Tag Archives: rezonings

“The Case for The Subway” Is Also a Case for Shared Public Benefit

It’s been hard to ignore the state of New York City’s subway of late, both in the news and in our daily (painful) existence. Though the exact path to improvement varies there is an understanding that more public investment is needed to fix the problem – a case that was laid out persuasively in Jonathan Mahler’s recent New York Times Magazine article, “The Case for the Subway.” Since Governor Cuomo has rolled out his budget and Andy Byford has started his new job as President of NYC Transit, it’s worth taking a moment to revisit Mahler’s piece and to specifically highlight a vital point it makes: Public actions, like the subway, often help make some people very, very wealthy. And it is imperative that the public should benefit more directly from that wealth.

As Mahler notes of the subway’s history, “Before the first tracks had even been laid, real estate speculators were gobbling up farmland and empty lots along the proposed route and then quickly flipping their parcels at huge premiums to builders.” This dynamic continues today, with gentrification following the subway lines ever deeper into every borough – and generating massive wealth for many landowners and developers along the way.

But the subway is not alone in aiding this dynamic. Wealth generation also comes with additional help from public action by the City – perhaps most importantly, in the form of rezonings. Mahler’s article makes this clear in profiling the real estate developer Jed Walentas of Two Trees Management, who has become rich “beyond the wildest dreams of most New Yorkers,” in part by his family’s development of Dumbo. As Mahler notes this was possible not only because of Dumbo’s good subway access, but also because it “required something much simpler: a change in the zoning law.” It took the City’s rezoning of Dumbo for prices to rise as astronomically as they did. It took the “simple action” of changing the zoning from manufacturing to mixed-use residential to make people millionaires, or as Walentas himself says, “You can make the money come right out of the air with a pencil.”

Since it’s the City that has such power to “make money come right out of the air,” we have to ask why so little of that money winds up available for public purposes. The City’s proposed rezonings are almost all in transit-rich, lower-income neighborhoods deeply at risk of gentrification. These rezonings will bring the potential for more density to certain neighborhoods – meaning taller and bigger buildings – and making some people very wealthy in the process. And yet our communities are still scrambling for resources, and told to prioritize among vital needs like schools, parks, housing – and transit. More must be done to ensure the wealth generated through these public actions actually benefits the public, not just a select few – especially for rezonings that threaten to put long time neighborhood residents at risk, at the same time that they are making money for developers. The City must shift expectations and create new tools to guarantee much more of this money benefits the communities that need it. City action can create wealth and City action must ensure it’s shared.

Christopher Walters, ANHD’s Rezoning Technical Assistance Coordinator

Community Demands Scope of Jerome Rezoning Be Reduced, As City Moves Proposal Forward

On Wednesday morning the City Planning Commission (CPC) voted to approve the proposed rezoning of Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. As the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD) has highlighted throughout this process, this rezoning continues to move forward despite consistent and clear demands from the community that the City reconsider and adjust. Yet with CPC approval of the rezoning, only a final vote by the City Council remains to determine its fate. The Bronx Coalition for a Community Vision is urging the Council to reduce the scale of the Jerome Avenue rezoning by half – from roughly 4,000 to 2,000 projected units. Coalition members were at the CPC vote on Wednesday to express their disapproval and make their voices heard. Here’s why they’re concerned and why they’re pushing for the rezoning to be reduced.

The crux of the Coalition’s argument is this: the scale of the proposed rezoning will make it more difficult to construct and preserve truly affordable housing in the neighborhoods around Jerome Avenue. Currently the City is doing a good job of subsidizing affordable housing in Community Districts 4 and 5 in the Bronx – and at much deeper affordability levels than it’s achieving city-wide. Of the 1,580 affordable units created in the CDs through Housing New York between 2014 and the first half of 2017, 35% of them were set aside for Extremely Low Income (ELI) households making up to 30% of Area Median Income (AMI), or about $25,000 for a family of three. In Jerome, the Mayor’s Housing plan currently produces a significantly higher percentage of ELI units than the citywide benchmark of just 15% ELI; the proposed rezoning threatens to put the production of these deeply affordable units – ones that actually come close to matching the needs of the community where half of households make under $25,000 a year – at risk.

The City cannot produce affordable housing using subsidy – as they are doing to good effect today – unless developers choose to partner with them. One consequence of the scale of the proposed rezoning would be to make this less likely. DCP’s Jerome Avenue proposal represents a marked change in land use, 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 value for private developers, and with it the housing market around Jerome Avenue. As it does, this will change the calculus for developers; rather than taking subsidy in exchange for affordability many will decide they are better off building market-rate. Yes, many of these market-rate developments will have to include affordable units set aside through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), but as we’ve detailed before, these units will be out of reach for a majority of the community. Neighborhood residents understand this and this is why they’re pushing back. Their message to the City is: Don’t trade the deeply affordable units you’re subsidizing right now for the possibility of a gentrifying housing market where the only guaranteed affordable housing would be out of our reach.

There are indications that the City understands this is a risk. As part of the rezoning, HPD has made a commitment to guarantee certain affordability levels in all HPD-financed new construction: with at least 10% of units for families earning less than 30% AMI, and an additional 10% for families earning between 30 – 50% AMI. But these committed numbers are in fact significantly lower than what is currently being created in the community. Currently, 35% of new affordable units in Community Districts 4 and 5 are going to households making below 30% AMI; the City’s commitment would provide less than 1/3 of that amount. This tradeoff makes no sense to the community.

This is why the Bronx Coalition for a Community Vision is calling for reducing the scale of the Jerome Avenue rezoning by shrinking the boundaries, lowering the zoning designations or some combination of the two. The community understands that the smaller the influx of new market-rate housing, the greater the possibility of constructing and preserving truly affordable housing. If the rezoning is reduced by half, there is a better chance that the market won’t undergo a drastic change and that what gets built will get built with subsidy; the City, furthermore, can dedicate their financial resources to ensuring these subsidized developments happen faster.

The City makes a larger argument about the need for the Jerome Avenue rezoning, reasoning that we need to increase the overall supply of housing of any type in order to meet the rising citywide demand and citywide affordability crisis at almost all rent levels, so the bigger the rezoning, the better. But where the City choses to site the major neighborhood rezonings matters; there is an opportunity to generate significant new private production in neighborhoods where housing markets have been relatively weak, such as Jerome Avenue, but those are also the exact neighborhoods that are most vulnerable to secondary displacement pressures when a significant amount of new market-rate housing is built. The amount of new private, market-rate housing that is incentivized by a rezoning must be very carefully balanced with the number of new affordable units that are created, and the depth of that affordability. If the balance isn’t right, then the net impact on the community will be to undermine actual neighborhood affordability. The Coalition knows that neighborhoods like those around Bronx’s Jerome Avenue are among the dwindling number of actually affordable neighborhoods in the City, and they have seen the inevitable worsening of gentrification of far too many neighborhoods where CPC and the City got it wrong.

As the rezoning moves to the next and final step of the process, the City Council should listen to the Coalition’s arguments and respond to their demands to reduce the scale of the rezoning. As Coalition member Roman Sigilfredo put it, if the City had “listened to us better, they would have a better understanding of our neighborhood and understand what it means to make the right decision.” It’s not too late. There is still time to listen and get it right.

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.

One Year After Rezoning, East New York and Cypress Hills Residents Gather to Keep Up the Fight

East New York and Cypress Hills residents came out this past Saturday for a Community Assembly hosted by the Coalition for Community Advancement, seeking to inform and engage community members one year out from a neighborhood-wide rezoning. The rezoning of East New York – approved in April, 2016 – was the first, and to date only, neighborhood rezoning to pass as part of the de Blasio administration’s Housing New York Plan. But as impassioned speakers and community leaders reminded the crowd throughout the day, the work of the local community in this process is far from done.

Coalition members Catherine Green and Pastor Preston Harrington started the day with a forceful rallying call for people to get involved and stay involved. As Green put it, “It’s important that we’re at the table, not on the menu.” Coalition members shared their experience organizing and advocating around the rezoning – highlighting what they fought for and what they won – while stressing that the fight continues around their unmet demands, including deeper affordability, new anti-displacement policies, and community benefit agreements with private developers to achieve measures like local hire and a living wage.

The Assembly included a visioning session around Arlington Village and a presentation on the potential development of Broadway Junction. Arlington Village, a privately owned site encompassing the entirety of two city blocks, was successfully cut out of last year’s rezoning thanks to the Coalition’s efforts, to better ensure that any new development there matches the community’s needs. Neighborhood residents had the opportunity to share their vision for the site, including around housing density and open space and what type of community facilities and commercial establishments would best serve the area. Representatives from The Department of City Planning and the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President presented a vision for Broadway Junction as a future office and retail hub – a move that would largely require a new land use review process – with a chance for questions from community members afterwards.

Both these sessions served to illustrate the larger message of the Coalition: that change is coming to East New York and even if it seems far off, now is the time to get involved, to organize and to stay organized so that the community can assert itself as early and as frequently as possible in the land use process and the scope of any future development. Or as Coalition member Al Scott put it, “How do we make sure we’re involved in the beginning, the middle and the end?” of the entire process.

Coalition member Bother Paul Mohammed closed out the event by laying out what was at stake for the community and why it’s so urgent for residents to get involved. “This is the last stand, if we’re forced out of East New York, there’s no place left for us to go.” But Mohammed, and his fellow speaker Ana Aguirre, were eloquent about their faith in the power of East New York and the strength of its community. Noting all that has been fought for and won in the past, including during last year’s rezoning as well as through prior long decades of disinvestment, Aguirre concluded by saying, “Don’t tell me we cannot organize and we cannot change things.”

This is a vital message, not just for East New York, but for every neighborhood facing a rezoning throughout the city, where the crucial fight is for communities to be equal partners in both the planning process and the planning outcomes. As the hard work of the Coalition for Community Advancement shows, community involvement can produce real results with real benefits for the neighborhood. But the work is never finished and the battle is always uphill. It takes constant engagement, constant organizing and constant people power to make it a reality. This is what our member groups are working for day in and day out and what ANHD is proud to work in support of.

Photos courtesy of Nora Gordon from Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A (BKA).

CASA’s New White Paper Gets to the Heart of The Displacement Debate

Last week, Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) released a powerful new white paper, “Resisting Displacement in the Southwest Bronx.” Drawing on research, their own organizing experience and the experience of tenants in the neighborhood, the paper lays out the myriad displacement pressures Bronx residents face, the ways in which a rezoning would exacerbate those pressures and tangible solutions that must be put in place to alleviate them.

The paper highlights the role harassment plays in forcing tenants out of their neighborhoods and strongly pushes back on the City’s stance that rezonings do not cause displacement. Countering this narrative is especially important in a low-income community of color like the Southwest Bronx, where the history of race, class and displacement cannot – and must not – be ignored. CASA outlines some of the tactics landlords use to push out their tenants, including the denial of services and repairs, using loopholes in the law to raise rents through Major Capital Improvements, non-rent fees, preferential rents, and bringing frivolous cases to Housing Court. If the proposed Jerome Avenue rezoning goes through – significantly increasing existing land value – the incentive to displace tenants as a way to increase profits will be even greater. Unfortunately, the City’s proposed mitigations for this – the creation of affordable housing through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and existing subsidy programs – are not sufficient, as the units created are at income levels beyond the reach of most neighborhood residents and cannot make up for the loss of existing homes.

This is why CASA is calling for new solutions to fight displacement before any rezoning moves forward. The proposals include creating an affordable housing subsidy program that truly matches the neighborhood’s need and a package of strong tenant protection measures such as Right to Counsel and a city-wide Certificate of No Harassment (CONH) program.

In laying out the reality and dangers of displacement in the Southwest Bronx, the paper makes the crucial point that the experience and voice of neighborhood residents on this issue cannot be ignored or glossed over. These tenants are not speaking up against a rezoning because they are uninformed, misinformed, reactionary or simply afraid of change. They are speaking up because they are experts in what is happening in their neighborhood. They know best about the reality of displacement and the threat it poses to their community. They know best what solutions must be in place to create a new path forward.

It is this community vision that CASA eloquently lays out in their paper’s conclusion:

“The other possibility, the one we fight for, is that this will prove to be a rezoning for low-income tenants of color. That the rezoning will be buttressed by so many anti-displacement policies that it will be something different: investment that corrects the past wrongs of our City’s developers and policy makers and creates a new path forward of development without displacement. If we cannot figure out how to bring investment in the Southwest Bronx without displacing thousands of tenants, without repeating our past, then we can’t do it anywhere.

But if we can do it here we can do it everywhere.”

Gowanus Community Comes Together for Rezoning Campaign with the Launch of the Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice

Yesterday afternoon members of the Gowanus community came together in force for the public launch of the Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice (GNCJ) and the release of their Priorities Platform. Formed in response to the City’s proposed rezoning of the neighborhood, the GNCJ is a coalition of local residents, workers, businesses, and community organizations united in their effort to ensure the voices of under-represented local stakeholders are meaningfully heard. Holding signs stating their demands, including, “Protecting tenants from displacement” and “Inclusion of NYCHA communities in the Gowanus rezoning,” the Coalition made a forceful and eloquent case for why any rezoning in Gowanus must move forward under the framework of advancing racial, social, and economic justice.

Speakers stressed the point that the City must avoid the mistakes of previous rezonings – including those along nearby 4th Avenue in 2003 and 2007 – that have led to the displacement of rent stabilized tenants, local businesses, and other community members to this day. To avoid this fate, the City must include the people most deeply impacted by these changes in the actual decision-making process. As Dave Powell of the Fifth Avenue Committee stated, “No rezoning that does not incorporate the voice of longtime residents is authentic.”

To this end, the GNCJ released their Priorities Platform outlining the five intersecting principles under which any rezoning should occur:

1. Advance Racial and Economic Justice
2. Create Real Affordable Housing and Protect Tenants from Displacement
3. Promote Environmental Justice
4. Uplift the Culture and Community of Longtime Residents
5. Protect Local Businesses Where We Shop and Work

Coalition members, including NYCHA residents and rent stabilized tenants, elaborated on these points and shared personal stories, calling for strong anti-displacement measures, the production of deeply affordable new housing, and substantial investments in NYCHA. Industrial business owners and the organizations that support them spoke about the urgent need to preserve industrial spaces and the good paying jobs they provide. Speakers called for the protection of small businesses that serve low- and moderate-income residents, as well as a commitment to deal with the pollution and environmental inequality that have been a part of Gowanus for decades. All of these demands pointed to a broader call to address the existing racial and economic segregation in the community.

The Coalition also released a neighborhood profile of Gowanus and its residents, highlighting the area’s history as an industrial hub as well as a diverse, mixed-income residential community – both of which are currently at risk. The report notes the massive rise in real estate value and speculation over the last 15 years in Gowanus and with it the growing inequality gap between the highest and lowest income households as the neighborhood has become both wealthier and whiter. And yet, despite these challenges, Gowanus is still home to a large population of NYCHA and rent-stabilized residents – a vital part of the community whose needs must not be ignored.

The Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice understands that a rezoning and the investments that it will bring could either help address long-standing challenges and problems in the neighborhood or significantly increase the displacement of long-term residents and businesses and deepen existing inequality. There is a chance for the City to get things right in Gowanus, but it must take the demands of the Coalition seriously and work with them to ensure the rezoning is in the best interest of the entire community.