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The State Of Bloomberg's Affordable Housing Plan


Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s five-year plan (In pdf format) to increase affordable housing in New York City, officially began July 1, the first day of the new fiscal year. The administration’s strategy, unveiled last December, was to preserve 38,000 units of affordable housing, and build 27,000 others, with a total of $3 billion. In May, Bloomberg offered the New York State Affordable Housing Conference an updateon the plan, reporting that things were shaping up well.

“We’re already moving forward on virtually every single element of The New Housing Marketplace plan,” he said. “Since last December we’ve put the rehabilitation and production of approximately 8,000 housing units into the pipeline. We’ve assembled city-owned tracts for creating hundreds more. We’re developing regulatory reforms that will speed private housing construction. And we’re targeting residential rezoning that will catalyze construction and rehabilitation throughout the city.”

While the city’s budget woes haven’t made the mayor’s goals any easier, he has remained staunch in his housing commitment. “It’s true that we won’t see some of the dividends from our housing plan for years to come,” he said. “Given the city’s current budget problems, some people may think that’s a luxury we can’t afford now. That’s exactly wrong. Building for the future is a responsibility we can’t shirk – especially now.”

LESS THAN PROMISED

Recently, Housing First!, a coalition of community, business, civic, labor, and religious organizations promoting affordable housing, released a report(in pdf format) on the mayor’s plan that compared it to their own proposed solution to the city’s affordable housing crisis. The coalition has called for a 10-year, $10 billion dollar plan that would produce 100,000 new homes and preserve at least 85,000 more. Their report suggests that the mayor’s plan moves in the right direction, though not far enough.

“ The mayor has made an important new commitment and that is a critical step forward,” said Joe Weisbord, staff director of Housing First!. “But, at the same time, the city’s housing situation continues to deteriorate. We need to look to the future when the economy and budget situation will improve. We see the plan that our coalition came up with as a good benchmark for the level of effort that’s going to be necessary in the long term.”

Most distressing to Housing First! is the drop in the city’s 10-year capital strategy commitment to housing. “ If you compare it to the strategy that was issued two years ago,” Weisbord pointed out, “city capital funds declined over a billion dollars for a ten-year time frame. That’s a product of these across-the-board cuts that the city has been making, but that means we continue to fall behind.”

While the city’s billion dollar capital cut is offset in part by an influx of funds from the Housing Development Corporation and from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the capital inflow for housing over the next ten years is still more than three-quarters of a billion dollars less than what was planned two years ago.

DISAPPOINTMENT IN DOWNTOWN

Another unhappy surprise for affordable housing advocates has been the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s plans for housing near the former site of the World Trade Center. Overall, the federal tax-free Liberty Bond program (In pdf format) allocates up to $1.6 billion for residential rental development, but so far, only $50 million will go toward apartments that are affordable to those learning less than Wall Street wages. The amount is very far from the $293 million proposed by Mayor Bloomberg last December, in his “21st Century Vision for Lower Manhattan.”

So as it now stands, thousands of apartments will soon go up in lower Manhattan, and only 300 will be affordable to moderate income families, those earning between $50,000 and $85,000 a year. And so far, there has been no Liberty Bond commitment to housing for New Yorkers earning less than $50,000 per year.

Affordable housing advocates still have faith in the Bloomberg administration’s commitment to improve the city’s housing situation. But there is disappointing news.. Homeless statistics are at a record high, vacancy rates painfully low. A new study(in pdf format) out from the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council estimates that well over 100,000 households counted in the 2000 Census were illegal additions to existing housing structures, attesting to the city’s dire need for additional housing, and one black market solution.

“ That’s a measure of how poorly we’re serving the population with our existing level of commitment to housing,” said Weisbord. “And an indication of how serious the situation is.”

From all outward appearances, Mayor Bloomberg seems determined to do something about it. “We are not going to push our problems, or our responsibilities, off on our children,” he told the New York State Affordable Housing Conference. “New York City has been down that road before -- during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s -- and we know exactly where it leads. We’re still paying the price for that mistake. We won’t make it again.”

Rebecca Webber is a journalist who has covered housing issues for Gotham Gazette since July 2000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greenpoint and Williamsburg Zoning Changes


The Department of City Planning recently released a proposal to rezone large sections of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn’s Community District 1. Most of the area to be rezoned is on and near the waterfront. Large sections of the waterfront, now zoned for heavy manufacturing (labeled M3), have been vacant for many years or occupied by industries such as waste transfer facilities strongly opposed by the surrounding community. Williamsburg activists are currently fighting the state’s plan to locate a 1,100 megawatt power plant on a waterfront site the city and community have proposed for a park. (For more information go to Stop The Power Plant).

The city and local community agree that changes have to be made on the waterfront. The current M3 zoning would not allow for the kinds of changes all agree are needed. But is zoning the right tool at this time to make these changes? Zoning is but one among many tools the city has at its disposal. Other tools include housing incentives and subsidies, infrastructure improvements (streets, sidewalks, utilities), industrial and business incentives, and city services (schools, community centers, and parks).

If zoning is changed without doing anything else, however, zoning can actually distort the way development occurs, leading to unwanted results. It can undermine the plan. How can that be?

Zoning Based on Detailed Planning and Programs

Zoning is basically a system for regulating the way land is used. The main “uses” set out in the city’s Zoning Resolution are residential, commercial and industrial. Within each of these uses, zoning sets up a maximum amount of building floor area that can be erected. But how do you know what the right mixture of uses and the right amount of building area should be? You know because you’ve planned the way you want the community to look, not in the abstract but on the ground, block by block. That is, the zoning is based on a detailed plan to develop and preserve the community.

Now, Greenpoint and Williamsburg do have officially approved plans, known as 197-a plans. The plans were made after years of community meetings involving a broad array of groups. Community Board 1 sent the plans to the City Planning Commission which, after numerous changes, approved the plans in 2001.

But these plans outline general principles that include waterfront revitalization, maintaining the mixture of residential and industrial uses, public access to the waterfront, and development of affordable housing. They do not say what uses should prevail on each block, or how much should be built on each block. That takes detailed block-by-block planning, by city agencies, property owners and community organizations working together to achieve the general vision set out in the community plan. It takes a detailed program and budget. Unfortunately, when the City Planning Commission looks at community plans it discourages them from putting in a lot of detail. The approved plans are completely disconnected from the city budget, so ideas mentioned in the plan don’t necessarily find their way into the programs or projects of city agencies. In other words, city agencies can easily file the plans away on a shelf and ignore them. It is then left to community activists to keep struggling so the city will honor them.

In Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the city has not done the detailed planning for redevelopment that should follow the general principles laid out in the approved plans. As a result, many community activists in Greenpoint and Williamsburg look at the zoning proposals and see them as potentially undermining the plan’s principles. Also, the rezoning is moving faster than the planning process, and will make any detailed planning, including design issues, moot.

Where’s The Affordable Housing?

For example, there’s plenty of room for new housing in the zoning proposal, but there’s no whiff of affordable housing, a cornerstone of the community plans. According to the Department of City Planning, making housing affordable isn’t their job. The department rejected proposals for inclusionary zoning in the recently approved Park Slope rezoning in Brooklyn. By rezoning without a plan for affordable housing the city will guarantee that the millions of square feet of new housing to be built on and near the waterfront will be “market-rate”–and out of the reach of most current residents. City planners points to the mayor’s housing plan, a city-wide plan that targets waterfront communities and promises over 65,000 units of affordable housing. But this is a city-wide proposal and there is no guarantee that any of those affordable units will end up in Greenpoint or Williamsburg. So for affordable housing there is no detailed plan. For market-rate housing, there is a detailed “plan”--the city’s rezoning proposal.

A committee of the Rezoning Task Force, a community-based group in Williamsburg, put together a vision statement for affordable housing that gets to the bottom of the issue. The committee states that “the city must guarantee that affordable housing will be integrated into each redevelopment site. Such a guarantee is possible through the implementation of present and any future tools such as: designating the use of ‘inclusionary zoning’ or an ‘affordable housing bonus’ zone, a Tax Increment Financing district, utilization of existing tax abatement programs.”

If we look more closely, the Department of City Planning rezoning plan explicitly negates the principles laid out in the officially approved Williamsburg Plan. That plan states that the city should capitalize on the availability of large underutilized waterfront sites to develop affordable housing and maintain income diversity.

Where’s the Mixed Use?

The Department of City Planning proposal also includes the establishment of mixed use zones (labeled MX), which theoretically would allow both industry and housing to coexist. But there is no detailed block-by-block plan or industry-by-industry plan that will guarantee the retention and development of industry. As a result, many of these blocks that are now zoned exclusively for industry will attract new market-rate investment for housing, pushing out whatever industry that’s left. Again, for market-rate housing there is a detailed plan--the city’s rezoning proposal. For industry, there is nothing—no incentives to grow, controls on rents, or assistance in making them better neighbors and eliminating conflicts with nearby residents. It is easy for planners to sit in their Brooklyn offices and draw lines on a map rezoning large areas of

Greenpoint and Williamsburg for mixed use, but unless something is done proactively to protect industry the net result will be a complete transformation of these areas from mixed use to upscale residential. It will be a “back-door” residential rezoning. (See the last two Land Use articles, about “as-of-right development" and “zoning to kill manufacturing" ). And that runs directly against the community plans approved by Community Board 1, the City Planning Commission and the City Council.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Planners Network Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.

The Black Organizer Blues


When I graduated from college armed with little more than a liberal arts degree and a penchant for fomenting campus protests, I moved back home to Central Brooklyn with visions of homespun revolution dancing through my head. My latest incarnation is that of a journalist, but the array of public identities I’ve traveled over the past 18 years – from political activist, to financial service provider, to economic justice advocate, to self-proclaimed community “organizer” – has always in some way been a pursuit of the idea that black-led social change can be professionalized.

Of course I’m not alone. Across the city there is a small cadre of black people running scrappy, non-profit, community organizing groups rooted in Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other black and Latino neighborhoods, organizations that are trying to sustain modest institutional challenges against targets like slumlords, predatory corporations and government agencies. In most cases these black-led efforts to build social justice institutions under the banner of community organizing, are struggling to meet payroll, find qualified glack organizers or have their phone calls returned by potential funders.

In a city with the largest concentrations of black people in the country, there are literally hundreds of relatively successful black-led organizations that are building housing, providing social services and fulfilling economic development needs. But when you identify the most well-funded and high profile neighborhood-based organizing bodies that operate in black (and Latino) neighborhoods, arguably none are black-led. An obvious question is, why?

Generally speaking, the term “community organizing” has itself proved problematic, if not exclusionary, in the way it is used. It has become a part of a jargon spoken by political activists, foundation program officers and other industry insiders to define a particular kind of social movement strategy. It is not that the concept of building a base of local leaders and using direct confrontation to address local problems and shift power does not have resonance among lay people. It is just that the assumptions made by many community organizers when they use the term – including myself – are not necessarily shared by the average person they are trying to organize. This is ironic, considering how populist the field of community organizing fancies itself to be.

In black neighborhood settings there is an even greater cultural disconnect when you use the term, especially if you invest it with the values and directives that hold sway among many professional community organizers, particularly those who have received formal training in the field. The problem starts with the idea of an organizer as an outside agitator, a benign progressive soul whose contribution to a community is to identify and train locally embedded leadership and help residents realize their own power. The fact that this model is fraught with paternalistic impulses and often carries with it a white middle-class man’s burden does not mean that organizers of color, particularly college-educated ones, are not susceptible to this view of community organizing themselves.

It’s been my experience that predominately black neighborhoods and organizations are steeped in a different activist tradition and sensibility, one that puts a premium on organizers not only living in, but actually having deep roots in and a personal connection to neighborhoods in which they organize. Consequently, black organizations often see “organizers” and “leaders” as being as one and the same.

Monifa Akinwole-Bandele, the co-executive director of the New York Chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a racial justice organization that focuses on freeing political prisoners and fighting police brutality, observes that the dominant view of community organizing stresses the process and means of social change, as opposed to the end. In other words, some feel that the act of people exercising collective power is more socially transformative than the very cause they have taken up.

In Akinwole-Bandele’s view, this is not only a misguided, but disingenuous notion. The benign outsider-organizer paradigm, she says, claims “that the organizer is objective and that the organizer doesn’t come in with an agenda... But, someone’s agenda is always going to be pushed and just coming together for the sake of coming together does not mean the right road will be taken.”

MXGM occasionally finds itself at philosophical odds with others in community organizing circles, mainly because MXGM is upfront about having a political agenda, one that includes a particular historical perspective, takes a sharply defined ideological position and puts forth a social vision. As Akinwole-Bandele sees it, “To not push an agenda is to keep the status quo.”

Roz Lee, the executive director of the New York Organizing Support Center, an organization that provides training and technical assistance to community organizing groups in New York, echoed Akinwole-Bandele’s sentiments. Although the center itself espouses a fairly specific view of organizing, Lee maintains that community organizing opinion makers in New York often do not give enough attention or respect to things that fall outside a certain formula. “I don’t think that there is enough room given to political education and the healing from wounds from the past, wounds from hundreds of years of being degraded.”

Lee, herself African-American, believes that “black-led community organizing contributes to a different style of organizing where consciousness-raising is valuable and necessary…The times our organizing efforts have faltered are the moments we stopped doing consciousness raising.” If you are a black-led group in a black community, Lee observes, “you are probably doing [political education], particularly in the early stages of organizing, and it’s easy to dismiss this as ‘not organizing’.”

The existence of a dominant model of community organizing is important to recognize if only because it affects the degree to which foundations support black-led community organizing work, a level of support that most people I have talked to feel is unsteady, unpredictable and luke warm at best. What “undergirds” this lack of support, is an “unintended racism”, observes Nia Mason, executive director of the Harlem-based Action for Community Empowerment. Foundation program officers like to support “people who know the same people as they do and speak the same language. They work with people who make them feel more comfortable with their investments.” Mason feels black-led community organizing groups are not aggressive enough in self promotion and that it’s “all in the marketing. Funders judge you on how much press you get. They fund who they’ve heard about. It’s a rare funder who will stick their neck out to fund an unknown”.

Alvin Starks, a black program officer with the Open Society Institute is one of the few funding agents in New York City who many black community organizers feel is sympathetic to their plight. Although Starks contends that funding for community organizing is hard to come by for everyone right now in New York, regardless of race, he acknowledges that black-led groups work at a disadvantage, in part because the socio-economic challenges for black neighborhoods are so multi-dimensional that groups often feel as though they don’t have the luxury to focus exclusively on community organizing as a neighborhood development strategy.

Starks addresses this by taking a broader and more ecumenical view of black-led social change work. Rather than getting caught up in defining community organizing, he said he is more interested in investing in “new voices who have strong community ties, have been nurtured by community ties and operate under some level of community accountability”. His guiding philosophy is to promote in disenfranchised neighborhoods “ social capital”, which he defines as public influence, power, access, and the ability to leverage resources.

The very idea of arming aggressive black community-organizing efforts is an unsettling notion, even to the presumed progressives in the funding world. Who can deny that a black-led protest or campaign, especially one that explicitly challenges what it perceives to be racism, has different political implications than the actions of a non black-led group? The specter of a rising “militant” black organization conjures up a singular kind of fear in the American imagination – even among black people themselves.

If you talk to those who care about the viability of community organizing strategies in black neighborhoods, they will concede that some of the most vexing challenges are closer to home. The social activism of the 1960s and 1970s in black New York gave way to a non-profit, civil society that emphasizes electoral activism, different forms of self-help and services like housing or daycare. Direct confrontation seems to be only popular in times of perceived crisis, such as when neighbors storm the local precinct after an act of police brutality or a community board stops a homeless shelter from opening.

Mason, who moved to New York in 1994, says her organizing work is not always understood, much less embraced in Harlem. “Most black people I meet think this work is too strident. They don’t think it’s the most effective way to get the resources that are needed in the community.”

When we look at the organizations that most shape the popular view of black-led social justice organizing – SCLC, SNCC, the Nation of Islam, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Black Panthers – the image that people are left with is a handful of charismatic figures – mostly men - who courageously lead the masses. The result is that unless there are personalities who commandeer the headlines, the perception is that there is a lack of social change leadership in black communities.

Historically, Lee observes, there is in black communities, a prevailing “ one voice, one leader, one people” paradigm: “There is a reliance on the kind of large scale leadership represented by people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and it gives the impression that there is a homogenous group of black people standing behind these figures and that this is the only activity going on. It’s hard to see other activity under the radar screen.” Even Akinwole-Bandele admits that her organization’s approach to leadership development, which eschews the cult of personality and promotes “platforms, not people” often goes against the expectations of most people in a neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant, the area MXGM considers to be its base.

One way or the other, for real ass-kicking, black-led, professional community organizing to flourish in New York City, black organizations will certainly have to craft a model of organizing that resonates even deeper with its constituency and establishes a more mutually supportive relationship with this base. Because at the end of day, if you want to find what is truly driving the agenda of any organization, follow the money.

In that respect, maybe the current foundation climate is as much a time for hope and opportunity as it is a time of hardship. Akinwole-Bandele found that the difficult time she has had in attracting foundation support forced her organization to engage its membership more and raise a greater share of its budget through fundraising events and grassroots fundraising campaigns. “We have become more isolated” with regard to foundations, she says, “but it’s going to make us stronger”.

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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