Even in their deepest moments of crisis, people who are homeless in New York City have rights, from the principled (the right to practice one’s religion) to the practical (the right to a bathroom that’s cleaned twice a day). And when a government agency coordinates where you live, and nonprofit agencies manage the daily routine in that place, there are dozens of ways each day that decent living might depend on everyone knowing what those rights are.
The Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, the Safety Net Activists, the Center for Urban Pedagogy and design studio 13 milliseconds this week released a pamphlet outlining the rights that homeless individuals and families have in New York City.
It covers everything from privacy to diet, voting to disabilities, public benefits to income savings; explains supportive housing and vouchers; talks about how to get a fair hearing and how to seek permanent affordable housing.
Despite loud chants of “no more luxury residential buildings” from opponents, Queens Community Board 7 approved a rezoning plan that would green light a waterfront development project by creating a Special Flushing Waterfront District, passing the measure by a 30-to-8 vote at its meeting Monday night.
As part of the Flushing waterfront revitalization plan, the development project would build a complex of nine buildings in a patch of 40 acres dubbed the “Special Flushing Waterfront District” bound by 40th Road on the South, 36 Avenue on the North, College Point Avenue on the East and Flushing Creek on the West. The complex of 1.39 million square feet of mixed-use buildings would include 1,725 apartments as well as retail shops, hotels and offices. It would also provide 1,533 parking spots and 3.14 acre of public space.
The vote triggered anger from many community organizations. Flushing for Equitable Development and Urban Planning, a coalition of local groups that formed to fight the rezoning, said in a statement that the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), the process which the project must go through to receive approval, is lacking when it comes to transparency and public engagement, and shows little commitment to the community. The statement said that what Flushing needs is not luxury residential buildings but senior centers, schools, libraries and affordable housing.
Seonae Byeon, housing organizer at the MinKwon Center, said rapidly rising rents have already left many businesses and residents in Flushing struggling, and it is increasingly hard for low-income people and new immigrants to survive here. The waterfront development project would push them further to the edge.
Congresswoman Grace Meng also raised issues about the project and called for resolving those problems before the plan is voted on by the City Council.
“There are many questions that must still be answered about this project. I have a number of concerns and priority areas that must be better addressed including: the low percentage of affordable housing units; the need to ensure the highest environmental standards and public access for Flushing Creek; a commitment to hire locally with family-sustaining wages and the use of union labor,” Meng in a statement. “[Flushing’s] future growth and success must include the needs of area residents …With this proposal being such a major project for the area, it is critical that the process not be rushed.”
Claire Shulman, former Queens borough president and an enthusiastic promoters of the project, said the development would revitalize the area by re-utilizing the land, storage and buildings that have been left idle, creating a 40-acre waterfront belt that connects Flushing, Willets Point and Corona.
The city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure allows the Queens borough president to make a recommendation about the project within 30 days of the community board’s vote. The City Planning Commission will then have up to 60 days to vote on it, followed by the City Council, which has 50 days to review and vote on the project before the mayor can take up to five days to make his decision.
Despite loud chants of “no more luxury residential buildings” from opponents, Queens Community Board 7 approved a rezoning plan that would green light a waterfront development project by creating a Special Flushing Waterfront District, passing the measure by a 30-to-8 vote at its meeting Monday night.
As part of the Flushing waterfront revitalization plan, the development project would build a complex of nine buildings in a patch of 40 acres dubbed the “Special Flushing Waterfront District” bound by 40th Road on the South, 36 Avenue on the North, College Point Avenue on the East and Flushing Creek on the West. The complex of 1.39 million square feet of mixed-use buildings would include 1,725 apartments as well as retail shops, hotels and offices. It would also provide 1,533 parking spots and 3.14 acre of public space.
The vote triggered anger from many community organizations. Flushing for Equitable Development and Urban Planning, a coalition of local groups that formed to fight the rezoning, said in a statement that the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), the process which the project must go through to receive approval, is lacking when it comes to transparency and public engagement, and shows little commitment to the community. The statement said that what Flushing needs is not luxury residential buildings but senior centers, schools, libraries and affordable housing.
Seonae Byeon, housing organizer at the MinKwon Center, said rapidly rising rents have already left many businesses and residents in Flushing struggling, and it is increasingly hard for low-income people and new immigrants to survive here. The waterfront development project would push them further to the edge.
Congresswoman Grace Meng also raised issues about the project and called for resolving those problems before the plan is voted on by the City Council.
“There are many questions that must still be answered about this project. I have a number of concerns and priority areas that must be better addressed including: the low percentage of affordable housing units; the need to ensure the highest environmental standards and public access for Flushing Creek; a commitment to hire locally with family-sustaining wages and the use of union labor,” Meng in a statement. “[Flushing’s] future growth and success must include the needs of area residents …With this proposal being such a major project for the area, it is critical that the process not be rushed.”
Claire Shulman, former Queens borough president and an enthusiastic promoters of the project, said the development would revitalize the area by re-utilizing the land, storage and buildings that have been left idle, creating a 40-acre waterfront belt that connects Flushing, Willets Point and Corona.
The city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure allows the Queens borough president to make a recommendation about the project within 30 days of the community board’s vote. The City Planning Commission will then have up to 60 days to vote on it, followed by the City Council, which has 50 days to review and vote on the project before the mayor can take up to five days to make his decision.
Despite loud chants of “no more luxury residential buildings” from opponents, Queens Community Board 7 approved a rezoning plan that would green light a waterfront development project by creating a Special Flushing Waterfront District, passing the measure by a 30-to-8 vote at its meeting Monday night.
As part of the Flushing waterfront revitalization plan, the development project would build a complex of nine buildings in a patch of 40 acres dubbed the “Special Flushing Waterfront District” bound by 40th Road on the South, 36 Avenue on the North, College Point Avenue on the East and Flushing Creek on the West. The complex of 1.39 million square feet of mixed-use buildings would include 1,725 apartments as well as retail shops, hotels and offices. It would also provide 1,533 parking spots and 3.14 acre of public space.
The vote triggered anger from many community organizations. Flushing for Equitable Development and Urban Planning, a coalition of local groups that formed to fight the rezoning, said in a statement that the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), the process which the project must go through to receive approval, is lacking when it comes to transparency and public engagement, and shows little commitment to the community. The statement said that what Flushing needs is not luxury residential buildings but senior centers, schools, libraries and affordable housing.
Seonae Byeon, housing organizer at the MinKwon Center, said rapidly rising rents have already left many businesses and residents in Flushing struggling, and it is increasingly hard for low-income people and new immigrants to survive here. The waterfront development project would push them further to the edge.
Congresswoman Grace Meng also raised issues about the project and called for resolving those problems before the plan is voted on by the City Council.
“There are many questions that must still be answered about this project. I have a number of concerns and priority areas that must be better addressed including: the low percentage of affordable housing units; the need to ensure the highest environmental standards and public access for Flushing Creek; a commitment to hire locally with family-sustaining wages and the use of union labor,” Meng in a statement. “[Flushing’s] future growth and success must include the needs of area residents …With this proposal being such a major project for the area, it is critical that the process not be rushed.”
Claire Shulman, former Queens borough president and an enthusiastic promoters of the project, said the development would revitalize the area by re-utilizing the land, storage and buildings that have been left idle, creating a 40-acre waterfront belt that connects Flushing, Willets Point and Corona.
The city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure allows the Queens borough president to make a recommendation about the project within 30 days of the community board’s vote. The City Planning Commission will then have up to 60 days to vote on it, followed by the City Council, which has 50 days to review and vote on the project before the mayor can take up to five days to make his decision.
Speaker Johnson and Councilmember Levin at the unveiling of the Council’s homelessness report on January 30.
New York’s modern homelessness problem, which first gained attention during the Koch administration, predates the creation of the City Council as we know it today.
It wasn’t until after the Supreme Court cast the Board of Estimate to the dustbin in 1989 and the city charter was changed that the local legislature gained its current share of governing power. By then, the crude image of the New York City homeless person—think of a shopping cart next to a cardboard box under an overpass—was indelibly stamped upon the city’s reputation.
Since that time the Council chamber has been where successive mayors tried to defend their approach to managing the homelessness problem, at hearings of the Council’s general welfare committee. In the 1990s, the irrepressible Steve DiBrienza grilled Mayor Giuliani’s homelessness team. In the 2000s a tall, bearded man from Brooklyn pursued a more conciliatory conversation with Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioners during that mayor’s first two terms; the questions got tougher from Anabel Palma during Bloomberg’s final tour. For the past six years, the once-bearded man has been mayor, and Stephen Levin has led the committee.
Meanwhile, thousands slept in the shelters, their numbers rising and falling, then rising and rising, on economic winds and policy shifts.
The Council’s release late last month of a report and policy blueprint on homelessness represents something different: a comprehensive and proactive approach to a crisis that multiple mayoral strategies have failed to corral.
Levin joined the WBAI Max & Murphy Show (Live at 5 p.m. at 99.5FM every Wednesday) this week to discuss the report.
Long history, divided management
In surveying the history of homelessness in New York, the report renders this assessment of recent mayors:
New York City has been struggling to address homelessness for decades, with varying success. The Koch and Dinkins Administrations recognized that permanent housing options were important, while the Giuliani Administration took a punitive approach to homelessness, restricting shelter access and criminalizing poverty. The Bloomberg Administration saw homelessness as an incentive problem, and while a key prevention program—Homebase—was created to help those at risk, rental subsidies and priority access to public housing were discontinued, resulting in an explosive increase in the homeless population. The de Blasio Administration has made strides, reinstituting rental assistance vouchers, enhancing street outreach teams to help unsheltered individuals come inside, and drastically reducing the homeless veteran population. But, right now, the homelessness crisis is only being managed.
The Council’s nearly 200-page report, which was two years in the making, proposes steps to address homelessness in all its facets: as a risk to those who could become homeless, a crisis for people who now are in shelters, and a trauma for those who have—for the moment—escaped the system.
It proposes everything from improving planning for those getting out of prison and making rental vouchers more broadly available to increasing the market value of those vouchers, targeting affordable housing to the city’s poorest, creating more “safe havens” and boosting support for those dealing with domestic violence, which is an increasingly visible driver of shelter use.
More fundamentally, it calls for an end to the odd bifurcation in the city’s approach to housing people, which treats the production of affordable housing and the handling of homelessness as separate portfolios (with public housing often as a third, separate bucket).
Need for immediate steps
At the unveiling of the report on January 30, Council Speaker Corey Johnson noted that the city has one deputy mayor who handles housing, and another who handles homelessness. “That makes no sense given the depth and breadth of this crisis,” Johnson said.
Backed by dozens of advocates on the City Hall steps on a frigid morning, the speaker alluded to the “national homelessness crisis” and said the Council’s goal in crafting the report had been to create a “long-term comprehensive plan.”
But he also stressed, “We must take immediate steps like increasing rental assistance voucher amounts.” Most of the proposals in the Council report are steps the city can take on its own, although some of the more significant moves would require support from the state.
“It doesn’t rely on simplistic, single new strategies,” Catherine Trapani of Homeless Services United, who spoke at the City Hall event, said of the report. “It’s not going to be one thing [that addresses homelessness]. If it were, we would have solved it already. It’s going to be lots of things, done to scale.”
Some of what the de Blasio administration has done is working, Trapani said.: Some segments of the homeless shelter census have leveled off in the past year. That is proof that policy can succeed, she said, but also an indication that more is needed.
On Max & Murphy, Levin broke down the report’s diagnosis of the homelessness problem and the lengthy list of fixes it has proposed.
“Some of it has to do with doubling down on existing policies but a lot of it has to do with things that we’ve been advocating for for years that are still not done. A lot of them are things we’ve been talking about for five, six years,” Levin said, like making sure runaway and homeless youth have options when they age out of the youth shelter system, and setting aside more subsidized housing for people in the shelter system. “There’s a lot of those kinds of common-sense solutions.”
Hear our conversation with Levin above. Below, you can listen to our discussion of the mayor’s state of the city address last week, or scroll down further to catch the full show – which includes discussion about the New Hampshire primary and Bloomberg’s recently unearthed 2015 comments on stop-and-frisk.
Speaker Johnson and Councilmember Levin at the unveiling of the Council’s homelessness report on January 30.
New York’s modern homelessness problem, which first gained attention during the Koch administration, predates the creation of the City Council as we know it today.
It wasn’t until after the Supreme Court cast the Board of Estimate to the dustbin in 1989 and the city charter was changed that the local legislature gained its current share of governing power. By then, the crude image of the New York City homeless person—think of a shopping cart next to a cardboard box under an overpass—was indelibly stamped upon the city’s reputation.
Since that time the Council chamber has been where successive mayors tried to defend their approach to managing the homelessness problem, at hearings of the Council’s general welfare committee. In the 1990s, the irrepressible Steve DiBrienza grilled Mayor Giuliani’s homelessness team. In the 2000s a tall, bearded man from Brooklyn pursued a more conciliatory conversation with Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioners during that mayor’s first two terms; the questions got tougher from Anabel Palma during Bloomberg’s final tour. For the past six years, the once-bearded man has been mayor, and Stephen Levin has led the committee.
Meanwhile, thousands slept in the shelters, their numbers rising and falling, then rising and rising, on economic winds and policy shifts.
The Council’s release late last month of a report and policy blueprint on homelessness represents something different: a comprehensive and proactive approach to a crisis that multiple mayoral strategies have failed to corral.
Levin joined the WBAI Max & Murphy Show (Live at 5 p.m. at 99.5FM every Wednesday) this week to discuss the report.
Long history, divided management
In surveying the history of homelessness in New York, the report renders this assessment of recent mayors:
New York City has been struggling to address homelessness for decades, with varying success. The Koch and Dinkins Administrations recognized that permanent housing options were important, while the Giuliani Administration took a punitive approach to homelessness, restricting shelter access and criminalizing poverty. The Bloomberg Administration saw homelessness as an incentive problem, and while a key prevention program—Homebase—was created to help those at risk, rental subsidies and priority access to public housing were discontinued, resulting in an explosive increase in the homeless population. The de Blasio Administration has made strides, reinstituting rental assistance vouchers, enhancing street outreach teams to help unsheltered individuals come inside, and drastically reducing the homeless veteran population. But, right now, the homelessness crisis is only being managed.
The Council’s nearly 200-page report, which was two years in the making, proposes steps to address homelessness in all its facets: as a risk to those who could become homeless, a crisis for people who now are in shelters, and a trauma for those who have—for the moment—escaped the system.
It proposes everything from improving planning for those getting out of prison and making rental vouchers more broadly available to increasing the market value of those vouchers, targeting affordable housing to the city’s poorest, creating more “safe havens” and boosting support for those dealing with domestic violence, which is an increasingly visible driver of shelter use.
More fundamentally, it calls for an end to the odd bifurcation in the city’s approach to housing people, which treats the production of affordable housing and the handling of homelessness as separate portfolios (with public housing often as a third, separate bucket).
Need for immediate steps
At the unveiling of the report on January 30, Council Speaker Corey Johnson noted that the city has one deputy mayor who handles housing, and another who handles homelessness. “That makes no sense given the depth and breadth of this crisis,” Johnson said.
Backed by dozens of advocates on the City Hall steps on a frigid morning, the speaker alluded to the “national homelessness crisis” and said the Council’s goal in crafting the report had been to create a “long-term comprehensive plan.”
But he also stressed, “We must take immediate steps like increasing rental assistance voucher amounts.” Most of the proposals in the Council report are steps the city can take on its own, although some of the more significant moves would require support from the state.
“It doesn’t rely on simplistic, single new strategies,” Catherine Trapani of Homeless Services United, who spoke at the City Hall event, said of the report. “It’s not going to be one thing [that addresses homelessness]. If it were, we would have solved it already. It’s going to be lots of things, done to scale.”
Some of what the de Blasio administration has done is working, Trapani said.: Some segments of the homeless shelter census have leveled off in the past year. That is proof that policy can succeed, she said, but also an indication that more is needed.
On Max & Murphy, Levin broke down the report’s diagnosis of the homelessness problem and the lengthy list of fixes it has proposed.
“Some of it has to do with doubling down on existing policies but a lot of it has to do with things that we’ve been advocating for for years that are still not done. A lot of them are things we’ve been talking about for five, six years,” Levin said, like making sure runaway and homeless youth have options when they age out of the youth shelter system, and setting aside more subsidized housing for people in the shelter system. “There’s a lot of those kinds of common-sense solutions.”
Hear our conversation with Levin above. Below, you can listen to our discussion of the mayor’s state of the city address last week, or scroll down further to catch the full show – which includes discussion about the New Hampshire primary and Bloomberg’s recently unearthed 2015 comments on stop-and-frisk.
The old saying, often mangled, is that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But what of the rest of us? What are those who know history, and remember it, supposed to do with that knowledge?
Vivian Vázquez Irizarry remembers the history of the South Bronx, where she was born and grew up. She remembers the strong and supportive communities that existed before the bad years, and she remembers the fires. She has studied the backstory that fueled those flames—redlining, White fight, the consultant-driven withdrawal of urban fire protection. Perhaps most important, she remembers what happened after the blazes: the rebuilding of the borough’s human fiber and physical shape thanks largely to working-class people who gathered together and fought for their place in the city. “We were the ones who saved the Bronx when no one else cared,” is how she sums up the story.
Along with Gretchen Hildebran and producers Julia Steele Allen, and Neyda Martinez, Vázquez Irizarry last year produced the film “Decade of Fire,” which revealed that history.
The Bronx had a uniquely dramatic experience, but similar narratives traced their arcs in many cities around the county in the 60s and 70s. And now, in many of those places, a different challenge presents itself: disinvestment and abandonment have been replaced by aggressive development and the threat of displacement. It’s the urban side of the larger national housing crisis, which is erupting into view everywhere from New Hampshire homeless shelters to Colorado manufactured-home parks, and has attracted the attention of most Democratic presidential candidates.
If the presidency shifts parties major housing-policy changes could come in 2021. But chances are, low-income communities are still going to have to fight for their interests and their places.
In a new short film called “Defending Your Block: How to Stay, Fight and Build,” Vázquez Irizarry and her team extract lessons from the experiences of community advocates in the Bronx, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles to inform those efforts at survival.
“Today we’re still fighting a housing crisis in the Bronx and across the country,” Vázquez Irizarry says in the film. “Every neighborhood is different but what we have in common is our determination to stay, fight and build.”
The film, being released Thursday exclusively on City Limits, focuses first on Hetty Fox, a legendary champion for Lyman Place in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx who began working in 1970 to save it from eradication by the flight of capital and the invasion of violence.
William Geist captured some of her spirit in a 1984 New York Timesprofile: “She said she spent a good deal of time on her second-story porch watching over the block. She walked the street at 2 A.M. to show a presence. She was mugged by a purse- snatcher who slugged her twice in the face but could not wrestle her purse away. She went home, put on her sneakers and went out after him.”
Fox, who died last year and to whom the film is dedicated, called this work “block defense.” She explained it simply in the movie: “You take responsibility for any misbehavior on your block.”
“I used to sleep with my boots on,” she said. “I had to be ready to jump up and run, jump up and fight, jump up and do whatever had to be done on a moment’s notice.”
It was about building as much as it was about fighting. Fox took over an abandoned building and made it into a community center. She built relationships by saying hello to people, approaching strangers, organizing block parties.
To Vázquez Irizarry, Fox’s success at protecting Lyman Place identifies four critical elements for looking to defend their place on the third planet from the sun: Vigilance. Engage with neighbors. Lead with a shared vision. Occupy space.
The same elements are in the story told by Ronell Guy, who helped organize tenants in a Pittsburgh housing development who were facing eviction in the late 1990s. After learning she’d be evicted with only 30 days notice from a Section 8 home, Guy rallied her neighbors–“We called the press. We did everything we could to draw attention.”–and, with the help of Legal Aid, got the eviction overturned.
But Guy understood that the victory was temporary. “We decided that we are never going to go through this again. We decided we’re going to take the property,” from the landlord who had tried to force her and her neighbors out. After learning that the city was about to forgive a huge note to the property owner, Guy and her allies convinced the city to instead move the properties toward tenant control.
Guy, whose organization became the Northside Coalition for Fair Housing, advises counterparts in other cities that “whenever sales occur, that’s your opportunity” to change the destiny of the properties that make up neighborhoods. But she also notes the importance of building the kind of community support that gives organizations the standing to get governments to listen to them. In Northside’s case, that involved a toolkit that would have been familiar to any old-time ward heeler, like diaper giveaways and cooking people dinner.
That sort of moment-to-moment, apartment-by-apartment approach to making change is the kind of thing history books will never capture. Like any successful grassroots movement, neighborhood organizing involves occasional instances of high drama surrounded by weeks and months of plodding work.
It’s that kind of effort viewers see in the story of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), an organization founded in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in 1995 to stop a scheme to redevelop the area around a planned transit hub in a manner that would have displaced the area’s people and culture. ELACC organizer Carla de Paz stressed the importance—and the labor intensity—of tracking lot by lot what parcels were changing hands, and which development plans were being hatched, so that ELACC could fight for its vision of developing the land itself.
Finally, “It was really hard for Metro to push back on us,” de Paz said, referring to the transit agency leading the development. “They saw the power that had been built.” Since 1998, ELACC has developed 731 units affordable housing.
The film notes Fox’s passing as well as the deaths of Jerome Avenue-area advocate Carmen Vega-Rivera and pioneering South Bronx activist Al Quinones, all in 2019. Vega-Rivera was a key figure in the resistance to the rezoning—an effort that failed. Not all community led efforts result in wins. And no win is ever permanent. But one lesson the film delivers, without saying so, is that the battle to save neighborhoods can actually create communities.
“I knew that success was to keep the houses here, and keep the people here and interested in staying here,” Fox told the filmmakers. “I knew I had to create something that fascinated people: Look inside, internally, and see what we can do together.”
The old saying, often mangled, is that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But what of the rest of us? What are those who know history, and remember it, supposed to do with that knowledge?
Vivian Vázquez Irizarry remembers the history of the South Bronx, where she was born and grew up. She remembers the strong and supportive communities that existed before the bad years, and she remembers the fires. She has studied the backstory that fueled those flames—redlining, White fight, the consultant-driven withdrawal of urban fire protection. Perhaps most important, she remembers what happened after the blazes: the rebuilding of the borough’s human fiber and physical shape thanks largely to working-class people who gathered together and fought for their place in the city. “We were the ones who saved the Bronx when no one else cared,” is how she sums up the story.
Along with Gretchen Hildebran and producers Julia Steele Allen, and Neyda Martinez, Vázquez Irizarry last year produced the film “Decade of Fire,” which revealed that history.
The Bronx had a uniquely dramatic experience, but similar narratives traced their arcs in many cities around the county in the 60s and 70s. And now, in many of those places, a different challenge presents itself: disinvestment and abandonment have been replaced by aggressive development and the threat of displacement. It’s the urban side of the larger national housing crisis, which is erupting into view everywhere from New Hampshire homeless shelters to Colorado manufactured-home parks, and has attracted the attention of most Democratic presidential candidates.
If the presidency shifts parties major housing-policy changes could come in 2021. But chances are, low-income communities are still going to have to fight for their interests and their places.
In a new short film called “Defending Your Block: How to Stay, Fight and Build,” Vázquez Irizarry and her team extract lessons from the experiences of community advocates in the Bronx, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles to inform those efforts at survival.
“Today we’re still fighting a housing crisis in the Bronx and across the country,” Vázquez Irizarry says in the film. “Every neighborhood is different but what we have in common is our determination to stay, fight and build.”
The film, being released Thursday exclusively on City Limits, focuses first on Hetty Fox, a legendary champion for Lyman Place in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx who began working in 1970 to save it from eradication by the flight of capital and the invasion of violence.
William Geist captured some of her spirit in a 1984 New York Timesprofile: “She said she spent a good deal of time on her second-story porch watching over the block. She walked the street at 2 A.M. to show a presence. She was mugged by a purse- snatcher who slugged her twice in the face but could not wrestle her purse away. She went home, put on her sneakers and went out after him.”
Fox, who died last year and to whom the film is dedicated, called this work “block defense.” She explained it simply in the movie: “You take responsibility for any misbehavior on your block.”
“I used to sleep with my boots on,” she said. “I had to be ready to jump up and run, jump up and fight, jump up and do whatever had to be done on a moment’s notice.”
It was about building as much as it was about fighting. Fox took over an abandoned building and made it into a community center. She built relationships by saying hello to people, approaching strangers, organizing block parties.
To Vázquez Irizarry, Fox’s success at protecting Lyman Place identifies four critical elements for looking to defend their place on the third planet from the sun: Vigilance. Engage with neighbors. Lead with a shared vision. Occupy space.
The same elements are in the story told by Ronell Guy, who helped organize tenants in a Pittsburgh housing development who were facing eviction in the late 1990s. After learning she’d be evicted with only 30 days notice from a Section 8 home, Guy rallied her neighbors–“We called the press. We did everything we could to draw attention.”–and, with the help of Legal Aid, got the eviction overturned.
But Guy understood that the victory was temporary. “We decided that we are never going to go through this again. We decided we’re going to take the property,” from the landlord who had tried to force her and her neighbors out. After learning that the city was about to forgive a huge note to the property owner, Guy and her allies convinced the city to instead move the properties toward tenant control.
Guy, whose organization became the Northside Coalition for Fair Housing, advises counterparts in other cities that “whenever sales occur, that’s your opportunity” to change the destiny of the properties that make up neighborhoods. But she also notes the importance of building the kind of community support that gives organizations the standing to get governments to listen to them. In Northside’s case, that involved a toolkit that would have been familiar to any old-time ward heeler, like diaper giveaways and cooking people dinner.
That sort of moment-to-moment, apartment-by-apartment approach to making change is the kind of thing history books will never capture. Like any successful grassroots movement, neighborhood organizing involves occasional instances of high drama surrounded by weeks and months of plodding work.
It’s that kind of effort viewers see in the story of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), an organization founded in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in 1995 to stop a scheme to redevelop the area around a planned transit hub in a manner that would have displaced the area’s people and culture. ELACC organizer Carla de Paz stressed the importance—and the labor intensity—of tracking lot by lot what parcels were changing hands, and which development plans were being hatched, so that ELACC could fight for its vision of developing the land itself.
Finally, “It was really hard for Metro to push back on us,” de Paz said, referring to the transit agency leading the development. “They saw the power that had been built.” Since 1998, ELACC has developed 731 units affordable housing.
The film notes Fox’s passing as well as the deaths of Jerome Avenue-area advocate Carmen Vega-Rivera and pioneering South Bronx activist Al Quinones, all in 2019. Vega-Rivera was a key figure in the resistance to the rezoning—an effort that failed. Not all community led efforts result in wins. And no win is ever permanent. But one lesson the film delivers, without saying so, is that the battle to save neighborhoods can actually create communities.
“I knew that success was to keep the houses here, and keep the people here and interested in staying here,” Fox told the filmmakers. “I knew I had to create something that fascinated people: Look inside, internally, and see what we can do together.”
The area around 425 Westchester Avenue, site of a soon-to-be charter school and office building in the South Bronx. Developer AB Capstone funded the project primarily through opportunity zone capital from Starwood Opportunity Zone Fund.
In November 2018, Marlene Cintron, the Bronx’s head of economic development, stood up in front of a crowd of mostly developers and lawyers, as they sipped pitorro at the Port Morris Distillery. She was there to champion a federal tax break that promised to revitalize the borough.
“We have always been the most ignored,” Cintron said to her audience. “These opportunity zones are here for you to take advantage of them.”
This time last year, anticipation for the Trump tax policy was high in the Bronx, one of the poorest districts in the nation. The tax incentive, introduced in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, allows investors who fund business ventures or develop real estate in a designated low-income census tract called an opportunity zone to defer capital gains taxes on profits earned elsewhere and, in some cases, completely eliminate them on the new investment.
The Bronx has 74 of these zones. And brokers predicted that the kind of investments the tax incentive could attract would create an entirely new borough. But a year later, Cintron has all but soured on the program.
“It didn’t happen,” she says now.
The fervor around opportunity zones in the Bronx has shrunk from a clap to a whisper. In 2018, several high profile developers, including Brookfield Properties, Somerset Partners and Starwood Capital, set out to raise millions in their own respective Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds to invest in the Bronx. But if they invested that money in 2019, they did it quietly.
The end of last year marked a major deadline for the program. Those who invested funds into a project by 2019, wouldn’t be taxed at all for their capital gains on that investment if they waited until 2029 to sell. But the New Year came and went, and there are only two known development projects fully or partially funded by opportunity zone capital in the Bronx.
Enthusiasm around the federal program has fizzled, perhaps because of a lingering stigma against the Bronx, a shortage of available property, or treasury guidelines that are vague and uncertain.
“It’s not something a lot of people talk about,” Cintron said. “It’s not a sexy subject for anybody because it’s not necessarily working.”
The Bronx’s development isn’t slowing down, as investment continues to grow, but Cintron and several brokers all said the same thing: the investment hasn’t been accelerated by opportunity zones. The Bronx’s biggest projects were set in motion long before the federal program started.
A slow year
In 2018, Ariel Property Advisors’ Year-End Sales Report in the Bronx touted the benefits of the federal program, crediting the OZ tax policy for a huge increase (114 percent) in private and institutional investors. But in Ariel Property’s mid-year report for 2019, opportunity zones weren’t mentioned at all, even though investment in residential and commercial real estate continued to rise.
“We were surprised, even as brokers,” said Jason Gold, an Ariel Property broker. “There are more development sites being traded in the Bronx in the past two years than anytime before, but it’s not as much as we expected.”
It’s hard to actually attribute an uptick in investment to OZ capital. Because the federal policy has no reporting requirements, it’s difficult to track exactly where opportunity fund capital is going.
This is a problem with the policy that’s not limited to the Bronx, according to Scott O’Sullivan, a partner at accounting and advisory firm Margolin, Winer & Evens (MWE). At the beginning of 2020, MWE conducted a poll of real estate professionals who attended a panel discussion the firm held on Jan.15 in Manhattan. Over 75 percent of attendees said they had not yet invested in a Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund, although 39 percent said they plan to invest in the next six months.
There’s a lot of uncertainty around OZs, O’Sullivan says, particularly for a smaller investor. There’s a lack of transparency in how many qualified opportunity zone funds are out there and which ones are smartest to invest.
“It’s not like shopping for a car, where there are dealerships all along the street ready to tell you what to buy,” O’Sullivan says. “For the big players, the RXR Realty’s of the world, they have the in-house attorneys and the in-house tax people, but for the mom and pops, there’s still a lot of uncertainty to how Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds work.”
The tax policy is best suited for large investors with millions in capital gains, which there’s no shortage of as the stock market reaches all-time-highs. But as the New York Times pointed out, this means investment in opportunity zones is going to be aimed at projects that will reap the greatest returns, largely high-rise, market rate apartments.
Opportunity Zones across the nation have raised more than $6.7 billion since the program started, according to most recent Novogradac Opportunity Funds listing. But there has been some hesitation in investing that money, O’Sullivan says, because there’s no certainty that the program will still exist in 2029, when investors have to pay taxes on the money they’ve invested, or that the capital gains taxes in New York and on a federal level won’t have risen substantially. This is a particularly slow investment period, as investors are waiting to see what happens in the 2020 presidential election, O’Sullivan says.
There’s still positive buzz around the program though. At the start of February, the New York Post ran a story singing a similar tune to what was written a year before. “New York City may be on the cusp of a new multibillion-dollar investment boom.” The Post interviewed an investor out of Arizona who said he planned to allocate $250 million of new investments in areas including New York. RXR Realty also launched an opportunity zone fund aiming to raise $500 million to funnel into redevelopment of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a project in New Rochelle.
In the Bronx, Brookfield Properties’ four-acre, $950-million development project that broke ground in December did use some investment from Brookfield’s opportunity fund, according to spokesman Andrew Brent.
“With the help of the Opportunity Zone program, Brookfield is cleaning acres of contaminated waterfront in Mott Haven and transforming land that has sat idle for decades into much needed housing,” Brent said.
But the massive waterfront project was set in motion nearly three years ago, before the land was designated an opportunity zone.
Most of the development that has already happened under OZ capital likely would have happened anyway in the Bronx, and Cintron said it was designed that way.
Nearly all of the Bronx qualifies to be an opportunity zone, as it’s one of the poorest counties in the nation.
“All they had to do was throw a couple of darts at a map and they would have been good,” Cintron said of the Empire State Development Corporation.
Instead, the Bronx EDC and the and the state ESD worked together in deciding where an opportunity zone would be the most valuable in the borough, Cintron said. Cintron said that the EDC looked at where projects were already starting and designated those areas as opportunity zones, so folks already investing in the borough could tap into opportunity fund capital.
The state’s ESD says it weighed input from Regional Economic Development Councils and local elected officials when deciding where to designate opportunity zones, but wouldn’t comment specifically on what Cintron said.
The Benedetto family, titans in New York City’s recycling industry, were able to lease their 250,000-square-foot tract of land in Port Morris to the highest bidder this year because the land’s position in an opportunity zone made the sale more attractive. But the family always had an intention to lease their property, according to their broker Randy Modell. He said the timing of the sale had nothing to do with opportunity zones.
“It was just a happy coincidence,” Modell said.
The most forthright example of Opportunity Zone investment in the Bronx in 2019 was Starwood Capital Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund’s investment in office space for a number of businesses in the South Bronx, as well as a charter school. While the money was useful for all parties, Ron Solarz, the broker who helped developer AB Capstone secure the equity from Starwood, said the project was already in motion before opportunity zones existed.
“The opportunity zone has nothing to do with what a developer decides to build.” Solarz said. “It was just the cherry on top. He wouldn’t have changed his plan at all.”
Gold also agrees that the existence of the opportunity zone policy doesn’t change much about whether the Bronx sees investment.
“People aren’t buying property in the Bronx because it’s in an opportunity zone,” Gold says. “The opportunity zone just adds to the story a little bit.”
No land
To be sure, the policy is new. And despite a passed deadline, there are still nine more years for investment to take hold. Gold said 2019 saw fewer development projects because of the new rent laws out of Albany, and trade war turmoil, but he expects to see many more developers take advantage of opportunity zone capital in 2020.
Developers might have nowhere to build, though. While the Bronx is known for having more available space than other boroughs, Cintron says, on top of many property owners being reluctant to sell, most of the available land in desirable neighborhoods like Hunts Point, Mott Haven or Port Morris is owned by the city.
About 1.4 square miles of city owned land in the Bronx is vacant. But Cintron says it’s been hard to negotiate with city officials to sell.
“There might be open space left, but it’s not for sale,” Cintron said. “In Hunts Point, the city of New York owns quite a bit of lots, but they want them for the garbage trucks, they want it for their stuff.”
Cintron’s space challenge tracks with the Bronx’s economic growth in 2019. The borough’s investment sales market increased 22 percent in the first half of 2019, but the volume of property sold decreased by 25 percent, according to Ariel Property Advisors’ 2019 Mid-Year Sales Report. But Gold says this has more to do with the cost of steel and other building materials going up because of international trade wars.
He says he still sees a lot of untapped resources in the Bronx. The problem, instead, is that long term investment in the borough is a bit of a gamble.
Shaking off the Bronx’s reputation
For many, the benefits of investing in the Bronx are still unknown, particularly investing opportunity zone capital. For an investor to benefit as much as they can from the tax policy, a project must have at least a nine-year longevity, and it must be able to turn a significant profit by 2029. In Brooklyn or Manhattan, a developer largely knows what kind of return they’ll get on their investment. In the Bronx, the waters are murky.
“I think it’s a big bet, because the Bronx still isn’t proven,” Gold said. “Businesses are thriving and more businesses are coming to the area, but can you still achieve the numbers you need to survive?”
As for opportunity zones bringing the essentials to low-income neighborhoods like Mott Haven, which proponents of the policy have promised, Cintron says she doesn’t see it. Developers want to look for the biggest projects, with the biggest long term gains.
“I don’t see it as a grocery store kind of policy. I’m quite frankly surprised someone was able to use it for a school,” Cintron says. “It was supposed to predominantly be about commercial development. It was a gift to the President’s Wall Street friends, one that we were willing to entertain as long as the community benefited.”
For residents of the South Bronx, barriers to development are welcomed. Cintron said that Brookfield deciding to develop in the neighborhood “was huge,” but community members like Welcome2TheBronx Editor-in-Chief Ed Conde don’t see it that way.
“There’s absolutely nothing positive about Brookfield,” Conde said. “Putting luxury housing in an area still puts pressure on the existing housing stock. It’s displacing people.”
Conde says he is starting to see a slow-down of building in the area, which might mean the neighborhood isn’t destined to be the next Williamsburg or Long Island City. But he still views gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and opportunity zones will only continue to attract the wrong kind of development. Even the kind of development that the best side of the policy offers, Conde finds demeaning.
“Is that what we’re worth? A supermarket or menial retail jobs? Why do we have to wait for a developer to come in to get a school?” Conde says.
In the end, the policy hasn’t yielded what it promised for the borough. But if investors aren’t drawn to the borough, even with the tax incentives, Cintron says good riddance.
“We’re okay with them not coming if it’s not going to benefit our community,” she says.
The area around 425 Westchester Avenue, site of a soon-to-be charter school and office building in the South Bronx. Developer AB Capstone funded the project primarily through opportunity zone capital from Starwood Opportunity Zone Fund.
In November 2018, Marlene Cintron, the Bronx’s head of economic development, stood up in front of a crowd of mostly developers and lawyers, as they sipped pitorro at the Port Morris Distillery. She was there to champion a federal tax break that promised to revitalize the borough.
“We have always been the most ignored,” Cintron said to her audience. “These opportunity zones are here for you to take advantage of them.”
This time last year, anticipation for the Trump tax policy was high in the Bronx, one of the poorest districts in the nation. The tax incentive, introduced in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, allows investors who fund business ventures or develop real estate in a designated low-income census tract called an opportunity zone to defer capital gains taxes on profits earned elsewhere and, in some cases, completely eliminate them on the new investment.
The Bronx has 74 of these zones. And brokers predicted that the kind of investments the tax incentive could attract would create an entirely new borough. But a year later, Cintron has all but soured on the program.
“It didn’t happen,” she says now.
The fervor around opportunity zones in the Bronx has shrunk from a clap to a whisper. In 2018, several high profile developers, including Brookfield Properties, Somerset Partners and Starwood Capital, set out to raise millions in their own respective Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds to invest in the Bronx. But if they invested that money in 2019, they did it quietly.
The end of last year marked a major deadline for the program. Those who invested funds into a project by 2019, wouldn’t be taxed at all for their capital gains on that investment if they waited until 2029 to sell. But the New Year came and went, and there are only two known development projects fully or partially funded by opportunity zone capital in the Bronx.
Enthusiasm around the federal program has fizzled, perhaps because of a lingering stigma against the Bronx, a shortage of available property, or treasury guidelines that are vague and uncertain.
“It’s not something a lot of people talk about,” Cintron said. “It’s not a sexy subject for anybody because it’s not necessarily working.”
The Bronx’s development isn’t slowing down, as investment continues to grow, but Cintron and several brokers all said the same thing: the investment hasn’t been accelerated by opportunity zones. The Bronx’s biggest projects were set in motion long before the federal program started.
A slow year
In 2018, Ariel Property Advisors’ Year-End Sales Report in the Bronx touted the benefits of the federal program, crediting the OZ tax policy for a huge increase (114 percent) in private and institutional investors. But in Ariel Property’s mid-year report for 2019, opportunity zones weren’t mentioned at all, even though investment in residential and commercial real estate continued to rise.
“We were surprised, even as brokers,” said Jason Gold, an Ariel Property broker. “There are more development sites being traded in the Bronx in the past two years than anytime before, but it’s not as much as we expected.”
It’s hard to actually attribute an uptick in investment to OZ capital. Because the federal policy has no reporting requirements, it’s difficult to track exactly where opportunity fund capital is going.
This is a problem with the policy that’s not limited to the Bronx, according to Scott O’Sullivan, a partner at accounting and advisory firm Margolin, Winer & Evens (MWE). At the beginning of 2020, MWE conducted a poll of real estate professionals who attended a panel discussion the firm held on Jan.15 in Manhattan. Over 75 percent of attendees said they had not yet invested in a Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund, although 39 percent said they plan to invest in the next six months.
There’s a lot of uncertainty around OZs, O’Sullivan says, particularly for a smaller investor. There’s a lack of transparency in how many qualified opportunity zone funds are out there and which ones are smartest to invest.
“It’s not like shopping for a car, where there are dealerships all along the street ready to tell you what to buy,” O’Sullivan says. “For the big players, the RXR Realty’s of the world, they have the in-house attorneys and the in-house tax people, but for the mom and pops, there’s still a lot of uncertainty to how Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds work.”
The tax policy is best suited for large investors with millions in capital gains, which there’s no shortage of as the stock market reaches all-time-highs. But as the New York Times pointed out, this means investment in opportunity zones is going to be aimed at projects that will reap the greatest returns, largely high-rise, market rate apartments.
Opportunity Zones across the nation have raised more than $6.7 billion since the program started, according to most recent Novogradac Opportunity Funds listing. But there has been some hesitation in investing that money, O’Sullivan says, because there’s no certainty that the program will still exist in 2029, when investors have to pay taxes on the money they’ve invested, or that the capital gains taxes in New York and on a federal level won’t have risen substantially. This is a particularly slow investment period, as investors are waiting to see what happens in the 2020 presidential election, O’Sullivan says.
There’s still positive buzz around the program though. At the start of February, the New York Post ran a story singing a similar tune to what was written a year before. “New York City may be on the cusp of a new multibillion-dollar investment boom.” The Post interviewed an investor out of Arizona who said he planned to allocate $250 million of new investments in areas including New York. RXR Realty also launched an opportunity zone fund aiming to raise $500 million to funnel into redevelopment of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a project in New Rochelle.
In the Bronx, Brookfield Properties’ four-acre, $950-million development project that broke ground in December did use some investment from Brookfield’s opportunity fund, according to spokesman Andrew Brent.
“With the help of the Opportunity Zone program, Brookfield is cleaning acres of contaminated waterfront in Mott Haven and transforming land that has sat idle for decades into much needed housing,” Brent said.
But the massive waterfront project was set in motion nearly three years ago, before the land was designated an opportunity zone.
Most of the development that has already happened under OZ capital likely would have happened anyway in the Bronx, and Cintron said it was designed that way.
Nearly all of the Bronx qualifies to be an opportunity zone, as it’s one of the poorest counties in the nation.
“All they had to do was throw a couple of darts at a map and they would have been good,” Cintron said of the Empire State Development Corporation.
Instead, the Bronx EDC and the and the state ESD worked together in deciding where an opportunity zone would be the most valuable in the borough, Cintron said. Cintron said that the EDC looked at where projects were already starting and designated those areas as opportunity zones, so folks already investing in the borough could tap into opportunity fund capital.
The state’s ESD says it weighed input from Regional Economic Development Councils and local elected officials when deciding where to designate opportunity zones, but wouldn’t comment specifically on what Cintron said.
The Benedetto family, titans in New York City’s recycling industry, were able to lease their 250,000-square-foot tract of land in Port Morris to the highest bidder this year because the land’s position in an opportunity zone made the sale more attractive. But the family always had an intention to lease their property, according to their broker Randy Modell. He said the timing of the sale had nothing to do with opportunity zones.
“It was just a happy coincidence,” Modell said.
The most forthright example of Opportunity Zone investment in the Bronx in 2019 was Starwood Capital Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund’s investment in office space for a number of businesses in the South Bronx, as well as a charter school. While the money was useful for all parties, Ron Solarz, the broker who helped developer AB Capstone secure the equity from Starwood, said the project was already in motion before opportunity zones existed.
“The opportunity zone has nothing to do with what a developer decides to build.” Solarz said. “It was just the cherry on top. He wouldn’t have changed his plan at all.”
Gold also agrees that the existence of the opportunity zone policy doesn’t change much about whether the Bronx sees investment.
“People aren’t buying property in the Bronx because it’s in an opportunity zone,” Gold says. “The opportunity zone just adds to the story a little bit.”
No land
To be sure, the policy is new. And despite a passed deadline, there are still nine more years for investment to take hold. Gold said 2019 saw fewer development projects because of the new rent laws out of Albany, and trade war turmoil, but he expects to see many more developers take advantage of opportunity zone capital in 2020.
Developers might have nowhere to build, though. While the Bronx is known for having more available space than other boroughs, Cintron says, on top of many property owners being reluctant to sell, most of the available land in desirable neighborhoods like Hunts Point, Mott Haven or Port Morris is owned by the city.
About 1.4 square miles of city owned land in the Bronx is vacant. But Cintron says it’s been hard to negotiate with city officials to sell.
“There might be open space left, but it’s not for sale,” Cintron said. “In Hunts Point, the city of New York owns quite a bit of lots, but they want them for the garbage trucks, they want it for their stuff.”
Cintron’s space challenge tracks with the Bronx’s economic growth in 2019. The borough’s investment sales market increased 22 percent in the first half of 2019, but the volume of property sold decreased by 25 percent, according to Ariel Property Advisors’ 2019 Mid-Year Sales Report. But Gold says this has more to do with the cost of steel and other building materials going up because of international trade wars.
He says he still sees a lot of untapped resources in the Bronx. The problem, instead, is that long term investment in the borough is a bit of a gamble.
Shaking off the Bronx’s reputation
For many, the benefits of investing in the Bronx are still unknown, particularly investing opportunity zone capital. For an investor to benefit as much as they can from the tax policy, a project must have at least a nine-year longevity, and it must be able to turn a significant profit by 2029. In Brooklyn or Manhattan, a developer largely knows what kind of return they’ll get on their investment. In the Bronx, the waters are murky.
“I think it’s a big bet, because the Bronx still isn’t proven,” Gold said. “Businesses are thriving and more businesses are coming to the area, but can you still achieve the numbers you need to survive?”
As for opportunity zones bringing the essentials to low-income neighborhoods like Mott Haven, which proponents of the policy have promised, Cintron says she doesn’t see it. Developers want to look for the biggest projects, with the biggest long term gains.
“I don’t see it as a grocery store kind of policy. I’m quite frankly surprised someone was able to use it for a school,” Cintron says. “It was supposed to predominantly be about commercial development. It was a gift to the President’s Wall Street friends, one that we were willing to entertain as long as the community benefited.”
For residents of the South Bronx, barriers to development are welcomed. Cintron said that Brookfield deciding to develop in the neighborhood “was huge,” but community members like Welcome2TheBronx Editor-in-Chief Ed Conde don’t see it that way.
“There’s absolutely nothing positive about Brookfield,” Conde said. “Putting luxury housing in an area still puts pressure on the existing housing stock. It’s displacing people.”
Conde says he is starting to see a slow-down of building in the area, which might mean the neighborhood isn’t destined to be the next Williamsburg or Long Island City. But he still views gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and opportunity zones will only continue to attract the wrong kind of development. Even the kind of development that the best side of the policy offers, Conde finds demeaning.
“Is that what we’re worth? A supermarket or menial retail jobs? Why do we have to wait for a developer to come in to get a school?” Conde says.
In the end, the policy hasn’t yielded what it promised for the borough. But if investors aren’t drawn to the borough, even with the tax incentives, Cintron says good riddance.
“We’re okay with them not coming if it’s not going to benefit our community,” she says.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg campaigns in New Hampshire, October 2019.
Poverty got a shout out in the run-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, in the final pre-primary debate last Friday, when moderator George Stephanopoulos asked a question about child poverty. Stephanopoulos noted that it was the first time in 20 years that such a question had worked its way into a presidential debate. Just as remarkable, perhaps, is that it was asked in the state with the lowest poverty rate it 2018. At 7.6 percent. New Hampshire was one of only six states with a poverty rate below 10 percent.
New Hampshire’s small size, rural character and lack of diversity (WalletHub found it to be the fourth least-diverse state) are often cited by people who question the Granite State’s unique and hallowed place in the presidential-campaign calendar. With the national poverty rate at 11.8 percent, add that measure to the argument that New Hampshire is not reflective of the national condition—at least not in a way that’s visible to television cameras and news correspondents who ramble through for a few days every four years.
Look closer, and the situation is more complicated. According to the American Community Survey, 44 of New Hampshire’s 107 cities, towns and villages post poverty rates in excess of the national average. Ten of them have more than one in five people living in poverty. Durham, N.H., has a poverty rate of 33 percent.
“I could drive you to the town of Exeter and you’d be appalled by the mobile homes that are rusting away and hidden in the woods,” Patte-Anne Ardizzoni, the communications director for Southern New Hampshire Services, Inc., tells City Limits. “That story stands for many of the towns.”
Some of the poor are newcomers: Until the number dropped dramatically under President Trump, New Hampshire was seeing a significant number of refugee families every year. But there is multi-generational poverty, too, especially in the northern half of the state: Coos and Grafton counties, which cover the north and west-central parts of the state, have the highest poverty rates among New Hampshire counties, at 13.3 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively.
The death of traditional industry, like paper plants, meant that “people who were once working (and generations had been in the same plants) found themselves without options,” Ardizzoni says. Lack of education—especially adult ed—or transportation options in rural areas compounds the problem. A dearth of workforce housing adds to the strain.
The latter manifests itself in a homelessness problem that, while exponentially smaller than New York City’s, is a significant concern in cities like Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest.
In the past year or so, “We saw a lot of attention paid to homelessness because it was becoming more visible than I’ve ever seen it,” says Cathy Kuhn, the director of the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness. “There were literally people sleeping downtown on Elm Street. It became a key point of discussion for city leadership.” While the city had an emergency shelter system for single adults, it was at capacity. “That was the first time that Manchester has ever had to deal with that.”
Kuhn says Manchester reacted well, convening a task force of stakeholders who crafted a thoughtful response plan. It’s still a work in progress, though. “Thankfully, we’ve been able to come up with a plan that at least on the coldest nights, when sleeping outside could be deadly, there is an overflow facility where our faith community here in the city sort of stepped up to provide that facility, both the space and the staffing.” However, “We don’t have overflow capacity on nights when it’s not cold but people still need shelters. That’s something we’re still working on.”
Family homelessness is also a growing concern. Of the households with children that her organization tracks as homeless, “typically around a third of families are reported living outside cars, basements and other places not meant for human habitation,” Kuhn says. As is the case in New York, families are less visible than street-homeless individuals. “It’s sort of the hidden homeless,” she adds. But the shelter system is simply not up to the task. “There are people getting turned away every single day,” she adds.
Just as disturbing, some of those homeless families have housing vouchers, but they still cannot find an apartment they can afford. “Our vacancy rate is so incredibly low,” Kuhn says. “It’s a landlord’s market.”
Therein lies the larger significance of New Hampshire’s homelessness problem. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual point-in-time count, New Hampshire has the eighth lowest number of homeless people among the states, with just under 1,400 homeless among a total population of 1.4 million. It’s not a huge number of people. But it indicates that even in a state with little poverty, and even amid a long-lasting economic boom, there are people in the U.S.—including working people—unable to afford a place to live. It hints at bigger vulnerabilities: the other families not in the homeless tally but barely balancing their earnings against rent and other essentials.
As in Manchester, the housing emergency facing other New Hampshire cities is small-scale, but real. Nashua, the state’s second-largest city, is also wrestling with a homelessness problem that is growing, slowly but steadily. And Ardizzoni says in Portsmouth, on the coast, “Families, working families, who would otherwise opt to be rent payers are staying at Cross Roads House. Kids get on the school bus outside of the shelter, parents go to full time work, and then return to the shelter.”
Kuhn is optimistic that the collaborative approach taken in Manchester will lead to an adequate policy response. But Ardizzoni worries that other demographic changes—namely, New Hampshire’s graying population as residents age in place or opt to retire there—will complicate the challenges. “The systems and services in place right now, and to include housing, are inadequate to cover the sheer number of those retiring and who will be retiring,” she says.
Housing issues have been uniquely visible during the 2020 presidential race, with most major Democratic candidates proposing plans to create more affordability. Some have explicitly mentioned homelessness. But none did in Friday’s debate at Saint Anselm College, three miles from the largest homeless shelter in America’s least-poor state.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg campaigns in New Hampshire, October 2019.
Poverty got a shout out in the run-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, in the final pre-primary debate last Friday, when moderator George Stephanopoulos asked a question about child poverty. Stephanopoulos noted that it was the first time in 20 years that such a question had worked its way into a presidential debate. Just as remarkable, perhaps, is that it was asked in the state with the lowest poverty rate it 2018. At 7.6 percent. New Hampshire was one of only six states with a poverty rate below 10 percent.
New Hampshire’s small size, rural character and lack of diversity (WalletHub found it to be the fourth least-diverse state) are often cited by people who question the Granite State’s unique and hallowed place in the presidential-campaign calendar. With the national poverty rate at 11.8 percent, add that measure to the argument that New Hampshire is not reflective of the national condition—at least not in a way that’s visible to television cameras and news correspondents who ramble through for a few days every four years.
Look closer, and the situation is more complicated. According to the American Community Survey, 44 of New Hampshire’s 107 cities, towns and villages post poverty rates in excess of the national average. Ten of them have more than one in five people living in poverty. Durham, N.H., has a poverty rate of 33 percent.
“I could drive you to the town of Exeter and you’d be appalled by the mobile homes that are rusting away and hidden in the woods,” Patte-Anne Ardizzoni, the communications director for Southern New Hampshire Services, Inc., tells City Limits. “That story stands for many of the towns.”
Some of the poor are newcomers: Until the number dropped dramatically under President Trump, New Hampshire was seeing a significant number of refugee families every year. But there is multi-generational poverty, too, especially in the northern half of the state: Coos and Grafton counties, which cover the north and west-central parts of the state, have the highest poverty rates among New Hampshire counties, at 13.3 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively.
The death of traditional industry, like paper plants, meant that “people who were once working (and generations had been in the same plants) found themselves without options,” Ardizzoni says. Lack of education—especially adult ed—or transportation options in rural areas compounds the problem. A dearth of workforce housing adds to the strain.
The latter manifests itself in a homelessness problem that, while exponentially smaller than New York City’s, is a significant concern in cities like Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest.
In the past year or so, “We saw a lot of attention paid to homelessness because it was becoming more visible than I’ve ever seen it,” says Cathy Kuhn, the director of the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness. “There were literally people sleeping downtown on Elm Street. It became a key point of discussion for city leadership.” While the city had an emergency shelter system for single adults, it was at capacity. “That was the first time that Manchester has ever had to deal with that.”
Kuhn says Manchester reacted well, convening a task force of stakeholders who crafted a thoughtful response plan. It’s still a work in progress, though. “Thankfully, we’ve been able to come up with a plan that at least on the coldest nights, when sleeping outside could be deadly, there is an overflow facility where our faith community here in the city sort of stepped up to provide that facility, both the space and the staffing.” However, “We don’t have overflow capacity on nights when it’s not cold but people still need shelters. That’s something we’re still working on.”
Family homelessness is also a growing concern. Of the households with children that her organization tracks as homeless, “typically around a third of families are reported living outside cars, basements and other places not meant for human habitation,” Kuhn says. As is the case in New York, families are less visible than street-homeless individuals. “It’s sort of the hidden homeless,” she adds. But the shelter system is simply not up to the task. “There are people getting turned away every single day,” she adds.
Just as disturbing, some of those homeless families have housing vouchers, but they still cannot find an apartment they can afford. “Our vacancy rate is so incredibly low,” Kuhn says. “It’s a landlord’s market.”
Therein lies the larger significance of New Hampshire’s homelessness problem. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual point-in-time count, New Hampshire has the eighth lowest number of homeless people among the states, with just under 1,400 homeless among a total population of 1.4 million. It’s not a huge number of people. But it indicates that even in a state with little poverty, and even amid a long-lasting economic boom, there are people in the U.S.—including working people—unable to afford a place to live. It hints at bigger vulnerabilities: the other families not in the homeless tally but barely balancing their earnings against rent and other essentials.
As in Manchester, the housing emergency facing other New Hampshire cities is small-scale, but real. Nashua, the state’s second-largest city, is also wrestling with a homelessness problem that is growing, slowly but steadily. And Ardizzoni says in Portsmouth, on the coast, “Families, working families, who would otherwise opt to be rent payers are staying at Cross Roads House. Kids get on the school bus outside of the shelter, parents go to full time work, and then return to the shelter.”
Kuhn is optimistic that the collaborative approach taken in Manchester will lead to an adequate policy response. But Ardizzoni worries that other demographic changes—namely, New Hampshire’s graying population as residents age in place or opt to retire there—will complicate the challenges. “The systems and services in place right now, and to include housing, are inadequate to cover the sheer number of those retiring and who will be retiring,” she says.
Housing issues have been uniquely visible during the 2020 presidential race, with most major Democratic candidates proposing plans to create more affordability. Some have explicitly mentioned homelessness. But none did in Friday’s debate at Saint Anselm College, three miles from the largest homeless shelter in America’s least-poor state.
Demonstrators held up banners at scene of the CB7 vote. (Credit: Sing Tao Daily)
