Author: Paul Nusbaum

 

This week’s readings help to paint a picture of the experiences faced by the predominantly Puerto Rican residents of the post war Lower East Side. Together, Nandini Bagchee’s chapter, “The Communitarian Estates of Loisaida (1967-2001)”, and Peter Wilson and Bill Weinberg’s “Avant-Gardening: Ecological Struggle in The City & The World”, tell a complete story of abandonment by the city, and the rise of a strong community organising movement which stepped in to counteract this abandonment. If one reads “Avant Gardening” out of context, it is easy to dismiss its increasingly anti-establishment rhetoric as pure fiction. Suggestions of abolishing the current world order, and an open, passionate hostility of the Lower East Side towards the rest of New York City, upon first observation, seems to border on delusional. When considered through the lens of Bagchee’s chapter, however, the strongly autonomous language begins to make more sense. The chapter outlines the history of community organizing in the Lower East Side, which was born out of the adverse conditions of the post Second World War neighborhood. Deindustrialization and landlord abandonment, later combined with New York City’s bankruptcy, the oil crisis, and many other factors left residents of the Lower East Side feeling almost completely abandoned. In this environment, CHARAS, the community organization primarily concerned with affordable housing, essentially became the leaders seeking to return the numerous abandoned buildings to productive use. This non-government restoration of community services, however, came under threat in the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s, as New York City began to emerge from it’s bankruptcy. As property values and speculative development activity began to return to the neighborhood, the precarious legal foundations related to the physical spaces occupied by the numerous community groups began to undermine the progress of CHARAS and the community as a whole. It is this infiltration, to which “Avant Gardening” responds. While the extreme rhetoric implicitly advocated in the concept of the Lower East Side Autonomous Zone may seem irrational at first, it comes, not only out of a need for self preservation, but out of the immense progress which had been made by the community organizations of the Lower East Side throughout the previous 25 years. In this context, it is highly possible that an autonomous Lower East Side could have been very successful, they were essentially autonomous since the 1970’s.

One of the greatest challenges with affordable housing, aside from creating affordable units, has always seemed to me, to be maintaining units in affordable programs. New York City’s rent stabilization policies, I have always felt, are too relaxed, as allowing units to return to market rate simply through turnover, seems to unfairly advantage those who took advantage of the program when it began. Similarly, the Mitchell-Lama program widely utilized in post Second World War development and redevelopment projects in New York City, also unfairly advantage original owners who took advantage of the program at its inception. The Mitchell-Lama program was a subsidized home ownership program, which aimed to make middle class home ownership in urban areas viable and desirable. The program was undoubtedly very helpful to the many families who took advantage of this in the 1950’s and 60’s. The program, in my opinion, however, had a major flaw. After a period of time, the shareholders of the cooperatively owned buildings could vote to leave the program, allowing them to sell their units at market rate, thus removing the unit from affordability. The flaws in both rent stabilization, and Mitchell-Lama type affordable housing programs, seem to be addressed by community land trusts. The community land trust model’s emphasis on long term sustainability and affordability, through the assertion of greater control over land use than traditionally seen, provides great benefit over the traditional affordable housing programs. Their combination of private, non-profit structure, with their eligibility for government subsidies also makes for an intriguing model. As Karen Gray explains in “Community Land Trusts in the United States”, the practice of using collective land ownership and leasing ground to the individual tenants offsets the costs of home ownership, allowing people to own or rent what is important, a home, without having to pay for the ground on which it sits. Development on the basis of ground leasing is a popular practice outside the United States, and has been particularly important in the development of England for hundreds of years, however, the land is typically controlled and developed by for-profit entities. By capping profits, CLT’s protect the interests of both current and future homeowners. The nuanced, well thought out, and delicately balanced structure of community land trusts seem to improve on the most obvious shortcomings of more traditional affordable housing programs, providing low and middle income people with the security and stability of truly affordable housing.

In this week’s readings, the issues and methods of affordable and low income housing in 1990’s New York City paint a picture of great effort and limited success. Among the most thought provoking was the chapter from “Who Deserves Housing? The Battle for East Thirteenth Street”, by Amy Starecheski. In this chapter, a number of former residents of the east thirteenth street squats discuss their experiences, and expose many contradictions to the fundamental ideas surrounding squats. Early on, there is a distinction between ideological squatters and their counterparts, low income New Yorkers with few other options. It would seem that the tension between these groups compromised the efficacy of the overall squat. The very concept of the deprivation based squat, as described in the chapter as a carefully selected group of vulnerable people, to the exclusion of the “undeserving poor” which include drug addicts, is inherently problematic. The precarious legal status also deprived the community of the tenant rights and the protection of law enforcement, leading to a lawless and somewhat unharmonious existence. Despite the limited early success of the urban homestead movement however, as time went on, the squats faced opposition from legally established low income housing developers.

While the squatting efforts undertaken in New York in the 1990’s were flawed, the contemporary efforts in low income housing rehabilitation primarily by the Joint Planning Council were also flawed. As described in Janet Abu-Lughod’s writing, “Defending the Cross-Subsidy Plan: The Tortoise Wins Again”, New York City was struggling in the early 1990’s, and both the commercial and multi-family sectors of the real estate market were severely depressed. This increased the activity of the low income housing developers, who saw an opportunity to gain control of the city owned tenement buildings which the squatters had already appropriated, in the absence of interest from private, market rate developers, which had been actively seeking such buildings in the late 1980’s, prior to the collapse of the movement to gentrify the Lower East Side. While this could be seen as a good thing, however, the pitting of two forces, both signaling the need for affordable and low income housing, was counterproductive and was ultimately damaging to both movements. All this was presided over by the government of New York City, which did nothing to take control of the situation and wasted favorable market conditions which could have been exploited to improve the affordability of housing in the city.

In the first chapter of Elizabeth Blackmar’s “Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850”, she writes that land was initially viewed by the Dutch and British Colonists of New York as an extractive resource. Arguably, the effort to extract the maximum value from New York land can be seen throughout history, down to the present day, albeit, in a very different way. In the early colonial times, land values on Manhattan were very low, as the city was only seen as valuable for its port. The valuable land was that which surrounded the Island, where the main export commodities, fur and timber were found in great quantity. Therefore, the area of lower Manhattan which comprised the port was granted and sold to those who had direct roles servicing and allowing the port to function. Outside of this, the ever present threat from the Native Americans to the north, made the city fairly unattractive and unstable. This instability characterized the New York City real estate market for hundreds of years, and played a role in depressing the city’s value. In fact, while contemporary developers often view regulation of property with contempt, historically, government regulation of real estate in Manhattan has been the catalyst for its explosive growth. It was not until the Commissioners Plan of 1811, which established the grid system and the created the 25’x100’ lots, that New York City began to move northward with any speed or regularity. With the introduction of the Commissioners Plan, speculative investment and development such as that described in Lawrence Veiller and Robert DeForest’s “The Tenement House Problem” could be undertaken. Prior to this, the uncertainty made most of the island unusable, as anything but farmland, in the absence of infrastructure or plans for infrastructure. Just over 100 years later, the 1916 Zoning Ordinance took this further. This revolutionary piece of legislature created, perhaps the strongest and most comprehensive set of planning and land use regulations in history. As described in Keith Revell’s “Regulating the Landscape: Real Estate Values, City Planning, and the 1916 Zoning Ordinance.”, this legislation resulted from the efforts of, primarily private entities, such as the Fifth Avenue Association. Formed of high end retailers, the rapid neighborhood change which Manhattan experienced throughout the latter half of the 19th century, largely resulting from the industrial revolution caused the private retailers to solicit public regulation to protect their considerable investments. Similarly, the disaster that was the 1915 Equitable Life Insurance Building, caused the city planners to realize the negative effects of private land use on both public and private space. Therefore, the regulation of both the use of land, and the physical form of buildings became a widely accepted practice. Throughout New York City’s history, the proactive approach to regulation of land has created a hospitable environment for the creation of one of the world’s most important property markets. This shows that while the imposition by the government on the rights of private property owners is often viewed as a nuisance by developers today, the stability, predictability, and regularity they create is invaluable and necessary for the creation of a functional modern city.

The readings for this week discuss the concept of the commons, and the implications of the misuse of common resources by individuals in various contexts. The classic 1968 text, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, by Garrett Hardin, discusses his belief that the issues caused by overpopulation of the earth cannot be solved by technology. According to Hardin, however, there is no agreeable solution to this problem, because as long as the downsides of individual actions do not exceed the individual positives of that action, there is no incentive to alter behavior. Hardin relates his explanation of the tragedy of the commons to many contemporary and historical examples. From pastures to parking spaces, the absence of rules incentivizes selfishness as the negative impact is externalized and therefore only a fraction of the positive impact. In “Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism”, by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, the arguments of Hardin are extended and adapted to apply to modern events, such as the current economic situation in Greece. Caffentzis and Federici argue that, in the absence of a functional capitalist economy, a commons-like collective of sharing emerges. The aid of “free medical services, free distributions of produce by farmers in urban centres, and the ‘reparation’ of the electrical wires disconnected” (Caffentzis and Federici), are examples of the mutual aid which comes to be in Greece. This is later equated to the squatters movement, to complete the argument that commoning and collective movements such as these come out of necessity, due to the dire situations that arise from capitalism. The extremes of the free market, therefore, often create a desire and need for a commons. Further, the concept of the commons, Caffentzis and Federici argue, is the basis for the more recent formation of what they refer to as “soft capitalism”, which they present as a solution to the extreme, neo-liberal capitalist practices, which often work counter to the best interests of the majority of people.

While this week’s readings offer some very interesting examples, applications, and interpretations of the principle of the commons, with numerous historical and contemporary applications, they are weak in their discussion of possible solutions to the tragedy of the commons. Hardin discusses the need for internalizing the external cost of actions against the good of the commons, which could work in a similar way to taxes. As Hardin points out, the only solution to the tragedy of the commons is to remove the benefits of exploitation, but this is exceedingly complicated. It is this dilemma that makes the commons, inherently tragic.