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.

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. 

From this week’s readings, “¡Viva Loisaida Libre!” by Bill Weinberg was the most reactive piece I have read all semester. To me, it was by far the text that exemplified the problematic mindset of many authors throughout this course. I completely disagree with this type of structure in which Weinberg tries to present. Rather my complaints aren’t in the moral aspects of his vision, nor the shock of such goals, but rather the plausibility in his “utopia”.

 

For Weinberg, the ideal societal structure when it comes to land and property is that of a self-sustained “green” community that resists large corporate’s glutinous, detrimental, and abusive behavior onto the said land. His plan of achievement is the, “banning of absentee landlords. All buildings not owned by neighborhood residents will be expropriated without compensation and turned over to the tenants to be run cooperatively.” (Weinberg, 39). Here he wants to strip land from owners who don’t utilize it for the community. However, this is an extreme action, and its probability and plausibility are close to none in the modern day.

 

Not only that, his plan to make the area into a revolutionary green and virtues zone consists of other extreme ideas. Weinberg’s vision for the community is that of: “The bicycle will become the predominant mode of transportation” (Weinberg, 40), “The police will be replaced with neighborhood watch groups and rotating block patrols of local residents.” (Weinberg, 41), and “… a program of total recycling will be instated.” (Weinberg, 41). Here he wants to have an area that operates with man-powered transportation, no policing, and 100% recyclable waste. When handling problems that would arise, he states that, “… neighborhood’s sense of community will evaporate the climate of fear and alienation in which violent crime thrives. The young, strong, and healthy will take responsibility for protecting the backs of the elderly, infirm and disable” (Weinberg, 41). Any violators would be, “… escorted to the neighborhood’s borders – or thrown into the East River.” (Weinberg, 41). Indeed an utterly valid view on how a structure of society can operate, the problem that truly bothers me is the process in which Weinberg attempts to obtain such a community.

 

Weinberg pushes an agenda of secession and breaking away from the status quo in the metaphoric as well as the literal sense. This agenda ultimately entails the vilification of the norm. The current is terrible, Weinberg progressive idea is good, choosing good seems to be the logical idea; thus, to support the standard makes you a supporter of the detrimental. He makes his end goal seem sustainable and logical however his agenda holds reliance upon the foundation of people being righteous. There is no accountability in acknowledgment that society operates the way it does because of people. Instead, he dismisses the innate bad within all by blaming a system, following that his stance stems from a focus of the end goal. Hence my biggest complaint, plausibility. Never would his end goal be achieved due to his end goal being the problem. Its innate vilification of the current doesn’t provide any incentive for the current to move towards Weinberg’s society. For a better community to realistic, there must be an operation of compromise in which Weinberg lacks.

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.

The housing crisis is the defining characteristic of many metropolitan areas. In the Lower East Side, market-based housing costs doubled in just one decade in New York’s Lower East Side (Angotti 12). Everyone is impacted by the high cost of housing. One-third of the nation are unable to pay for basic necessities because the cost of housing is too high (Gray 66). Low-income people are particularly negatively impacted, as speculation increases the costs of the land itself. They marketplace preferences the interests of high-income people over lower-income individuals. Simultaneously, because of the large amount of equity held in the land through this process, homeownership has been prefered over rentership. To encourage these equity holdings, for the past four decades, federal housing policy has favored promoting homeownership over rentership. Yet, because of the rising land values, homeownership is largely inaccessible in expensive housing markets. Even in the most expensive American neighborhood, the Upper East Side, 70 percent of people rent (Angotti 2).

Community land trusts present an interesting way to change how land is owned and make it more accessible for low- and moderate-income people. Community land trusts combine individual and collective land ownership. The community land trust purchases own the land, individuals then lease the land from the community land trust. Most community land trusts are based on providing stable and affordable for people who are not served by the marketplace. Thus, they create leases at low rents (Gray 69). This makes homeownership more accessible for people, who would not afford or qualify for loans, even with government assistance. Because the land is leased from the community land trust, instead of truly owned by the individual, the costs remain low over time. This process removes the housing from the marketplace. Instead of renting or buying as an individual, you are part of a compact. The residents are responsible as stewards for the land. Lease-holders make up the majority of the land trusts board. This makes the people living in the housing the proprietors of their own housing costs and quality (Gray 71). In doing so, it takes away the competitive and antagonistic relationship between tenants and landowners. This encourages the collective interest of the community over any one individual’s interests.

Community land trusts provide an alternative to the default laissez faire housing market. They can, therefore, help stabilize neighborhoods facing exponentially increasing rents due to speculative land development. Because of skyrocketing rents in cities across the country, it is not surprising that community land trusts are increasingly popular, with half starting this century and increasing most rapidly in the past decade (Gray 73). They provide the stability that is difficult for low-income renters. Yet they also remain within the marketplace, as a small-scale solution of collective within the greater sea of market-based housing. As a result, community land trusts are not a whole-scale solution, but part of a patchwork of different housing systems for different community groups. For most renters in expensive housing markets, rents will continue to rise, as the local economy grows and new highly paid people move into the community. Community land trusts have begun to create a more equitable system, but expanding quality affordable housing remains difficult for the vast majority. Moving forward, community land trusts beget the question would an equitable system have one form of land and property or use several interlocking systems?

 

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.