On Friday, Brett and I went to a meeting at the Picture the Homeless office. We met with Eric, Ryan, and Jenny Akchin, who’s a new policy organizer with PTH. We gave them a summary of what we’ve done, and they gave us a lot more direction about how we can help them.

First we discussed the white paper. Jenny is working on researching the ways that buildings can be converted to to CLTs. She explained four main paths: eminent domain, 3rd party transfer, a 7A administrator, and an alternative enforcement program. Briefly, eminent domain is when the city takes buys a building from its owner to use it in the public interest; a third party transfer is when a non-profit takes over a building and then turns it into a CLT; a 7A administrator is when a building is so badly run that they city assigns an outside organization to manage it and make repairs that are paid for by the owner (this often results in the owner relinquishing the building, because it’s very expensive for them); and alternative enforcement is when owners are given deadline by which they have to repair serious problems, and if they don’t a tax lien is placed against the property. We agreed to do more research on these to see how they might work. We’ll include this information, and anything we discover about policies that might make more buildings become CLTs through these methods, in our white paper.

I asked Picture the Homeless specifically about what power city council has to create CLTs, and they said that one thing city council could do was outlaw using rent-stabilized buildings for cluster-sites. This would effectively outlaw cluster sites, because market rate buildings would be too expensive for the city to turn into shelters. Jenny also said that the city council has been passing lots of harassment laws recently, so they could define poor living conditions as harassment (or maybe they already are harassment, I wasn’t clear on that point) and then say that the consequence for this harassment is that the building comes under administration by a 7A administrator. As I understood it, this would effectively increase the number of buildings that fall under 7A administration, and then hopefully become CLTs. In our white paper, we’ll explore these two ideas for policies to suggest to City Council.

I anticipate these new research goals being challenging, because they seem to get deep into the specifics of New York housing law, which is not something that any of us are experts on. We’ll do our best, and ask Jenny for help when we need it, and hopefully we’ll be able to get some useful information. I found this nyc.gov site (http://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/owners/compliance-housing-quality-enforcement-programs.page) that had a clear overview of a lot of the different types of housing quality enforcement, and it looks like there’s a lot of information in links on that page, so hopefully that helps, although none of it will address conversion to a CLT specifically.

We also discussed what they would like us to do for a popular education project. Ryan told us that the main need they have is for a brochure explaining the problems with cluster-site housing. They want something short and attention-grabbing that they can hand out to people. We brainstormed about that, and decided that what would be best is a single sheet of paper folded into thirds that will tell rent-stabilized tenants in cluster site buildings, cluster site residents, and the general public how cluster site shelters affect them. Our proposed format is three sections titled something like “what you need to know about cluster sites if you’re a… cluster site resident” “…rent stabilized tenant in a cluster site building” “… New York City taxpayer.” Then on the back of the brochure we’d explain what Picture the Homeless wants to happen. They have a Prezi that they made about shelter site housing that they shared with us to give us ideas about how to talk about these issues, and they’re also going to share their list of demands for the campaign, which we will also mention in the brochure. We decided that we would give them a draft of the brochure on May 4th. On that day, at 5:30, we’ll have a meeting at their office to discuss our draft and what changes we can make.

Eric also mentioned that it would be helpful to have a website for the cluster-site campaign that they can use to post popular education tools and information about all the organizations that are sponsoring the campaign. We said that we’d look into how difficult that would be, and if we could do it. I was just looking around WordPress to see how it worked, and I started a site called https://endclustersites.wordpress.com/. I haven’t added anything to it, but it does look like it’s pretty easy to use, so we’ll keep working on it.

We want to have a group meeting soon to talk more about the white paper and the popular education materials, and coordinate our efforts.

Tasks

graphic design of the brochure- Brett, Bethany, Annalise

designing the website and putting information on it- Brett, Bethany, Annalise

Brochure text (all of these will be very very short)

info for shelter residents- Riley

info for rent-stabilized residents- Riley

info for the general public- Corrin

Picture the Homeless’s goals- Corrin

White paper

research paths to turn buildings into CLTs- Omar

research policy proposal about making it illegal to use rent-stabilized buildings for cluster sites- Zumana

research policy proposal about giving 7A administrators to more buildings- Anna