The disquieting drone of bulldozers
could be the soundtrack for this summer if
a so-called "middle-income" develop-ment
scam by the New York City Hous-ing
Partnership is allowed to go through.
Partnership plans to build nine,
four-story condominium buildings on East
10th and 11th Streets between Avenues A
anc C, containing 98 two- and
three-bedroom duplex apartments, fronted
by 12,800 sq. ft. of commercial space.
Another 65 duplexes are slated to be
developed on Suffolk Street. Construction
could begin as early as "mid-summer,"
according to sources within the Department
of Housing, Preservation and Development
(HPD).
The Partnership plan would eradicate
several well-established
neighborhood gardens, including the Chico
Mendez Mural Garden at 11th and A (named
after the Brazilian rain-forest martyr);
the 10th Street Garden between B and C;
and the Rodriguez Community Garden on
Suffolk between Rivington and Stanton, one
of the only green spaces in a very densely
popu-lated area south of Houston.
And that's just the beginning. Those
friendly neighborhood sellouts on
Community Board 3 have invited
Partnership to build their homogenized
"town-houses" on as many as 22 sites on
the Lower East Side, in the process wiping
out as many as a dozen other commun-ity
gardens. The result would irrevocably
alter the landscape of the LES, not just
in the loss of green, open space, but
through the imposition of what is
essen-tially low-rise, yuppie housing
aimed at further displacing the poor.
Partnership claims the duplexes,
priced between $120,000 to $160,000, are
designed for families earning up to
$71,000. While the market value for these
units is much higher, Partnership offsets
the construction costs of the units with
state and city subsidies. Yet even at
those subsidized prices, housing experts
say when you add up the monthly
maintenance and mortgage fees, any
neighborhood people earning less than
$70,000 would be hard-pressed to afford
these units.
While there are resale restrictions to
discourage owners from speculating on
their units, after 25 years, prices could
go sky-high.
The Partnership invasion of the
Lower East Side constitutes the final
phase of the Cross-Subsidy scam
negotiated between Community Board 3
(CB3) and HPD. Under this agreement,
brokered during the Koch Administration,
the city allowed non-profits to develop
vacant buildings on the Lower East Side
for low and moderate-income housing, in
exchange for the right to sell off all the
vacant lots (i.e. Gardens) for market-rate
housing. But the market- rate component
stalled when the real estate market
bottomed out in the late 1980s, and no
developers wanted to finance new
construction.
Now, with gentrification surging, both
CB3 liberals and the conservative
appointees of Councilmember Antonio Pag‡n
are pushing for the Partnership's "middle
income" condos as a supposed alternative
to flat-out market rate hous-ing. Pag‡n's
cronies, who have long argued that the
neighborhood is "over-saturated" with
low-income people and social service
centers, say middle-income housing would
shore up the "tax base and stability" of
the LES. But, a brief look at the history
of the NYC Partnership and its "urban
renewal" philosophy suggests anything but
stability.
The New York City Partnership was
founded in 1982 by David Rockefeller, the
great financier whose development
machinations in the 1980s led to the
dismantling Manhattan's manufacturing
base--the rail freight yards and docks,
the source of blue-collar employment --in
favor of a glut of office space for New
York's finance, insurance and real estate
industries (i.e., the rich). In a sense,
the Partnership was conceived as a vehicle
for the privatization of public housing
and urban resources heralded by Ronald
Reagan.
Having absorbed New York's Chamber of
Commerce, the Partnership has become one
of the most influential non- governmental
bodies dictating housing and economic
development in the city today. It's
members include the top executives of New
York's major corporations and
institutions.
The New York City Housing Partnership
is a subsidiary of the New York City
Partnership. It is currently the larg-est
builder of privately financed low- and
middle-income housing, having leveraged
more than $1.5 billion to construct
13,000 homes and apartments in
50 low-income communities across the five
boroughs over the past decade.
While that might seem like a laudable
effort, Partnership's development agenda
is rooted in Rockefeller's philosophy to
"de-densify" the poor through what urban
specialists like to call "planned
shrinkage." Why, you might ask, is the
Partnership putting up four-story condos
on the LES, when most of the housing stock
here is five or six stories?
In fact, Partnership's notion of urban
renewal is based on building suburban-
style, low-density housing. At a time when
the city is hemorraging under one of the
worst housing crises in the nation, this
corporate behemouth has devoted itself to
constructing white-picket fenced ranch
houses and two- and three-family homes all
over the Bronx, Harlem, East New York,
Williamsburg, Staten Island-- and now, the
LES.
"The aim is to get rid of large
numbers of poor people and replace them
with smaller numbers of middle class
people," says Robert Fitch, author of The
Assination of New York (Verso, 1993), a
book which delineates how real estate
barons and corporate "philanthropists"
like Rockefeller and Ford have sold out
the working poor.
Describing Partnership's develop-ment
schemes in the Bronx, Fitch ex-plains the
rationale for low-rise housing: "Low
Densities mean low costs, and low taxes.
As one south Bronx activist and opponent
of...planned shrinkage, Harry DiRienzo,
explained:
"Developing a home for a household
earning $40,000 a year, with a car and
kids in a private school is perceived by
some as preferential to a household with
an income of $8,000, with twice as many
children and some level of social service
needs. This helps explain why the South
Bronx is now being developed by the New
York City Partnership with densities of 18
households per acre on land which once
housed 120 households per acre. "
In other words, by subsidizing low-
density, middle-income housing instead of
poor people's housing, the govern-ment can
lower expenditures for welfare, social
services and schools, while
broadening the city's tax base. And the
poor, well, they'll just have to fend for
themselves.
It's important to understand that the
Partnership agenda is citywide, working in
tandem with the Giuliani Administra-tion's
goal of privatizing virtually all city-
owned property. Last year, Giuliani
announced his intention to sell off at
least half of the city's 750 community-
run gardens. Many will no doubt go to the
Partnership.
The city in turn provides the
Partnership with plenty of cash to
subsidize its development schemes, roughly
$300 million a year. The cozy
relationship is evi-dent in the revolving
door that exists be-tween city
bureaucrats, corporate execs, and
Partnership employees: for example,
Veronica Wright, the current president of
NYC Housing Partnership, was formerly
Deputy Commissioner for Planning and
Policy at HPD.
Partnership also works closely with
LISC/Enterprise, the development and
funding organizations which financed the
destruction and gut renovation of the 13th
Street squats last summer. In fact, former
NYC Partnership president Kathryn Wylde,
is a close buddy of Pag‡n, and helped him
lead the drive to enlist LISC/Enterprise
in the 13th Street project.
Not surprisingly, the contractor for
the 13th Street site, Donald Capoccia of
BFC Partners in the Bronx, has also been
selected to construct Partnership's condos
on 10th, 11th, and Suffolk Streets.
Capoccia is a major campaign contributor
to Pag‡n. As reported in SHADOW #9,
Capoccia was the "pro-ject manager" who
enabled his friends and acquaintances to
buy apartments in buildings designated for
low-income housing located at 72-74 East
Third Street for nominal amounts of cash.
Within two years, most of the players
resold their apartments for an average
profit of $100,000 each.
The magnitude of NYC Partnerships
influence over city planning
cannot be overstated. In order to further
fuel its "urban renewal" agenda, last
September, the Partnership created another
subsidiary, the New York City Investment
Fund, supposedly aimed at creating jobs
and economic develop-ment in so-called
"blighted areas." But one has to question
how philanthropic the Investment Fund will
be considering that its chair is Henry
Kravis, the billionaire owner of New York
magazine whose multi-billion-dollar
takeovers and leveraged buyouts during the
80s and early 90s led to the corporate
downsizing of hundreds of thousands of
jobs nationwide. The Fund's vice chair is
real estate baron Jerry Speyer; its president
is Kathryn Wylde, the former head of NYC
Housing Partnership. The board reads like
a Who's Who of corporate America,
comprising the top CEO's of Chase
Manhattan, Merrill Lynch, Time Warner,
Goldman Sachs, Dime, NYNEX, Solomon
Brothers, Crains New York Business, and
others.
Working with a pool of $57 million
in investment capital culled from 57
corporations donating $1 million each,
the Fund plans to promote job creation
through larger companies and retailers, as
opposed to non-profits and small
businesses, which it says do not generate
enough potential for growth. One might
ask, growth and jobs for whom?
According to its literature, the Fund
intends to "reinfore NYC's status as the
world financial capital. Recognizing the
inevitability of job losses from
consolidation and relocation of back
offices to lower cost areas, the Fund will
focus on sustaining the city's role as the
center of inovation in financial services.
It will also help structure new financing
vehicles for commercial real estate,
particularly in neighborhoods/sectors
where conventional financing is often
unavailable." Bottom line, big money
rules.
So what does all this wheeling and
dealing mean for the fate of the Lower
East Side? Basically, that we're coming up
against a mother-fucking octopus with more
deep pockets than you want to know about,
that's intent on radically re-landscaping
our community at the expense of green
space and the poor. And the so-called
progressive non-profits and housing groups
in the nabe aren't going to do a thing to
stop it, because they're all looking to
get a piece of the pie.
In addition to the Partnership condos
on 10th and 11th Streets, CB3 District
Manager Martha Danzinger and a bunch of
Pag‡n cronies are seeking to turn the park
space at La Plaza Cultural at 9th Street
and Avenue C into an $11 million,
seven-story project called Willow House.
Under the guise of providing a sorely
needed girls club for the neighborhood,
the project would create 64 units of
market-rate housing along with 16 units of
low and moderate- income housing, and
over 7,000 square feet of commercial space
(i.e. strip- mall), extending through to 8th Street.
The girls club would occupy only 10
percent of the space. Not surprisingly,
Chase Manhattan, one of the key players
in the Partnership and NYC Invest-
ment Fund, has offered to underwrite the
project. The Girls Club cabal, which
operates out of the offices of Pag‡n's
housing group, Lower East Side Coali-tion
Housing Development, says it plans to
preserve La Plaza's old willow trees, but
it's hard to believe those 100-year old
trees will survive such a humongous
undertaking. (See accompanying story in
this issue--Ed.)
When you add up the Partnership condos
on 10th and 11th with the market-rate
housing and commercial development at La
Plaza, and Giuliani's plan to auction off
the Charas-El Bohio community center at
9th and Avenue B to the highest bidder,
you basically have one three-block area
about to be re-mapped for the rich. Throw
in the cam-paigns to gut rent
stabilization and privatize the public
housing projects, and you start to
understand the magnitude of the urban
space war now under way.
But this battle is far from over. More
than just green spaces, the gardens at
10th and 11th Streets should be
recog-nized as the first firewalls in the
fight to contain a much larger
gentrification agenda. Recently Lower East
Side gar-deners joined with gardeners from
Har-lem, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten
Is-land to form the NYC Coalition for the
Preservation of Gardens. They are now
working with a group of lawyers to
in-vestigate the feasibility of a
class-action suit against the city to
block the wholesale destruction of
gardens. Such a coalition may provide a
basis for a city-wide revolt against the
corporate-sponsored HPD/Partnership
development scams, but only if squatters,
private and public housing tenants, and
small businesses, recognize that these
gardens are our common ground.
(HPD and Partnership reps will be
presenting their plans for the 10th and
11th Street condos at the CB3 Hous-ing and
Land Use Committee meeting on May 15, at
6:30pm, at Project Renewal, 333 Bowery.
All concerned par-ties are encouraged to
attend.)
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