[Continued from yesterday’s Part 3 and the preceding Part 1 and Part 2.]
By: David A. Smith
The king died, and then the queen dies is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief, is a plot. – E. M. Forster
As we’ve seen in the three parts up to now, the site that became known as SPURA was an eminent-domain battleground in the 1960s, and then a vacant political landscape in the 1970s and into the early 1980s.
The Lower East Side, 1980s: probably the corner of Ludlow and Essex,
From a New York Times blog post that “documents the dwindling Jewish presence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s.”
Sources used in this post
New York Times (March 23, 2014): the story damning Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Silver
New York Times (September 25, 2013; green font): Mr. Rapfogel’s indictment
New York Times (September 17, 2013; blue font): Announcement of development
New York Times Letter to the Editor, November 29, 1989; red font); Local opposition
During this period, though I didn’t know it at the time (being too young to have any context), affordable housing was losing its brand value; indeed, we all called it ‘subsidized housing’ – a bad phrase – or ‘low income housing’, and that made its status as a code word and bogeyman even more manifest.
I’m moving in next door
Soon after, Mr. Rapfogel took a post in Mr. Goldin’s office as liaison to the Jewish community. He also became head of United Jewish Council’s development arm, South Manhattan Development Corporation, and soon after wrote an article in the group’s newspaper saying his mission was to “retain the distinctly Jewish religious and cultural identity of our community.”
“We wait with bated breath for the development of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area,” he wrote in 1985. “City government must never again believe that it will force more low-income housing on a community that has been made into a poverty ghetto.”
Here again, two decades after 1967, is the recurring political theme of Messrs. Rapfogel and Silver: too much low-income housing will yield poverty concentration and turn the neighborhood into an economic ghetto. Today that view looks ridiculous, given the property’s location, but even in the mid-1980s the area looked like something out of The French Connection.
Mike and Vinnie, Lower East Side Shopping, 1985
Street preacher, Lower East Side, 1985
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel co-hosted annual legislative meetings put on by U.J.C., and later by Met Council, with the affable Mr. Rapfogel serving as the master of ceremonies and the taciturn Mr. Silver lending gravitas. Plans for the site were an occasional focus of those meetings.
That was the case in 1988, after the Koch administration selected the Lefrak Organization to build a project with a mix of commercial and residential projects on the site. Advocates for the poor opposed the plan’s dearth of low-income housing.
The 1980s were a time of change for affordable housing’s public and industry perception.
On the one hand, poverty concentration in public housing and Section 8, a consequence of the Federal housing preferences, was making affordable housing properties politically toxic.
I won’t vote for anything that stinks
Important historical note. I cannot find the following on the Web, but I experienced it and remember it and know that it is true.
The Federal preferences, now made voluntary (though still followed in some places), advised owners of both public and Section 8 assisted affordable housing that they have to give first priority in new vacancies to people meeting any of three criteria: (A) living in substandard housing (which included homelessness), (B) paying a severe rent burden (housing cost greater than 50% of income), or (C) displaced by Federal action (e.g. eminent domain. In practice, Items A and B dominated, and both of them had the inevitable consequence of selecting for the poorest of the poor – and most frequently, for the homeless.
The result was steady poverty concentration – residents who moved out of Section 8 or public housing tended to be those who had elevated their income, while those who moved in were quite poor (now called Extremely Low Income or ELI). This steady adverse economic section had two consequences: (1) Section 8 became ever-more costly per apartment, because new renters paid 30% of an ever-smaller incoming income, and (2) Section 8 became the place to go if you were homeless.
That, in turn, led to a backlash by communities, something I did not fully appreciate until our company, Recap, was completing the LIHPRHA preservation of an elderly property just outside of Pittsburgh, and the town sued in Federal court to enjoin the closing, because the elderly residents and the city alderman were terrified that adding the Section 8 would turn the property into a homelessness den where substance abusers would prey upon the elderly.
Are we clear on this yet?
As the correlation strengthened between public housing/ Section 8 housing and ‘Zip codes of pathology,’ as Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski called them, localities (and judges) began mandating poverty deconcentration, as codified legally in Chicago’s 1976 Gautreaux decision which deemed poverty concentration to be segregation.
Toto, I don’t want to live in the projects anymore:
Plaintiff Dorothy Gautreaux of Chicago
On the other hand, meanwhile, poverty concentration, the de-institutionalization of what we then called the mentally ill, and the addictive effects of hard drugs (especially crack cocaine, which entered America in the mid-1980s and directly contributed to a spike in crime rates at affordable housing properties – again, I remember this hitting our properties), led homeless advocates to argue that (1) housing had to be focused on those most in need, even if that meant fewer apartments at much higher cost, and (2) for many extremely low income households, housing had to be coupled with ongoing supportive services funded by government.
An epidemic in low income neighborhoods: Tom Brokaw, 1980s
The rise in New York City’s homeless led to confrontations, including around the Delancey Street site, like that referenced in, as shown by this New York Times Letter to the Editor (November 29, 1989; red font):
Recently a group of squatters took over a building on Fourth Street, between Avenues B and C, and dubbed it the ”Alphabet City Community Center in the East Village.” This group is not representative of the community and has sought to work outside it for its own agenda.
The building on Fourth Street is the proposed site for 82 units of single room occupancy housing for single homeless elderly people, to be sponsored by the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens. Those who protested the city’s action to empty the building did not even know that a project for the elderly was proposed for the site. When the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the police tried to secure the building, the squatters threw eggs, bottles of urine and stones at them.
Shades of the thankfully-vanished Occupy squatting fad.
One squatter was quoted as saying that a tree that needed to be cleared should not be cut as it will last forever, but the senior citizens will die.
There is a great housing need in the Lower East Side. Given the increase in homelessness and limited resources of land and money, we need to work together as a community for the best possible plan. Those who are not part of the solution are part of the problem.
Elaine Chan, Budget Coordinator, Lower East Side Joint Planning Council New York, Nov. 9, 1989
Ms. Chan stayed on the issue, as demonstrated by another New York Times Letter to the Editor (April 16, 1991):
Lower East Side protest, 1991
On the Lower East Side, no single minority has the population needed to create a Latino, Asian or African-American council district. But by combining their numbers, we achieve lines within which lives an 83% minority population. From that district a minority candidate has the best opportunity to be elected. (Most people working on districting around the city believe a minimum of 75% minority population is necessary to assure the election of a minority candidate.)
That is politics, the minority becoming the majority, either via immigration/ emigration, assimilation, or coalition:
The longstanding split in the community had some Latinos and housing advocates demanding that the city build only low-income housing on the site, while residents of the nearby co-ops countered that only commercial development was appropriate.
Sam LeFrak and his son Richard, some years ago
[Continued tomorrow in Part 5.]