Tag Archives: Jerome Avenue

It’s Up to the City Council to Make the Jerome Avenue Rezoning Right

Today the City Council held their public hearing on the Jerome Avenue rezoning, and despite the weather, community members came out in force to make their voices heard. The Bronx Coalition for a Community Vision held a press conference on the steps of City Hall to start the day, and coalition members and local residents gave testimony in the Council Chamber until late into the afternoon.

The Bronx Coalition has been clear from the beginning that the rezoning cannot move forward unless it corresponds to the local community’s vision and needs. At the press conference and in their testimony, speaker after speaker made their core demands explicit: reduce the scale of the rezoning and implement a No Net Loss Policy pilot program for Jerome. Both are aimed at preventing the displacement of current residents and ensuring that future housing remains affordable for the current community.

As it stands now, the City has projected that the rezoning will bring over 4,000 units to Jerome Avenue. The Coalition is demanding that the rezoning be reduced in scale to cut this number in half. As numerous speakers made clear, the larger the upzoning the greater the potential for it to permanently change the housing market around Jerome – and not for the better. Currently, the vast majority of what gets built in the community is subsidized, with a relatively high percentage of units serving households under 30% Area Median Income (AMI). But an upzoning of the scale currently proposed threatens to change the market so that developers are less likely to take subsidy – meaning more market rate units and fewer affordable ones as time goes on. Reducing the scale of the rezoning would help reduce this risk, ensuring that a greater share of the new units that are built continue to be built with subsidy and therefore aimed at lower income families, the way they are today.

A No Net Loss Policy for the neighborhoods around Jerome would provide an additional level of protection against displacement by ensuring that the community does not lose more affordable housing than it gains following the rezoning. While the City has committed to creating affordable units through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) and continued subsidy, it must ensure that even more affordable units leaving regulations or forgoing subsidies as the market changes do not offset these. A No Net Loss program would prevent this – by tracking the creation and loss of affordable units by income level over time, and creating a mechanism to hold the City accountable for both the positive and negative sides of the rezoning results.

These are not abstract concepts; these are actions that will effect the lives of real people in the Bronx, as was made clear by countless residents standing up to tell their stories and asking, “If I have to leave the Bronx, where am I going to go?”

The City Council has the power to say no to this rezoning, or to adapt it to better meet the community’s demands. Previous rezonings can be used as a precedent. The scale of both the East New York and East Harlem rezonings were reduced by the City Council – in the case of East Harlem by close to 25%. As part of the East New York rezoning, the City agreed to create a taskforce to explore basement legalization, while in East Harlem the City agreed to include the neighborhood in its pilot “Partners in Preservation” initiative. There is ample precedent for enacting the types of demands that the Bronx Coalition is asking for and the Council must use its power to make them real. As Councilmember Vanessa Gibson said at the hearing, “This is about the future of the Bronx.” She’s right and the Council has a vital decision to make in what that future will ultimately look like. Or as a Bronx Coalition member put it, “We are counting on you for help, please don’t let us down.”

Christopher Walters, ANHD’s Rezoning Technical Assistance Coordinator

Community Perspective: Why Folks Are Saying No to the Jerome Avenue Rezoning

Bronx Residents See Realities that the City Won’t Acknowledge

The proposed rezoning of Jerome Avenue takes a step forward with the City Planning Commission hearing taking place today. This hearing comes as community residents continue to express serious concerns that their voices have not been truly heard in the rezoning process or their feedback meaningfully incorporated by the City.

As ANHD’s Technical Assistance Coordinator to neighborhoods facing major rezonings, I spend a lot of time at local Department of City Planning hearings and at local community-led planning meetings. Part of my job is to translate the obtuse language of professional zoning-speak, but mostly my job is to listen to what the community is saying and help them to powerfully bring that perspective to the zoning process.  There is often a lot of distance between what the community is saying and what the City and the Department of City Planning seems to be hearing. In light of this, it’ important to understand how many Bronx residents see the Jerome Avenue rezoning and to highlight the fundamental difference between their perspective and the City’s.

Here is what I have heard in my time working with the Bronx Coalition for a Community Vision, from residents at meetings, marches and rallies asking the City to listen to the voices of the community; this is what I have heard at Community Board and Borough President hearings – both in the testimony that residents have delivered, and in the back of the room and in the hallways, in the discussions that residents are having among themselves.

At its root, the community’s concern is this: there’s a difference between a housing plan and an affordable housing plan. What the City is proposing for Jerome Avenue is presented as an affordable housing plan, but a clear eyed assessment of its outcomes shows this isn’t nearly as true as it needs to be. The clearest impact of the rezoning will be to increase the total amount of housing that can be built in the neighborhood, rather than to specifically increase the amount of affordable housing available. Yes, this new housing encouraged by the rezoning will include a certain percentage of affordable units through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH). But these can only come in conjunction with market-rate units – about 2 to 4 new market rate units for every 1 affordable unit produced. The community understands this, and sees the proposed rezoning of Jerome as, more accurately, a market rate housing plan.

This is the fundamental concern of community residents and one they feel the City has not properly addressed. Instead of acknowledging this distinction between new development and affordable units, the community continues to hear the City represent the Jerome rezoning, in their discussions and presentations, as being primarily an affordable housing plan.

The creation of affordable housing is vitally important for the neighborhoods surrounding Jerome Avenue, but the way in which it’s done matters profoundly to community residents. The rezoning represents a marked change in land use – from primarily manufacturing to high density residential districts – opening up the possibility of a massive amount of new residential housing where it’s currently not allowed. This type of wholesale changing of land use has the potential to significantly increase land values and with it the housing market around Jerome Avenue, creating waves of secondary displacement effects as higher-income renters move into the neighborhood. It’s a story that local residents have seen played out countless times throughout the city. It’s a story that Jerome residents are well aware of, and in many cases have experienced themselves before moving to the Bronx. This is why they are pushing back against the City’s plans.

To address these concerns, the City says that the new affordable units produced under MIH will mitigate the displacement effects of the rezoning. But here are two key issues that local residents understand and that the City seems to ignore: 1) the rent levels set for MIH units are already higher than most current residents can afford to pay, and 2) there’s absolutely no guarantee that MIH units will be held for households that are displaced. The City also says that displacement won’t be an issue for Jerome, since this is a neighborhood where subsidy is generally needed for new construction, a trend the City believes will continue after the rezoning. But building deeply affordable units is contingent on private developers taking City subsidy, and as the market changes post-rezoning, there is no guarantee that developers will continue to do so. The only guaranteed affordable housing this rezoning would provide are MIH units, comprising some 20%-30% of the total units built. Considered all together then, the tradeoff of MIH units for the possibility of significantly more market-rate simply isn’t worth it for many Jerome residents.

Meanwhile, the City has actually been doing a good job of subsidizing new construction at affordability levels that meet the neighborhood’s current need, with over a third of Housing New York units in the Jerome vicinity going to Extremely Low Income households. This is a crucial need being served, and it makes a difference with local residents. The City should strongly consider why it wants to risk changing this dynamic with the proposed rezoning and all the ramifications it brings.

Residents of Jerome Avenue understand these risks and complexities, and this is why they’re pushing back. They understand that a true affordable housing plan, especially for an area like Jerome Avenue that is threatened by market-rate development, would need to result in more affordable housing than market rate development. This is what the City and the Department of City Planning need to hear: that the anger and opposition being expressed by the community is not coming from ignorance, or NIMBYism, or “fear of change,” but from a deep understanding, rooted in experience, that a housing plan and an affordable housing plan are two very different things.

Christopher Walters, ANHD’s Rezoning Technical Assistance Coordinator

New Map of Preferential Rents Shows the Displacement Risk for Rezoning Neighborhoods and Low Income Communities City-wide

Last week, ProPublica launched a new tool mapping the number of rent stabilized apartments with preferential rents by zip code, throughout New York City. The results are eye-opening. Almost a third of all rent stabilized apartments in New York currently have preferential rents: over 250,000 units citywide. That’s over 250,000 households that do not truly enjoy the protections of rent stabilization. That’s over 250,000 households that are at risk of displacement, especially in low-income communities.

The use of preferential rents directly undercuts the protection and stability rent stabilization is intended to provide, leaving tenants vulnerable to large rent increases at every lease renewal, regardless of the rates permitted by the Rent Guidelines Board.  Especially troublesome is the prevalence of preferential rents in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Six of the ten New York City zip codes with the most preferential rents are in the Bronx, with poverty rates in those areas ranging from 30 to 43 percent – a population that cannot afford a big rent increase.

Of equal concern is the fact that many of these neighborhoods with high numbers of preferential rents are in areas where the de Blasio administration has proposed large-scale rezonings, further exacerbating the risk of displacement. This is a risk the City does not adequately address. The city is mandated to consider how a rezoning could impact current residents, including potential displacement. And yet, when considering displacement risks, the City excludes rent stabilized tenants from their analysis, under the erroneous assumption that their tenancy is secure. The prevalence of apartments with preferential rents shows just how wrong this is.

Take East Harlem as an example, which is currently going through ULURP for a neighborhood rezoning. In its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the City found no adverse impacts due to secondary displacement. But again, the City did not consider rent stabilized tenants in their analysis. According to ProPublica there are close to 5,000 apartments with preferential rents in the two zip codes that include East Harlem. This means almost 5,000 families are not subject to the limits on a rent increase that rent stabilized tenants depend on. How can these 5,000 families be considered secure in their apartment then, or free from displacement risk? As land values and rents increase following the rezoning, there’s nothing to stop a landlord from raising the rent to a level that might force a tenant out.

The same concern exists around the proposed Jerome Avenue rezoning in the South Bronx, where there are close to 9,000 apartments with preferential rents in the two zip codes spanning the area – two zip codes with poverty rates over 40%. The same concern exists in Inwood, or Bushwick, and the list goes on. These are by far not the only households at risk of displacement, both in these rezoning neighborhoods and throughout the city. But these are households we know are at risk just from preferential rents alone.

The goal of the de Blasio administration’s Housing New York plan is to both construct and preserve affordable housing. Rent stabilized housing makes up the largest portion of our city’s existing affordable housing stock. The new data on preferential rents illuminates once again the vulnerability of rent stabilized tenants, and the need to place protections for existing residents and preservation of existing affordable housing at the center of any affordable housing plan intended to actually address the affordability crisis facing our city.