Over the course of this semester, we’ve learned about the ways in which land has been dispossessed, property has mismanaged to keep marginalized communities in poor living conditions or updated to evict them for richer tenants, and how the soul of a neighborhood and its public convening spaces have been sanitized for the sake of gain by the state and corporate interests. Through reading about the legacies of Puerto-Rican-led organizing towards the world the community wished to see, we see a reclamation of the perceived autonomy over land and property usage from the state into the hands of the people who live in the neighborhood itself.
It goes without saying that today’s New York leaves much to be desired in terms of providing for its citizens through both social service and infrastructure initiatives. It’s hard for one not to be outraged by the recent report outlining how Hudson Yards was financed through an EB-5 visa workaround which qualified it as a distressed and targeted employment area by connecting it to Harlem’s public housing projects, one of many ways in which the city continues to prioritize the city’s capitalist ends rather than working for something better for its residents. At times, feeling hopeful for something better seems pointless when the entire city is weighed down by these seemingly-impenetrable forces controlling every aspect of urban life.
And yet, there are those who continue to fight, denying this entities their unopposed immutability. Queens-based organizers such as those in Make the Road united together to force Amazon out of Long Island City. The same has happened in Berlin with Google. There are those like United Workers in Baltimore who demand that their government use their resources to invest in the development of collectively-owned and managed lands. And, important to our case today, we see that La Plaza Cultural and the Loisaida Center are still standing. That squats have been incorporated into legal living spaces. That these developments are not new, and that (at least some of them) have stood the test of time over the decades and remain central points within the community is something to be admired.
As “Anarchist Bill” said during our tour a few weeks ago, the fact that El Bohio remains unoccupied and undeveloped years after it was acquired by a private developer is a promising sign as well, that the dream of another cultural center might be realized within the next decade.
And while we can hope for an autonomous Lower East Side, we might be also able to expand into cross-neighborhood solidarity, and see a New York liberated from those who have held its people back creating beautiful, collectively-sustained communities.
I’d love to see a cross-neighborhood coalition! I think this is happenings with the New York City Community Land Trust Initiative in some ways, although most of the people involved are older (and tired) and need a social movement to build around the solutions they are trying to offer. Unfortunately, I think younger folks are much smarter about intersectionality and identity than older folks, but older folks are much smarter about making class-based claims for material reparations (like low-income housing) than young folks are. The two groups need to work together more! What would happen to CHARAS if it did reopen, after all? It’s going to have to run on youth power. How can you take what Anarchist Bill and Chino offered as young people and transform it into something young people NOW might want?