Author: Stephanie Alexis Rountree

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. 

When so much about today’s world, shaped by the neoliberalism that has plagued us since the 1980s as mentioned in Gray’s piece, is focused on the individual experience, making private the social and economic struggles faced by the working class and people of color at the hand of capitalist forces, community land trusts provide alternative means through which we can develop our relationship to property. 

At this point,  the centrality of property ownership to one’s overall generation of wealth has been established– it’s why we witnessed an organized effort to block Black and Indigenous people from owning valuable plots of land/ property, as it would seem to dilute the ability for white people to maintain this distinction of wealth accumulation from marginalized groups. Yet rather than indoctrinating individual families or people into this system of wealth accumulation via home ownership, which only serves to reinforce the system’s validity, CLTs allow for the regeneration of not just the self, but the community as well. Unlike a few weeks ago, we’re not talking about property managers or landlords taking advantage of the people who need it most, but the community reinvesting in itself over generations. 

Through my work at Right to the City, I’ve been lucky to come into contact with a number of CLTs, from Miami to Baltimore, and while affordable housing is obviously a central point of their projects, what is also revealed in their plans reflects a responsibility to attend to the needs of its community in a way that the surrounding government has failed to  over generations. Just as the decay of a community takes place over decades of neglect, so too does its regeneration require rehabilitation over a long period of time, recalling the closing point of Angiotti’s piece.

This week’s readings offered a wonderful introduction into the politics at play to retain the heart of the Lower East Side in the face of efforts by the city government and their real estate allies to sanitize the area for their own economic gain during the latter part of the 20th century, taking away spaces that once held such importance to the city’s marginalized communities. Whereas the struggle seen during the 42nd Street Redevelopment Plan as outlined in Samuel Delany’s “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” and elsewhere was the erasure of connections forged through patronage to various pornographic theaters and other similar convening spaces, the problem posed within the Lower East Side around the same time seems more urgent, as it is a struggle for life and shelter in an arena that so desperately wants to criminalize their existence.

As the progression of the global economy have pushed more and more for an emphasis on service and consumption, which Smith references in “New City, New Frontier,” there were those who resisted these shifts in an attempt to protect themselves from getting swept up by the forces of displacing development. The way in which Smith chose to make the comparison between the struggle for land between the Lower East Side’s historic working class, black, brown, and immigrant residents and the new class of young professionals, influenced by the Western aesthetic, and that between indigenous peoples and those who settled in the Plains (or their counterparts in the African continent), posed a parallel about the project of taking spaces which are deemed by others to not be operating at their full capacity (reminiscent of the views of settlers we read earlier in the class) from those who have long been living there and repurposing it for their own use, and then viewing themselves somehow as noble or charting new territory. It’s simply settler colonialism with a new name. It then becomes more clear why it is all the more crucial to occupy those remaining spaces, to make visible that they cannot be easily erased. 

Last summer, I took up walking dogs in my free time, many of whom lived in the East Village, meaning which led me to frequent Tompkins Square Park. Not only was it (save for the ‘yuppies’, of course) completely void of many of the different groups we saw in Paper Tiger TV’s documentary on the park as well as in Smith’s description– the Ukrainian men playing chess, drug dealers, Puerto Rican women pushing babies in strollers, etc.– but I remember it appearing to lack any clear heart, or connection to the neighborhood in which it was embedded. I’d imagine much of that comes from as a result of the shift in demographics as well as the redesign, but since I’m coming at it from an outsider’s perspective, perhaps the new ways in which its newer patrons have made use of this space were not visible (though I’d imagine much of these relationships would come in contrast with or attempt to erase the uses of those who inhabited the space during these times of resistance). 

In Starecheski’s account of squatting on East Thirteenth Street also outlined the ways in which groups of people can imagine a new way of relating to property in the city that doesn’t rely on the law and in fact actively refuses to abide by it, forcing officials who usually position themselves as the sole possessors of power over how the city is shaped to work with residents on their terms rather than simply impose. While different cases, this is something we’re also seeing in Spain, in which the government and the banks are forced to renegotiate understandings of space with those who are occupying it. 

Throughout this week’s readings, we get insight into the origins of how New York became the real estate hub it is today, taking us all the way back the collection of private property by wealthy white British settlers in the 18th century, setting in place the system we have for collecting rent that we have today in Blackmar’s “Manhattan For Rent,” the consequential public policy of the early 20th century in Revell’s “Regulating the Landscape,” and the realities of how the city has failed its working class and immigrant communities in De Forest and Weeks’ “The Tenement Problem.”

While it was certainly interesting to see the influence of labor relations (from facilitating a redistribution of property to the middle class to the shift in dependency on slavery in the city, as well as the Haitian Revolution providing a disruption to the Anglo-American understanding of property rights), what I find more compelling is the story told by “Regulating the Landscape” and “The Tenement Problem.” It is truly heartbreaking to see how attempts were made throughout the years to better regulate the tenements in which New York’s labor class lived in that were continually abandoned, leaving many to suffer, while real estate magnates were able to essentially seize control over dictating the formation of the 1916 Zoning Ordinance to their benefit. 

I recently started reading Samuel Stein’s new book “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State,” and so much of this is introduced in the introductory chapter. Starting off with the memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the anniversary of which was this Monday, marking the death of immigrant women for the sake of capitalist greed, to the Grenfell Tower fire a few years ago. With 106 years between them, the one thing that remains true is the failure to prioritize building a city equitably for the working class, immigrants, and people of color. Although they are municipal  employees, Stein raises the question of how much they are truly able to help given the push to increase city revenue: “If the city is an investment strategy, are they just wealth managers?”

Capitalism, averse to limits being placed on their ability to exploit land and production, will prevent planning that affects this aforementioned exercise, as we examined in Revell’s piece, but we must work towards a place where we fight not for the Amazons, but for those who are continually being displaced, and are running out of places to go. It goes without saying that this will not be provided by the state, but I’m certainly interested in continuing to read Stein’s piece and seeing where he sees city planners fitting into this future, and the potential to right the wrongs of the planners who made way for the crisis of the tenements and the forming of the city to the desires of its elite.