As we reach the end of our semester, we also approach the completion of our popular education piece for the East Harlem community regarding the future of private developments in that area and the intertwined futures of the current residents of El Barrio. After last Wednesday’s group presentations in front of our peers and the community contacts for all the groups we were able to obtain quality feedback for the postcard, which Giselle mentioned in our last project update.

Our initial draft of the postcard which was presented looked like the following

On one side of the postcard we were going to provide the mass public with information on the residential towers and a little bit of what was going on behind the scenes. The first half of the postcard was going to talk about the buildings themselves as well as the contractor who wanted to start development on these buildings and the second half of the same side was going to mention how the ami of the community was calculated so that people know the injustices they were going to be put through.

Amanda created three block towers representing the three towers, which are the issues at hand, and list out important information which was declared in the appeal to start construction of the three towers. These towers, which are supposed to be 32, 41, and 47 stories tall, are widely believed to become an eyesore by the current residents of the community. The contractor promised 25% of the apartments to be affordable housing units in order to get the application approved and for construction to start. However, this contractor, Forest City Ratner, is the same company which was responsible for the Barclay center, where they promised to provide 10,000 jobs and 2,250 affordable housing units in order to gain the bid. Since the conception of the Barclay Center, Forest City Ratner has only provided 300 housing units.

The next topic at hand which we were going to introduce on this postcard was the ami calculations. The median income of East Harlem is $31,079 whereas the median income for New York City as a whole is $50,711, according to 2010-2012 estimates from the U.S. Census. Affordable housing units are priced according to the AMI of a particular group of counties. The AMI of New York City includes counties such as Nassau-Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland County who have median incomes of $109,000, $105,700, $98,800 respectively.

On the back of our postcard we will be including a letter, addressed to the Honorable Speaker Mark-Viverito, talking about our concerns with the changes this private development will bring to the community. The residents of the community will be able to sign mail in these postcards.

This is what our second draft looked like

After speaking with the community contact and getting feedback from them we were able to change some of the information we were spreading out to the public. They appreciated the idea of having a postcard because it was a cheap and efficient manner to get the people’s attention as well as the attention of council members.

Andrew has also been working along side someone from the El Barrio Unite organization and has been working on gathering up the footage for the documentary and compiling it together. We will be posting that up on youtube once we have worked out the minor details with our community contacts.