Tag Archives: New York Times

Dear New York Times Real Estate Section,

Your front-page article this weekend, with the headline “Finding Washington Heights” and gauzy illustration of a beatific white woman framed in a sea of darker faces, went too far.

Why bother to write to you, Real Estate Section? The obvious answer is that the headline is offensive; Washington Heights is a long-standing, vibrant community with a concentration of working-class, Spanish-speaking New Yorkers that was not, in fact, first discovered by the woman in the illustration. The title and illustration makes the unspoken racial dynamic of the article clearly, painfully, and distressingly clear. These days, this is called the ‘columbusing‘ of long-established communities of color and immigrant neighborhoods. There was no discovery; people have been there for generations.

But here is the larger point, Real Estate Section: you are part of an important news organization that sees itself as “the paper of record”.  You have an obligation to be more than a glossy supplement for the real estate industry, pushing juicy articles designed to excite the market in whatever neighborhood the industry wants to make the next frontier of gentrification.

Any responsible article should include the context that many neighborhoods across New York City are reaching a crescendo of concern about the crisis of gentrification, displacement, and tenant harassment that people and neighborhoods experience when they are pushed out of their community against their wills to make way for people with more economic power and social capital.

Washington Heights is one of the neighborhoods at the epicenter of this crisis. Developers have driven up the price of residential real estate in that neighborhood by 96% in the past five years, while the incomes of current residents have gone up by only a fraction, and thousands of Washington Heights residents have been pushed out of their affordable apartments. The neighborhood has lost more than 5,600 rent regulated units since 2007, a devastating blow for a working class community in a city where affordable housing is vanishingly scarce.

This matters to our city. It matters because it is brutally unjust to the people who are displaced, and harassed out. It matters because the people being pushed out are too often from working-class, immigrant, and communities of color that are part of the economic and racial mix that we all value. It matters because in this day and age, cities have increasingly become the essential centers of economic opportunity, and when whole communities are pushed out to the margins and beyond, they are locked out of that opportunity and fall further behind.

But, Real Estate Section, instead of giving us the service of an article that acknowledges this social and political reality, you give us an article that is a colonialist travelogue with the first-person point of view of a privileged person touring around a neighborhood that she can appropriate merely by looking at it.

I know you say that you are just a real estate section, and your job is to show attractive things to people who can buy real estate, so of course your point of view skews to people who tend to be white and wealthy, and naturally you write for those who are able to afford an ethnically exotic “new” neighborhood that you show as ripe for exploitation.

What would an article titled “Finding Washington Heights” be if it were written from the point of view of a long-time resident in a rent-regulated apartment writing about her neighborhood?

You are a part of a great newspaper with significant influence. Dear Real Estate Section, you should be more than a vehicle for real estate sales. You can cover the real estate market like a real newspaper and not be an active agent for speculation, displacement, and gentrification.

Thank you for considering this advice, Real Estate Section.

Displacement Alert Project Map Gives Activists and Policy Makers Key Information to Proactively Address the Displacement Crisis

The tenant displacement crisis is at the center of neighborhood concerns and City policy focus. We cannot allow market forces to price and push out our City’s diverse communities. ANHD today released the Displacement Alert Project Map (the DAP Map) that, for the first time, presents key information in an interactive, easy-to-use map that local activists, service providers and policy makers have long needed.

www.dapmapnyc.org

The DAP Map is a web-based, building-by-building map designed to show where residential tenants may be facing significant displacement pressures across New York City. Read the exclusive report about the DAP Map in this piece published today in the New York Times –  New Tool Shows New York Neighborhoods At Risk Of Rent Hikes

The DAP Map has three data view options and one combined risk score view. Each view option is based on unique data compiled by ANHD. The map shows previously unavailable building-level data, and color-codes buildings by risk-level so the information is clear and intuitive:

• Is there a high rate of loss of rent-regulated tenants in the building?
• Do NYC Department of Buildings permits indicate a high rate of tenant turnover?
• Was the building sold for a price that might indicate a speculative investment strategy? 
• Where do we see building facing multiple combined risks?

Clicking on any individual building and details about that particular risk in that building appears in a pop up box. The DAP Map can also be searched by entering an individual building address.

ANHD developed the DAP Map as a strategic tool for tenants, community groups, service providers and policy makers who want to address NYC’s displacement crisis. Our ANHD neighborhood groups know that growing market pressures are impacting existing affordable housing, and increasing tenant harassment and displacement in many neighborhoods. The DAP Map can be used to:

• Identify at-risk buildings.
• Provide proactive outreach and education tenants.
• Identify where and why neighborhoods might be experiencing a wave of displacement pressure.
• Align government policies on displacement to real-time displacement forces and trends. 

The DAP Map data is currently viewable only at an individual building level – aggregate data will be included in the next phase of the project. Meanwhile, ANHD analyzed the aggregate level data and found the following neighborhood patterns:

• There are 96,000 multi-family buildings in the data set. They all had at least one indicator of potential displacement concern: sold in 2015, at least one rent regulated unit since 2007, or had a residential DOB since 2013.
• New York City has lost over 156,000 rent-regulated units from 2007 to 2014.
• Nearly 26% of the buildings on the DAP Map have a high risk score, suggesting increasing rents.
• In over 5,400 buildings, the 2015 sales price per unit increased by more than double the 2010 area average.
• Just 10 zip codes account for one-quarter of all the buildings in NYC that lost a high percentage of rent regulated units between 2007 and 2014.
• Twenty-five zip codes account for one-half of all the NYC buildings that lost a high percentage of their rent regulated units in that same time period.
• In those same 25 zip codes, there is a correspondingly high number of Department of Buildings permits, with 16 of these zip codes showing exceptionally high DOB permit activity.
• In those same 25 zip codes, there is a correspondingly high number of exceptionally high per-unit property sale prices. In 12 of those zip codes, the average per-unit sale price was 150% above the average price in the surrounding area.

New York’s low-income communities, communities of color, and immigrant communities have been disproportionately impacted segregation, redlining, and predatory practices, and are increasingly feeling pushed out of our City. ANHD and our members are committed to stopping New York City’s growing displacement crisis and building a more equitable future for all of our City’s neighborhoods.

The DAP Map can be a tool to uncover problem buildings and patterns that City policy can help to address. This past spring, Mayor de Blasio committed to enacting a new, city-wide Certificate of No Harassment program as one key tool to help prevent displacement and preserve affordable housing.