“I think if we have affordable housing, specifically low-income housing, it will be problematic,” said Ann Bobco, a Lower East Side resident since 1986 and a former member of Community Board 3 in the late ‘90’s. “We will be dropped into the midst of “ghettoization.”
Her husband, Bill Wuertz, also a 23 year Lower East Side resident, shares the same views. “It has always been a huge issue that was never going to get resolved. It’s too complicated and there are so many opinions on the matter. After 40 years, you obviously can’t put people back there.”
The issue Mr. Wuertz is referring to is the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), a large stretch of city owned land, several blocks south of the Williamsburg Bridge in the Lower East Side. It remains the largest tract of underdeveloped New York City-owned land in Manhattan south of 96th street.
Throughout the 1950’s, all around the world, especially in New York, cities were using federal “urban renewal” dollars to solve their problems. Tax-paying individuals and businesses began leaving urban areas, and cities had less money to work with to care for its citizens or update infrastructure. To reclaim valuable land, the city decided to bulldoze old buildings in poor neighborhoods (the “slums”) to replace them with new, publicly subsidized apartments and educational and cultural facilities for higher income residents. And so in 1967, under a federal “slum clearance” program, tenements housing 7,000 residents on SPURA were razed.
Residents were displaced by the hundreds of thousands. Some were re-housed in publicly subsidized low-income projects; others were simply removed. As part of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area plan, low-income housing was promised to be built in return. But more than 40 years later, much of the area still lies vacant, occupied by several parking lots.
Affordable housing, which seems the most obvious approach for the city to right their wrong, is more complex than recently thought.
According to Council Member Alan Gerson of 1st Council District and representative of the Lower East Side, “The highest level of affordable housing is geared towards 80 percent of area median income. The problem is that the area median income is far greater than neighborhood median income in places like the Lower East Side. The result is you have housing that is classified as affordable that is not affordable to a significant amount of folks who really need affordable housing.”
There’s a criteria that the city applies that is based on what it is called “area median income” and different affordable housing programs are geared to different individuals and families with incomes at a certain percentage of area median income.
Given the complexity of affordable housing at the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, CM Gerson has developed a few strategies to move forward with this conflict. Among them includes building to building negotiations, reaching an agreement with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to establish and sustain a Chinatown/Lower East Side Affordable Housing Trust fund, negotiating with private developers to get money into the trust funds in exchange for city benefits, and placing certain zoning requirements on developers to include certain percentages (in some case 20%) of affordable housing units.
Meanwhile, Gerson recently negotiated a commitment by the Bloomberg administration to use millions of Lower Manhattan Development dollars to upgrade and preserve substandard tenement housing.
“It has remained underutilized because of the schism between the community groups that wanted to create all affordable housing on that land and community groups that didn’t want any housing at all,” said Gerson. “That split had political overtones between different factions of the Democratic Party, different factions of the political spectrum, different elected officials on opposite sides, as well as racial and ethnic overtones.”
While Gerson faults the worst of New York politics for nothing being done after all this time, he feels its time to break the stalemate and thinks it can be done.
“I think the time is right for this type of solution for two reasons,” said Gerson. “Some of the old animosities/tensions have begun to fade over time and there is a growing recognition on law committees that there really is an affordable housing crisis, more severe than we’ve had in a generation.”
However, Joel Feingold, land use organizer of Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), a membership based organized established in 1977 that was founded as a response to the housing crisis in the Lower East Side, disagrees the old tensions have dissipated.
“It’s a visible wound in the fabric of the city,” said Feingold. “It’s not because it’s a long standing issue that people have sort of forgotten about it. In fact, because it is so old, I think it’s like this old wound that people have been fighting over forever that keeps it fresh in peoples minds.”
Feingold mentioned that there are different communities with different interests fighting on Delancey Street. His approach has been to “rise above the fray” by offering education and consciousness raising about the site, discussing its history and displacement.
In addition, Feingold and his fellow activists of GOLES have been doing consciousness raising sessions where they have been recruiting community members from different parts of the community and in different languages to talk about what they would like to see on the site. They are in the process of compiling a report which will be released in June talking about what the community said they wanted.
“Not too surprisingly, the vast majority said they wanted affordable housing,” Feingold quipped.
According to Feingold, in terms of ethnic diversity, there are a lot of different people coming together behind this idea of affordable housing on this site. His team took part in a survey process that was part of this research phase of this report, and the survey was available in Chinese, Spanish, and English. They did everything from survey the people in the Seward Park Extension which is part of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) very close to the site to randomly approaching people in Tompkins Square Park.
“It’s a function of how well we organize, how well the community organizes, how united we are, how willing we are to sort of go the limit in terms of making demands and following up with actions, meetings and legislatures,” said Feingold. “Given the way the economy is, I think that with the amount of public money that is out there, maybe something can happen. But, it would be entirely up to the folks in the community.”
“The diversity that makes our city great requires housing affordability,” said Gerson in his Fiscal Year 2009 report. “New York and Lower Manhattan must remain places where hardworking people can afford to live, seniors to retire, and young people to start out.”
The quotes you use make your conflict story powerful. I think all neighborhoods should have affordable housing, with times like these not everyone can afford to pay their mortgage.
As was mentioned in class your story relates to mine. For the reasons that both of our communities have remained the same way for a long time (screaming for improvement and residents fearing that as a middle class they won’t be taking care of). However, as you noted, the community has to take hold of the issue and make their voices heard in order for change to rule in their favor. I look forward to seeing how your neighborhood as well as mine develop within the next decade.