All posts by Abhishek Samdaria

Final Project Update

The Future of Major Private Development, , , , , , ,

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

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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

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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.

Giving the Residents of NYC a Voice in their Communities

On (Re)Shaping the System, , ,

“Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. In other words, the people who pay taxes decide how tax dollars get spent. Participatory budgeting helps make budget decisions clear and accessible. It gives real power to people who have never before been involved in the political process. And it results in better budget decisions – because who better knows the needs of our community than the people who live there?” – PBNYC.org

The participatory budgeting process has gained significance over the past decade, as the importance given to it has grown larger in scale. It allows for a better reallocation of funds in a neighborhood because the members of that community get to decide where those funds will be going rather than having them go towards a nonexistent problem.

When you give people a voice or an outlet they will use it to further prosperity of those around them. This is most evident from the information given in the article, “Participatory Budgeting in New York City.” Ms.Su states that “half of 2014 PB voters had never worked with others on a community issue before. One third were foreign-born. In one district, over two thirds of distributed ballots were in languages other than English. Further, census block groups served by PB allocations had 20% higher percentages of minority residents and families with income below the poverty level (Goldberg and Finkelstein 2014).” This information shows us that people are interested and concerned about what goes on in their neighborhoods and how their problems are being dealt with. Even though some residents did not understand English and the proposals being put forward they still attended the meeting in order to grasp what the future of their neighborhood would look like.

There are many advantages and disadvantages to participatory budgeting. Some advantages are: it helps establish a good communication between the residents of a neighborhood and councilmembers; it helps sustain efficient resource allocation; helps the members of the neighborhood develop skills in policy making, budgeting, and management; it increases organizational commitment; it helps the establishment of more realistic and achievable objectives. The disadvantages that came up with participatory budgeting are: it is difficult to get the members to communicate and disclose information to higher authorities (ex. The high school students were afraid to bring up issues to their principals); In some cases the members may not have relevant information or necessary knowledge that helps them justify their proposal or even participation (i.e they are not trained).

I believe that the benefits of the participatory budgeting system outweigh the disadvantages because the disadvantages are no longer valid or applicable after a successful system is already in place. I.e a network of communication and unification of the members of the community has already occurred and is in place. And the spillover effects of participatory budgeting outweigh any inconvenience that the members have to go through in the initial process.

Location, Location, Location

The Politics of Place, Oppression, and Privilege, , , ,

According to Squires and Kubrin, “Real estate mantra tells us that three factors determine the market value of a home: location, location and location.” What encompasses the value of location? This emphasis on location is due to the many things that define it, such as: proximity to great schooling, economically stable neighborhoods, proximity to public transport and public goods such as hospitals. However the availability of these amenities in a neighborhood are directly correlated to ‘privilege’.

New York City, a city that is at the center of the world and a city that never sleeps, has its own fair share of problems that bring rise to unrest and injustice to its very own residents. It is a city that is divided into cultural community backgrounds, for example you have Little Italy, Chinatown, Spanish Harlem just to name a few. But the real question that arises is that are all of these communities receiving the same amount of attention regarding opportunities and growth?

Because of the ‘development’ of these communities people of particular ethnicities are more attracted to live among the people who remind them of home. This indirectly results in racial segregation and affects the distribution of urban growth. Even though the general theory taught is that education is important to get out of the poorer neighborhoods, with this continuous uneven distribution of wealth the allocation of resources is significantly different. Squires and Kubrin state that the “continuing disparities result in fewer educational resources, less qualified teachers and higher teacher turnover and, ultimately, lower educational achievement in low-income and minority communities.” This means that this is an endless cycle of poor education resulting in lower paying jobs and inability to relocate to a more affluent neighborhood.

All of this relates back to my group’s project on the new private development in Spanish Harlem. When speaking to our contact, he told us that most of them congregated to that area because they missed the feel of the community they had back home. They tried to create that here in NYC and had succeeded. However most of the businesses in that particular neighborhood were family owned businesses and not much money was being spent in that particular neighborhood as was in the upper east side, which is approximately 10 blocks down. This results in people being forced to go back to the countries they come from or even escaped from. And now with the new private development the contractors are using the excuse of pouring money into the neighborhood to attract the city to their plans. But instead all they are doing is breaking up this community feeling that the residents have and gentrifying the area that would result in higher land values that could cause more displacement. Even though more money is entering the neighborhood and this could lead to better schools, the ones who needed the better education are the ones being forced out so who is really helping?