over-crowded supermarkets, cruddy, stomach-curdling bodegas -- seemed to represent a level of self-destruction and dietary corruption that went well beyond my inability to buy tofu on Nostrand Avenue. While most residents and activists look at conditions such as public safety, housing availability, public education, environmental concerns and economic opportunities when taking on community development issues, seldom do we consider one of the most basic elements -- how an area feeds itself -- as a sign of neighborhood well being.

Recently I stumbled upon a growing movement of activists who have coined a phrase - “food justice” - that I think places how and what a community eats squarely in the context of community building and social change. Up to now “food security” has been a more common term used to describe a similar, if not broader, area of social concern. While government bureaucrats and international non-governmental-organizations alike have been using food security to call attention to a whole host of agriculture- and hunger-related issues, activists have also used it to focus on creating community-based ways of producing food in an affordable, sustainable and environmentally-friendly manner. Along the way they have sought to create local jobs, promote good health and stress the importance of small, local farmers.

New Language and Icons

With the use of the term “food justice” this activism hasn’t changed so much as it has taken on fresh new political energy. In an increasing number of grassroots efforts in New York, local people are re-imagining their collective relationship to food. According to Bryant Terry, the founder of the youth-based, not-for profit B-Healthy, food justice starts from the conviction that access to healthy food is a human rights issue and that the “lack of access to food in a community is an indicator of material deprivation”. Food justice, Bryant suggests, goes beyond advocacy and direct service. It calls for organized responses to food security problems, responses that are locally driven and owned.

For its part, B-Healthy tries to offset the dominance of processed foods and fast food advertising in the lives of young people with political education and a sort of counter-insurgency culinary training. With a curriculum that includes books like Fast Food Nation, Diet for a Small Planet and Food Fight, B-Healthy offers everything from cooking classes to tips on how to shop for pesticide-free, non-genetically modified foods.

With a Black founding director and a youth-of-color constituency, many of whom are immigrants, B-Healthy has implicitly challenged the popular image of health food consciousness as being the strict domain of WASPy vegans who listen to public radio and shop at the Park Slope Food Co-Op. And rather than try to introduce “culturally inappropriate’ foods into the lives of families, B-Healthy works with foods and seasonings that are familiar to them

Food System Alternatives

Education is perhaps the first line of offense in the long fight to change eating patterns and food distribution in any given neighborhood. But as most food justice advocates will tell you, this education has to be coupled with action -- the creation of viable alternatives.

Just Food, which has integrated a social justice mission into its name, has been the catalyst for the establishment of 30 CSAs -- Community Supported Agriculture -throughout the city, some in areas like Harlem, Bushwick and East New York. CSAs are arrangements in which people living in a given area purchase “shares” of organically-grown produce directly from local sources. CSAs provide urban families with more healthy eating choices, while also supporting family-run farms. Just as importantly, CSAs, like other local food systems, eliminate a neighborhood’s dependence on far-flung corporate growers and a host of intervening processors, handlers, distributors, transporters and other middle people who have made the business of connecting urban America to food inefficient and environmentally taxing.

Just Food also works with a small number of community gardeners who are learning to market and distribute their produce in local settings. In most cases, local food justice efforts not only provide food, but often help strengthen neighborhood economies, provide employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for youth and offer innovative ways to utilize open space.

One text book example of a project that seeks to address a range of community needs through food activism has recently taken root in Red Hook, a mostly low-income neighborhood with a food terrain that is decidedly user-hostile. According to Ian Marvy co-director of Added Value, Red Hook has only one full-service, sit-down restaurant and no major grocery store, but is otherwise replete with bodegas, steam line eateries, pizza shops and fried chicken shops. On real estate that is being eyed by hungry developers seeking new water front opportunities, Added Value and a cadre of young people from the surrounding area maintain a modest farm with other local farmers and run a market where young people sell the farm’s collective harvest, as well as beef, chicken and fish from other local farms. Added Value is also making plans to build a green house and harvest fish itself.

Marvy is clear about what distinguishes his work and that of his colleagues. “Food security is more about analyzing problems, ameliorating issues and providing answers--Food Justice--involves local people from seed to sale. It educates, organizes and mobilizes new social relations around food. It touches hands, hearts and pockets.”

Bold New World

Efforts like B-Healthy, Just Food, Added Value and New York-based CSAs are all relatively young. And right now they are all looking to achieve justice through education and feeding, rather than agitation and confrontation. Ruth Katz, executive director of Just Food, is intent on rebuilding a demand for healthy foods and envisions a return to a time in our nation’s history when, in the midst of food shortages in the 1940s, forty percent of the nation’s food was supplied locally.

Still, some are hinting at a slightly more aggressive march towards progress. Terry sees the young people he works with as one day creating community organizing campaigns. He looks to take on the perpetrators of structural, food-based racism that, he feels, has kept areas like Red Hook and Central Brooklyn flooded with toxic foods and empty of choices. Of course, these days, racism is often easier to feel than prove. And while the economic development and food distribution visions of Terry and his peers are clear, a strategy of what public policies would be targeted by food-centered, grassroots organizing campaigns is far less so. Any way you look at it, America’s appetites for fast food and corporate farming - both defining aspects of American culture -- are not retreating anytime soon.

But then again I still believe that one day I will help start a black-run food cooperative in Bed-Stuy; and that affordable, family-style, locally-owned restaurants will spring up while liquor stores and Burger Kings die a certain death; and that a loud chorus of my neighbors will compel my community board, City Council representative and Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce to establish a farmers market on local abandoned property.

New social realities always begin here, as somebody’s seemingly far-fetched dreams. In the meantime, I’m itching for a food fight.

Mark Winston Griffith, a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Essence and Spin, is also founder of the non-profit Central Brooklyn Partnership, which organizes people to build economic power.



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