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In 2003, Bush signed the American Dream Down Payment Act that will help 40,000 families a year with down payments and closing costs on new homes. In addition to helping low-income families with funding, the program puts pressure on mortgage companies and the real estate industry to provide opportunities for minorities to purchase affordable housing. Bush set a goal to increase the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million by the end of the decade. The White House claims there have been over 1.53 million new minority-housing owners since 2002.
(Learn more)
However, the Bush administration is increasing requirements in order to qualify for federal housing subsidies. Beginning January 2004, a new regulation requires 8 hours of community service for approximately 60,000 people who live in public housing in New York City. If they do not abide by the regulations, they can be evicted. At the same time in recent years, federal subsidies for low-income housing in New York City have decreased. Between 1999 and 2003, the federal subsidy for the housing authority decreased by $58 million, or 6 percent.
Kerry would support measures to create more affordable housing, similar to initiatives he has sponsored in the past. As a member of the Senate, Kerry proposed the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act, that would create 1.5 million rental apartments over ten years and support long term affordable housing. He also proposed the Community Development Tax Credit Act that would encourage the construction and rehabilitation of 500,000 homes over ten years for low and middle-income families. Neither of the bills passed.
Kerry opposes Bush’s cuts in programs that support affordable housing, and will work to ensure the survival of those programs. (Learn more)
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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.
Omar Freilla is unusual. A person of color under 30 years old, Friella is attempting to start a worker cooperative in New York at a time when community-based cooperatives have been nostalgically relegated to the dustbin of counter-culture experimentation from years gone by.
Freilla's project, for which he recently received a grant from the Open Society Institute, is called the Green Worker Cooperatives and is dedicated to creating worker owned and environmentally friendly manufacturing businesses in the South Bronx. In a worker cooperative, the employees are the owners and receive an equal share of all profits. With its neighborhood base, Green Worker Cooperatives seeks to create local manufacturing jobs through the reselling of salvaged construction materials. Freilla has recently completed a feasibility study and is working on a business plan while searching for warehouse space.
Community development strategies over the past decade have been largely distinguished by their individual-based approach to fighting poverty. The prominence of programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (a federal income tax credit for low-income people) and the growing popularity of tools like Individual Development Accounts (programs that help people acquire assets using savings accounts and financial incentives) and school vouchers(programs designed to allow students from poor families to attend schools outside their public school system) reflect a social welfare vision in which low-income people are seen more as isolated, entrepreneurial contenders for the American Dream rather than inter-dependent participants in a community-wide, social improvement effort.
Of course, there is no reason for these visions to remain mutually exclusive. But formal, neighborhood-based, cooperative economic development, which is a powerful way for us as New Yorkers to interrupt our respective rat races and find common ground with our neighbors, is hard to find in New York, even in our day-to-day language. These days, when most of us hear the term "co-op" in New York we have visions of yuppie-owned units of real estate. Rarely do we talk or think of co-op or "cooperative" as a social value or a model for how we seek to live and interact with our neighbors.
Service, Not Profit
Cooperatives are first and foremost businesses that are owned and democratically controlled by either the employees or the customers who use the services of that business, as opposed to outside investors. Cooperatives are created to provide a quality, affordable service or product, rather than reap huge profits. In most cases, surplus revenue is returned to the members in proportion to their use of the cooperative, not proportionate to their "investment" or ownership share, according to the National Cooperative Business Association. All community-based cooperatives are driven by a local need to provide access to certain services or generate certain economic activity, although the location of cooperatives in New York often says as much about the left-leaning agenda of the organizers as it does about the income level of the community.
Other than organizations like Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker-owned home health care agency that currently employs over 700 Black and Latino people (most of whom are formerly public assistance recipients), there were few models of community-based cooperatives in New York that provided Freilla with inspiration.
New Yorkers are probably most familiar with consumer cooperatives such as community development credit unions which provide low-cost financial services and credit to under-banked New Yorkers. If you are fortunate to live in the right neighborhood, you may have also encountered a food coop, like the Park Slope and Flatbush Avenue Food Co-ops in Brooklyn, or the 4th Avenue Food Co-op in Manhattan. Community Supported Agricultureprojects, which are sprinkled sparingly throughout the city, serve as small, more informal associations in which local people come together to buy mostly organic fruits and vegetables from local farmers.
And yes, there are housing cooperatives that actually live up to their names. Housing Development Fund Corporations - or limited-equity coops - offer low-income tenants the ability to come together and execute control over their living conditions.
Challenges
According to Freilla, the Green Worker Cooperatives is an organic outgrowth of the economic conditions in the South Bronx. "Everybody wants a job where they can receive some dignity and exert more responsibility", says Freilla. Not only will local people be assured a living wage at the Green Worker Cooperatives, but training will be "front loaded" so that the skill based attained at Green Worker Cooperative is transferable.
Just the same, it will be important for Freilla to be aware of the challenges he will undoubtedly encounter. Ironically, the biggest hurdle that urban American Coop organizers face is the one feature that makes coops such effective alternatives. Any cooperative operating in New York has to contend with the fact that the sharing of profits, decision making and corporate responsibility is almost antithetical to the way we are used to shopping, consuming and working.
For example, I sometimes hear complaints from members of the Park Slope Food Coop - the longest running food coop in New York City and the largest wholly member-owned and operated food coop in the country - about the work hours that each member is required to contribute. And yet, the strict enforcement of these voluntary work hours is arguably the single most important reason why the Park Slope Food Coop has thrived since 1973. The collective investment of time is the sweat equity that enables the members to enjoy reduced prices on quality, otherwise high-priced, food items and even enjoy perks like free, while-you-shop, daycare.
Many members, no matter how strong their politics, find participation in cooperative institutions akin to walking up a crowded "down" staircase. When I was chairman of the board of the now defunct Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, most of my fellow 5000 members were fiercely proud of this Black-run institution, almost nationalistically so. But despite the cultural force that the credit union represented, members often couldn't resist thinking of it as a glorified bank (it didn't help that we were located in a former bank branch and adopted all the visual trappings of a bank). Consequently members often acted like traditional, non-shareholding, bank customers. They didn't realize that when they didn't pay their credit union loan, for instance, they were actually stiffing their neighbors and depriving themselves of financial dividends in the long run. In cooperatives, perhaps more so than any other kind of business, what goes around, comes around.
Democracy and non-hierarchical, collective decision-making can also prove challenging for many corporate-trained principals of cooperative ventures. Different kinds of cooperatives observe widely divergent forms of membership-led government, but universally speaking, when your mind is trained on providing a service it is tempting to make unilateral decisions and rationalize it as efficient business practice.
Freilla has already had to confront the ways in which cooperatives don't fit neatly into our popular imagination. A worker cooperative is neither an advocacy nor traditional service-oriented not-for-profit and while approaching foundations for grants during his start-up phase Freilla discovered that his project confounds program officers using standard funding guidelines. The fact that the Green Worker Cooperative includes training programs and represents a little-understood industry -- sustainable waste management and resale -- makes it that much more difficult to categorize.
One day in the future, when different political and economic conditions hold sway, maybe neighborhood-based cooperatives will be closer to the rule than the exception. Until that day comes, you might want to consider joining or even starting a coop, even if it's a small, informal venture between you and your friends. It may not only offer a more humane way to shop or work, but perhaps a better way to live.
 Every year, the Rent Guidelines Boarddecides how much to increase rents on rent stabilized apartments, affecting millions of New Yorkers where it matters most: in their wallets. On June 17, the board will make its final decision, after several highly charged public meetings. Nearly half of the people in the city stand to be directly affected by the ultimate decision.
The board's staff prepares detailed studies of landlords' income and expenses, of the mortgage market, of tenants' incomes and affordability of housing.
The final outcome is a reflection of what numbers the board's members thought were most compelling. The nine members include two who represent tenants, two who represent landlords and five who represent the public at large. The public members constitute the swing votes. They include an investment banker, an attorney, a real estate developer, a consultant to non-profit organizations and an architect.
Political intrigue is common. This year, the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents landlords across the city, submitted to the board estimates of costs that tenant groups say are greatly exaggerated.
"There's no economic justification for a rent increase this year," said Michael McKee, associate director of New York State Tenants and Neighbors. "All the data show that landlords are doing extremely well and tenants are suffering. The data don't lie."
The "net operating income" for landlords - that is, their profit - rose by 18 percent from 1989 to 2002. From 2001 to 2002, however, profits declined slightly -- by 0.1 percent. Tenant advocates like to point out that in that same two-year period people's real wages declined, and that New York City has lost almost 200,000 jobs since 2001. The advocates argue that landlords are making decent profits on rent stabilized buildings, while tenants are being squeezed: Slightly less than a quarter of tenants have "severe rent burdens" -- that is, they're spending half or more of their income on rent.
The landlords sees it differently from the tenants.
"The range of guidelines that are proposed just barely touch on what is needed for property owners to stay afloat," said Jack Freund, executive vice president of the Rent Stabilization Association. "People can afford a reasonable rent increase. If you don't provide what owners need to maintain their buildings, you're going to hurt the people you're trying to protect."
Freund dismissed the reported increase in net operating income as well as talk of an affordable housing crisis. "To the extent that there is an affordability issue in the city, that is a government issue," Freund said.
The board's meetings put landlords and tenants within arm's length in the same room. Even if they were at a cocktail party, that would be provocative. But when the subject is money, it is going to become contentious, as was clear at a recent board meeting, where there were hisses, boos, chants and shouts. The chairman of the board, Marvin Markus, lost his gavel trying to pound the meeting back to order. "Calm down, Mr. Chairman!" someone shouted. He threatened to have some people removed, but did not ask police at the doors to carry out the threat.
The already passionate landlord and tenant relationship - the second most important relationship after marriage, some say - is on view at these meetings.
At its May meeting, board members rejected proposals from tenant members for no increase and from owner members for significant increases. For the first time, they set a range for increases on one- and two-year leases of 3 to 5 percent and 4.5 to 7.5 percent respectively. The vote was 5 to 4.
In a recent interview, the board's chairman, Marvin Markus, an investment banker, said the housing situation in New York City was not bleak. He also dismissed the exaggerated numbers submitted by the Rent Stabilization Association.
"Last year, the increases (passed by the board) were not anywhere near what the numbers show," Markus said, referring to the increases in costs that landlords faced.
"I can tell you if it's left to Markus the final will be as high as possible," McKee said. "We don't call him Marvin Mark-up for nothing."
McKee said tenants need to come out if they want to show Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who appoints all of the board's members, that the board's decision could cause him political problems.
"It's not an economic decision - it's a political decision," McKee said. "And there's one person responsible, and that's Mayor Bloomberg."
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.
 The residents of 33rd Street in Astoria, Queens weren’t looking for trouble. It literally fell into their backyard.
In June of 2003 a curious set of engineering plans floated from the roof of a building and into the backyard of Mario Bazzolo, setting off a chain of events that could have long-term repercussions for the expansion of wireless technology in New York. As fate would have it, Bazzolo, an electrical engineer, immediately recognized what the details of the blueprint represented and in reporting his findings to his neighbors confirmed what some had suspected all along: That recent construction on the roof of 32-42 33rd Street was not the work of a cable television company, as one of the men working on the roof had falsely claimed. The antennae which looked onto surrounding homes and families on this quiet residential street were in fact part of a base station transmitting radio frequency (RF) signals used for mobile phones.
Since that day in June in 2003, the residents living in and around 32-42 33rd Street, organized now as the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition, have been fighting to have these antennae removed. In doing so, they have become lay experts on “non-thermal ionizing radiation” (radiation that does not heat tissue) and have discovered that there are over 200 antennae located within a mile and half radius of their block, primarily on residential buildings. From there they have taken on the wireless phone industry and New York City zoning officials while prompting two legislators to introduce bills that would begin to more closely regulate the mounting of cell phone antennae in New York City neighborhoods and state-wide. Perhaps most importantly, the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition has inspired a growing city-wide effort to rein in what some consider to be the unchecked proliferation of cell phone antennae across the city, and to bring public awareness to potential health risks posed by their radiation emissions.
The cell phone industry, mostly in the form of wireless service providers and communication technology companies, real estate developers, construction companies and others with a vested interest in a multi-billion dollar business, say these fears are unfounded. In extolling the safety of cell phone base stations, they also emphasize the importance of cell phones in times of emergency (almost ten thousand 911 calls are made from wireless phones in New York everyday) and point to American society’s growing reliance on cell phones.
Cell phones started appearing regularly on New York City streets in the early 1990s. Today there are approximately 10.5 million wireless phone subscribers in the city alone. More to the point, there are thousands of cell phone antennae throughout the city, although no one knows the exact number or even how to get an accurate count. Yet while cell phones have become a highly visible and ubiquitous feature of modern life, the mobile phone industry’s rooftop infrastructure remains largely unnoticed by the general public. In fact, there was little evidence that the public cared where cell phone towers were placed until there was political oppositionto recent attempts by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to rent public school rooftop space to cell phone companies.
Cellular phone facilities typically consist of three primary parts: the antenna, the base station, and the equipment. Antennae send and receive signals to and from cellular phones using RF radiation at frequencies between 800 and 1990 megahertz (MHz) which is greater than most FM radios, cordless telephones, and television broadcasts, but less than microwave oven frequencies.
At the heart of the dispute between organizations like the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition and the New York Wireless Access Coalition, a wireless industry advocacy association, is their interpretation of research that has been done on the safety of these antennae. While the radio frequency used by cell antennas may seem no more dangerous than a microwave oven, it is the constancy of the emissions and the proximity of antennae to humans that has raised questions among scientists and prompted countless health studies. Most of the research done so far is limited and inconclusive at best, neither denying nor concluding that cell phone antennas pose a public health threat. In fact, at a recent City Council hearing, both wireless phone advocates and their detractors quoted excerpts from the same World Health Organization (WHO) fact sheet to champion their cause.
The wireless phone industry, public health officials and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) all point to the fact that there is no smoking antenna, no proof that the radiation produced by cell antenna radio frequencies constitutes a real health risk. As a result, wireless advocates maintain there is no justification for trying to impose regulations on the cell phone industry.
Anti-proliferation organizers and members of the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition acknowledge that cell phones are important mainstays in today’s society, but argue that the need for more scientific research is reason enough to at least monitor cell phone antennae construction. Evie Hantzopoulos, a spokesperson for the Coalition who freely admits to being an avid cell phone user herself, points to the city’s experience with asbestos as a cautionary tale of how medical science is often years behind the growth and use of new technologies, innovations and materials.
The research debate is a highly complicated one, not only because opinions within the scientific community - some of which has been underwritten by the cell phone industry itself - vary greatly, but because no one has yet been able to complete a long term study that accurately simulates real life conditions and antenna exposure.
While Jessica Leighton, the Assistant Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health testified at City Council hearings that antennas were “unlikely” to pose a health risk, she also admitted “it is fair to say that some questions have not been conclusively answered. While more study may be warranted, it would take an enormous amount of time, money and expertise…Entirely different training, expertise and professions are required to evaluate emissions, exposure and health outcomes.” Leighton concluded that “Better studies are based on very large populations, followed for many years into the future… Short-term health studies conducted locally are not likely to shed meaningful light on these issues.”
In addition to the seemingly divine hand that delivered the errant blueprints to Bazzolo’s doorstep in Astoria, it took a very aggressive community organizing campaign by the coalition for the issue of cell tower proliferation to take on a broader city-wide profile. After learning that the owner of 32-42 33rd Street was renting rooftop space to T-Mobile, residents discovered that the rooftop was accessible to the residents of the building, lacked proper signage and that three of the antennae were openly exposed, within mere feet, to people living in the adjoining building - all in violation of Federal Communications Commission(FCC) guidelines.
In response, the coalition quickly produced a 500 signature petition demanding that the antennae be removed, called on their public officials to get involved and requested an inspection of the base station from the FCC. In the process they also learned that securing the legal right to have the antennae dismantled would not, however, prove to be so easy.
Normally, telecommunication companies are required to apply to the Board of Standards and Appeals and then appear in front of a public hearing before they can build in a residential neighborhood. However in 1998 Deputy Commissioner of Buildings Richard Visconti issued an order that exempted cell phone companies from this long and expensive neighborhood process. Visconti explained his action by saying, “The department recognizes that the cellular telephone has become a prevalent form of communication essential to the public interest. As such, those companies wishing to erect cellular antennae and install related equipment are to be treated with the deference afforded other public utilities.”
As such, cell phone carriers operate under very little control or oversight, not only in New York, but statewide. According to an open letter issued by the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition, “telecommunication companies themselves are not required to inspect or monitor the sites. The FCC issues a blanket license for a geographical area. As long as the company self-certifies that the site meets federal guidelines, they can put up an antenna sites wherever they wish...[N]o agency on the local, state or federal level tracks where these antennae are being sited.”
Because the New York State Public Service Commission is regarded as a competitive market, they do not regulate wireless companies. Furthermore, local and state governments across the country are prohibited from using health concerns as a guiding principle in the zoning of cell phone antennae and base stations because, the FCC reasoned in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, there is no solid evidence linking cell phone technology with heath risks.
In the meantime, the coalition has questioned the validity of the exemption that was granted the wireless phone industry and contemplates a class-action lawsuit. Hantzopoulos asserts that Visconti’s action was “in violation of the New York City Charter” and he “had no authority to issue this exemption”.
The coalition has already been successful in compelling T-Mobile to remove three of the nine antennae, the ones that directly exposed residents in the adjacent building. By the time the FCC arrived in October of 2003 to inspect the site, it represented perhaps an even more significant victory for the coalition: The Queens Chronicle reported it was the first inspection of a New York City cell phone antenna ever conducted by the FCC. What arguably should have been routine, was, in fact, a landmark event for the agency that took months and a great deal of applied political pressure from Queens to achieve. As a result of this experience, Hantzopoulos surmised that when it comes to wireless technology, the “FCC has neither the expertise nor the capacity to ensure public safety”.
Indeed, the coalition’s allies have proven to be closer to home. A target of the coalition’s advocacy, Astoria City Councilmember Peter Vallone, Jr. has introduced a billthat, if passed, would mandate that the city maintain a list of where cellular phone antennae are erected, thus giving the public the ability to at least track antenna locations. Vallone has called for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to study the long-term effects of living and working near multiple antennae and base stations and has already prompted the City Council Committees on Health and Housing and Buildings to hold hearings in April of 2004 on the proliferation of cell phone antennae.
Astoria Assemblyman Michael Gianaris has been pushed even further in sponsoring Assembly Bill 9897, which is designed to “promote the responsible and efficient placement of wireless facilities in residential areas”. Specifically, the legislation would establish a four-month moratorium on the construction of wireless facilities, allowing time for the establishment of a new siting board that would ensure certain criteria are met before a wireless tower is erected.
Gianaris’ legislation would also mandate a study on the health effects of cell phone tower emissions; require companies to demonstrate the need for each wireless facility; require written notice of the facility to residents living within 500 feet of the proposed tower; call for public hearings on specific construction proposals; and require that cellular phone facilities conform to the aesthetics of the surrounding neighborhood.
The cell phone industry has not taken this lying down. In her testimony before the New York City Council hearings, Laura Altschul, Director of National Siting Policy at T-Mobile USA Communications, said that while these legislative initiatives are “well intentioned, they have the potential…to threaten the city’s wireless communications systems and undermine the advances New York City has made in telecommunications to date.” In addition to emphasizing the important role that cell phones play in originating 911 calls, Altschul argued that the tracking of cell phone antennae could be exploited by terrorists to threaten homeland security.
But the protest genie may have already escaped the bottle, both locally and nationally. For instance, several independent grassroots campaigns in San Francisco aimed at halting the placement of wireless antennae in residential areas joined forces in 2000 under the banner of the San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union(SNAFU), a city-wide coalition of individual residents and neighborhood organizations. And taking the lead from the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition, community boards #1 in Queens and #7 and #8 in Manhattan have passed resolutions calling for the study of potential cell antenna health risks, while boards #3 in Manhattan and #10 in Brooklyn have recently placed the matter on their agendas.
In the meantime, with three antennae removed, but six remaining on the roof of 32-42 33rd Street, the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition continues its fight and has become the leading grassroots voice for people across New York desperate for information and advice regarding cell phone antennae. Hantzopoulos says that she and the coalition members have received countless emails and phone calls from people facing their own dilemmas: Co-op boards and landlords wondering whether to accept money from companies seeking to put antennae on their roofs; cancer victims questioning their own close exposures to antennae; residents, grassroots organizations and elected officials considering how to mount their own local anti-antenna campaigns; even a parent trying to decide whether to buy a house on the coalition’s block. “This is going to be a major public health issue in the years to come,” Hantzopoulos said. “The public is just beginning to learn about it and they will be outraged.”
Thanks to the fiftieth anniversaryof the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, talk this month is about segregation in the schools.
Our education administrators could easily brush off the fact that city schools remain separate and unequal by blaming residential segregation - and with some justification. After all, most students go to their neighborhood schools, particularly students whose parents have limited resources and can't afford long school commutes. Still, our educators should acknowledge that educational apartheid is both a product of residential apartheid and a stimulus for it. Whites protect their exclusive residential enclaves to protect their privileged schools.
In "Separate and Unequal: Racial and Ethnic Neighborhoods in the Twenty first Century," the Lewis Mumford Center found that the income disparity between black and white neighborhoods is gaping - black incomes are 55 percent of white incomes. The disparity between Hispanics and whites is even greater.
Today the ethnic division of the city is complex. Over one third of the city's population is foreign born. The city's newest immigrant groups are much more diverse than in the past. They come from many more countries and their incomes vary more widely. They don't easily fit into the historic black/white racial categories that have dominated the U.S. since the early days of slavery. Yet they are segregated.
There are of course many reasons for residential segregation, there is no agreed upon strategy for eliminating it, and it's not obvious what integration really means. But it is incredible that in this city where those formerly dubbed "minorities" are now the majority there is no public discussion about how the city's policies may be responsible for segregation and the inequalities that go along with it. The political establishment seems to think everyone is color blind.
One set of city policies that appears to be immune from scrutiny relates to land use and zoning.
Zoning and the City of Enclaves
The main government mechanism for exercising land use policy is zoning. In principle, zoning separates industrial, commercial and residential functions, and controls the form and density of new development. In practice, zoning has been used to separate people by income and race. Zoning by itself isn't the cause of segregation, but it codifies and reinforces segregation patterns created by discrimination in real estate, and makes it difficult to change them.
There are at least two main ways that zoning codifies segregation and inequality: by encouraging gentrification and by maintaining environmental racism.
When the city's planners propose zoning changes in diverse neighborhoods that would spur massive new housing development, as they have done in Greenpoint and Williamsburg (Brooklyn), for example, they encourage the displacement of low-income working people and people of color, stimulating the conversion of the neighborhood to an all-white upscale enclave. As neighborhoods improve and property values go up, property owners put pressures on the city to change zoning rules and allow for new development. The city's planners normally applaud such trends as evidence of healthy development, and they then bestow on property owners windfall gains by "upzoning" sections of the neighborhood. But this kind of zoning change has a ripple effect, jacks up property values in the surrounding areas, and makes the neighborhood unaffordable to the people who now live there. The end result is income segregation, and since blacks and Latinos disproportionately fall on the lower end of the income scale, the outcome is also racial segregation. Ironically, many of the working class tenants of European descent now living in Greenpoint will be forced to move from a relatively integrated neighborhood to a lily-white suburb.
There are tried and true zoning techniques that aim to prevent this gentrification from further segregating neighborhoods. One of these, inclusionary zoning, mandates that a portion of all new residential development be affordable to people with low incomes. Alas, the City Planning Department recently opposed a proposal for inclusionary zoning in Park Slope, Brooklyn and is resisting demands for inclusionary zoning in other parts of the city.
At the same time that relatively diverse central neighborhoods are turning into yuppie enclaves, the city's planners gleefully provide zoning protections for the less diverse lower density neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Recently recommended zoning changes in Staten Island, for example, will provide further protections to white homeowner enclaves.
Environmental Racism
Another way that zoning reinforces segregation is by allowing most of the noxious, polluting infrastructure to be located only in the city's shrinking number of manufacturing districts. The people who live and work in and near these districts are disproportionately people with modest incomes and people of color. A fascinating but little-known study by Lehman College professor Juliana Maantay (Solid Waste and the Bronx: Who Pays the Price) showed how white neighborhoods have managed to get their industrial districts rezoned for new residential development much faster than low-income communities of color. Since 1961 the city's wealthiest borough, Manhattan, converted industrial zones to residential and commercial zones the fastest, while in the Bronx, the city's poorest borough, there have been the least conversions. Prof. Maantay looked more closely at waste-related facilities in the Bronx and found that 87% of people living within one-half mile of these noxious uses are people of color. These are neighborhoods with high rates of asthma and other diseases related to noxious uses.
Since the city has no long-range plan for retaining industry, it does very little to help clean up existing facilities so they will be compatible with residential neighborhoods and continue to provide industrial jobs in those areas. Instead, the city is basically telling neighborhoods the only way they can get rid of bad industrial neighbors is to become upscale, lily-white bedroom enclaves,
What About the Suburbs?
To be fair, New York City must share the responsibility for discriminatory zoning with the suburbs. Many towns in upstate New York, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut require minimum lot sizes for homes of half-acre, one acre, and in some cases up to 20 acres. As a result, only the most expensive homes can be built. Since whites are disproportionately among the wealthiest homeowners, this effectively excludes blacks and other people of color. It's also no coincidence that NYC has the majority of the region's low-income public housing units.
While whites find opportunities for affordable housing in the suburbs, middle class blacks usually have a much harder time finding any housing. As reported in the Mumford Center's Separate and Unequal study: "Findings indicate that even minorities who have achieved higher incomes and moved to the suburbs live in more disadvantaged conditions than their white peers."
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.
The City Council recently held what for them was a first, an awards ceremony honoring six people for their work in affordable housing.
Did all the effort and expense for the ceremony – Council chambers filled with friends and family, an elaborate buffet, an appearance by Speaker Gifford Miller – mean anything more than just another event at City Hall?
Yes, insisted Councilmember Gale Brewer afterward: Housing, she believes, is back as a potent political issue.
The competition for attention is stiff. In one poll, New Yorkers ranked the economy, the city budget, and terrorism as the most important problems. Only two percent put housing first. But that poll, by Quinnipiac College, was conducted more than a year ago. Ask local officials now about constituent calls, and the answer is different:
“Housing is the number one problem in my district without a question,” said Councilmember Robert Jackson of Harlem in a recent interview. “I see it every day. Rents are going up so high and people are being evicted.”
Councilmember Letitia James of Brooklyn said she was getting “three or four” calls a day from people with housing problems, and helping landlords and tenants reach agreements that do not involve actual eviction.
There are also about a dozen council resolutions concerning housing issues pending now. In the city budget, the council has proposed using money from a commuter tax to finance affordable housing construction. At the state level, Vito Lopez, chairman of the Assembly’s Housing Committee said there are probably “10 percent” more bills about housing this year than last.
People are paying more attention not just because rents are going up, but also because
• A new commissioner of the city’s housing department has taken over;
• Cuts to the federal Section 8 program that could increase the number of homeless people are going into effect.
• The probable loss of more Mitchell-Lama apartments is uniting tenants.
The attention will only intensify in coming weeks. On May 13, two events will bring out hundreds, perhaps thousands of tenants: a rally to compel City Council members to adopt a bill to enable tenants to obtain roof-to-cellar inspections of their buildings and an overnight vigil at City Hall Park that begins at 2 p.m. At the same time, the Rent Guidelines Board is continuing hearings to determine whether and how much to raise rents on rent stabilized apartments.
But outside of the city, housing is not as potent an issue.
“I don’t hear much about housing,” said Erik Kriss, who covers Albany for the Syracuse Post Standard. “It’s not a steady issue.”
In his January 20th budget address, Governor George Pataki mentioned housing only once; in his State of the State address two weeks earlier, he had not mentioned housing at all.
State Senator John Bonacic, chair of the senate housing committee, said housing was important but simply a victim of a full agenda in the legislature that is dominated by education, health care and homeland security.
“You won’t find one person who will not say affordable housing is not important because it is,” said Bonacic, a Republican. “It goes hand in hand with economic development, to take care of the economic engine. And there is a critical need for affordable housing, especially for the mid-Hudson to the city, Long Island and Hudson. In terms of a political issue, I don’t think it’s a high political issue.”
A spokesman for Senator Joseph Bruno, majority leader of the State Senate, said housing did not stick out as an issue because the primary solutions to housing problems rest with the private sector, not the government.
“We prefer to see things that can be done to encourage competition through the strength of the market to encourage construction of housing, rather than the government just coming in and building homes or units,” said Marc Hansen, from Bruno’s office.
Michael McKee, associate director of New York State Tenants and Neighbors, a statewide housing advocacy organization, said attention to housing outside of the city was virtually nonexistent.
“I don’t think any of the players in Albany are paying attention to housing, affordable housing or any tenant protection program,” McKee said.
Assembly Member Lopez begged to differ.
“There is definitely more chatter,” Lopez said. “There is more attention because there is a serious housing crisis.”
Lopez said he expected the Assembly this year to commit $70 to $90 million for construction of affordable housing in the state budget. But that is far short of what is needed, affordable housing developers and advocates have said. In contrast, the mayor’s plan will spend about $3 billion on the preservation and construction of 65,000 affordable housing units through 2008 – and that is short of what is needed, too, experts have said.
This difference in how much attention housing gets in the city and in Albany is not lost on housing advocates. They are planning to apply more pressure on politicians to make housing a priority, particularly by rolling back luxury decontrol, which is part of the rent regulation laws renewed last year.
Luxury decontrol, which allows landlords to deregulate apartments that reach $2,000 monthly rent vacant or when the rent is $2,000 or higher and the household income is greater than $175,000 for two years consecutively, has been blamed for the loss of as many as 100,000 rent stabilized apartments.
Although Republicans in the legislature vocally oppose rent regulation, McKee said advocates are not targeting them alone. Democrats who have failed to win political battles for tenants are being targeted, too, he said. Tenants and Neighbors organized a rally outside of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s office on a recent weekend.
The Democrats’ “whole response is, â€what do you expect us to do?’” McKee said. “It’s pretty pathetic…. Well, we expect you to play hardball.”
Acknowledging that making housing a potent issue in Albany would be difficult, McKee said the recent rally was just the beginning of putting pressure on state politicians.
“Normally, the legislature never deals with rent regulation unless it’s a sunset year,” he said. “They’re not going to want to do it. They’re not going to do it unless there is an enormous effort by tenants and advocates.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.
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Almost two years ago, Mary Zuniga found a two-bedroom rent stabilized apartment for $1,500 near Columbia University. The Texas native had a friend from her home state that wanted to come to New York City and the two agreed to split the rent.
What Zuniga did not know at the time was that the $1,500 rent was apparently illegal, about $600 more than the legally registered rent.
She is hardly alone. Rent overcharges are common in the city and many tenants do not know they are paying too much. But complaints about overcharges are dwindling. Some believe this is a direct indication of the dismantling of rent regulation.
Rent stabilized apartments make up about half of all rental apartments in New York City. A state agency, the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, establishes the legal rents for these apartments and landlords must report any increases.
Rents increase in these apartments in a number of ways.
*The Rent Guidelines Board meets annually to decide whether rent regulated apartment rents should increase to cover landlords’ costs.
* If an apartment is vacated and a new tenant moves in, the landlord can increase the rent.
*If the landlord renovates the apartment, she can request an increase of 1/40th the cost of renovations from the state agency or apply it directly if an apartment was vacant.
The cost of building-wide improvements can also be passed on to tenants in rent increases.
In Zuniga’s case, the landlord said he had improved the apartment by replacing the appliances and the floor. Although the floor looked new, the appliances were old, Zuniga said. After finding a free attorney through a community organization, Zuniga and her roommate filed a complaint over a year ago with the state housing agency, which is pending.
Sondra Rutherford, a tenant advocate, has helped tenants file thousands of overcharge complaints over the last 20 years. After she helped lead a rent strike in her building in the early 1980s, people sought her assistance with overcharge complaints. In any given year, she had 100 to 125 active cases; for the last few years, she has averaged only 15, she said.
“I developed it into a nice healthy business for 20 years,” Rutherford said. “But with changes in the last five years, I have reached rock bottom. I can’t afford to give it full time focus anymore.”
The heyday of overcharge complaints ks gone, she said. The state housing agency was unable to provide numbers on the cases.
“They’re less and less common because of the phase out of rent regulation laws,” she said. “As soon as a tenant moves out, the landlord renovates the apartment…. [The landlords] jack the rent up to market value. They’ll get paperwork from contractors claiming $30,000 to $40,000 in renovations. The agency accepts it without any substantive review.”
Bob Katz, legal counsel to the Queens League of United Tenants, agreed, adding that the state housing agency has changed rules on rent overcharges and other ways for landlords to raise rents.
“All these rules are to maximize rents for landlords – to do away with rent regulation,” he said. “They’re succeeding very nicely.”
One significant change in the way overcharge complaints are judged concerns how far back a review of the apartment’s rent can go. When the state legislature renewed rent regulation laws in 1997, they limited a rent history review to four years. That means if a landlord can get away with an overcharge for four years, challenging it becomes moot.
Other mechanisms to increase rents have also been relaxed, Katz said. “Major capital improvement” increases were once allowed only for improvements that were depreciable according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that rule has been abandoned and now anything goes, he said.
In one large Queens apartment complex, the landlord was allowed to increase rents not only to cover the cost of putting in boilers, but also for the costs of pruning trees and building an office in the basement.
All of these increases simply speed up the deregulation of apartments, a problem that housing advocates say is exacerbating homelessness and forcing middle-income people to leave the city as the stock of affordable housing evaporates. Once a rent stabilized apartment’s rent reaches $2,000, a landlord can apply to the state housing agency to deregulate it.
Katz said he is preparing to file a federal lawsuit against the state housing agency for effectively denying tenants their right to due process of law by changing the rules in midstream.
“I’m finding enough of these cases where there is a change of standards by [the state housing agency],” he said. After a tenant files a complaint, he said, the rules are changed and the tenant loses the case as a result.
For Zuniga and her roommate, that possibility exists. Almost two years after filing their complaint with the state housing agency, they have yet to get a decision.
“All they can tell you is that your case is still open,” she said. “They don’t have much to say to you at all.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.